Category: SL Tech

2025 week #29: 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, July 17th, 2025. Please note that this is not a full transcript, but a summary of key topics, and timestamps are to the official video, embedded at the end of this report.
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

  • Official Viewer: 2025.04 – 7.1.14.15192634334, issued May 25, promoted May 28 – No Change.
  • Second Life Project glTF Mesh Import, version 7.1.14.15976006598 July 2 – No Change.
    • This is an early Alpha release with some of the rough edges and already resolved many bugs and crashes, although more are to be found, together with general feedback from the community. Please read the release notes if you intend to test this viewer.
  • Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

 glTF Mesh Uploader

[Video: 1:41-3:03 – and as noted below]

  • This project is moving into beta testing, and the updated viewer for beta testing is currently with QA, and should appear on the Alternate Viewers page “pretty soon”.
  • Again, as a reminder this project is providing the overall functionality available for uploading COLLADA .DAE files to the upload of glTF mesh files. As such all current constraints will continue to exist within this work.
  • Enhancements will be coming (and Feature Requests have been received for things like increased tri counts and vertex limits), but are regarded as a separate tranche of work.
  • [Video 4:50-6:00] A request was made for enhancements to the convex physic hull limits (e.g. number and complexity). This would require simulator-side changes, as some of the constraints are enforced server-side, and are “fundamental” to how Second Life works.
    • There is no work currently being planned around this.
    • In general it was considered something that might be better tackled if / when the Lab gets to “re-doing” SL’s internal mesh format.

Lighting Discussion

  • [Video 6:05-7:40] Light and particle exclusion volumes – the question was asked that as SL now has water exclusions “volumes”, how hard would it be to do the same for lighting and particles (e.g. to prevent lighting in one room bleeding into another).
    • In actual fact, SL does not currently support water exclusion volumes – it only supports water exclusion surfaces, which operate more-or-less in 2 dimensions to “hide” water”, rather than excluding it from a volume area.
    • Geenz noted that water exclusion and light / particle exclusions are “very different” in nature, with water exclusions surfaces being handled by a dedicated rendering pipe, and both light and particles requiring their own specific solutions.
    • He further noted that for lighting, other engines typically support linking a light source to a volume, constraining the light to it. SL does not have that capability, and while it would not be impossible to enable it, the work would be non-trivial, and is not something being looked at. His preferred approach would be to get shadows working more efficiently and at a larger scale.
  • [Video: 10:39-11:25] Related to the above, it was noted that non-shadow punctual lighting could help with lighting / darkness / shadow issues. These had been something Runitai Linden had started to look at prior to departing the Lab; in Geenz’s view, a means to determine which lights should / should not cast shadows might offer a partial solution.
  • [Video: 12:17-13:43] Geenz also noted there are been several requests on Canny for lighting improvements, and he would like to get some work on lighting prioritised. However, there is a large amount of work already identified for the viewer, and so prioritising and further work has the be done “carefully”.
    • He also noted issues with point lights were noted (fall-off being incorrect; the light radius tends to exceed the value set; point light penetrate objects far too much, etc), and suggested they could potentially benefit from a revisit at some point.
  • [Video: 24:36-25:30] Would it be possible to create a reflection probe-like if volume and assign an EEP setting to it?
    • There is no means to do this directly, but in theory could be done via LSL.
    • Rider Linden noted that by using an Experience, it is possible to trigger EEP settings for individual agents, which might achieve something similar.
    • A Feature Request on the idea was requested.

Viewer-side Havok Sub-Library and Pathfinding

[Video: 25:39-32:38]

  • Pathfinding’s future is still up in the air, with no final decision taken as yet. Currently all that is being looked at is the removal of the Havok sub-library from the viewer, which impacts Pathfinding.
  • This sub-library is used for two purposes:
    • For convex decomposition in mesh uploads.
    • Visualising / managing the Pathfinding Navmesh.
  • In terms of mesh uploads, there are alternative open-source libraries which could be used in place of Havok. Some of these alternatives are already being used by TPVs in preference to having to obtain a Havok sub-library licence from LL, and Geenz noted that a Pull Request from any viewer using such an alternative would be “welcome”.
  • Using Havok in the viewer purely for visualising the Navmesh is seen as overkill, again considering there are potential alternatives which could be used.
  • Philip Linden noted the need to reduce the amount of technical debt in the codebase, and removing Havok from the viewer would assist in this.
  • As far as Pathfinding as a whole is concerned, Geenz reiterated that currently, the Lab is not looking to completely deprecate it (both within the viewer and on the server-side); all that is being discussed at present is the need to remove Havok from the viewer.
  • An ancillary question asked by Rider linden was how many people at the meeting actually used Pathfinding characters, as opposed to NPCs using llGetStaticPath (which appears more popular, given the 15LI penalty and overall complexity of build Pathfinding characters).

In Brief

Please refer to the video as well.

  • [Video: 3:14-4:10] There is some work going into “beefing up some frame time metrics” – this will mean the viewer’s Statistics Floater (CTRL-SHIFT-1) will be updated with “a lot more” statistics going forward.
    • Some of this work will be surfaced in the next update to the glTF Mesh Upload RC viewer.
    • How many of the new stats are to be tracked in real-time is still TBD within the Lab.
  • [Video: 8:05-8:40] In terms of water exclusion volumes, this work has not yet bee prioritised and would required co-ordination between the simulator and viewer teams as it would require the passing of new object flags in order to work properly.
  • [Video: 20:41-24:08] General Linden Water update:
    • Improvements to Screen Space Reflections (SSR) on water are currently on hold pending the work on gathering better frame time metrics to be sent to the logs (how often is a user’s frame rate significantly dipping, for example), rather than just logging a user’s frame rate at the time they log-off.
    • The work that has been done on water SSR also still needs some further polish.
    • Overall the aim is to offer real-time reflections on any surface without it being a “gigantic frame rate killer”.
    • Other things that Geenz would like to bring back include shoreline fading, which had to be disabled due to alpha rendering issues – but this kind of work may have to wait for expanded EEP settings for water.
  • [Video: 33:40-36:02] PBR texture stretches when “stretch textures” is unchecked was raised over a year ago, and is marked as “complete”. It is not clear if a fix was actually deployed (and it does keep occurring), so Geenz and Atlas linden are going to take this back for a further review.
  • [Video: 37:04-48:24] A discussion on “lag”, and the (still common) assumption that most of it is simulator-side, and thus LL’s problem, rather than the viewer becoming overloaded thanks to people’s proclivity to jam-pack their avatar with complex meshes, multiple attachments, high-resolution textures, etc., thus impacting their own system’s performance (and potentially that of the people around them).
    • Geenz acknowledged that there is more LL could do to allow people to better quantify the impact they are having on themselves and others, vis à vis their avatar outside of the (inaccurate) avatar complexity system.
    • A problem here is that whether provided via options in the viewer, documentation, etc., people will ignore recommendations, warnings, reminders, etc.
    • Potential approaches to helping people understand the impact of the avatar include: indicating how much of their VRAM their Avatar is absorbing; having a meter display over their avatar’s head indicating the level of impact on general performance their avatar is having (both of which would only be visible to the user viewing them – and not to everyone else).
    • Technical solutions which might also help and under potential consideration for future implementation include texture streaming.
    • This discussion also encompassed the deficiencies with the ARC (Avatar Render Cost calculations & figures, and regulating the tension between people dressing their avatars so that they are resource-intensive to render, then going to a club or social venue and then dragging down the performance experienced by other users vs. allowing the venue owners to have the ability to set an “upper limit” on how resource-intensive avatars entering their club can be in order to preserve an experience that can be enjoyed by everyone.
  • The first 10 minutes of the meeting included a largely text-based discussion on the physics engine and viewer freezes. In short, there are no planes to change the physics engine, and the kind of viewer freezes experienced by SL as physics calculations are carried out are not uncommon within platforms using user-generated content (UGC), so trying to replace the current Havok engine (or even updating it) would not necessarily solve these issues.
  • A discussion between a user and Geenz concerning an EEP setting setting and use of an RGB cloud map, and whether this is supported. No definitive answer, other than Geenz would need to investigate.
  • The end of the meeting touched on SL Mobile issues and Project Zero – these are covered in other user group meetings.

Next Meeting

2025 week #29: SL SUG meeting (“Leviathan Hour”)

Posted on by Inara Pey
La vie en Rose, April 2025 – blog post

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 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.
  • 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.

SL Viewer Updates

  • Default viewer 7.1.15.15596336374 promoted June 12 – No Change.
  • Second Life Project glTF Mesh Import, version 7.1.14.15976006598 July 2 – No Change.
    • This is an early Alpha release with some of the rough edges and already resolved many bugs and crashes, although more are to be found, together with general feedback from the community. Please read the release notes if you intend to test this viewer.
  • Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

In Brief

Also refer to the video for the full meeting.

  • Leviathan has been working on resolving a exploit which – although this is not certain) he may have accidentally introduced into the simulator code during her first stint at the Lab(!).
  • Further work on the game_control project for the viewer remains in hibernation.
    • The core code was in a viewer development branch that was archived during the most recent switch to the viewer development and release workflow.
    • While much of it has been “salvaged” from the retired dev branch, it still needs to be approved for porting and merging into a current development repository.
    • There are also functional questions to be addressed – such as what to do about keyboard-only users and game_control.
  • Work on the Linux version of the official viewer also appears to be “stuck” in the archived develop branch.
  • Leviathan asked if anyone has tried to use the SL raw terrain save/load system, and if so, whether they have found it works correctly. There are apparently some bugs within it, and he’s trying to determine how best to prioritise it for fixing.
    • The general consensus at the meeting was getting the OK to update, port and merge the game_control code should be a higher priority than the terrain save/load.
  • A general discussion on porting features / capabilities to / from Firestorm (and on offering Pull Requests to Firestorm for code such as game_control).
  • A brief indication of “prioritisation competition” for viewer-side features at the Lab: some developers prefer to develop the code and build a functional UI to access it, then polish the latter; others (and management?) prefer code that is put forward with a complete, polished UI design.

Date of Next Meeting

  • Tuesday, July 22nd, 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 #28: SL SUG meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey
Sous les Oliviers, April 2025 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, July 8th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. 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 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.
  • 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.

Simulator Deployments

  • There are no planned deployments to any channels this week, only restarts (RC channels subject to confirmation at the time of the meeting).
  • The next simulator release is estimated to be around two weeks from being ready for deployment.

SL Viewer Updates

  • Default viewer 7.1.15.15596336374 promoted June 12 – No Change.
  • Second Life Project glTF Mesh Import, version 7.1.14.15976006598 July 2 – New.
    • This is an early Alpha release with some of the rough edges and already resolved many bugs and crashes, although more are to be found, together with general feedback from the community. Please read the release notes if you intend to test this viewer.
  • Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

Upcoming Changes to the Simulator User Group Meetings

  • As from this meeting, the Simulator User group will be moving to every other week, rather than weekly. So the next formal meeting will be on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2025.
  • However, for the foreseeable future, Leviathan Linden plans to make himself available to hold informal meetings on the “off” weeks – so he will be available on Tuesday, July 15th.
  • In addition:
    • The format of the meeting will also be changing to include a “dev stand-up” in which the members of the engineering team who are present can provide a short “here is what I’m working on” summary.
    • The meeting might also include a mail box so that questions which cannot be addressed at the current meeting can be submitted and answered at the next.
    • The location of the meeting will be changing (and at the time of writing is TBA).
    • The meeting will remain text-only – although this may change when speech-to-text becomes available.

In Brief

Also refer to the video for additional discussions.

  • Puppetry:
    • The Puppetry project remains in hibernation, awaiting work on things like getting inverse kinematics (IK) into the viewer.
    • There has been some internal talk of animation streaming (which had been experimented with during the Puppetry work) at the Lab, but this has yet to the thrashed out enough to get close to getting on the development roadmap.
  • SLua:
    • Leviathan Linden has been working on an optimisation to address a SLua bottleneck with llSetLinkPrimitiveParams(). This work has resulted in object FullUpdates measurably faster when viewed via debug timings, although the difference is not noticeable is term of user experience.
    • He also noted that he didn’t really drop the number of function calls all that much, but that “they are doing less work, but still about the same number of them”.
    • As such the work needs to progress further, but is once again paused whilst Leviathan addresses some high priority bugs.
  • Rider Linden is working on on expanding llRequestInventoryData, allowing it to take advantage of metadata in other assets (e.g. materials, animations, textures, sounds) which could prove useful for scripts.
  • Questions were raised on accessing Aditi, the beta grid. Those trying to do so / having issued should refer to this help desk article.
  • Map Tiles:
    • Individual Map tiles have a UUID (as well as a URL to allow them to be shown on web pages); however, 4, 16, 64, etc., region tiles only have a web URL.
    • A script function to confess the UUID for a region’s map tile has often been requested. Pepper linden noted that LL have have the mapping of region id to texture tile UUID, so the latter can be exposed via an LSL function, but the work to do so has yet to be prioritised.
    • The process for pruning stale Map tiles from the map, as there is a bug in the mapgen that results in “chunks of the map disappearing.”  As a result map tile removal is back to a manual process.
  • The request to “bring back LindenWorld” made at SL22B (and raised at just about every User Group meeting since), prompted Leviathan Linden to note:
It is an interesting idea. Although [the] LindenWorld feature set is very buggy/outdated. It isn’t compatible with modern SL accounts. I wonder how we would do auth? It would probably have to be rewritten for it to actually work. From a developer’s perspective: it would be a lot of work to host a LindenWorld grid. Just to build the ancient LindenWorld client… big long overhaul of legacy C++ code which no longer builds with modern compilers/libraries/APIs.
  • A general discussion on terrain, adding more geometry detail to the terrain per metre, the raw terrain export/import.
  • A discussion on water, the water plane, exclusion volumes, “physical” water, etc.

Date of Next Meeting

  • Tuesday, July 22nd, 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.

July 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 July 2nd, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript.

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.

General Work in Progress

  •  Still making progress on marketplace responsive work, mostly focused on search.
  • Doing some updates on technical upgrades to critical internal services.
  • Investigations into the current marketplace page response delays.

General Discussion

The meeting revolved around a number of questions asked of attendees.

  • Complete avatars – a series of questions on the subject of complete avatars (as defined by the Marketplace category): How how many of merchants have sold a complete avatars on the Marketplace or CasperVend; do merchants have a higher rate of complaint regarding full avatar sales compared to other items they might sell; did anyone at the meeting use a complete avatar.
    • Given the lack of merchants at the meeting, the first two questions were largely moot.
    • Some at the meeting did indicate they have used complete avatars, but feedback was somewhat limited.
  • A general discussion on very first purchases made in Second Life – for the oldbies in the group, hair was genrrally one of the first purchases.
  • A discussion around a feature request to add a dynamic map to the viewer log-in splash screen. Responses were mixed.
    • Some saw it as an import means of communicating “how vast” Second Life is to new users.
    • Others (myself included) saw it as potentially being confusing / meaningless to new users – as per the the comment on the feature request by Bavid Dailey. How big Second Life is a minor aspect of the platform when compared to providing people with a means to get to the places they want to be (e.g. via in-world portals, by LMs). In all likelihood; new users will barely grasp the concept of a SLurl or how to enter it with the correct format in the (already available) Location field – ergo, adding a scrolling map on the splash screen adds very little to their experience.
    • There is also the question of technical complexity of implementing a scrolling map within the viewer that is up-to-date with the current state of the grid.
  •  A short discussion on how easy / difficult it is to get people engaged in Second Life, and what is required to help get them engaged.
    • Some responses came down to the simplistic (and not necessarily accurate) “single-point” requirement for engagement (e.g. better in-world building tools – while definitely a good-to-have, such tools are still only one aspect of engagement).
    • Others came down to finding the right way to approach people about Second Life (e.g. in my case, by aligning SL to the interests friends have).
    • More broadly, comments encompassed the patience required to understand the complexities of the viewer and Second Life; the perception of Second Life held by people outside of SL (or were once engaged and departed) that the platform is “old”, “dated”, etc., in comparison to modern games.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, August 6th, 2025.

2025 week #27: SL SUG meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey
Les Secrets d’Albane, April 2025 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, July 1st, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. 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):
  • 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

  • There are no planned deployments to any channels this week, only restarts (RC channels subject to confirmation at the time of the meeting).
  • The back-end work which had stalled simulator updates over the last few weeks is now largely completed, and Rider Linden is hoping to get a cut of the simulator release to QA for week #28. The backend migration was about storing of build pipeline assets (libraries, docker images, etc) from one cloud service to another. While this was in progress, the opportunity was taken to do “a lot of clean-up and fresh implementation” of using Github workflow jobs.

SL Viewer Updates

In Brief

  • SLua:
    • Rider Linden hopes to return to a half-finished project of speeding up some permissions calculations that happen when changing primitive parameters via LSL/Slua. This is a hot spot that Harold Linden noticed when benchmarking SLua scripts.
    • The overall memory limit for SLua scripts has not yet been settled. However, as the bytecode is smaller, even if the current Mono limit is kept, SLua programs will have more room to work.
    • Rider Linden indicated he would nudge Harold and Signal Linden about updating the current SLua servers on Aditi.
    • It has not yet been decided how require, include, etc., will work with SLua, and a determination will likely be made during the beta – although there is no time frame when the latter will commence.
    • One of the things Harold Linden has done is move the definition of the LSL API to a config file, allowing some of the Mono boilerplate to be autogenerated from it.
  • A general discussion on coding and how SLua might be handled, caveated with reminders that LL is trying to maintain LSL compatibility; and in LSL once a prototype is set and published changing it becomes breaking.
  • Linden Lab is considering setting up a public repo (or similar) which could be used to publish the XML used to define the LSL commands.
  • [Feature Request] llLinksetDataWriteWithValidation() has been filed, and is see as an “outstanding proposal”.
  • A discussion on experiences and the KVP database (e.g. experience permissions, allowing “purchasable” access to larger amounts of KVP storage, use of external storage and LSL access to it. This was largely driven by users.
  • A general discussion on a modal generating capability via LSL for HUDS, etc., together with approaches and pros and cons.

† 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 #26 Project Zero User Group Meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey
via Linden Lab
The following notes were taken from the Thursday, June 26th 2025 Project Zero User Group (PZUG) meeting.

  • They are based on my audio recording of the meeting + chat log.
  • They should not be taken as a full transcript of the meeting.
Table of Contents

Meeting Purpose

  • The Project Zero User Group provides a platform  for open discussion about Project Zero, the cloud-streamed version of the Second Life Viewer. Topics can range from sharing the goals for Project Zero, demoing the current experience, and gathering feedback to help shape the future of cloud access for Second Life.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
    • The second and fourth Thursday of every month at 13:00 noon SLT.
    • In Voice and text.
    • At the Hippotropolis Campsite.
  • 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

Recent Updates

Firestorm Zero

  • Firestorm Zero has – for the time being – been shut down as a streaming option.
  • Those who still had remaining purchased time for Firestorm Zero should have been refunded and received an e-mail notification that the service was being shut down.
  • The reason for shutting it down is primarily related to:
    • The amount of work required to maintain two different streaming products.
    • The need for the Lab to migrate project Zero to a new platform at the behest of their streaming provider, and not having time to also migrate Firestorm Zero in the same period.
  • This does not mean there will never be a further offering of Firestorm as a part of the Second Life streaming service.

New Joiner Workflow Updates

  • There has been a complete refresh of the Lab’s web-based new joiner workflow at join.secondlife.com, which now leverages the Avatar Picker first seen in Project Zero. For more on this, please see A short look at the refreshed Second Life web-based join flow.
  • As a part of this, the sign-up flow specific to Project Zero has also been updated. In particular, the Project Zero web site web.secondlife.com (formerly zero.secondlife.com) has been refreshed so:
    • It now  shows the same backdrop image as now seen on the web sign-up flow.
    • It Includes a slide show of Polaroid-like snapshots intended to illustrate to ne users what people can do in SL, whilst waiting for an instance of the viewer to become available and load in their browsero.
      • My own tests of this suggested that the page will keep parsing through the images seemingly ad infinitum if you cannot be connected to a browser instance of the viewer, rather than indicating this is the case.
The revised web page for launching Project Zero (web.secondlife.com) with the backdrop splash image and the “polaroid snapshots” slide show
  • Overall, these changes  – both to web.secondlife.com and (particularly) join.secondlife.com have resulted in more incoming users sticking around in-world.

Current Focus

  • In line with Philip Rosedale’s SL22B Meet the Lindens session on Wednesday, June 25th (see the video, or refer to my summary of that event for specifics), Project Zero is focused on the new user experience.
  • Specifically, how to get a new user from logging in and choosing an avatar through to customising that avatar so it reflects what they want to reflect, as easily as possible, using the Avatar Welcome Pack content, rather than Senra.
  • This is likely to be an iterative process over multiple months, with a cadence of updates intended to test and refine ideas and approaches.
  • The work will also involve gathering quantitative data on how well the approach(es) seem to be working, and also qualitative data through spending time at areas where people coming into SL are, and watching and interacting with them as they customise their avatar, and gain feedback.

General Discussion

  • Project Zero remains primarily focused on use by incoming new users, with a “very small concurrency” of existing users available to access it.
  • The reason for the focus on incoming new users is because it is easier to try new ideas and iterate on them easier using Project Zero, rather than trying to do so through the desktop.
  • It is recognised that there is a hunger among existing users to try the streaming viewer, and one way to do this might be to start to offer it on a paid basis as was the case with Firestorm Zero. However, this is not something that is likely to happen in the short-term.
  • The current action of Project Zero simply booting a user off when their allotted time is up without any warning / gracefully log-out is something to be addressed in “the very near future”.
  • Whilst the UI for Project Zero largely resembles that of the official viewer, there are differences, some visible (such as the lack of a left-side toolbar button field, and some not so visible.
    • The not-so-obvious difference is that elements linked to buttons are subject to redesign, so that if any are updated – such as Chat – the associated Conversations floater can be redesigned so it does not obscure so much of the in-world view when it is open.
    • These aspects of the work potentially allow elements of the viewer to be displayed outside of the world view, but withing the browser tab, as has been done with the Avatar Picker, leaving the in-world view unimpeded.
An example of a viewer toolbar button (Avatars) causing the Avatar Picker to be displayed within the browser tab, but outside of the Second Life viewer window, leaving the latter unencumbered.
  • A general discussion on helping new users understand customising their avatars – from providing freebies suitable for the bodies in the Avatar Welcome Pack in placing such as the Welcome Hub and locating these together with the teleports to the changing rooms; providing additional help and information boards, etc., within the changing rooms, offering new users a “home space” where they can go to change (much like Sansar had / has), etc.
  • Offering some form of recognised changing room area where new users could experiment with avatar dressing / customisation was seen as advantageous on several levels:
    • It has a familiarity with the way we go about trying clothing in the physical world, and thus is a comfortable environment.
    • It could be used by a new user and a mentor or friend, so the latter can give support and lessons without interruption.
    • It can save on unintended embarrassment (e.g. having a fatpack for multiple different bodies and accidentally wearing everything).
  • A broader discussion on how to offer new users more of an experience in Second Life – should they be prompted / directed on the basis of interest, or should it be free-form? Should users be provided with lists of Groups which share their interests? How can this be done?, etc.

Date of Next Meeting