Category: SL Tech

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, May 6th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from my chat log of the meeting. Pantera also recorded the meeting, and that recording is embedded at the end of this piece – my thanks to Pantera, as always, for providing it.

Meeting Overview

• The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
• These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Every Tuesday at 12:00 noon SLT.
  • In text (no Voice).
  • At this location.
• Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
• Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Simulator Deployments

• On Tuesday, May 6th, the Main SLS channel was restarted without any update.
• On Wednesday, May 7th:
  • BlueSteel and the snack channel running the Elderberry simulator update (see below) should be restarted.
  •  All remaining RC channels should be updated with Elderberry.

Elderberry Update (2025.05)

• A new option to llDerezObject – DEREZ_TO_INVENTORY, which returns the targeted object to inventory and saves its current state (e.g. has the same behaviour as Build → Object → Save Back to Object Contents.
• llIsLinkGLTFMaterial  – which can can determine if a face on a linked prim is PBR.
• REZFLAG_DIE_ON_NO_REZZER – which will cause a rezzed prim to die if its rezzer is no longer present in the region.
• llSetGLTFOverrides, rather than changes to llSetColor and llSetAlpha to work with PBR, as changing the latter was “starting to lead down some very scary paths WRT ‘What is the right thing to do'”.
• Possibly a fix for llSetGroundTexture, which currently has the NE & SW values swapped. The question was asked in this was in the release, but the question wasn’t fully answered.

Upcoming Deployment – Fig Pudding (2025.06)

• This is still being put together.
• The update is unlikely to surface before June, as the simulator team has been focusing on some necessary internal work (e.g. ensuring various repositories build and deploy via Github actions correctly; updating where docker images are stored) which has drawn attention away from feature work on the simulators.

SL Viewer Updates

•  Default viewer: 2025.03 7.1.13.14343205944, issued April 9th and promoted April 15th.
  • New UI element for water exclusion surfaces: Build / Edit floater → Texture Tab → Hide Water checkbox.
  • The maximum amount of Reflection Probes can now be adjusted to better accommodate low VRAM scenarios.
    • Values will be set automatically depending on your chosen graphics quality. OR
    • Use Preferences → Graphics →  Advanced Settings →  Max. Reflection Probes to manually set.
  • An issue with being unable to see Sky Altitude values in the Region/Estate window has now been resolved.
  • Preferences → Graphics → Max. # of Non-Imposters has been renamed Max. # of Animated Avatars for clarity.
  • Bug and performance fixes and memory optimisations.
• Release Candidate: 2025.04 – 7.1.14.14742193597, May 2nd 2025 – NEW.
  • Includes the following new features:
    • Chat Mentions (Early Support): Type @ then pick a name. To follow: audible alerts and highlight colour pickers.
    • My Outfits subfolders: now supports the use of subfolders.
  • Key updates:
    • Build Floater improvements: increase to scale boundaries; Physics Material Type now updates when selecting linked objects; Repeats per Meter value no longer incorrect for non-uniform sized objects
    • Hover height: the minimum/maximum is now +/- 3 meters.
    • Snapshot floater: L$ balances can be hidden independently of the rest of the UI.
    • Preference Search bar: general usability and readability improvements.
  • Refer to the release notes for full updates and fixes.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha, version 7.1.12.14175675593, April 2nd.
  • Will only work on Aditi. Blog post: Lab officially announces Luau Alpha testing.

In Brief

• A request for SLua events to be updated along the lines suggested in this canny request. Rider Linden indicated that a update will be made prior to SLua moving to wider beta testing, and will likely It will likely end up looking similar to the Canny proposal. However, there is no current time frame as to when the update will be made.
• A Canny request was filed in January for a llGetRegionWorldMapTile feature. This was reportedly now sitting in the backlog of requests and work the server team are hoping to work through in time.
  • This saw a follow-up request at the meeting to be able to zoom down to the level of centring a parcel on the map. Rider indicated that it should be possible to give the full region map as a as a texture ID, allowing scripts to adjust the offset and scale of the texture to achieve desired results.
• A discussion on regions idling (at 1 FPS(?)) when not in use (e.g. when there are no avatars in the region, no child agents registered with in and no HTTP IN/OUT functions running); the ability for llGetEnv to obtain a region’s status.
  • Regions are not completely shut-down when “empty”. as most require scripts to keep running.
  • This broadened into a discussion on how low a region takes to start-up. The most accurate might be “no long in the scheme of things, but variable”.
• In response to a question on progress with combat 2.1 features, Rider stated:

Combat 2.1 is pushed back. I’ve got no eta when that will come back up. I’d like to get it moving, I think it introduces some important additions that have impacts outside of just Combat, but there are lots of things that need doing and I can only type so fast.

• The latter half of the meeting was taken up with discussions of texture loading, the impact of alpha layering, non-optimised contents and similar, the majority of which was more viewer-centric. They arose from a complaint that Fantasy Faire is overloaded with “4K textures” (which aren’t actually a thing in SL) causing viewer performance issues.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 29th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from my chat log of the meeting.

Meeting Overview

• The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
• These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Every Tuesday at 12:00 noon SLT.
  • In text (no Voice).
  • At this location.
• Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
• Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Simulator Deployments

• On Tuesday, April 29th, the Main SLS channel was restarted without any update
• On Wednesday, April 30th:
  • BlueSteel and a snack channel should be updated with the Elderberry simulator update (see below).
  •  All remaining RC channels should be restarted without any change.

Upcoming Deployment – Elderberry

• A new option to llDerezObject – DEREZ_TO_INVENTORY, which returns the targeted object to inventory and saves its current state (e.g. has the same behaviour as Build → Object → Save Back to Object Contents.
• llIsLinkGLTFMaterial  – which can can determine if a face on a linked prim is PBR.
• REZFLAG_DIE_ON_NO_REZZER – which will cause a rezzed prim to die if its rezzer is no longer present in the region.
• llSetGLTFOverrides, rather than changes to llSetColor and llSetAlpha to work with PBR, as changing the latter was “starting to lead down some very scary paths WRT ‘What is the right thing to do'”.
• Possibly a fix for llSetGroundTexture, which currently has the NE & SW values swapped. The question was asked in this was in the release, but the question wasn’t fully answered.

SL Viewer Updates

•  Default viewer: 2025.03 7.1.13.14343205944, issued April 9th and promoted April 15th – No Change.
  • New UI element for water exclusion surfaces: Build / Edit floater → Texture Tab → Hide Water checkbox.
  • The maximum amount of Reflection Probes can now be adjusted to better accommodate low VRAM scenarios.
    • Values will be set automatically depending on your chosen graphics quality. OR
    • Use Preferences → Graphics →  Advanced Settings →  Max. Reflection Probes to manually set.
  • An issue with being unable to see Sky Altitude values in the Region/Estate window has now been resolved.
  • Preferences → Graphics → Max. # of Non-Imposters has been renamed Max. # of Animated Avatars for clarity.
  • Bug and performance fixes and memory optimisations.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha, version 7.1.12.14175675593, April 2nd.
  • Will only work on Aditi. Blog post: Lab officially announces Luau Alpha testing.

In Brief

• A (reasonable) request was made to have simulator release names (“Elderberry”, “Puff Pastry” or whatever) actually reflected on the release notes rather than referencing them solely by release number.
• Questions llDerezObject() DEREZ_TO_INVENTORY:
  • Is the clean-up procedures after de-rezzing any different to other objects? Should not be, the; the object is killed from in-world on receipt of the derez command, then a new asset is generated to replace the deleted one in the rezzing object’s inventory.
  • Is DEREZ_TO_INVENTORY to to any capability? No. The code was originally set up to respond to a message from the viewer and so would report messages back that way; however it is being updated to be smarter than that to avoid missed messages, etc.
• A feature request to allow attachment rezzing directly from another object’s inventory has been received (e.g. to assist with changing outfits). It is regarded as a large project and, if accepted, has yet to be added to the development roadmap.
• A feature request to Add function to get a list of objects in the region (somewhat similar to the Area Search in some TPVs) has been submitted and is currently being tracked. Upvote if you’d like to see it get onto the roadmap for implementation.
• A discussion on prim manipulation and LSL and differences between viewer-side and simulator-side disconnects (e.g. LSL cant set sphere taper, and viewer can’t set floating text or particle). This drifted into discussion of prim / linkset ordering and an actual node hierarchy for the same that is known to the viewer, together with a means to set the linkset number for a given object in the linkset / “click and assign” root prim for a linkset.
• Leviathan Linden offered some feedback to those testing the SLua regions on Aditi:

One thing I was working on a week or two ago but currently on hold: people on the Lua servers were using the faster scripts to thrash a log of prim properties, which would generate a storm of Full Updates. Someone noticed some hot spots in the generation/sending of those updates, slowing things down making the problem look like Lua’s fault. So, I was working on a speed-up there. Wasn’t done, got side-tracked. Will get back to it.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.