Category: SL Tech

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, July 15th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting (“off week”). They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. The notes were taken from my chat log of the meeting and Patera’s video, which is embedded at the end of this article – my thanks to her 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 other Tuesday from July 8th, 2025, 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.
• The term “off week” is used to describe meetings held by Leviathan Linden on those weeks when a “full” Simulator User Group meeting is not scheduled to be held.

Simulator Deployments

• There are no planned deployments to any channels this week, only restarts.

SL Viewer Updates

• Default viewer 7.1.15.15596336374 promoted June 12 – No Change.
• Second Life Project glTF Mesh Import, version 7.1.14.15976006598 July 2 – No Change.
  • This is an early Alpha release with some of the rough edges and already resolved many bugs and crashes, although more are to be found, together with general feedback from the community. Please read the release notes if you intend to test this viewer.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

In Brief

Also refer to the video for the full meeting.

• Leviathan has been working on resolving a exploit which – although this is not certain) he may have accidentally introduced into the simulator code during her first stint at the Lab(!).
• Further work on the game_control project for the viewer remains in hibernation.
  • The core code was in a viewer development branch that was archived during the most recent switch to the viewer development and release workflow.
  • While much of it has been “salvaged” from the retired dev branch, it still needs to be approved for porting and merging into a current development repository.
  • There are also functional questions to be addressed – such as what to do about keyboard-only users and game_control.
• Work on the Linux version of the official viewer also appears to be “stuck” in the archived develop branch.
• Leviathan asked if anyone has tried to use the SL raw terrain save/load system, and if so, whether they have found it works correctly. There are apparently some bugs within it, and he’s trying to determine how best to prioritise it for fixing.
  • The general consensus at the meeting was getting the OK to update, port and merge the game_control code should be a higher priority than the terrain save/load.
• A general discussion on porting features / capabilities to / from Firestorm (and on offering Pull Requests to Firestorm for code such as game_control).
• A brief indication of “prioritisation competition” for viewer-side features at the Lab: some developers prefer to develop the code and build a functional UI to access it, then polish the latter; others (and management?) prefer code that is put forward with a complete, polished UI design.

Date of Next Meeting

• Tuesday, July 22nd, 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.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, July 8th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. The notes were taken from my chat log of the meeting and Patera’s video, which is embedded at the end of this article – my thanks to her 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 other Tuesday from July 8th, 2025, 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

• There are no planned deployments to any channels this week, only restarts (RC channels subject to confirmation at the time of the meeting).
• The next simulator release is estimated to be around two weeks from being ready for deployment.

SL Viewer Updates

• Default viewer 7.1.15.15596336374 promoted June 12 – No Change.
• Second Life Project glTF Mesh Import, version 7.1.14.15976006598 July 2 – New.
  • This is an early Alpha release with some of the rough edges and already resolved many bugs and crashes, although more are to be found, together with general feedback from the community. Please read the release notes if you intend to test this viewer.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

Upcoming Changes to the Simulator User Group Meetings

• As from this meeting, the Simulator User group will be moving to every other week, rather than weekly. So the next formal meeting will be on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2025.
• However, for the foreseeable future, Leviathan Linden plans to make himself available to hold informal meetings on the “off” weeks – so he will be available on Tuesday, July 15th.
• In addition:
  • The format of the meeting will also be changing to include a “dev stand-up” in which the members of the engineering team who are present can provide a short “here is what I’m working on” summary.
  • The meeting might also include a mail box so that questions which cannot be addressed at the current meeting can be submitted and answered at the next.
  • The location of the meeting will be changing (and at the time of writing is TBA).
  • The meeting will remain text-only – although this may change when speech-to-text becomes available.

In Brief

Also refer to the video for additional discussions.

• Puppetry:
  • The Puppetry project remains in hibernation, awaiting work on things like getting inverse kinematics (IK) into the viewer.
  • There has been some internal talk of animation streaming (which had been experimented with during the Puppetry work) at the Lab, but this has yet to the thrashed out enough to get close to getting on the development roadmap.
• SLua:
  • Leviathan Linden has been working on an optimisation to address a SLua bottleneck with llSetLinkPrimitiveParams(). This work has resulted in object FullUpdates measurably faster when viewed via debug timings, although the difference is not noticeable is term of user experience.
  • He also noted that he didn’t really drop the number of function calls all that much, but that “they are doing less work, but still about the same number of them”.
  • As such the work needs to progress further, but is once again paused whilst Leviathan addresses some high priority bugs.
• Rider Linden is working on on expanding llRequestInventoryData, allowing it to take advantage of metadata in other assets (e.g. materials, animations, textures, sounds) which could prove useful for scripts.
• Questions were raised on accessing Aditi, the beta grid. Those trying to do so / having issued should refer to this help desk article.
• Map Tiles:
  • Individual Map tiles have a UUID (as well as a URL to allow them to be shown on web pages); however, 4, 16, 64, etc., region tiles only have a web URL.
  • A script function to confess the UUID for a region’s map tile has often been requested. Pepper linden noted that LL have have the mapping of region id to texture tile UUID, so the latter can be exposed via an LSL function, but the work to do so has yet to be prioritised.
  • The process for pruning stale Map tiles from the map, as there is a bug in the mapgen that results in “chunks of the map disappearing.”  As a result map tile removal is back to a manual process.
• The request to “bring back LindenWorld” made at SL22B (and raised at just about every User Group meeting since), prompted Leviathan Linden to note:

It is an interesting idea. Although [the] LindenWorld feature set is very buggy/outdated. It isn’t compatible with modern SL accounts. I wonder how we would do auth? It would probably have to be rewritten for it to actually work. From a developer’s perspective: it would be a lot of work to host a LindenWorld grid. Just to build the ancient LindenWorld client… big long overhaul of legacy C++ code which no longer builds with modern compilers/libraries/APIs.

• A general discussion on terrain, adding more geometry detail to the terrain per metre, the raw terrain export/import.
• A discussion on water, the water plane, exclusion volumes, “physical” water, etc.

Date of Next Meeting

• Tuesday, July 22nd, 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.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, July 1st, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. The notes were taken from my chat log of the meeting. No video this week.

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

• There are no planned deployments to any channels this week, only restarts (RC channels subject to confirmation at the time of the meeting).
• The back-end work which had stalled simulator updates over the last few weeks is now largely completed, and Rider Linden is hoping to get a cut of the simulator release to QA for week #28. The backend migration was about storing of build pipeline assets (libraries, docker images, etc) from one cloud service to another. While this was in progress, the opportunity was taken to do “a lot of clean-up and fresh implementation” of using Github workflow jobs.

SL Viewer Updates

• Default viewer 7.1.15.15596336374 promoted June 12 – No Change.
• Second Life Project glTF Mesh Import, version 7.1.14.15830455952 June 24 – NEW.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

In Brief

• SLua:
  • Rider Linden hopes to return to a half-finished project of speeding up some permissions calculations that happen when changing primitive parameters via LSL/Slua. This is a hot spot that Harold Linden noticed when benchmarking SLua scripts.
  • The overall memory limit for SLua scripts has not yet been settled. However, as the bytecode is smaller, even if the current Mono limit is kept, SLua programs will have more room to work.
  • Rider Linden indicated he would nudge Harold and Signal Linden about updating the current SLua servers on Aditi.
  • It has not yet been decided how require, include, etc., will work with SLua, and a determination will likely be made during the beta – although there is no time frame when the latter will commence.
  • One of the things Harold Linden has done is move the definition of the LSL API to a config file, allowing some of the Mono boilerplate to be autogenerated from it.
• A general discussion on coding and how SLua might be handled, caveated with reminders that LL is trying to maintain LSL compatibility; and in LSL once a prototype is set and published changing it becomes breaking.
• Linden Lab is considering setting up a public repo (or similar) which could be used to publish the XML used to define the LSL commands.
• [Feature Request] llLinksetDataWriteWithValidation() has been filed, and is see as an “outstanding proposal”.
• A discussion on experiences and the KVP database (e.g. experience permissions, allowing “purchasable” access to larger amounts of KVP storage, use of external storage and LSL access to it. This was largely driven by users.
• A general discussion on a modal generating capability via LSL for HUDS, etc., together with approaches and pros and cons.

† 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.