Category: SL Tech

Please note that this is not a full transcript of either meeting but a summary of key topics.

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 and is held in a mix of Voice and text chat.
• 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 and is generally text chat only.
• Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.

Official Viewer Status

• Default viewer 2025.07 7.2.2.18475198968 – Apple Silicon Support – dated October 16 –  No Change.
  • Github Changelog.
• Release Candidate 2025.08 – 7.2.3.19375695301 – maintenance update with bug fixes and quality of life improvements – November 4 – NEW.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

General Viewer Updates

• 2025.08 is to be the last viewer release for 2025. This is likely to be promoted to de facto release status after the US Thanksgiving holiday.
• At the time of writing, 2025.08:
  • The crash rate is improving.
  • This viewer includes the VHACD convex decomposition library.
  • Mesh content creators are encouraged to try the current beta of the the viewer to make sure physics hulls are working in-world, etc., given that many settings with the library are different to those used by Havok, the longer-term plan being to eliminate Havok sub-libraries from the viewer.
• The next viewer version will by 2026.01 – details of which will be made available once its likely contents have been initially settled on by the Lab.
  • However, it looks like 2026.01 will include the new code for faster log-in loading of inventory for those with very large inventories, and a dedicated Linux build of the viewer.
  • During the OSUG meeting, Geenz Linden indicated that another project he hopes to start moving forward with in 2026 is the Current Outfit Folder (COF) updates contributed by Kitty Burnett (Catznip), and the current plan is to get this into 2026.01.

You Tube Embedding Issue

• As a reminder:
  • You Tube recently updated elements of their video embedding code such that non i-frame youtube.com/embed/NNNNN style links will not work within Second Life (whilst youtube.com/watch/NNNNN style links will still function correctly – although this latter format does expose all the You Tube on-screen video controls, etc).
  • This is an issue liable to impact a variety of in-world television and similar systems utilising You Tube.
  • It is very much a You Tube issue, so there is no guarantee they would remain valid / useful for any length of time.
• For further detail please refer to the official blog post: YouTube Embeds in Second Life: What Happened and How to Keep Your Media Working.
• Those finding further information on issues arising from this You Tube change should report them via the SL Feedback Portal.

SLua Update

• Back-end support for SLua is now available in Beta on Agni, the main grid.
• The SLua beta viewer, available from the official Alternate Viewers page, must be used for writing SLua code, but no specialised viewer to view SLua scripts running in-world.
• The latest SLua viewer includes the websocket to Visual Studio.

SLua Resources

• Official scripting portal (this is a work in progress and open to contributions – Github for the latter here).
•  Suzanna’s SLua Guide (Suzanna  Linn).
• VSCode plugin + documentation (Wolfgang Senizen – likely be discontinued and contributions shifted to support the official documentation).

CCUG Discussion – In Brief

• glTF animation upload support: this is “on the radar” for development, but is not currently an active project, and needs to be added to the current viewer roadmap.
  • A request to review animation priorities was also requested, and it was suggested this might be something that could possibly be looked at within the current animation support framework.
  • A general discussion on animations and priorities continued through the early part of the meeting, but no-one from the Lab with sufficient up-to-date knowledge of the animation system to provide meaningful input to the discussion.
  • This discussion included the following animation feature requests: user-definable animation priorities and allow starting an animation with a specific priority, together with this proposal for animation network reworking from user Coyote Enthusiast.
• A request was made for an independent alpha channel (i.e. not linked to Diffuse/Colour channel) and available to both both Blinn-Phong and PBR that could help reduce the number of unique textures required for things like terrain, and without having to atlas huge sheets of layered details. The short answer was that this is unlikely until there is (at the very least) an opportunity to revisit texture streaming at the very least, with Geenz noting:

We’re already on some razor thin memory margins on some of our potato machines – so if we did that we’d need to find a way to make some stuff more scalable in our texture streaming tech. This isn’t a no – we need that for other things. But it’s not a 30/60/90 days thing I’m sorry to say.

Bakes on Mesh (BoM) Layering

• Better layer ordering has been put to the UI/UX team with not promises as to when it might be worked upon, although there are “other projects” the Lab is planning which would also benefit from this.
• A feature request for allowing sets / containers for/of BOM layers has been submitted, and is defined by Geenz as “interesting” and “TBD”.
• The above led to a discussion on BoM improvements (e.g. PBR materials support; blend modes of different layers; etc).
  • In response to this, Geenz noted he would like to get PBR specular support, if only as a migration path from Blinn-Phong (and with the noted, “if you do this expect things to not quite look right if you mix these two”).
• This discussion involved the potential complexities / straightforward aspects of PBR specular support, providing BoM support to alpha channels, before circling back to the benefits of having better texture streaming in general and prioritising the latter to different texture slots, etc.
• This discussion touched upon BoM support for Animesh and a request for a universal alpha.

OSUG Discussion – In Brief

• Signal Linden revealed that Friday, November 21st, 2025 was his last day at Linden Lab after 10 years with the company, rising to the position of Director of Engineering.
  • Signal has been the major driver in overhauling and improving the Lab / third-party/open-source relationship, which is to continue along the path Signal has set for it, improving and refining things where appropriate.
• Roxie Linden noted that there has been a WebRTC voice server update. This provides HRTF (better spatialization) as well as server crash fixes. It’s still regarded as “beta”, but the WebRTC team is looking for feedback on its usability.
  • Further work on WebRTC is in progress, including spatial moderation.
  • Thought is still being given to replacing Echo Canyon (Vivox Voice testing region) with a WebRTC equivalent, with Roxie Linden indicating this is now a matter of scheduling and implementation.
  • Roxie’s preferred approach would be to have an ‘echo’ option with Preferences which, when used, does a full round trip to the server and back, allowing both device verification on the WebRTC service and network quality. If adopted, this will require both a server update and some viewer UI work.
• A brief discussion on potentially replacing Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF) in the viewer (e.g. to something like Servo – as this matures). The response was that CEF is unlikely to be replaced in the foreseeable future, which does not mean there will not be fixes, etc., for identified issues.
• Request for LL to provide SGV support, including for text on prims / test rendering in-world, including the following two requests:
  • SVG Canvas: A way to generate dynamics graphics on prim faces (without MoaP).
  • Add a Text Rendering Method.
  • In response, and specifically in terms of in-world text rendering, Geenz Linden suggested that something like MSDF might be more appropriate for SL, as it allows pre-rasterizing a large collection of fonts into some really tiny textures, and get some pretty sharp text rendering that scales “pretty easily”.
  • This led to a discussion on potential uses of SVG, and the advantages of SVG over MSDF, and vice-versa, and other options for in-world text rendering (and the use-cased thereof – such as notice boards, etc.).
  • Geenz requested tat if there are SVG-specific use-cases before text rendering, these be recorded in a feature request Canny.
• A request was put forward to have TPV stats (usage per OS, crash rates and crash types) on a more frequent basis once more (they were at one time monthly, then switched to weekly before becoming more sporadic once more). This will be looked into.

Next Meetings

• CCUG: 13:00 SLT, Thursday, December 4th, 2025, at the Hippotropolis Campsite.
• OSUG: 13:00 SLT, Friday, December 5th, 2025, at the Hippotropolis Theatre.

Please note that this is not a full transcript of either meeting but a summary of key topics.

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 and is held in a mix of Voice and text chat.
• 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 and is generally text chat only.
• Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.

Official Viewer Status

• Default viewer 2025.07 7.2.2.18475198968 – Apple Silicon Support – dated October 16 –  No Change.
  • Github Changelog.
• Release Candidate 2025.08 – 7.2.3.18980112811 – maintenance update with bug fixes and quality of life improvements – November 4 – NEW.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

General Viewer Updates

• 2025.08 is liable to be the last viewer release for the year, with development work as a whole (including server-side) liable to slowing down due to end-of-year holidays and company breaks.
  • That said, Geenz Linden is hoping to get the go-ahead to try and get “a few things” out for the door before year-end. These include fixes/improvements to PBR water , and also clearing some technical debt.
  • The fixes/improvements to PBR water sparked a brief conversation on the PBR water issues and solutions (e.g. tweaks to SSR and whether or not these will “fix” things – although it was made clear that the “old” water reflections code will not be coming back to the official viewer codebase).
• Work is progressing on getting a Linux flavour of the official viewer back into shape. Those interested in the work can find it in this viewer repository, and the Lab is actively looking for feedback.
  • Note that this build is WebRTC only, Vivox Voice is not supported.
  • Depending on progress / feedback there is a potential for this viewer to surface as a Release Candidate / beta viewer before the end of the year – Geenz is hoping to achieve this as a part of the technical debt clean-up work.
• Open Source meeting: Geenz is attempting to move forward with replacing the viewer Contributor License Agreement with digital certificates of origin for code contributions to the official viewer.
  • In short, instead of contributors having to read through and accept LL’s code license, and assign rights accordingly, when a code contribution is made, the originator  just adds a sign-off as a part of the code contribution commit.
  • There will be new documentation on this revised process that will be made available ahead of it being implemented.

You Tube Embedding Issue

• You Tube recently updated elements of their video embedding code such that non i-frame youtube.com/embed/NNNNN style links will not work within Second Life (whilst youtube.com/watch/NNNNN style links will still function correctly – although this latter format does expose all the You Tube on-screen video controls, etc).
• This is an issue liable to impact a variety of in-world television and similar systems utilising You Tube.
• The is very much a You Tube issue, so while the Lab could investigate options for workarounds there is no guarantee they would remain valid / useful for any length of time.
• Note that (obviously) Vemeo (and other services) video embedding is unaffected by this issue, as does hosting from a personal server.

CCUG Discussion – In Brief

• Brief discussion on the following PBR bugs:
  • Meshes uploaded without all materials at lowest LOD display random materials.
  • PBR material texture artifacting [sic].
  • Glow Part of Emissive mapped PBR material does not animate when set to “blend”.
  • All are essentially under investigation (or awaiting further information), although prioritisation is unclear.
• A request was made for an official viewer specific user group “to discuss the UI”.
  • As pointed out at other meetings where this has been raised, there are already two user groups wherein the official viewer and TPVs are discussed: the Content Creation User Group, and the Open-Source Development User Group (formerly the TPV Developer UG). Adding a third really doesn’t add anything significant.
  • In terms of UI “discussions”, it was suggested these are rarely fruitful with in a large group, as opinions tend to be subjective / biased according to which viewer people prefer to use, and which UI style (viewer 1.2X style or viewer 2.0+ style or variations thereof) they like. Ergo, a meeting specifically focused on the viewer UI isn’t potentially going to be that beneficial in terms of generating actual UI improvements.
• A discussion on SL enhancements and prioritisations: A general note on the complexities of making enhancements to SL and determining what should / can be done and when.
  • In terms of graphical enhancements, it was noted that often, these tend to work best with dedicated / more recent GPU cards, with the problem being that stats show the majority of SL users tend to run medium or lower specification hardware, often with more limited GPUs and / or integrated graphics which may or may not be able to adequately run newer rendering options. Thus, the implementation of such capabilities can become a complex balancing act of determining what the “average” SL system can manage, how well it can do so without dramatically changing how SL appears to the user (changes to SL’s in-world appearance often causing widespread backlash when changes are made), determining what the general defaults for new capabilities should be in order to best address end-user hardware capabilities, etc.
  • Then there are enhancements to the platform which may not have a performance impact, but which do have questions around them in terms of overall benefit to users (e.g. quality of life improvements for the majority of users, content creation improvements, etc.), and also around resources required to bring them to fruition, etc., all of which need to be balanced against one another and with things like graphics improvements, et al, in order for the Lab to determine prioritisations.
• The above extended to offering hardware cut-off points for SL, with the Lab preferring to keep this more towards operating systems (and associated hardware drivers, etc.) reached a manufacturer’s end-of-life, rather than arbitrarily setting cut-off points.
  • An example of this could be taken with older versions of the Mac OS (e.g. OS 12 or older). LL would like to cease support for these versions of the OS and focus on more recent releases offering support for more up-to-date libraries, etc., offering better functionality, but the number of Mac users still running systems only capable of running older versions of the OS currently prevents LL from setting a cut-off for Mac support.
  • The flipside to this is when OS vendors present an end-of-life for a given operating system, it can actually benefit SL and users who do upgrade (e.g. the ending of official support for Windows 10 bringing many older versions of Intel’s integrated HD graphics to an end of life state).
• The above expanded into a conversation on communications, keeping users informed of SL’s capabilities and changes, what can be done within SL with the right viewer settings, informing users of the potential impact on their systems of enabling  / increasing various settings (based on stats, etc., the viewer is dynamically gathering on in-world scenes and the hardware running the viewer), etc
• Geenz indicated that a longer-term hope is that more work can be done in making the viewer more multi-threaded in CPU use and cutting down on the reliance on co-routines within the viewer code as a result. However, no time frames on this.

OSUG Discussion – In Brief

• It is likely that the current alpha-blend Blinn-Phong issues are likely to be fixed prior to year-end, as these require server-side work as well, and the server team is already very busy with WebRTC and SLua.
• The first part of the meeting involved a discussion on Linden water reflection, Screen Space Reflections, lighting probes (all as summarised above) and a potted history of invisiprims and their “return” as water exclusion surfaces.
  • Elements of work Geenz is looking to try to get moved forward with the viewer include:
  • Re-introducing legacy search.
  • Discord integration with the viewer.
  • Making the viewer updater “more open source friendly”.
  • “Killing” Autobuild in the viewer build process.
• Geenz offered a PSA to TPVs:

 If you are receiving increased reports about the latest AMD drivers causing problems with shadows enabled, I can confirm that a rollback to the previous version fixes that. I’m already digging around to see who I can report a driver bug to.

• A request was put forward to have TPV stats (usage per OS, crash rates and crash types) on a more frequent basis once more (they were at one time monthly, then switched to weekly before becoming more sporadic once more). This will be looked into.

Next Meetings

• CCUG: 13:00 SLT, Thursday, November 20th, 2025, at the Hippotropolis Campsite.
• OSUG: 13:00 SLT, Friday, November 21st, 2025, at the Hippotropolis Theatre.