Category: SL Tech

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, August 5th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) off-week meeting (which I’ll be referring to as the “SUG Leviathan Hour” going forward). These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. The notes were taken from my chat log of the meeting and Patera’s video, which is embedded at the end of this article – 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 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

• On Tuesday, August 5th, the majority of the grid – SLS Main channel and RC channels – was updated with simulator update 2025-07-25.16512260888.
• The purpose behind this en masse restart (the first in a long time) was to account for network changes intended to allow the Lab to spread simhost servers across across multiple AWS availability zones (not necessarily AWS global regions).
• As a result, there will be no RC channel restarts on Wednesday, August 6th.

AI Summit and Tools

• Week #31 saw a Linden Lab summit on brainstorming how to use AI moving forward and experimenting with possible uses.
• It is possible this summit may have caused the announcement on the forthcoming suspension / closure of the Character Generation project also made public during that week (see: LI announce a pause in the current SL AI character designer project).
• As a result, Leviathan Linden has been exploring how hard it would be to use AI assistants to replace the llmath code in the viewer with GLM (graphics library math), a more standard and faster library; however, this is turning out to be more of a challenge than anticipated, with “lots of changes”, requiring care with the work.

SLua Update

• Signal Linden defined the next goal for SLua is to roll it out to some Agni (Main grid) regions in a limited fashion. However there is work to be completed ahead of this happening – such as the project being made production ready, and “real” documentation assembled, and the inclusion of a new API for event handling.
  • Feedback  / ideas for the events API can be submitted here.
• Such a partial deployment would obviously be for testing purposes, and would mean that SLua scripts would only run on regions with the server-side support.
• It was suggested that those regions offering building / scripting courses are considered for inclusion in Main grid SLua testing.
• There is a concern that due to the amount of CPU time consumed even when idling, there is a concern that all script time in a region with a large number of SLua scripts could be consumed by idling scripts. This lead to a discussion on scripts, loads, scheduling and script times.

In Brief

• As well as experimenting with GLM, Leviathan Linden has also trying to get some old server projects merged and shipped:
  • A slight speedup of scene load at login (and maybe less frequent missing content on arrival).
  • Compressed data from login.cgi for faster download of initial login data (and maybe fewer failed logins for people with lots of inventory folders).
• Leviathan also hopes soon start working on the WebRTC voice streaming system.
• Rider Linden is hoping to complete the LSL land functionality work he’s been developing for the Moles. This will include a llSetParcelForSale function (name still to be finalised at the time of writing).
• Rider is also looking to expand llRequestInventoryData. There have already be requests for it to encompass to get information like tint and alpha from PBR textures, and sound and animation length.
  • Additional suggestions include PBR properties like metallic/roughness; animation priority; last attach point/position/rotation for a worn item, and last rezzed/in-world position/rotation.
• Pepper Linden:

On the Conductor front, it’s been moving through QA, and we anticipate an Aditi and Agni rollout within the next week. During the initial roll out, we’ll be keeping the packing mode the same, and later on, turning on our new ‘packing’ logic (how we place regions on servers).

Some minor notes on our Discord integration for community servers, I had promised that we’d get that out relatively soon but unfortunately Discord has rolled out a UI change to profiles that’s now hiding the connection details, so that’s something we’ll need to figure out and handle before releasing it.

• Monty Linden is finishing-up work to move the experience KVP store.
• Signal Linden has been working on multiple projects:
  • Putting together release plans for the next viewer release.
  • Coordinating with contributors on viewer Discord integration, apple silicon support and other projects.
  • Following up on the August 5th deployment, and preparing to put some simhosts into another AWS availability zone.
• As noted in my week #31 TPVD meeting notes, Camera Constraints Bug (below -0 metre altitude) has been filed. This affects all v7 viewers – but Kirsten Lee (Kirsten’s Viewer) has filed a possible fix.
• The mention of the llSetParcelForSale function resulted in a discussion on land rentals in the second half of the meeting – specifically around the use of texture  / signs at altitude advertising regions / parcel available for rent, when looking at the world map.

Date of Next Meetings

• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, August 19th, 2025.
• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, August 26th, 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.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, July 29th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) off-week meeting (which I’ll be referring to as the “SUG Leviathan Hour” going forward). These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. The notes were taken from my chat log of the meeting and Patera’s video, which is embedded at the end of this article – 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 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

• There are no planned deployments to any channels this week, only restarts.

In Brief

Also refer to the video for the full meeting.

• Leviathan has turned his attention back to the issue of some people experiencing failures on logging-in, which he describes thus:

So… the problem is the login.cgi computes a big “viewer return value” (aka the VRV) which it sends back [to the viewer]. It has “Content-type: llsd+xml” header on it, and can be several MB in size. It contains, among other things, the list of your friends, groups, and a skeleton summary of all of your inventory folders. When the data package is very big and your download rate is low… it can take a while for it to arrive. If it takes too long the viewer can timeout on the request… even though login.cgi thought it “succeeded” and sent an alert to the Region where you were supposed to arrive.

– Leviathan Linden

Leviathan believe one aspect that makes the VRV so big is the number of folders within inventory (not the contents of folders, just the count of folders). However, Leviathan believes he has a solution (which is pending deployment):

So anyway: a relatively simple change on the login server allows the data to be gzipped, which can speed up the transmission … The Second Life Viewer (SLV) uses libcurl for its http requests, and it can handle gzipped data implicitly. Any viewer that picked up that capability from SLV should see benefits when login gets the update.

– Leviathan Linden

• Another issue Leviathan is looking into a bug where Premium+ users can’t upload mesh for L$0 after crossing a region boundary, although he hasn’t found a root cause as yet.
• There is apparently some exploratory work going on with in the engineering team(s) on the potential to use AI tools for code generation.
• An update to SLua is in development, and might be deployed to Aditi (the beta grid) in the next week or so.
• A general discussion on the (currently stalled) game_control project. As noted in my previous Leviathan Hour summary, the game_control work (and the work for a Linux version of the SL Viewer) is currently archived during the most recent switch to the viewer development and release workflow.
• A Function to Detect Right click (which has it own debate) was raised. Leviathan Linden noted there subject is stalled. This led to an extended discussion on the ticket, and the issue(s) it encompasses. This discussion extended to one on Touch Pointer Capture, together with ideas for extended mouse hover operations, and expanded use of the mouse scroll wheel.

Date of Next Meetings

• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, August 5th, 2025.
• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, August 26th, 2025, due to Leviathan being on vacation (unless he can find a volunteer to fill-in for him).

† 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, July 15th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting (“off week”). They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. The notes were taken from my chat log of the meeting  – no video this week.

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 other Tuesday from July 8th, 2025, 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.
• The term “off week” is used to describe meetings held by Leviathan Linden on those weeks when a “full” Simulator User Group meeting is not scheduled to be held.

Simulator Deployments

• There are no planned deployments to any channels this week, only restarts. Although the Main channel apparently had some issues on Tuesday July 22nd, leading to multi restarts for some regions.

In Brief.

• Rider Linden is working on a few new script features that the moles need for an upcoming project. These mostly deal with land and being able to transfer or sell land using a script.
• Pepper Linden has been working on a re-write of LL’s Conductor service, and is currently wrapping this up as it goes through QA. The Conductor service is responsible for placing regions onto servers, and the re-write is designed to allow the team responsible to more optimally place regions and prevent things like ‘hot-spots’ (e.g. one region on a host using more resources than it should and starving other regions of CPU time).
•  Signal Linden is working on number of projects:
  • Making “shovel-ready” tasks for open source contributors. This includes: bringing back legacy search; implementing drag-and-drop uploads; resizing large textures before uploading; etc.
  • Looking at bounty/reward platforms for compensating people for working on initiatives LL hasn’t got much traction on.
  • Getting budget approval for taking SLua to production and merging some “nice small fix-up PRs” on the LSL-definitions repo.
• The idea in having a series of defined tasks for contributors is to have more people contributing upstream to the viewer and providing “ready to go” code and thus free the Lab’s core viewer team to focus on larger viewer projects.
• Having the ability to replace mesh / prim HUDs with something more suitable was discussed. One suggestion has been the development of an HTML5/CSS/JS solution of some sort. However, this would require quite a bit of both viewer and server work; as such, a proof of concept from the community would go a long way towards getting some server attention on it.
  • Some concerns were raised about this leading to people having to connect to unknown external websites.
  • Another suggestion was for a  small mobile subset of SVG within SL, although this is a potential awkward solution as it doesn’t allow thing like buttons lighting up on HUDS when moused-over.
  • This led to a discussion on options (HYML5, SVG, some form of modal system built-into the viewer, using MOAP / CSS, with various opinions being expressed.
• glTF mech import:
  • As reported in my CCUG meeting notes, this is to go to “beta” with the next viewer update.
  • Full glTF scene import is regarded as “seriously deprioritised”, with Signal Linden expressing a preference for keeping it so until it can be implemented server-side.
  • There s a report that a change in the glTF uploader broke the glTF scene rendering. no further details available.
• The plan to replace the SL Wiki (powered by Media Wiki) with a new documentation platform was discussed (see:  Modern Documentation Platform: docs.secondlife.com).
• As of the next official meeting, the Simulator User Group will be at a new location (still TBC at the time of writing). What this should look like was a source of extended discussion, as was whether or not Simon Linden’s home (the meeting place until now) should be left intact or destroyed (“destroyed” won that part of the discussion).

Date of Next Meeting

• Tuesday, August 5th, 2025 – venue TBA (check the SL Public Calendar and/or User Group wiki page for updated SLurl).
• Unofficial meeting (TBC): Tuesday, July 29th, Venue: TBC.

† 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.