Category: SL Tech

2025 week #37: SL Open Source User Group meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Sawrey Forest (Zendo), July 2025 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from my chat transcript + the video recording by Pantera (embedded at the end of this summary) of the Open Source User Group (OSUG) held on Friday, September 12th, 2025. My thanks to Pantera as always for providing it.

Meeting Purpose

  • The OSUG meeting is a combining of the former Third Party Viewer Developer meeting and the Open Source Development meetings. It is open discussion of Second Life development, including but not limited to open source contributions, third-party viewer development and policy, and current open source programs.
  • This meeting is generally held twice a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
  • Dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they are generally conducted in text chat.
  • The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.

Official Viewers

  • Default viewer 2025.06 7.2.1.17108480561 – August 29 – No Change.
    • Inventory Favourites System, plus assorted new features.
    • Improvements to avatar system; camera and movement; chat; voice; content creation tools.
    • Mesh uploader updates.
    • Text & UI polish.
    • Fixes for Environment and Rendering; stability and crashes; UI.
    • System improvements.
  • Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

Viewer 2025.07

In Brief

Please refer to the video for the following:

  • In order for PBR lighting to render anywhere close to correctly, alpha blending had to be switched from SRGB to linear colour space. This can cause some older content using Blinn-Phong, to look either more opaque or more transparent than in did pre-PBR.
  • A fragmented discussion on LL possibly offering better Linux support in the future (and subject to priorities) and on Linux packaging in general, which ran through a good portion of the meeting.
  • A discussion on alpha being inverted on PBR vs. Blinn-Phong  (e.g. 1 is fully transparent on BP and fully opaque on PBR), and on whether one of the values should be flipped. Geenz indicated that no flipping would occur, due to the risk of confusing for people, given the two (PBR and Blinn-Phong) are distinct workflows.
  • Appearance fixes #3492 for current Outfit Folder (COF) issues is potentially being looked at for inclusion in the 2025.08 viewer update.
  • CoACD is being considered (alongside other options) as a replacement for Havok mesh decomposition.
  • Again, please refer to the video for the rest of the discussion.

Next Meeting

† 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 gathering 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 #36

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, September 7th, 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 2025.06 7.2.1.17108480561 – August 29 – NEW.
    • Inventory Favourites System, plus assorted new features.
    • Improvements to avatar system; camera and movement; chat; voice; content creation tools.
    • Mesh uploader updates.
    • Text & UI polish.
    • Fixes for Environment and Rendering; stability and crashes; UI.
    • System improvements.
  • Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V7-style

  • Kokua: 7.2.1.57692 (no RLV) and 7.2.1.61405 (RLV variants)  (2025.06), September 6 – release notes.
  • Megaphit Release – 7.2.1.54496 – August 28 – changelog.

V1-style

  • Cool VL Viewer Stable: 1.32.4.4, September 6 – release notes.

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

2025 week #36: 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, September 4th, 2025, and the official video is embedded at the end of this article. 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

  • Default viewer 2025.06 7.2.1.17108480561 – August 29.
    • Inventory Favourites System, plus assorted new features.
    • Improvements to avatar system; camera and movement; chat; voice; content creation tools.
    • Mesh uploader updates.
    • Text & UI polish.
    • Fixes for Environment and Rendering; stability and crashes; UI.
    • System improvements.
  • Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13.

Viewer 2025.07

  • This is now in development.
  • Will likely include (although the list is subject to possible change as the viewer develops):
    • “Proper Discord support” for those with a Discord account  – further clarification to follow as the viewer is developed.
    • Native Apple Silicon support, which should see a performance boost for those running Apple Silicon.
    • A Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF) update (used to power the in-viewer browser, media on a prim (MOAP), etc.), which should bring some performance and security improvements – although the former will not necessarily be observed in regions / parcels making heavy use of MOAP (e.g. in arcades, and similar).
      • This also might include a code contribution which enables  PRIM_MEDIA_FIRST_CLICK_INTERACT within the viewer, allowing the user to interact with a media without an initial “focus” click, as well as passes hover to the media.
      • As a side note: a code contribution included in 2025.05 7.2.0.16729091892 (current release at the time of writing) allows media Autoplay turned off, whilst still allowing it to work on HUDs using MOAP.
    • New performance metrics which should allow the Lab to gather data on the likely performance impact new features might have on the viewer. This should benefit updates such as the improvements to screen space reflections (SSR), which have been parked in a viewer branch pending the ability to better assess how these updates might impact the average user’s experience in terms of frame rate (speed, smoothness, etc.).
  • It was indicated that 2025.07 could act as a baseline for updates to SLua support in the viewer.

General Discussion – In Brief

  • Alpha / Gamma issues (linear alpha blending):
    • In order for PBR lighting to render anywhere close to correctly, alpha blending had to be switched from SRGB to linear colour space. This can cause some older content using Blinn-Phong, to look either more opaque or more transparent than in did pre-PBR.
    • A suggested fix for this would be to give people the ability to adjust the alpha/gamma on per texture entry for the object (including no mod items), and this had been scheduled in 2024 for release “after the  ExtraFPS viewer”.
    • However, as this was essentially a “permission hack”, the update got held-up. It has now been decided to default all old content to gamma space blending, to bring back some of the “old” alpha blending functionality
  • Extracting Sky and Water Settings assets from a Day Cycle was filed a year ago and noted as tracked (also: https://github.com/secondlife/viewer/issues/2887), but progress may have stalled. As such, a effort will be make to raise its priority, although it still likely will not surface in a viewer until at least the 2025.09 release.
  • Issues with updating alphas on PBR materials was raised (currently, it is not possible to change the alpha without also changing the colour/tint. llSetLinkGLTFOverrides can be of some help with certain issues, and Brad Linden indicated that a Canny on the matter is working through the system, which should also help.
  • Custom Skeleton support: Geenz noted that the move to glTF mesh import was primarily to address the fact that COLLADA .DAE is increasingly unsupported by content creation apps, and thus SL needed to update to a “newer” format.
    • However, the manner in which the work has been done could support the use of custom skeletons in the future.
    • But, in order for this to be possible, several other hurdles would have to be cleared first (such as updating the internal SL mesh file format to support custom skeletons and without breaking existing content).
    • As such, any such support would need further consideration and prioritisation against other updates / projects before getting on the roadmap.
  • Vulkan support: this was referred to as still being “some way off” and requiring some extensive work, including cleaning-up how the view handles OpenGL.

General Questions

  • Questions were asked about both segmenting regions / parcels into vertical zones; the status of further work on Combat 2. and on Land impact calculations. These were questions more specific to Rider Linden (who was unfortunately unable to attend the meeting) / the Simulator User Group, and as such were redirected to the latter.
  • The question was raised if the developing Lobby capability for SL Mobile (which will eventually allow people to use some aspects of the Mobile app such as chat without them appearing as on-line to others) could be implemented within the viewer.  It was indicated that this might be possible in the future, although there is no current work in this direction at present.
  • This above encompassed a conversation on where conversation logs are currently stored (on the local device, be it computer or Mobile) vs. being stored in a manner that makes it accessible to all devices a user might employ to access Second Life. This is something the Lab is looking at, allowing for the privacy / data protection concerns of storing logs on third-party services, and would likely be an opt-in service
  • Additional questions on cashing-out, lifetime memberships, etc., were similarly pointed towards the relevant user group meetings, as no-one from the Lab at the CCUG in involved in these areas.

Next Meeting

September 2025 SL Web User Group

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday September 3rd, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. The official video is embedded at the end of this summary.

Meeting Overview

  • The Web User Group exists to provide an opportunity for discussion on Second Life web properties and their related functionalities / features. This includes, but is not limited to: the Marketplace, pages surfaced through the secondlife.com dashboard; the available portals (land, support, etc), and the forums.
  • As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
    • On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
    • In both Voice and text.
    • 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.

Announcements

  • The AI Character Generation beta has been spun down. See: LL announce a pause in the current SL AI character designer project for more.
  • All of the original Linden Homes micro-continents have been decommissioned.
    • Remaining holders of these homes have been transitioned over to the current Linden Homes selections.
    • All of the V1 Linden Home regions have been removed from the grid and the associated Linden Home V1 web-based home control pages have been archived.

Updates

  • As the August Web User Group was ending, the Marketplace the third-party Elastic Search instance experienced a significant failure, causing a very significant Marketplace outage. This caused some merchants were mistakenly charged multiple times for Product Listing Enhancements, which were all refunded.
    • If any merchant believes they are still out of balance, please open a support ticket.
    • The Marketplace team is working to stabilise the Marketplace and add more resiliency to MP systems to handle external outages.
  • Various bug fixes with Marketplace Responsive Search have been released, together with various clean-up tickets around support, land, and region store
  • A further tease  – without specifics – of an upcoming announcement “in the next few weeks” related to balancing-out the economy and providing more Linden Dollar sinks (see: An Update from Linden Lab – Linden Dollar Exchange Rate and the Economy – July 2025).

General Discussion

  • Open question from Juniper Linden: If you could remove one feature/aspect of Marketplace, what would it be? Responses went beyond the scope of the question and included:
    • Revert the change that makes “classified” ads at the top of search returns less obvious than they used to be (e.g. re-add the border around them or highlight them).
    • Refining the best-selling items section of the Marketplace (e.g. break it into price ranges / prevent it showing items which were on a short-term offer – e.g. L$75 for a day or so, but have since reverted to their full price, etc., or resetting an item so it doesn’t appear in the Best Selling list for the week in which its listing has been altered).
    • Improved filtering for searches (e.g. by body type).
    • Filtering-out AI generated content (assuming it is properly self-reported as such within the listings, which currently isn’t possible, nor is how AI been used in a product  – for example, is the item itself created using AI tools, or only the scripts within it?).
  • The default for the number of items shown on a Marketplace Page (e.g. following a search) has been altered from 96 to 48 (with the drop-down offering 24, 48 and 96 items per page options).
  • The above led to a discussion on further redefining the Marketplace product categories – notably around the avatar (e.g. having an Avatar category, with sub-categories such as Body Parts, Shapes, Hair, etc.).
  • Web map (maps.secondlife.com) and following-on from the August meeting:
  • This is a reported issue where, if you have been given the ability to see a friend on the in-world Map and can teleport to them, the teleport may fail if they are on a region with a space in its name, as the space breaks the SLurl.
  • A request was made to have a web page in the nature of the Land Auctions page, but specifically for rentals, rather than relying on search / the in-world world map. This was seen as a good idea for the Lab to consider, but would need further consideration in order to fit-in to the development roadmap.
  • Note: during the above question, a group of unicellular organisms attempted to disrupt the final ten minutes of the meeting. However, as the majority of the topics had been discussed, Pantera has wisely cut the attempt from the meeting video, which jumps to the closing remarks.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, October 1st, 2025.

2025 week #36: SUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Silent Melody, June 2025 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 2nd, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. They were taken from my chat log of the meeting and the video recording by Pantera, embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks to Pantera 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 is held every other Tuesday at 12:00 noon, SLT (holidays, etc., allowing), per the Second Life Public Calendar.
  • The “SUG Leviathan Hour” meetings are held on the Tuesdays which do not have a formal SUG meeting, and are chaired by Leviathan Linden. They are more brainstorming / general discussion sessions.
  • Meetings are held in text in-world, at this location.

Simulator Deployments

  • There are no planned deployment for the week, only restarts.
    • The restarts include upgrading some of the hardware to better classes of machines in the background, which is being carried out in stages on each restart.
    • Monty Linden noted the Main SLS Main channel restart saw an increase in the mix of more modern AWS hosts, but there were some glitches which led to some regions being off-line for a bit longer than expected.
  • It is hoped a new simulator update  – Grapejuice – will be ready for deployment to one or more RC channels in week #37.

In Brief

  • Rider Linden is working on an official native VSCode plugin for LSL and SLua. This is proceeding smoothly so far, and the hope is to open the repo opened to public viewing as soon as possible.
    • Right now, this is just for communicating compile errors from the viewer to the plugin.
    • However, he is planning on pushing a lot more through it in the future (e.g. DAP when LUA debugging becomes available).
    • He will most likely put in a LSP interface so that it can communicate with Selene for syntax colouring, etc.
    • There is a viewer branch with the initial code (PR: https://github.com/secondlife/viewer/pull/4599).
  • Leviathan Linden is working on getting the webRTC voice router to automatically submit crash reports in a similar manner to the viewer.
  • Pepper Linden noted that:
    • Working is continuing on turning on the new dynamic packing, noting there has been a “small road bump” due some issues seen with reported region stats. However, it should be turned on for some RC channel regions this week. Things to look for: better performance/less lag, and less restarts.
    • Pepper is currently working on the outfit project for SL Mobile.
  • Monty Linden is “thinking about the eventqueueget and other problems” as he re-visits protocol failures again with a view to updating an improving on his previous work in this area.
  • User Suzanna (SuzannaLinn) is producing a website with a SLua guide, including examples and a LSL to SLua transpiler.
  • A general discussion on SLua event handling, and on state switching (LSL -> SLua) which led to a wider discussion on coding practices and options which ran through the second half of the meeting.

Date of Next Meetings

  • Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, September 9th, 2025.
  • Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, September 16th, 2025.

† 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 #35

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, August 31st, 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 2025.06 7.2.1.17108480561 – August 29 – NEW.
    • Inventory Favourites System, plus assorted new features.
    • Improvements to avatar system; camera and movement; chat; voice; content creation tools.
    • Mesh uploader updates.
    • Text & UI polish.
    • Fixes for Environment and Rendering; stability and crashes; UI.
    • System improvements.
  • Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V7-style

  • Kirstens Viewer S24(4) – Sjáandi (Build 2640) – Release Candidate, August 31 –  – release notes.
  • Megaphit Release – 7.2.1.54496 – August 28 – changelog.

V1-style

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links