Category: SL Tech

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, February 25th, 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):
  • 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

• On Tuesday, February 25th, 2025, the SLS Main channel was restarted without anu deployment.
• On Wednesday, February 26th, 2025, the Carrot Cake update should be deployed to the rest of the RC channels (having already been deployed to BlueSteel). This includes:
  • Monty Linden’s work on 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).
  • Simulator support for the  increase to viewer Profile Picks (from 10 to 20) announced as a part of the Membership Mania promotions.

Future Deployments

• The next simulator update is to be called Durian Scones. The size and content of this update is still TBA. However, Monty Linden indicated it will carry updated SSL certificates – he will be publishing details here.
  • These will be Digicert-signed, not Linden-signed.
  • Protocols should mostly be compatible. But looking to a future with old stuff being deprecated.
  • The new certificates should fix the longstanding issue of llRequestSecureURL being untrusted.

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 7.1.12.12999043440, February 4, 2025 – No Change.

In Brief

Please refer to the video below for the following:

• Leviathan Linden is working on the issue of objects not rendering on logging-in. He describes his work as not yet having found a cause, but working on a new theory. This led to a discussion on whether the issue is within the viewer (e.g. caching errors, issues with objection occlusion calculations) or a simulator-side issue (e.g. Interest List transmission problems). This discussion is woven through most of the meeting.
• A discussion on improving the calculations used to determine the LI of Animesh objects, which also touched on the LI calculation formula being revisited as a whole “at some point”.
• Combined with the above was a discussion on optimising LOD / incentivising better LOD generation on the part of creators.
• A general discussion on gravity and changing it, revolving around this suggestion.  As Rider Linden noted, fiddling with SL’s gravity is both difficult and can have unforeseen outcomes.
• A general discussion on when Lua(u) will be surfacing (Rider Linden: “VERY VERY VERY VERY soon!”), with a reiteration that LSO is not going to be deprecated; however Mono will eventually be removed, with LSL compiling to Lua. This included a discussion on preserving data stored in script memory in transitioning away from Mono to Lua when it comes to in-world scripts that are running.

† 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 18th, 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):
  • 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

• On Tuesday, February 18th, 2025, the Banana Bread update was deployed to the SLS Main channel This update includes expansions to llGetObjectPermMask that let you get an object’s permission mask taking into account the permissions on its inventory, and that ability has been added to llGOD.
• On Wednesday, February 19th, 2025:
  • Carrot Cake should be deployed to the Bluesteel RC. This includes Monty Linden’s work on 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).
  • The remaining RC channel will be restarted without any deployment.

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 7.1.12.12999043440, February 4, 2025 – No Change.

In Brief

Please refer to the video below for the following:

• Leviathan Linden has been been working with another Lab developer to improve avatar loading. He believes they have been able to make a few improvements, particularly in improving near-to-far sorting for avatar loading, with those nearby loading the fastest.
  • He hopes that the work will surface in a viewer update in March.
  • This is seen as offering “small” improvements, as further work will be required on the simulator end so the server sorts avatar data at its end rather than just sending it, but this has yet to be done.
• Leviathan also noted that the packet loss / UDP data loss noted in the last SUG meeting appears to be a result of the viewer allowing the network socket buffer (the one managed by the OS) to overflow, which can happen when the viewer experiences a long frame. It can also affect avatar loading, so his fix for the issue is going into that work.
• Region crossings / Disconnects: More reports of issues, particularly around teleports and disconnects user Quinn Elara has been logging her experiences, which the Lab has been looking at (note: be aware if posting viewer log information to the Feedback Portal, as it can contain personal information).  This issue became a topic of conversation through a portion of the meeting.
  • The above slid into a conversation of using the BugSplat tool in the viewer for reporting data.

† 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 11th, 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):
  • 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

• On Tuesday, February 11th, 2025, the simulators on the Main SLS channel were restarted with no update.
• On Wednesday, February 5th, 2025 the Banana Bread update should be deployed to the remaining RC channels, having been deployed to BlueSteel RC last week) This update includes expansions to llGetObjectPermMask that let you get an object’s permission mask taking into account the permissions on its inventory, and that ability has been added to llGOD.

Upcoming Deployments

• The simulator update to Banana Bread is called Carrot Cake.
• Development on this update has been “accelerated” such that an initial deployment to the BlueSteel RC in week #7 (commencing 17th, February 2025).
• This update should include llSetGroundTexture – this will allow a region owner/EM to set and adjust ground textures on a region, including some of the PBR features like rotation, offset and scale.
• Monty Linden indicated his work on 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) is to be rolled into Carrot Cake. He further indicated that he plans to update the SL Wiki documents on EventQueueGet as time permits.

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 7.1.12.12999043440, February 4, 2025.
  • Numerous crash and performance fixes.
• SL Mobile (Beta) version 2025.1.542 / 0.5.533 – Create / Delete accounts, fixes – February 4,  2025.

In Brief

Please refer to the video below for the following:

• llGetEnvironment (+ related functions) return inaccurate unit vectors for sun / moon position is still awaiting action.
• Requests were made for LSL  capabilities for manipulating the upcoming llGroundTexture.
• There was a report that the entire SLS Main Channel was restarted a second time during week #6. However, Rider Linden indicated that a number of regions were moved between servers, which prompted restarts, but there was no additional LL-lead restart of the entire channel.
• There are reports that there is a bug with llRezObjectWithParams: in using REZ_POZ with the local flag set TRUE, the rezzed object is positioned against in-world coordinates instead of rezzer local coordinates. So, for example, if the rezzer is aligned with world coordinates, the object arrives where expected, but if the rezzer is rotated, the object continues to arrive at the unrotated position. A bug report has been requested on this.
• Rider Linden noted that there is liable to be Lua server-side scripting engine news “soon”. This was followed by a general discussion on the project.
• Leviathan Linden has confirmed the viewer is dropping packets when it gets spikes of UDP data. He is going to try to provide a patch for viewers to prevent this, but also needs to look into the server behaviour to try to determine why and how the data spikes are happening. This sparked a discussion on UDP, packet loss and bandwidth which ran the most of the meeting.
• A request was made for the status of much-needed PBR-related LSL functions (plus easy PBR alpha-switching and PBR override permissions). The response was an agreement that they are needed, but not on an “immediate” queue for implementation.

† 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.