2025 week #3: SL CCUG meeting summary

Lights in White Satin, November 2024 – blog post
The following notes were taken from:

  • The livestream and my chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, January 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 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.
  • Release Candidate: none at present.

General Update & Runitai Linden’s Departure

[Video: 2:11-7:20]

  • 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.

Runitai Linden Departing LL

[Video: 3:52-7:20]

  • 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.

2K Bakes on Mesh

[Video: 12:52-14:47 and 15:10-17:03]

  • 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.

In Brief

  • [Video: 10:05-10:39] A request was made for Darcy Linden to attend at least some CCUG meetings to discuss the Lab’s AI character generation project (see: Introducing the Character Designer (Alpha) and this follow-up forum thread). Vir Linden indicated he will check with Darcy on plans to join / hold meetings.
  • [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).

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 week #3: SL SUG meeting summary

La Côte Sauvage, November 2024 – blog post

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.
  • 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

  • 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.
  • A discussion on llDerezObject.
  • 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.

2025 SL viewer release summaries week #2

Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation

Updates from the week through to Sunday, January 12th, 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.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V7-style

  • Black Dragon for Windows version 5.2.2 (PBR) January 8, 2025 – release notes.

V1-style

  • Cool VL viewer Stable branch: 1.32.2.31, January 11, 2025 – release notes.

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links

January 2025 SL Web User Group summary

The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby
The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday January 8th, 2025. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the meeting, recorded by Pantera Północy, is embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks as always to Pantera for recording it and making it available. Table of Contents

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), 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.

General Update

[Video: 0:40-3:40 and 7:36-8:20]

  • Pre-Holiday Marketplace issues:
    • There were some outages and slow delivery times on the Marketplace in the run-up to the holidays.
    • Due to these problems, store holders were unable to see the view count on their Top Selling Products report, as it was not reporting correctly. This has now been corrected, and the view count is once more reporting correctly, and will not be removed from the report.
    • The underlying causes of all of these issues should now be fixed. Anyone experiencing continued problems WRT them should file a ticket.
  • Decimal point values manifesting on L$ amounts: users noted that places such as the Marketplace cashier page started displaying decimal point valves on L$ amounts (e.g. L$50.98). This was not intentional, and should now be corrected. Again, anyone still seeing it should file a ticket.
  • Related Items Display on MP listings: an issue with Related Items not displaying correctly on Marketplace project listings has been fixed and related items should all display correctly, even when resizing the browser window smaller.
  • [Video: 7:36-8:20] Featured News Blog feed:  the Feature News blog widget on the default viewer log-in screen (“Linden News” on Firestorm) is currently broken.
Broken blog feed widget on the default log-in splash screen for the viewer
    • This may also be causing Featured News failing to display on the dashboard (which might display something like Grid Status instead).
    • LL are working to correct this problem.

Web Properties Refresh

[Video: 3:47-6:08]

  • The pages at community.secondlife.com have been refreshed as a part of the overall drive to update the appearance of the various pages / sites.
The refreshed community.secondlife.com pages / portal
    • Four page themes are offered on refreshed pages: Light Classic, Light New, Dark Classic, and Dark New (the default). These can be selected via the Themes drop-down link at the foot of refreshed pages:
Options for switching Second Life refreshed page themes
      • Issues have been reported when displaying Knowledge Base articles in the new layout (not clear if this is in general or specific to the Dark mode(s)), and LL are working to rectify these issues.
      • Again, if anyone notes specific issues with page displays in any of the themes, please file a ticket.
    • Updated, January 9th: Similar work in planned for the dashboard (secondlife.com), although at the time of writing, this has yet to be surfaced – although Sntax Linden indicated it was “very close to being deployed”. The initial Dashboard refresh has been deployed.
The initial dashboard refresh (secondlife.com) was deployed shortly after this summary was published. Currently, there is no option to change themes
  • Within secondlife.com, the What Next? section (top menu bar and https://secondlife.com/my/whatnext/) is also to be significantly updated, as much of it is very dated in content. However, the time frame for this surfacing is still TBD.

Project Zero (Viewer Streamed to a Browser)

[Video: 33:00-48:22]

  • For background (if you need it!) see: Second Life in your browser: a new initiative from Linden Lab).
  • Sntax Linden indicated that this can also be a subject for discussion at WUG meetings (he is on of those leading the work), although it may evolve into having its own user group in the future.
  • Overall response appears positive, although some appear to have pain points – notably with multi-factor authentication causing problems in loading the viewer. This was thought to have been fixed, but still appears to be an issue.
  • The time limit for Project Zero has now been increased to 1 hour per session (from 10 minutes).
The viewer-in-a-browsers website, showing increased time limit (as of January 9th, 2025)
  • Reasons as to why people might not use the services (currently still free) given at the meeting included:
    • Inability to: save viewer Preferences; perform uploads; save chat IM logs, etc.
    • Lack of Firestorm support.
    • No in-built (client-side) AO for avatars.
    • Most of the above are on the roadmap – see my article in the link at the top of this section – although TPV support is dependent on TPVs being willing to engage in the project as it continues to be developed.
  • There have been reports of zero.secondlife.com not working on Brave (Chrome derived browser) which were thought to have been fixed; however Brave still hangs without loading the viewer (the same is true for Gener8, Vivaldi and Epic, all of which, like Brave, are heavy on privacy browsing).
  • Note that from the 48 minute point onwards, this conversation devolves in discussions on food.

In Brief

  • A further discussion on https://maps.secondlife.com/ following that of the December 2024 meeting, this focused on the search function and how it arrives at its results, given they do not appear to be region / parcel based.
    • This segued into a wider discussion of map searches and sources used, accuracy of returns, preferred means of searching for places (e.g. SL search – then use the Map link in the relevant result, or use Maps (in-world or web), etc.
    • As a part of the more general search comments, it was suggested that when users have Maturity ratings set (e.g. only G or only M), search indicated that results are limited due to the set rating.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, February 5th, 2025.

2025 week #2: SL SUG meeting summary

Omerta Island, November 2024 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  January 7th, 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.
  • 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

  • On Tuesday, January 7th, 2025, the simulators on the Main SLS channel were restarted with no update.
  • On Wednesday, January 8th:
    • The BlueSteel RC 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).
    • The remaining simulators on the RC channels are to be restarted without any update.

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:

  • A discussion on llSetAgentRot and extending it, with Rider Linden noting:
I left the API open to be able to use any rot. Unfortunately there are a lot of assumptions in both the simulator and the viewer about the agent only rotating around Z. Changing that is going to be a much larger project.
  • Questions were asked on improving the quality of Linden Water effects and reflections. Such questions are best dealt with via the Content Creation User Group (summaries here).
  • An intertwined discussion with the above about Linden Water and swimming options.
  • There have been requests for a llSetObjectMass() function. Whilst this doesn’t currently exist, this SL wiki page has been created to provide a (hopefully) equitable capability, with Leviathan Linden noting:
Vehicle developers were asking for an llSetMass() method so they could standardize the mass of the vehicle after the agent had sat down. It turns out that LSL function is not necessary, there is a way to do it with existing LSL functionality, but it is a little tricky for multi-prim objects.
  • A further discussion on improving vehicle interaction with parcel bans – something LL is hoping to address – such as the potential for putting banline information on the mini-map, with other suggestions being put forward.
    • This led to a broad discussion on issues of parcel privacy and access, security and forced teleporting of unwanted visitors.
  • Requests have been made to modify Experience permissions so that creators can set them to “only this time” or “work like phone apps“. This led to a discussion on Experiences  and the format of the permissions dialogue, etc.

 

† 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 #1

Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation

Updates from the week through to Sunday, January 5th, 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.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V7-style

  • Alchemy – 7.1.9.2514 (Beta WebRTC build) January 4, 2025 – release notes.

V1-style

  • No updates.

Mobile / Other Clients

  • Radegast client version 2.42, January 3, 2025 – release notes.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links