Category: SL Tech

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, February 17th, 2026 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 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

• Tuesday, February 17th, 2026:  the SLS Main channel simhosts were restarted and updated to simulator release 2026.02 (Kiwi). This includes:
  • LL’s annual server certification changes – some outstanding changes are required to Aditi (the Beta grid), Agni is fully up-to-date.
  • “PERMISSION_PRIVILEGED_LAND_ACCESS”, allowing the llSetParcelForSale function to be used (and potentially other parcel settings in the future), but will require a viewer-side update in order to be accessed.
  • A bug fix to llTransferOwnership that was stripping out items that it shouldn’t have.
• On Wednesday February 18th, all simhosts on the RC channels should be restarted without any updates.
• The next simulator release is now officially 2026.03 – Loganberry; no details are currently unavailable.

In Brief

Please also refer to the video, below.

• Rider Linden is currently engaged on some under the hood backlog fixes that have been needed for quite a while.
• Rider also raised two “how much will this break?” questions:
  • Right now LL’s LSL Regex operates on 8 bit characters. A bug report has been submitted about it not supporting unicode. So the question is: what if LL switched to using unicode under the hood. Another option on that would be to add a flag at the end (like “/i”) that would indicate it should unicode? The favour shown at the meeting was an under-the-hood unicode change although concerns was raised over the potential for implement work-arounds to the issue which might be in widespread use.
  • The second question was on change notification on texture changes – and the fact that LL aren’t sending them; the notifications are available on a scripted texture change, but are not being fired. This discussion got mixed in with  discussion on “Second Life II” (which Sansar sort-of wasn’t, although also kind-of was) please refer to the latter half of the meeting for details.
• Leviathan Linden:
  • Is working on “some final changes to my workaround for the “cannot change mesh face” problem. After code review some changes were determined to be necessary.
  • He has also implemented a submission from Henri Beauchamp (Cool VL Viewer) to try to resolve the issue of “perpetually cloudy avatars” by resending avatar attachment info whenever the viewer requests avatar textures. This still requires further refinement and addition to a simulator update, but it is progressing.
  • A bug report about too many listen events when creating similar llListen() filters; this is now seen as a bug and a fix from Leviathan will be a part of 2026.03 Loganberry.
  • Leviathan has also received a bug report against the game-control viewer pre-release: custom key (button?) mappings are not being saved. He has not as yet been able to dig into it, but wanted people to know it is on his radar.
• Harold Linden (SLua):
  • Has added a couple of things: `table.append()` and `table.extend()` so that it’s much less annoying to work with lists of rules as is typical in existing functions like set primitive params/. This will be deployed in an upcoming TBD simulator update, as it still needs a couple of “tweaks”.
  • Harold is also working on a fix for `string.gsub()` and `table.sort()` and friends killing your script if they run too long.
  • Various questions throughout the meeting on SLua – please refer to the video.
• SLua Resources (as it was asked during the meeting):
  • Official scripting portal (this is a work in progress and open to contributions – Github for the latter here).
  • The Second Life official Discord server / channels.
  •  Suzanna’s SLua Guide (Suzanna  Linn).
  • Official VScode plugin notes:
    • It is not yet available on the VScode marketplace.
    • Issues and PRs for code submissions can be made here, and the plugin downloaded.
  • VSCode plugin + documentation (Wolfgang Senizen – likely be discontinued and contributions shifted to support the official documentation).
• The subject of region crossings causing issues and the need for them to be a “top priority” for “fixes”.
  • Harold Linden has done some work on some work to improve the testing situation there. Now that LL has codified how it (mis)behaves, he hopes LL can define a path for the correct behaviour while ensuring fixes don’t break existing viewers that rely on the broken behaviour
• Roxie Linden repeated her update that WebRTC is tentatively targeting a March deployment for WebRTC. When it happens, it will be a typical server rollout (week one: limited simulator RC channel deployment; week 2: deployment to all remaining simulator RC channels; week three deployment to the rest of Agni). However, if anything comes up, one or more stages of deployment may be delayed for fixes.
• Another viewer side-track for a server meeting, this time questioning the arrived of the “visual polish” viewer with SSR updates, something covered at the Content Creation User Group (attended by the individual raising the question at this meeting).
• I had to depart the meeting early; please refer to Pantera’s video (blow) for the final 20 minutes.

Date of Next Meetings

• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, February 24th, 2026.
• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, March 3rd, 2026.

† 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, February 10th, 2026 Simulator User Group (SUG) off-week meeting (the “SUG Leviathan Hour”). 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 Pantera’s video is embedded at the end of this article – my thanks to her, as always, for recording and 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.

Mesh Face Count Mismatch Bug

• This is a long-term bug whereby some mesh objects fail to accept a texture change on some faces. The texture change shows up on the viewer, but if you take to inventory or relog the texture change vanishes.
• The problem appears to require changes on both on the simulator side and on the viewer.
• Leviathan describes the bug a a form of protocol bug introduced by an old asset-upload-pipeline bug, which he believes has been complicated by a viewer-side bug.
• In short:
  • LL pack texture data using a variable-length scheme, depending on whether all faces are the same or there are differences, but the actual number of faces is not encoded; instead the simulator has been relying the number of faces being implicit to the “VolumeParams” of a prim (this approach pre-dating mesh).
  • LL then introduced meshes with up to 8 texture faces.
  • This, combined with a potential bug in the asset upload pipeline which caused the number of faces in the asset to be wrong, caused errors on the server side of things.
  • A fix for the upload problem was implemented, but the the issue persists for mesh objects uploaded prior to any fix for uploads being applied.
• Leviathan has a fix for the simulator issue(essentially a means to encode the number of faces into the legacy texture encoding without breaking protocol and without eating many bytes).
• However, in testing it, he found a viewer-side issue in loading and updating / recording mesh face textures data. He’s still working on this issue, but believes the viewer and server will have to have an updated protocol interpretation so they can communicate how many faces they think there are in an object. the data will live in the new object created by making any changes to a rezzed item.
• He noted that such a fix might also correct the issue of LSL not seeing the right number of faces.
• This discussion also involved some confusion over sculpties and their  total number of faces, and the actual total number of faces (8 or 9 – it’s 8 hard-coded on the simulator).

In Brief

• Leviathan has a fix for the problem whereby when sometimes rezzing an object on a mesh surface will fail and supply an incorrect or misleading message (e.g. not having parcel rez rights or something). See: FIRE-15429 and Beq Janus’ blog Coming to Firestorm soon… A couple of new features for builders and non-builders alike. It is currently in a Pull Request.
• There are no updates on the status of the game_control work,  and the pre-release of the game-control viewer remains unchanged.
  • Moving this project forward is dependent on the progress of the new SL Linux viewer build.
  • The next steps are to make some UI adjustments and identify any further changes required to get the code through QA for release.
  • As a reminder, game_control provides some keyboard mapping options from the existing avatar control actions:
    move forward, strafe, turn, jump, fly, and (maybe) crouch. It doesn’t currently support “all the keys” input.
  • The reason for game_control is to provide LSL scripts access to game controller input. But how the controller interacts with avatar-control, fly-cam, and keyboard mapping complicated things.
  • There was talk during the early days of the project the game_control could be made to handle MIDI inputs; however this is currently not supported.
  • This led to an extended discussion on key mapping options.
• Leviathan expressed an interest in turning to support the current drivers for the Connexion 3D Mouse devices (e.g. SpaceNavigator, etc.), given the current working driver for SpaceNavigator is badly out-of-date, and more recent versions. However, this is an interest, not a commitment to actually do so.

Date of Next Meetings

• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, February 17th, 2026.
• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, February 24th, 2026.

† 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.