Category: SL Tech

2025 Week #17 Project Zero User Group Meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey
via Linden Lab
The following notes were taken from the Thursday, April 24th 2025 Project Zero User Group (PZUG) meeting.

  • They are based on my audio recording of the meeting + chat log.
  • They should not be taken as a full transcript of the meeting.
Table of Contents

Meeting Purpose

  • The Project Zero User Group provides a platform  for open discussion about Project Zero, the cloud-streamed version of the Second Life Viewer. Topics can range from sharing the goals for Project Zero, demoing the current experience, and gathering feedback to help shape the future of cloud access for Second Life.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
    • The second and fourth Thursday of every month at 13:00 noon SLT.
    • In Voice and text.
    • At the Hippotropolis Campsite.
  • 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.

Resources

Note: “Zero” or “Project Zero” in these summaries always refers to the SL official viewer running in a browser; “Firestorm Zero”, “FS0” or “FS Zero” always refers to the Firestorm viewer offering in a browser.

Avatar Picker

  • Released on April 24th, 2025.
  • Actually the first part of presenting Project Zero with a new UI, built using HTML / React, and first discussed by Philip Rosedale when Project Zero was initially launched.
  • Takes the form of a UI element that “pops in and out” of the left side of the browser window for the viewer.
  • Allows a user to select one of the avatars available within the new Avatar Welcome Pack, and the dress it in one of the available outfits.
  • The idea is to help new users get started with the kinds of avatars and avatar accessories more generally found in SL, thus grounding them more in the platform and the avatar ecosystem.

Project Zero and On-Boarding New Users

  • With the resumption of direct advertising of SL, the Lab has noted:
    • Only around 10% of users responding to an ad and who are directed through the sign-up process that requires them to download and install the viewer, actually get as far a logging-in.
    • However, the number responding to an ad and being directed to the sign-up process culminating in them being able to access SL directly through their browser using Project Zero, has a success rate of over 50% actually logging-in.
  • Data gathering on incoming new users responding to ads suggest that the majority are using computers that would not be able to run the viewer to its fullest visual extent; however, 90% of those users coming in via the Project Zero route are able to properly “see people and hear the birds”.
  • The next strategic step is seen as encouraging those new users to more fully engage with the platform, and two steps are being taken in this direction – the Avatar Picker noted above, and an upcoming “Destination Picker”, which is seen as an extension to the avatar onboarding process.

Project Zero “Destination Picker”

  • This is liable to be the next element for the new UI.
  • When available, it will allow (new) users to select one of the 12 destinations, in a similar manner to the Go button seen on the web account registration  / join pages.
  • The desire being to point them towards locations and experiences that bring home the value of Second Life, and which encourage them to continue to log-in to the platform.
  • In this it is recognised that:
    • Simply listing a plethora of destinations which may or may not have active use risks losing incoming new users on the basis if they get sent to places where there is no engagement with others, they simply will not stay.
    • Similarly, just sending people to “crowded” places (clubs, shopping areas, etc.), is not necessarily a good idea, and people within those environments may not be amenable to answering questions / offering assistance. etc.
    • People are much more likely to stay if they find people who are friendly, willing to offer help, point them towards community resources, etc.
  • As such, the destinations placed in the Picker are going to be curated (and possibly rotated), based on how well they assist in helping new users feel “part” of SL.

Additional Notes on Destinations / On-boarding

  • Selections for inclusion are liable to be along lines that reflect the typical reasons people give for signing-up to SL – such as an interest in art, a desire to experience live music, etc.
    • In this regard, incoming new users are already being “round robined” to a number of potential starting points: the Welcome Hub, Gateways such as Firestorm’s gateway, experience-oriented hub like MadPea, etc.
    • However, the Lab wants to move this on to the users themselves being able to make a choice as to where they go on logging-in.
  • A new channel will be provided to those managing the selected destinations, which will provide them with data such as: numbers of new users returning for a further session, number of users going to no upgrade to a subscription tier, and other data that can help illustrate the success of a location in supporting new users, and possible highlight areas for possible optimisation.
  • With regards to the success of destinations used within the on-boarding of new users over the year, Philip Rosedale noted the following:
Over all these years, when we have looked at the statistics for destinations for areas as different as those I’ve mentioned – the Welcome Hub, the Adventure Island, the Firestorm Welcome Island, the MadPea games, for example – fascinatingly enough, we see that the success at retaining new users is virtually identical for all of those destinations; and overall, is of course very poor. 
So its interesting to not that we’re not even close, it would seem, on what the right on-boarding experience is; because all of the ones we have tried are equally unsuccessful. 

– Philip Rosedale

New Users and a Sandbox

  • Sntax floated the idea of offering incoming users the opportunity to go to a specific sandbox environment were they could join other users and new users in collaborative building / learning to build.
  • Active Worlds used to have something similar for its incoming new users.
  • Responses to this at the meeting were mixed.
    • Positives: offers the opportunity for collaborative work using the built-in tools; allows experienced 3D content creators new to SL experiment with importing mesh; could become an informative learning “playground”.
    • Negatives: built-in tools for content creation are both complex and have not seen any real TLC in years; primitives fall well short of more refined meshes; the potential for griefing.
  • This lead to a more general discussion on engaging new users, opportunities for engaging them in activities and how to direct them (e.g. offering those wanting to use Voice to “Voice friendly” locations; offering experiences such as games, sailing, flying, etc.

Notes on Availability

  • Existing users can also use the Avatar Picker, however:
    • It is only available on Project Zero.
    • Project Zero is geared towards incoming new users, so existing users might find it difficult to obtain a slot when trying to log-in via Zero.
  • Part of the reason for this is the Lab feels the capability needs to mature before becoming more widely available to existing users.
  • That said, if people would like to use Zero because it would potential offer a better experience than a viewer running locally on their computer, should IM Sntax Linden stating why they want to use Zero and what, specifically, they would use it for and the perceived benefits. Such use cases might then help speed the development of the capability.
  • Passes for Firestorm Zero are currently not available.

Date of Next Meeting

April 2025 SL Mobile UG meeting summary: avatar updates

Posted on by Inara Pey
Campwich Forest grounds: location for the Monthly Mobile User Group (MMUG)
The following notes were taken from the Thursday, April 24th 2025 Monthly Mobile User Group (MMUG) meeting. These notes should not be taken as a full transcript of the meeting, which was largely held in Voice, but rather a summary of the key topics discussed. The meeting was recorded by Pantera, and her video is embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks, as always to her in providing it.
Table of Contents

Meeting Purpose

  • The Mobile User Group provides a platform to share insights on recent mobile updates and upcoming features, and to receive feedback directly from users.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
    • The last Thursday of every month at 12:00 noon SLT.
    • In Voice and text.
    • At Campwich Forest.
  • 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.

Resources

Release Updates and “Coming Soon”

[Video: 2:57-8:46]

Version: 2025.3.548 (Android); 0.5.534 (iOS)

  • Issue: Not receiving items! – inventory offers received when using Mobile failing to appear in Inventory once logged-in on the Desktop viewer. This has now been fixed.
  •  Dash for Cash has proven popular, and has seen a small update in that it now references avatars by name.

“Coming Soon”

  • If you teleport whilst in the Lobby, a teleport pop-up will be displayed in addition to the teleport progress bar at the top of the Lobby screen.
  • Settings clean-up:
    • The Max Avatars drop-down is due to move from the Developer tools list (Menu → Settings → </> Developer Tools) up to the main Settings menu.
    • Group notifications are to become more granular, allowing notifications for specific groups to be turned on / off.
An upcoming change will see the Max Avatars setting move from the Developer Tools to the main Settings screen (note: the above is for illustration only; final update may appear differently).
  • Initial groundwork so that people can access the Lobby feature without their avatars having to be physically in-world:
    • This will see the the Sign Out button move from the Menu up to the Profile bar, and a new button introduced to the Menu: Return to Lobby.
    • When implemented, avatars will still be rendered in-world and seen as on-line, as this is only the groundwork.  However, it is hoped that things will progress over the next few months to reach a point where using the Lobby, as noted, does not require the avatar to be present in-world.
  • Additional quality of life updates are also targeting the May update, but the meeting was considered “a little too early” to discuss them.

Avatar Update

[Video: 9:27-43:00]

  • The core of the meeting was a presentation from Adam Sinewave on some of the challenges involved in rendering avatars on SL Mobile, the approach taken, status to date and work that should be appearing in upcoming releases.
  • This presentation took the form of a slide show with comments from Adam, and I’ve embedded a video of it below, with a concatenated summary of Adam’s comments. to see the latter in full, please watch the video directly in You Tube and click the transcript button in the video’s description area.

  • SL Mobile is a fully ground-up rebuild of Second Life for Mobile devices (utilising the Unity engine), utilising a very different architecture compared to the Desktop Viewer and with no common code, in order to work within the constraints of most Mobile devices.
  • This is particularly evident in the case of avatar rendering, where the different approaches to avatar skeletons as substantial:
    • The SL system is largely “monolithic” (for want of a better term): a single skeleton per avatar containing multiple bone sets, all capable of being positioned be shape, deformer animation, with no deterministic (or even an entirely random) approach to the ordering / priority of such changes.
    • The Unity system is more flexible and robust, but as a result can bring rendering quirks and issues hidden by the SL system into sharp relief.
  • Testing such avatar for issues and the effectiveness of fixes applied (regression testing) has until recently been manually-intensive requiring eye-on testing for each an every issue / fix. However, time has been spent building an in-house testing / regression system to automate a lot of this work, greatly speeding the process of issue identification, fixing and testing.
  • Outside of the above, there are still areas of work associated with avatars (some of which impact in-world objects as well) still to be address, and doing so will take time. These include at the time of the video:
    • “Not Working”: Animesh; avatar lighting; transparency on avatars (alpha layers); PBR materials rendering. All of these will be addressed, but the time frame is liable to be longer-term and the priority of work subject to change.
    • Partially working: Flexi wearables (partially supported, but in need of improvement); system eyes (positioned based on a “average” placement within the skull and which requires further improvement).
  • Silhouetting (avatars appearing transparent in the Mobile app): this is viewed as overly-aggressive, but has been necessary to ensure avatars only render when “complete”, so as to avoid any nudity that might collide with Apple’s rules on such. Unfortunately, this exposes a number of areas where avatar loading can fail and the avatar becoming such as a silhouette. Work is progressing on addressing these issues, but it will require a cycle of multiple updates.
  • A look at (at the time of the meeting) some of of the  upcoming avatar fixes improvements – including expanding the avatar test suite and, for users: improvements to resource loading and texture handling, allowing more to be seen and enabling avatars to be loaded / unloaded as they enter / leave view.
  • It was noted that much of this work has yet to reach the Mobile app (Alpha or Beta), be will be doing so in upcoming releases.

In Brief

Please refer to the video for details on the following and other questions which may have had a simple “yes” or “in progress” reply.

  • [Video: 45:56-47:10] A question on whether mesh creators simply using the default right-hand attachment point of avatar items can cause issues with losing items or how alpha blends work when compared to Desktop.
    • In terms of alpha blends, Mobile uses a different approach to layering (order-independent transparency using Z-depth rather than attachment order), such issues of layer ordering doesn’t apply.
    • It’s acknowledged that this might not quite match what creators are expecting, but it allow for a more efficient use of resources.
  • [Video: 47:38-48:48] SL and Unity handle rotation differently.
    • SL’s coordinates are based on right-handed rotation with the Z axis as up; Unity uses left-handed rotation with the Y axis as Up.  Thus, a translation system between the two is required, which can lead to issues.
    • Further complications can be introduced as a result of animations using rotation.
    • Fixes have been developed to address the more noticeable issues, which will be appearing in the next “update or two”.
  • [Video: 49:37-50:44] Inventory access through Mobile is on the roadmap. However, it is a very large, resource-intensive project with a lot of impact.
    • As such, as, when and how it is tackled is a matter of strategic consideration alongside other priorities.
    • Currently, it is not something that has seen any “substantial” work carried out.
  • [Video: 50:52-50:54 (text]  Mobile app hanging with “Not Responding” and the options to Close App or Wait:
    • The workaround for this at present is to go to the Developer Tools (Menu → Settings → </> Developer Tools), locate the Max Memory Limit drop-down and reduce the amount of memory (e.g. to 30% or 25%).
    • Further work has been made to general performance, which should be going into upcoming releases. As such, reports on the issue would be appreciated if it continues to manifest after these are available.
  • [Video: 51:01-52:53] Has anything been learnt from Mobile (thus far) that can be used to improve the Desktop experience?
    • Suggestions have been passed to the Desktop viewer team from Mobile.
    • There is a desire to unify experiences between the viewer and Mobile where possible (e.g. such as unifying chat history) and which may require changes to the viewer as well as updates to Mobile. However when such work will be carried out was unclear at the time of the meeting.
    • Outside of user-facing work, the avatar testing tool is something potentially of interest to the Desktop team as well.
  • There is an issue with certain fonts in name tags not displaying correctly on Mobile. This is known and will be investigated.

Date of Next Meeting

2025 week #17: SL SUG meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey
Peng Lai, February 2025 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 22nd, 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 and Pantera’s video, embedded at the end of this piece.

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):
  • 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

  • This week will see all channel restarted without and deployments.

Upcoming Deployment – Elderberry

  • It is hoped the at Elderberry update will be deployed the BlueSteel RC channel on Wednesday Apeil 30th, 2025.
  • This release will likely include:
    • Anew 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'”.

SL Viewer Updates

  •  Default viewer: 2025.03 7.1.13.14343205944, issued April 9th and promoted April 15th – NEW.
    • 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.

In Brief

Please refer to the the video for details on the following.

  • Ability to rename a group is marked As Planned, but “is not currently in the queue right now”.
  • A request to make gravity / physics variable on a region basis (or as least when underwater. The response to this was twofold:
    • File a Feature Request outlining the requirement and how it might be used (e.g. through the SL Experiences mechanism) and see what the feedback from the community might be.
    • Whether the work could be undertaken or no would depend on a combination of how feasible it would be; the effort required to implement it (particularly in relation to other requests); how it might be employed.
The physics engine can handle a different acceleration of gravity, no problem. But, we’d have to track down all the places where we have hard-coded the normal value of gravity (server and viewer) and then replace that with a value that is communicated from the server, so we’d have to adjust the data protocol a bit, then get that work in all the important TPVs. Just thinking out loud how hard it would all be.

– Leviathan Linden

  • The above threaded through much of the meeting, in placing crossing over  into discussions:
    • About facilitating natural swimming in SL (i.e. Linden Water shouldn’t exhibit the same gravity as land and causing avatars to drop to the riverbed / sea floor).
    • The idea of the official viewer providing a built-in AO system (e.g. akin to Firestorm’s, but making use of llSetAnimationOverride.
    • On the SL wind and its usefulness (and to the ability to have wind-driven weather).
  • The official Discord channel has seen a conversation about allowing experience scripts to optionally rez objects as the experience land owner, rather than only the owner of the object (e.g. let an experience gun rez bullets under land group instead of needing to set land to open rez). Rider Linden stated he’d like to get something like this added to the roadmap.
  • Although more viewer-side, the camera became a focus of discussion:
    • While no work has been taken on it, New llSetCameraParams() rules: CAMERA_POSITION_KEY and CAMERA_FOCUS_KEY is something that might be a part of providing better camera controls for the likes of machinimatographers.
    • A reminder was given, as well: llSetKeyFramedCamera.
    • Leviathan Linden remided people that he had re-implemented follow-cam in the game-control project, so that the camera could be moved around with the game controller device. However, “there was much work to be done there to make anyone happy”.
  • The viewer-side implementation of Lua (not the server-side SLua project currently being tested on Aditi), is apparently “on hold”.

† 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.

2025 SL viewer release summaries week #16

Posted on by Inara Pey
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation

Updates from the week through to Sunday, April 20th, 2025

This summary is generally published every Monday, and is a list of SL viewer / client releases (official and TPV) made during the previous week. When reading it, please note:

  • It is based on my Current Viewer Releases Page, a list of all Second Life viewers and clients that are in popular use (and of which I am aware), and which are recognised as adhering to the TPV Policy.
  • This page includes comprehensive links to download pages, blog notes, release notes, etc., as well as links to any / all reviews of specific viewers / clients made within this blog.
  • By its nature, this summary presented here will always be in arrears, please refer to the Current Viewer Release Page for more up-to-date information.
  • Outside of the Official viewer, and as a rule, alpha / beta / nightly or release candidate viewer builds are not included; although on occasions, exceptions might be made.

Official LL Viewers

  • Default viewer: 2025.03 7.1.13.14343205944, issued April 9th and promoted April 15th – NEW.
    • 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 – No Change.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V7-style

  • Kokua: 7.1.13.56907 (no RLV) and 7.1.13.60579 (RLV variants)  (2025.03), April 18 – release notes.
  • Megapahit: 7.1.13.53452 (2025.03) – April 15  – changelog.

V1-style

  • Cool VL Viewer Stable: 1.32.2.44, April 19, 2025 – release notes.

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No release updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

2025 week #16: SL CCUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Hippotropolis Campsite: venue for CCUG meetings
The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, April 17th, 2025.

Please note that this is not a full transcript, but a summary of key topics .
Table of Contents

Meeting Purpose

  • The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with related viewer development work.
  • This meeting is generally held on alternate Thursdays at Hippotropolis.
  • Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they are conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.

Official Viewer Status and Updates

Viewer Status

  •  Default viewer: 2025.03 7.1.13.14343205944, issued April 9th and promoted April 15th – NEW.
    • 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.

Upcoming Viewers

2025.04
  • The 2025.04 viewer is “still progressing”.
  • There is an issue described as “not all of the glTF meshes not coming in”, including those with less than 65K vertices. The cause for this is still under investigation and is currently preventing the viewer progressing to an RC release.
  • This viewer is provisionally targeting:
    • The glTF mesh uploader (based on the current .DAE mesh uploader and doing pretty much the same). Again, please note that this is not the full glTF scene importer which has been discussed at previous CCUG meetings; that work is being broken down into smaller, more easily managed projects.
    • Possibly – and subject to confirmation – re-enabling subfolders within the My Outfits folder.
    • Hover height improvements.
  • The glTF issue coupled with an elevated crash rate issues discovered in 2025.03 and affecting 2024.04 means that this viewer will be running behind the planned schedule for releases.
2025.05
  • Internal discussions on what form this should take are in progress.
  • One option is to have this release comprise entirely of updates originally planned for inclusion in the 2024 Maintenance C release prior to that being put on hold when the focus shifted to addressing performance issues, etc., in the wake of the initial PBR release.
  • One of the updates for this viewer is likely to be Inventory Favourites (presumably somewhat similar to the Firestorm Favourite Wearables).

Removing Scale From LI Calculations (Recap/Update)

  • Signal Linden highlighted a Feedback Ticket he has raised, proposing the removal of scale from Land Impact calculations, which has been touched upon at the last couple of SUG meetings.
  • However, there are now a few caveats starting to appear possibly impacting “everything from rendering to physics”, which require further internal discussion at LL.
  • One of these is the LI goes in both directions – so while removing scale from the calculation may be positive for a net reduction in the LI of objects that have been scaled up in size – it could have a net negative for objects scaled down (e.g. you have a group of objects each with 20 LI, and have scaled them down so each only has 10 LI, removing scale would reset them to 20 LI apiece).
  • Further, the Lab needs to re-evaluate LI as a whole and where there could be potentially “bad” impacts on LI changes as a result of scaling – such as with streaming calculations, which are entirely based on scale.
  • As such, this work is now in the column of “something we want to do, but we need to do it responsibly”.

In Brief

  • Blue tint on reflective surfaces: this is largely the result of one of two things:
    • Outdoors, the fact that automatic  / void probes will be reflecting the ambient lighting and when outdoors there is rather a lot of sky, and so they is going to give reflections a blue tint.
    • Indoors: no internal reflection probe has been placed to override the automatic / void probes, so the sky reflections will be used via the automatic probes. Solution (not always ideal / possible): install a reflection probe indoors.
  • PBR metallic “vs.” PBR specular: it was acknowledged that general control of reflectiveness in surface could be – to a degree – better managed through the support of PBR specular rather than relying solely on PBR metallic (as is currently supported), and adding PBR specular is being considered.
  • Terrain:
    • Significant updates to SL terrain (e.g.  terrain painting (summarised here), increasing the terrain geometry, potentially implementing better terrain LODs, etc), all all either on-hold (terrain painting) or seen as a much larger undertaking that needs to be focused solely on terrain improvements.
    • As such, they are currently viewed as “down the road projects” while the focus remains on providing content creators with more immediately benefits (such as the taking mesh models, etc., directly from their preferred workflows and dropping them into SL without additional faffing).
  • Lighting:
    • Geenz Linden has broken down what he refers to a “super Canny” feature request on lighting into a number of smaller requests. All are tracked – but this does not mean they are currently being worked upon, but rather are things Geenz would like to get to as time allows:
    • Path Traced Global Illumination (PTGI) described as “not any time soon”.
    • Environment versioning: to help track chances to the environment rendering, versioning of assets has been introduced. whereby if the parameter ranges of an asset are changed by LL, then the “old” version of the asset becomes locked and the revised parameters only apply to  new asse version (which requires a new viewer version).
    • Light sources on water (outside of the Sun and Moon: not going to be “coming back” any time soon.
  • Some confusion around glow and emissive mask on PBR. The best place for information on PBR, Blinn-Phong (“legacy”) materials + capabilities) is Kirsty Aurelias’ handy (invaluable) guide.
  • Changes to Blinn-Phong alpha-gamma (as has been discussed in previous meetings) is currently on hold and subject to on-going discussions within the Lab on how to best proceed.

Next Meetings

2025 week #16: SL SUG meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey
Simurg, February 2025 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 15th, 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 and Pantera’s video, embedded at the end of this piece.

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):
  • 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

  • This week will see all channel restarted without and deployments.

Upcoming Deployment – Recap

This next simulator update will be called Elderberry. Among other things, this should include:

  • 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.
  • Updates to llSetAlpha will have a caveat: if alpha  is set to >0.85, it will switch the overrides to opaque; setting under that value sets them to blend. This is because there seem to be some serious rendering issues with blend mode and an alpha near 1, per this image.
  • 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'”.

SL Viewer Updates

  • Default viewer: 2025.03 version 7.1.13.14343205944, dated April 9th, 2025, promoted April 15th, 2025.
    • 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 7.1.12.13907344519, April 2nd.

In Brief

Please refer to the the video for details on the following.

  • A general discussion llDerezObject and whether an object being taken back by an object has been renamed will result in a copy being generated, or the original still replaced (answer: still replaced).
    • As a result, a DEREZ_TO_INVENTORY_COPY parameter has been requested, and could be suppled in the simulator update after Elderberry.
    • Rider Linden also noted he may need to disallow a reclaim on coalesced inventory objects, as once in-world, acoalesced object becomes a grouping on independent objects, with not connection between them or any means to re-group them.
    • Discussion around this functionally and iiDerezObject continued through most of the meeting.
  • Progress on SLua is described as being “good”, but as per the pervious meetings (SUG and TPVD), there is more back-end work to be done before the SLua project moves to a “beta” on Aditi.
  • Following the discussion on World → Show → Land Owners has been broken since the release of PBR such that all owners, regardless of type are only shown as red, rather than in different colours based on ownership (see Land owners colour),  it was noted that a fix for the issue should be in the next RC viewer update – 2025.04.

† 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.