Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week through to Sunday, January 26th, 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.
Note that for purposes of length, TPV test viewers, preview / beta viewers / nightly builds are generally not recorded in these summaries.
Official LL Viewers
Release viewer: version 7.1.11.12363455226. formerly the ExtraFPS RC, dated December 17, promoted December 19 – No change.
Release Candidate: Forever FPS, version 7.1.12.12935708795, January 24, 2025.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 21st, 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 Pantera’s video of the meeting, which is embedded at the end – 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.
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, January 21st, 2025, the simulators on the Main SLS channel were restarted with no update.
On Wednesday, January 22nd, 2025 the RC channels will be restarted.
Banana Bread, the next simulator update will be likely be deployed to Aditi for testing.
SL Viewer Updates
Default viewer: version 7.1.11.12363455226, formerly the ExtraFPS RC (multiple performance fixes, aesthetic improvements and UI optimisations), dated December 17, promoted December 20 – No Change.
Release Candidate: Forever FPS, version 7.1.12.12793544240, January 17, 2025.
Numerous crash and performance fixes.
In Brief
Please refer to the video below for the following:
Leviathan Linden is due to resume work on the problem where content doesn’t always show up on first login/teleport arrival after being asked to look into a couple of other issues. His initial investigations have indicated that the problem is most likely simulator-side, be he’s still digging into the exact cause.
2K Bakes on Mesh:
Pepper Linden confirmed the simulator updates have been approved by QA.
Pepper also confirmed the viewer update is related to a problem found within the texture pipeline of ExtraFPS using too much VRAM (see this Canny issue report). This fix is due to go into the Lab’s ForeverFPS viewer update, and LL would like Firestorm to include it in a release before switching on 2K BoM.
There is some confusion as to the status of the glTF scene import project in the wake of Runitai Linden’s departure from LL.
Runitai got as far as prototyping the capability on Aditi, but it was not tied into the physical engine.
As has been mentioned numerous times, the majority of the focus within the graphics / viewer teams has been on improving overall viewer performance and is currently geared towards assisting Firestorm deal with blocker to their ExtraFPS release.
The above led to a discussion on the value of including some form of 3D mesh editing tool in the viewer. Unsurprisingly. These discussions saw a range of viewpoints expressed.
Leviathan Linden intimated that the viewer-side work for his game controller updates (which are available server-side) is also pending on resources within the viewer team becoming available in order to make the game control options more easily accessible (e.g. with the official viewer, it has to be unlocked via the Advanced menu).
A discussion on properly-supported “walking / running backwards” animations states.
It was suggested that the server-side Luau work (scripting) could be deployed to Aditi “in the next few months (possibly)” to allow scripters to poke at it while it is still in development.
Requests for additions to the official viewer, including RLV (RLV/a has been contributed by Kitty Barnett for inclusion in the official viewer, but the status of the work in doing so is unclear – it’s a significant piece of work).
A reminder that Monty Linden is working to correct defects within EventQueueGet (a simulator Capability that delivers messages from a simulator to viewers over HTTP using a long-poll scheme. It is core functionality without which viewer/simulator coordination is impossible), and is seeking feedback – see here for both defects, proposals to resolve and how to test.
† 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.
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week through to Sunday, January 19th, 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.
Note that for purposes of length, TPV test viewers, preview / beta viewers / nightly builds are generally not recorded in these summaries.
Official LL Viewers
Release viewer: version 7.1.11.12363455226. formerly the ExtraFPS RC, dated December 17, promoted December 19 – No change.
Release Candidate: Forever FPS, version 7.1.12.12793544240, January 17, 2025.
Simurg + Winter Valley, November 2024 – blog post †
The following notes were taken from my audio recording + the video recording by Pantera (embedded at the end of this summary) of the Third-Party Developer meeting (TPVD) held on Friday, January 17th, 2025. My thanks to Pantera as always for providing it.
Meeting Purpose
The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors to discuss general viewer development. This meeting is held once 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 re conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.
The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.
Release viewer: version 7.1.11.12363455226, formerly the ExtraFPS RC (multiple performance fixes, aesthetic improvements and UI optimisations), dated December 17, promoted December 20 – No Change.
Release Candidate: Forever FPS, version 7.1.12.12793544240, January 17, 2025.
Numerous crash and performance fixes.
Upcoming Viewers
ForeverFPS surfaced somewhat faster as an RC viewer than had been anticipated at the CCUG meeting.
Other plans for viewer updates are under review; there a numerous code commits in the Develop branch awaiting a viewer, but collectively, they are regarded as to many to all go into a single viewer update, so the order of release over several viewer updates needs to be determined.
WebRTC / Updating to Viewers with WebRTC Support / Rendering Holdbacks
Further re-iteration of the desire to see as many users as possible to move from viewers which lack WebRTC support (e.g. Firestorm 6.6.17) to those (predominantly PBR-based) viewers with the WebRTC support, so that the Vivox service can be turned off across the grid.
A further request was made as to why people are resistant.
Once again, the response was largely around the quality of the reflections / general look of the Linden Water plane on PBR viewers, lack of exclusion volumes for water; darker ambient tones to natural lighting.
Ambient issues, particularly with legacy EEP skies should have been largely corrected in ExtraFPS.
It was also pointed out that there are cohorts of users who are happy with what works for them, even if half their in-world view seems to be “broken” in some manner, and simply will not update as long as the viewer they use can still access SL.
A particular issue here with regards to WebRTC, is that while a high percentage of users are not updating to viewers with PBR + WebRTC support, it is not clear how many would be adversely affected by the loss of Vivox voice, given that many in SL rarely, if ever use Voice. If the number is small, turning off Vivox might not be an issue; if the number is large, it could cause people to abandon SL.
It was also suggested that wider communications from LL (and TPVs) on the nature of upcoming changes like WebRTC might help to make users more aware of what is going on.
In response to exclusion volumes and water quality / reflections, Geenz Linden noted:
There might be a way to provide exclusion volumes for water (e.g. to prevent water rendering inside boat hulls, etc.), but the issue is complicated.
There has been a regression in the way water appears and generates reflections; part of this was the result of the “pre-PBR” means of rendering water required multiple passes, which became a performance issue. However, improving water is on his list of things to do, and he hopes that some of the ideas he has will also help improve screen space reflections (SSR) .
However, he also indicated that bring back “full real-time reflections” on water is a not insignificant ask, and will likely only be possible after the moiré system has been further optimised, as reflection generation will likely piggyback off of that. As such, the work to recover water reflections will take time and will be iterative in nature, and there may be impacts on the general appearance of water.
Commenting on SSR, Geenz also noted that while improvements can be made, it will be “really hard” to return SSR quality to pre-PBR – but then, pre-PBR SSR had its own performance issues. As such, work in this area requires careful consideration on how to make improvements without impacting performance.
[Video: 24:14-29:30] General discussion / opinions on how and where to present assorted graphical settings and options within the Preferences / debugs, and how users understand / learn about the viewer’s internals.
[Video 30:16-32:25] Discussion on graphics and lighting – improving HDRi rendering, ambient like, introducing punctual lighting, using physical units for lighting.
[Video: 37:14-43:40] EventQueueGet is a simulator Capability that delivers messages from a simulator to viewers over HTTP using a long-poll scheme. It is core functionality without which viewer/simulator coordination is impossible. However, a number of defects in the design and maintenance of this capability have been found (see here for both defects and proposals to resolve).
Monty Linden has implemented a “phase 1” project to address some of these issues, and has set-up a channel of several regions on Aditi (the Beta grid) for public testing of the changes to validate that they do not in fact break anything. He has also published information on how users can help with the test and what is involved in the “phase 1” work.
During the meeting, he requested that people take the time to visit the test regions, carry out TPs and physical crossing between regions, leaving suitably scripted objects running on the regions, etc., per the testing information forum topic and report back via the topic or via the Feedback Portal.
This work may become part of the Banana Bread simulator release (still in the process of being defined), and further references to the work will most likely be via the Simulator User Group meetings.
User groups for discussing Project Zero / SL Mobile:
The Project Zero viewer-in-a-browser project is open for discussion at the Web User Group (as Sntax Linden leads both the WUG group and Project Zero); and it has been indicated it might spin-up its own user group in time.
There are internal discussions going on in the Lab about starting a SL Mobile User Group. More to follow on this.
† 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.
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 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
Release viewer: version 7.1.11.12363455226, formerly the ExtraFPS RC (multiple performance fixes, aesthetic improvements and UI optimisations), dated December 17, promoted December 20, 2024.
Numerous bugs and issues have been reported following the ExtraFPS viewer promotion, and as a result, these seem likely to be developed into a bug-fix viewer (“ForeverFPS”), with an initial cut at an RC version potentially coming in the next week or so.
There are “numerous discussions” occurring at the Lab regarding possible future projects, but nothing at present to announce.
It was announced that Runitai Linden (often referred to as DaveP) is departing Linden Lab to enter public service.
Runitai commented directly on his reasons for departing the Lab and his feelings about doing so, however, rather than drop them here for those who prefer to read rather than listen, I’ve provided a transcript with some additional notes: Runitai Linden hears the call of Public Service.
It is believed the 2K bake updates for the Bake Service are “ready to go”, having cleared QA per my notes from the SUG meeting.
The viewer updates required to allow 2K textures to be used with wearable layers are apparently merged into the Develop branch, but yet to surface within an RC viewer built from that branch.
In theory, the back-end support could be enabled pending the viewer update, because it will not interfere with current rendering, as the viewer should continue to limit wearable textures to the current maximum of 1024×1024 until it is updated to apply 2K bakes. However, discussions on how to proceed pending the viewer update will be taken-up internally by LL.
[Video: 14:48-15:00] here have been multiple requests / discussions over the years about the potential of an Inventory archive to allow people to reduce (some of) their Inventory bulk / bloat by archiving items through a supported system rather than just boxing them. Currently, such a service is not on the roadmap.
[Video: 17:32-22:55] A request to add the type of client (viewer, browser, SL Mobile) some is using to their avatar tag “to help people help others”. Surely the easiest way to find this out, as a mentor / someone giving assistance, etc., is to ask (“Are you using SL on a Mobile or through a browser, or have you installed the client on your computer?”).
Comments from Philip Rosedale
The core CCUG meeting was shortened to 30 minutes due to LL meeting conflicts. However, Philip Rosedale dropped in to provide assorted comments and feedback.
[Video: 24:40-25:35] On AI and Scripted Agents, etc.: thinks the Lab’s policy on AI and bots is going to be “a complex and evolving matter”, and that as AI becomes more powerful, people will need to come together to decide how best to handle it in SL, given the variety of views.
[Video: 27:39-40:14] The above indirectly led to a discussion on being able to identify bots in Group chat sessions and IMs similar, where it may not be obvious that messages are being bot / AI-generated. There are flags which should be used with scripted agents and which should force a message to indicate a messenger is a scripted agent in IMs; however, the issue appears to be that chat and IM can get flooded so quickly with text, the notification can be missed. Suggestions were made to make this text a different colour and possibly pin it to the top of the chat / IM window.
This resulted in a list of categories of bot bad behaviour being drawn up, including begging, phishing, undesired group chat, traffic gaming, data collection (e.g. Bonnie Bots) even overwhelming users with NPC text & failing to account for other interactions.
Overall, this became an extended conversation, and following the video is recommended for full context.
[Video 25:45-26:48] On promoting Second Life as a place to hold work meetings: does not believe the platform has reached that point, because of the lack of nuance within avatar communications – humans really heavily on non-verbal communication cues for further subtext, etc., in exchanges, and SL currently cannot provide these.
[Also, as a sidenote, LL put considerable effort into trying to develop SL as a behind-the-firewall “business application” between 2008-2011 with the Second Life Enterprise (SLE) package (licenses at around US $55,000, but I cannot remember how many avatars came with that license), and that didn’t go so well at the time – potentially because of the shortfalls Philip mentions being among the reasons it didn’t really gain a lot of traction at the time.]
[Video: 40:14-50:10] A discussion on resource allocation through Project Zero to allow fair and balanced access to SL at minimum / no cost through the browser for people without it being abused (e.g. by people creating and running dozens / hundreds of bots through the browser access, thus running up costs to a point where others have to start paying at a higher rate.
As this was a brainstorming session producing multiple ideas (e.g. limiting browser access to subscription accounts – potentially missing the people the service is really geared towards helping, as they may not have subscription accounts; controlling via some form of 2FA; utilising Payment Information on File both as a means to limit access to those who are PIOF and a means to prevent them logging-on more than one account through the streaming service at one time, etc.), please refer to the video.
[Video: 50:11-54:08] When will voice services switch solely to WebRTC? – still waiting for more users to move from Firestorm 6.6.17 to a PBR-enabled version of Firestorm (which will hopefully happen once Firestorm release a version based on the ExtraFPS viewer code, allowing for the issues for poor Linden Water quality – reflections, etc.).
[Video 55:50-1:01:05] Discussion on exclusion volumes for boats under PBR (as re-enabling the forward renderer to allow invisiprims to hide water volumes is not going to happen). Runitai indicated there are potentially alternatives to allow such exclusion volumes to work.
[Video: 1:01:11-1:02:55] Comments on alternative rendering engines and content support segueing into thoughts on why other VW platforms have never achieved the level of adoption by users as witnessed with Second Life (including Sansar, OpenSim and Meta).
† 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.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 14th, 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 Pantera’s video of the meeting, which is embedded at the end – 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.
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, January 14th, 2025, the simulators on the Main SLS channel were restarted with no update.
On Wednesday, January 15th, all remaining RC channel outside of BlueSteel should be updated with the Apple Cobbler simulator update, which includes llGetAttachedListFiltered(),llGiveAgentInventory(),llMapBeacon(),llTransferOwnership(), and a modification to llModPow, so it should work faster (however, it does not correctly handle the full range of positive 31-bit integers -and Leviathan Linden is working to define the range for which it supplies correct answers, so check the wiki page for updates).
SL Viewer Updates
Release viewer: version 7.1.11.12363455226, formerly the ExtraFPS RC (multiple performance fixes, aesthetic improvements and UI optimisations), dated December 17, promoted December 20 – No Change.
Release Candidate: none at present.
In Brief
Please refer to the video below for the following:
Rider Linden:
I have an internal change dealing with how the simulator makes outgoing HTTP calls. It’s just a proof of concept and changes how a few things at start-up are handled, residents shouldn’t see any differences. As that expands further in the future, I’ll start calling out things that people should be paying attention to.
Leviathan Linden:
Just a status update on what I’m working on: I’ve been trying to come up with a reliable repro for the “sometimes objects don’t show up upon login/teleport arrival — in order for them to show up you need to do a relog” problem. Although I don’t have a reliable repro for it I’ve verified it is a real server-side bug and have some ideas to try out. I got side-tracked on something but will get back to working on that later today.
A request was made on whether there could be a way for an Experience owner to see the data stored (e.g. as two-column spreadsheet) and without having to query the whole thing a few keys at a time. This led to a general discussion on now this might be achieved, with Monty Linden adding:
KVP things are something we have to look at again in the future – if people have wants, now is a good time to start asking … if something’s needed, can add it to the stew pot.
The above led to a broader discussion on scripting – a viewer UI for LSD / status on the Luau project for the viewer (unclear, as Signal Linden had to depart the meeting before replying); the potential for a llLinkSetData equivalent on avatars (seen as unwise because of some of the potentials it might present – such as allowing a script to put “cookies” on avatars), data storage, touched on this Canny request, and circled back to user-supplied grid-wide experiences. This discussion ran through most of the rest of the meeting.
The question was asked whether it would be possible to have llGetObjectDetails respect parcel privacy settings, whereby if an object that isn’t on the parcel you are standing on has Avatars On Other Parcels Can See and Chat with Avatars on This Parcel toggled off, it won’t be able to get a list of your attachments – notably as a form of protection against data-gathering bots. Rider Linden requested a Canny feature request on this.
Leviathan Linden suggested that a merge of 2k BOM has passed a QA review; however, as Pepper Linden was not available at the meeting to confirm overall status.
† 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.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 