Category: SL Tech

2025 week #43: SL Open Source User Group meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Oscarton Forest Park, August 2025 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from my chat transcript + the video recording by Pantera (embedded at the end of this summary) of the Open Source User Group (OSUG) held on Friday, October 24th, 2025. My thanks to Pantera as always for providing it.

Meeting Purpose

  • The OSUG meeting is a combining of the former Third Party Viewer Developer meeting and the Open Source Development meetings. It is open discussion of Second Life development, including but not limited to open source contributions, third-party viewer development and policy, and current open source programs.
  • This meeting is generally held twice 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 are generally conducted in text chat.
  • The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.

Official Viewers

  • Default viewer 2025.07 7.2.2.18475198968 – Apple Silicon Support – dated October 16 –  No Change.
    • This viewer now ships as a “Universal Binary” that contains both the Intel and Apple Silicon versions of the viewer. It should give performance gains on the Apple Silicon version in particular.
    • Also includes various WebRTC improvements and bug and crash fixes.
    • Known issues:
      • This version does not support convex decomposition for physics meshes with Apple Silicon. This will be hopefully be corrected in a future update or release, possibly with the help of a code contribution.
      • Navigation buttons in the in-viewer browser are no longer present for marketplace and search – these will be restored in a future update.
      • Apple Silicon does not support pathfinding tools.
      • Subtle rendering differences might be noticed on certain configurations and EEP environments.
    • Github Changelog.
  • Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

Viewer Updates

  • 2025.07 has seen an uptick in crash rates as a result of some WebRTC changes, and LL is working to resolve this. As such, TPVs looking to ship WebRTC / updates are advised to keep an eye on the Develop branch for relevant commits to integrate into their viewers if they would prefer to avoid the 2025.07 issues.
    • As apart of the overall WebRTC project, a server-side update is anticipated as being ready for release in the next 1 to 2 weeks, with fixes for some issues and some new features.
  • Viewer 2025.08 will be a maintenance update with a focus on resolving crash issues, with the hope it may also include some log-in time improvements for those with very large inventories.
  • Work is progressing on a contributed Linux update, details in this Github PR, which LL is hoping to “land” this year.
  • A new SLua project viewer is in the works. This should include Rider Linden’s work on an official native VSCode plugin for LSL and SLua, as noted in my more recent Simulator User Group meeting summaries.

In Brief

Please refer to the video for the following:

  • A general discussion on the viewer UI and making it easier for new users to quickly discover how to mute those using Voice in order to be obnoxious / harass, without necessarily requiring guidance from a mentor / friend on how to do so.
    • The above also broadened into a more general conversation on improving the chat functionality in the viewer in general (e.g. Voice controls + the conversations floater, etc.).
    • Also touched on was the on-going work with Project Zero (viewer in a browser) to reconstruct the viewer UI (or elements thereof) with a HTML/React-style approach – although this is being done without any intent to “break” the existing UI approach within the viewer.
    • As Geenz Linden noted (and the meeting chat demonstrated), views on the viewer UI and things like the conversations / chat floaters (or CHUI – Conversation Hub User Interface, to use the terms employed when the overhaul Viewer 2 chat UI was first introduced back in 2011) tend to be highly subjective when opinions are voiced. As such the suggestion was made to use the Feedback Portal to offer feature requests on what might be done to improve text chat & its UI elements (and Voice chat), and to upvote features thought to be worthwhile.
  • The second half of the meeting included a lot of general discussion on what might be done to “improve” the viewer experience in general, together with a side discussion between Geenz Linden and Henri Beauchamp on the alpha-gamma fix for legacy objects rendering by PBR + improving the appearance of water on PBR rendering.
    • A very short-form summary of these latter two items is to note server-side work is required for the alpha-gamma fix, but is currently stalled, whilst water is awaiting the updates to SSR (screen space reflections), which has yet to be prioritised for a future viewer release.

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 #40: SL CCUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Hippotropolis Campsite: venue for CCUG meetings
The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, October 2nd, 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 generally 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

  • Default viewer 2025.06 7.2.1.17108480561 – August 29 – No Change.
  • Second Life Beta viewer 2025.07 7.2.2.17774206511 – Apple Silicon Support – September 26 –  NEW.
    • This viewer now ships as a “Universal Binary” that contains both the Intel and Apple Silicon versions of the viewer. It should give performance gains on the Apple Silicon version in particular.
    • Also includes various WebRTC improvements and bug and crash fixes.
    • Known issues:
      • This version does not support convex decomposition for physics meshes with Apple Silicon. This will be hopefully be corrected in a future update or release, possibly with the help of a code contribution.
      • Navigation buttons in the in-viewer browser are no longer present for marketplace and search – these will be restored in a future update.
      • Apple Silicon does not support pathfinding tools.
      • Subtle rendering differences might be noticed on certain configurations and EEP environments.
  • Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

Viewer 2025.07

  • LL are working on implementing some bug fixes prior to offering a further beta version of this viewer.
  • One change with the next version will be the return of Havok convex decomposition for Mac Intel systems to enable mesh uploads under emulation Requires the enabling of Rosetta in the universal build for Mac) until such time as a an alternative can be implemented.
  • Work on an alternative solution is in progress via code contributions. This is likely to be included in viewer 2025.08.

General Discussion – In Brief

  • The confusingly-worded Create “System Body Shape v2.0” came up for discussion.
    • In short: LL unlikely to implement any form of new / updated system avatar, preferring to focus on implementing more modern technology and capabilities that allow creators to develop more capable (and less complicated to users?) avatars.
    • This included a brief discussion on “open souring” the avatar system body so creators could take it and modify / improve it for themselves, with the note that technically it is, but as it misses some critical elements which tend to render doing this moot.
  • A potential bug with touching scripted objects was demonstrated with attachments designed to be touched (in short: a object could miss initial touches and thus fail to trigger touch_start() ). This was demonstrated at the meeting, and a Canny report was requested on the problem, together with the demo item.
    • This discussion also encompassed issues with fast clicking on object in-world and cursor positioning, and unexpected results (e.g. rapidly clicking on a touchable object with the mouse moving, so that a subsequent click “misses” the item, causing the server to register that in favour of the the expected return  – like a dialogue box or something – from the initial click).
  • A discussion on setting materials / overrides on PBR vs. Blinn-Phong. In short, with Blinn-Phong, a change in texture / material can be carried out with a reset of overrides; within PBR, changing the material resets overrides. In the case of scripted items, unless the material change and new overrides are sent as a single packet, changing the material can result in the object appearing to “flash” as the material is displayed prior to the new overrides being applied.
    • The prompt for the question arose out of how a scripted bottle held by an avatar could change to a selected texture (to presumably represent the drink in the bottle), and how this might be better coded rather than relaying purely on texture caching, which appeared to be the root of this particular problem.
    • Possible solutions for this became somewhat convoluted (outside of finding a mean by which required textures could be pre-loaded), and frankly zapped right over my head. However, the conversation took up the the last part of the meeting.
  • A question was asked as to why sometimes trying to rez mesh items (or items onto mesh objects)  results in a “Failed to place object at specified location” error message.
    • This can often come down to the physics shape of the surface on which an item is being rezzed, as Beq Janus explained in one of her videos.
    • Another cause can be a mismatch between where the viewer thinks an object is trying to be placed and where the simulator views it as being placed – which has been a long-standing problem.
  • A misunderstanding has apparently led to some concerns that support for sculpties is being deprecated / sculpties are being “eliminated”. Neither of these are correct; there are no plans to either deprecate or eliminate sculpties. 

Next Meeting

October 2025 SL Web User Group

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday October 1st, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. The official video is embedded at the end of this summary.

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), and 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.

Updates

  • Bug fixes shipped:
  • Removal of “What’s Next” Basics in dashboard menu.
  • More results should now be displayed in Destination guide searches.
  • Under-the-hood work including:
    • A Python library upgrade for internal services.
    • A security review of the Lab’s JavaScript packages.
    • Clean-up of the subscriptions services to prevent double-charging of PMEs.

New Premium Plus Subscription Option

For those not aware:

  • Mid-October will see the launch of Premium Plus No Stipend.
    • All of the benefits of Premium Plus without the Stipend or Signup bonus.
    •  Monthly Cost of with stipend vs. no stipend: US $29.99 vs. US $15.99.
    • Annual Cost of with stipend vs. no stipend: US $249 vs. US $143.88 (US $11.99/month billed annually).
  • For details, see my blog post: Coming soon: New Option to Reduce the Cost of SL Premium Plus-Subscriptions.

Questions from the Lab

  • Why do you make all your items no transfer? Are most items no transfer?
    • Most items are created No Transfer (75%-90% in estimates), although the return of Gacha might be increasing the number of transferable items.
    • No transfer is preferred for multiple reasons. Those cited included: complexities of customer support with transfer items then have been passed from one user to another; the risk of object loss if an item is set to No Copy as a result of being set to Transfer (e.g. through accidental deletion & trash purge). Most users prefer to have Copy / Modify items over Transfer (/ No Copy) / Modify items.
  • What would encourage creators to make items transferrable?
    • Largely a matter of personal choice, but Transfer was not seen as a popular need.
    • The exceptions to this were seen as items specifically designed to be gifted / intended for the Gacha units & the resale market.
  • How do you attract new users to your stores? Gifts? Credits? Responses included: Group gifts; store credits / discounts; sales / special offers.
  • Has anyone used the new Avatar Welcome Pack? Have you made items for it?
    • Unsurprisingly, mixed opinions on the avatars in the Welcome Pack, although it was noted that as the bodies are Legacy, many creators have clothing available for them, even if the clothing is not specifically created with the starter avatars in mind.
    • Complaints were raised over the fact feet are not posable (so high heel shoes won’t work with them), and the “dead face” expressions – with reminders that the Welcome Pack avatars are just that: for getting started, before moving on to more capable store-bought avatars.
    • This lead to a discussion on what could / might be included in the Welcome Pack – such as a limited AO system from one of the dedicated AO creators, just to again help people get started and not necessarily try to work out where they need to shop or immediately diving into the MP.
  • For those who have helped new users create an avatar via the Welcome Pack, what have been the common problems?
    • Feedback ran from lack of variety in the avatars (e.g. all of them are human); lack of contextual / explanatory information.
    • General feedback on bodies / heads in general was the over complexity of things and the steps a new user must go through (even after exposure to the Welcome Packs), together with easily identifying what will / won’t work with a given body type / head type if the new user is not familiar with brands, BoM, using HUDs, etc.
  • How long would you say an experienced user would take to create a really good avatar?
    • Estimates varied from “5 minutes” to “an hour”, depending on approach (e.g. having the necessary avatar parts – head, body, etc.), already in inventory and working from there, vs going out and shopping for a suitable body / head, etc., vs. using the Avatar Welcome Pack.
    • It was noted that helping new users build / customise avatars takes much longer, both due to the general learning curve and the need to overcome the technical / language barriers (e.g. explaining what “BoM” is, why only certain clothing will fit certain bodies, how to recognise what is needed from multi-body pack of clothing in order to wear the outfit on the avatar, etc.).
  • What would you say is the average cost of a good avatar?
    • Just for a head, body, skin, hair and initial outfit: US $50, although cost is relative depending on what is being sought.
    • This also folded itself into people’s expectations / desires for their avatar and its looks.

General Points

  • Sntax Linden noted that the Avatar Picker / Customiser found in Project Zero is now offered in the official viewer, but without the dedicated Avatar toolbar button, the Picker opening within the viewer rather than as a separate browser panel.
  • It was pointed out (as I’ve done previously), that the official welcome hub is out-of-step with the Avatar Welcome Pack as it only references the Senra avatars.
  • The Q&A session included a wide-ranging discussion on approaches to getting new users acclimatised to SL using a mix of web options / capabilities and in-world experiences.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, November 5th, 2025.

2025 week #40: SUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Three Finger Pines, July 2025 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 30th, 2025 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 my chat log of the meeting and 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

  • During week #39, the BlueSteel RC was updated with simulator version 2025.08/2025-09-16.17777995432 (Huckleberry).
  • On Wednesday, October 1st, this simulator update should be deployed to the remaining RC channels.  This update includes:
    • A new function that allows you to set a parcel for sale – this is pending a viewer-side update.
    • Various WebRTC updates.
    • More accurate CPU usage measurement; more correct live configuration file load on start; more meta data about asset upload so LL knows when people are uploading glFT assets.

SLua Updates

  • The LLEvents C++ implementation is basically done, and Harold Linden is testing it and integrating it with the simulator.
  • LLTimers is “going to be funky” because he believes that timers aren’t currently based on real time but rather frame time which is affected by time dilation in the simulator.
    • Basically, if a simulator is running at 70% speed and a timer is scheduled for 10 seconds later, it might actually happen in 13 seconds.
    • Harold notes that it’s not clear if this is the desired behaviour going forward, and so is looking for some opinions on what people actually want there.
    • The preference at the meeting was for real time (or both, as a primary / secondary set of options, if this could be handled tidily), although there was some discussion on event timers and frame / real time, etc.
    • He noted that any adjustments made would only affect users of LLTimers, not existing uses of llSetTimerEvent().
    • Those with strong opinions on the matter are asked to weigh-in on SLua event handling proposal.
  • Harold has also been profiling of the script scheduling code after reports that there can be some slowdown on simulators just by virtue of having scripts that don’t really do anything. The adjustments made should mean things run 5-10% faster now on regions with lots of scripts that don’t do much, which is most of them.
  • The LSL compiler and runtime will be open-source (MIT licensed).
  • Harold Linden has tried to put most of the code in the SLua repo that is going to be open-source, so scripters can have a mostly-complete SLua implementation for local testing.

SLua Questions

Please also refer to the video.

  • Will the LL functions that return -1 meaning “not found” (e.g. like ll.ListFindList() ), still return -1, or will they return nil? Answer: they will continue to return -1.
    • Similarly, negative indices like -1 in library functions will continue to work as before.
  • Will the LL functions that return boolean values in a list (e.g. ll.GetPrimitiveParams{PRIM_PHYSICS}), still return number? Or will they return boolean? Answer: they will continue to return a number, unfortunately.
  • Will there be a llcompat library with the functions in LSL style (0-based, etc.)? Answer: yes.
  • Will ll functions support constant folding (such as ll.Ord(“a”) being turned into 97 at compile time without having to run the function call at runtime)? Answer: not currently, but there’s no reason that they couldn’t.
  • Will it be possible to use very large scripts without having to break them up? Answer: the memory limit should be at least 128kb and scripts will generally be much smaller, so technically yes.
    • Rider Linden additionally noted the memory requirements for the Luau VM are considerably less than the old Mono VM. So there should be some headroom on larger scripts, and LL hasn’t made a final call as yet about the memory allotment.
    • Additionally, script monitors should show roughly the memory you were _using_ at a recent point in time rather than when hitting the memory limit.
  • Is there a way to avoid stack-heap collisions (e.g. is the Lua VM armed against them)? Answer: SLua does allow you to catch failures to allocate with pcall().
  • Will a “shared data” system be implemented, where multiple copies of the same script reference the same instance of bytecode data? Answer: yes, that basically comes with the VM system.
  • What is happening with viewer-side scripting capabilities? Answer: it has been put on ice for the present.
    • This sparked a mini-discussion of local scripting use cases, format, security, etc.

In Brief

  • Rider Linden has the official native VSCode plugin for LSL and SLua “ready for feedback”. He still has some further work to do on this, but hopes to have the repo open and available “as soon as possible”.
  • Leviathan Linden is now working on a server-side implementation for voice moderation on WebRTC (e.g. the ability for estate owners / managers (and possibly parcel holders) to mute people’s voice).
  • Pepper Linden  is still working on outfit support for SL Mobile, and is also working on a new viewer feature, “async inventory”:
    • This allows the loading of inventory asynchronously, leveraging the inventory cache after logging-in.
    • It should see those with very large inventories to log-in much faster than is currently the case (initial testing had 200K inventories loading in 5-10 seconds).
    • The work is described as currently “very rough” and not ready for inclusion in any active viewer branch.
  • Signal Linden has been variously involved in:
    • Apple Silicon support.
    • Working with our operational team to finish some simhost hardware configuration changes which have been in progress for a while.
    • Trying to help unblock Lua documentation efforts, get folks the resources they need to build a new documentation site.
  • Mesh faces mismatch issue: this appears to be a server-side problem rather than anything integral to the viewer. Leviathan Linden is now looking at options for correcting it – his current idea is to use the viewer request to modify a non-existent face to be a hint to the server that it maybe needs to update an asset and put it on a background queue somehow, that would essentially re-submit the asset for update in the background.

Date of Next Meetings

  • Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, October 7th, 2025.
  • Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, October 14th, 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.

2025 week #39: SL Open Source User Group meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Another Song of Freedom, July 2025 – blog post †

The following notes were taken from my chat transcript + the video recording by Pantera (embedded at the end of this summary) of the Open Source User Group (OSUG) held on Friday, September 26th, 2025. My thanks to Pantera as always for providing it.

Meeting Purpose

  • The OSUG meeting is a combining of the former Third Party Viewer Developer meeting and the Open Source Development meetings. It is open discussion of Second Life development, including but not limited to open source contributions, third-party viewer development and policy, and current open source programs.
  • This meeting is generally held twice 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 are generally conducted in text chat.
  • The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.

Official Viewers

  • Default viewer 2025.06 7.2.1.17108480561 – August 29 – No Change.
    • Inventory Favourites System, plus assorted new features.
    • Improvements to avatar system; camera and movement; chat; voice; content creation tools.
    • Mesh uploader updates.
    • Text & UI polish.
    • Fixes for Environment and Rendering; stability and crashes; UI.
    • System improvements.
  • Second Life Beta viewer 2025.07 7.2.2.17774206511 – Apple Silicon Support – September 26 –  NEW.
    • This viewer now ships as a “Universal Binary” that contains both the Intel and Apple Silicon versions of the viewer. It should give performance gains on the Apple Silicon version in particular.
    • Also includes various WebRTC improvements and bug and crash fixes.
    • Known issues:
      • This version does not support convex decomposition for physics meshes with Apple Silicon. This will be hopefully be corrected in a future update or release, possibly with the help of a code contribution.
      • Navigation buttons in the in-viewer browser are no longer present for marketplace and search – these will be restored in a future update.
      • Apple Silicon does not support pathfinding tools.
      • Subtle rendering differences might be noticed on certain configurations and EEP environments.
  • Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

Viewer 2025.07

  • At the time of the meeting, the 2025.07 viewer was pending release.
  • The first part of the meeting involved discussions on potential routes to provide convex decomposition for physics meshes for this viewer version via open-source options, on both a short-term temporary basis and long-term solution.

In Brief

Please refer to the video for the following:

  • Appearance fixes: this is being considered for the 2025.08 viewer update, and Geenz has requested feedback / discussion on via Discord.
  • [Video: 13:12-19:52] A request was made to change the LOD default as a part of the work to provide convex decomposition on this viewer. This was denied, the focus being on providing a “feature complete” version of the viewer for Apple Silicon.
    • However, this led to a discussion on how best to handle LODs and auto LODs.
  • [Video: 20:20-End] A broad discussion on dressing avatars, including:
    • Baking clothing meshes (sort-of a-la BOM) / using mesh proxies fore clothing / layering clothing, and potential for improvement performance as a result.
    • Providing a scripted means to dress avatars according to the requirements of an Experience (e.g. if someone just a mech combat experience, scripts in the experience dress their avatar accordingly).
    • “Discouraging” overly-complex avatars.
    • This discussion encapsulated general ideas, feedback, etc., and also touched on things like VRAM use, etc.
    • The latter part of the discussion strayed into texture resolution + texture compression, licensing and libraries, etc.

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.

September 2025 SL Mobile UG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Campwich Forest grounds: location for the Monthly Mobile User Group (MMUG)
The following notes were taken from the Thursday, September 25th 2025 Monthly Mobile User Group (MMUG) meeting. These notes should not be taken as a full transcript of the meeting, which was largely held in Voice, but rather a summary of the key topics discussed.

The meeting was recorded by Pantera, and her video is embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks, as always to her in providing it.
Table of Contents

Meeting Purpose

  • The Mobile User Group provides a platform to share insights on recent mobile updates and upcoming features, and to receive feedback directly from users.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
    • The last Thursday of every month at 12:00 noon SLT.
    • In Voice and text.
    • At Campwich Forest.
  • 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.

Resources

Current Releases

Version: 2025.7.560 (Android) – July 23 / 0.1.557 (iOS) – July 22.

Forthcoming Updates

[Video: 2:50-17:55]

  • A new Alpha build is currently available for Android, and is just waiting to be cleared by Apple (if not already available by the time the post is published).
  • This alpha is viewed as being “close” to being ready for a beta release “Soon™”, and includes all current work on the Mobile product, several aspects of which are outlined below.

Avatar and Character improvements

  • Load times: a “significant” reduction in the amount of memory required to load an avatar, allowing Mobile to both load more avatars in a scene, and do so more reliably.
    • Performance in environments with large numbers of avatars should also now be improved.
    • There are still some shape changes to be completed to allow all avatars to render correctly, but this work is progressing.
  • Network connection stability:
    • As reported in the August update, because of its dynamic nature, SL Mobile requires a constants data stream, and so is far more susceptible to signal interruptions / conflicts with other apps for bandwidth use, etc.
    • Work has therefore been put into making the app more robust in how it maintains network connectivity and continues to function through such interruptions, doing all that is required of it.
    • These improvements also feed into the avatar system as well, further helping with the speed and reliability of avatar loading.
  • Under-the-hood work: general optimisations such as re-targeting download orders (e.g. increasing the download priority of avatar clothing downloads to again improve avatar downloading and rendering).
    • This under-the-hood work also includes refining code related to the loading and unloading of in-scene objects, so when moving around the world, content should load / unload more effectively, with more content in general loading.

EEP Rendering

  • A first pass at implementing EEP environment settings.
  • This is a direct port of the sky shaders used in the viewer, so that scenes should render a lot closer to how they appear on the Desktop viewer.
  • The work includes all of the lighting data, fog / haze data, etc., as well as the sky shaders.
  • Further work is required on lighting due to differences in how the Unity engine and the SL engine respectively handle lighting.

Transparency Rendering

  • Due to the need for order-independent transparency, coupled with limitations within the GPUs used on most mobile devices, SL Mobile has been unable to render “true” transparency, and has had to rely on dithering to approximate transparency.
  • One means to get around this is to use temporal anti-aliasing, which LL has been waiting on through an update to the version on Unity they use with Mobile.
  • The work on this upgrade was recently completed, allowing said temporal anti-aliasing to be utilising within the app, providing better transparency rendering without any loss of performance.
  • Until this work is fully dialled-in, there might be some light ghosting visible when panning around transparent surfaces.

Lighting / Point Lighting

  • There is a “slight incongruity” between how Unity handles point lighting (lighting placed around a scene) compared to how Second Life handles the same (the Unity rendering path prefers quadratic lights – bright up close, dim at a distance; SL is more medium-bright when close, medium-dark when further away). This resulting in point lighting in Mobile to look different to the same lighting seen in the viewer.
    • To try to address this, the lighting calculations used for such point lights has been tweaked within SL Mobile so that such lights will be rendered more closely to how they are within the viewer.
  • As a general note, updates to directional lighting may allow shadows to be re-enabled in the Mobile app, although shadow rendering is expensive, and further work in this area is required.

General Improvements

  • Multi-threading for object and content loading has been improved, which see see more effective use of the CPU cores within a mobile device.
  • Streaming audio has been completely rebuilt to avoid using a now-deprecated library within the current beta streaming audio build.
  • Improvements made to loading the world following a rapid log-out / log back in.
  • General improvements and minor adjustments to the UI. Perhaps the most noticeable of these is the temporary return of the sign-out option as a button in the menu (pending further updates down the road which will likely see it return to a drop-down option once again).
  • Improvements to how spinning objects and target_omega are handled.

Q&A Session

[Video 18:14-End]

  • Switching to another app when using the SL Mobile app and then switching back to SL Mobile can seem to take time.
    • This is partially out of LL’s hands: apps not in current use can be “moved” from active memory to free-space for other apps. Changing focus can also result in the web page used to assist in rendering the UI being suspended.
    • Both of these factors can result in a delay in resuming a session as the focus is returned to SL Mobile.
    • Consideration may be given to adding a pop-up message about possible delays when switching away from SL Mobile to another app, with a possible more in-depth examination as to what might be done to be carried out at some point in the future.
  • Inventory access: outfit sub-folder support, etc: Inventory is something being worked on, but the work is such that no major announcements as to what is being done / what to expect could be made at this meeting.
  • Message caching (e.g. people can receive messages whilst on SL Mobile, but also still see them when logged in via the Desktop viewer): there has been some movement on this, and work is continuing, although complex. Further updates in due course.
  •  Could the current SL networking calls be used with SL Mobile to save tampering with the SL infrastructure?
    • No,  because SL mobile uses different protocols in order to handle:
      • Swapping between the device’s wifi and cellular connections on the fly.
      • Disruptive connections which could otherwise result in high packet loss – something UDP would have difficulty in managing.
    • The protocols used by SL Mobile also reduce the bandwidth the app uses when compared to Desktop (e.g. transmitting the scene state to SL Mobile uses 97% less bandwidth than the viewer).
  • Does SL Mobile run better in landscape mode or portrait? There shouldn’t be any difference.

Date of Next Meeting