The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 6th, 2026 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 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
- All simhosts appear to be undergoing restarts this week, with no deployments.
Game Control
- Leviathan Linden had planned to try to port game_control back into the develop-Linux branch, but was beaten to the line bye Rye of the Alchemy viewer, show has submitted a Pull Request. Rye’s submission looks good, but has yet to be built.
- This means that if the Linux build passes muster, it can join with the Windows and Mac builds and be passed into the main develop branch.
- However, it has been a report of issues with Rye’s build on systems not using Pulseaudio, which tend to crash on start, so this will have to be investigated, although the overall impact on Linux users was the subject of debate.
SLua Work
- No indication on when the SLua viewer will be promoted to release status – but that is a question more for viewer meetings.
- Harold Linden noted his personal “to do” list for SLua is mostly around improving testing / allocation strategy in general, and noted that it is currently growing as LL find usability issues they think are worth pushing the viewer release back for, in order to get them included.
- One of the things Harold would particularly like to see working is setting link primitive parameters “in a sane way to be less-bad by the time we go general availability for sure”.
- He also noted he’d like a `require()` function that works correctly with the built-in editor as well.
- Harold further noted that there is some rearchitecting that needs to go on behind the scenes, and the viewer definitely needs to be in a better state prior to promotion.
- This led to a further conversation of possible SLua inclusions / updates, and on things like script scheduling – LSL vs. SLua (should be no difference), and script execution.
- Harold further noted he is refactoring the script scheduler is he goes to try to improve things but in terms of scheduling and execution, and so the simulator isn’t spending “a lot of time figuring out that it has nothing to do”.
- Multi-threading isn’t seen as an answer for this, because some scripts may be waiting on work being carried out by scripts currently running, and multi-threading could being this dependency.
SLua Resources
- The nine beta test regions are centred on SLua Beta Void (mind the water!).
- Official scripting portal (this is a work in progress and open to contributions – Github for the latter here).
- The Second Life official Discord server / channels.
- Suzanna’s SLua Guide (Suzanna Linn).
- Official VScode plugin notes:
- It is not yet available on the VScode marketplace.
- Issues and PRs for code submissions can be made here, and the plugin downloaded.
- VSCode plugin + documentation (Wolfgang Senizen – likely be discontinued and contributions shifted to support the official documentation).
In Brief
- As well as working on Game Control (documentation here), Leviathan Linden has been trying to track a crash/corruption bug he accidentally introduced into the development simulator branch. The impact of this should be very limited – has only thus far shown up on the SLua test regions.
- Leviathan also noted that there are been no progress on:
- Experimenting with adjusting avatar bounding box size.
- Enabling avatars to turn to face the direction of travel of travel when walking backwards (on the official viewer).
- No progress on fixing the mesh mismatch issue.
- Monty Linden warned that the Lab is coming up on the “annual simhost certification dance”, and will be part of the 2026.01 “Kiwi” release.
- This should be invisible to everyone with one weird exception: The ‘TLS Web Client Authentication’ in the EKU is now *strongly* deprecated at all certification authorities. Monty noted that “No one should care unless they extended/ported the SL viewer’s fussy cert code that checks the server part of this”.
- Henri Beauchamp (Cool VL Viewer) put forward a lengthy outline for solving the issues of avatars already in a region appearing as clouds to those newly arriving – which appears to be a largely server-side issue. He has developed a viewer-side workaround, and proposed a server-side messaging fix which would negate any need for viewer-side workarounds.
- Both Leviathan and Monty Linden have an interest in trying to eliminate cloud avatars, and Leviathan indicated he would look at Henri’s proposed fix.
- This extended into a discussion on solving the issues of missing attachments on visible avatars when people TP into a region, etc.
Date of Next Meetings
- Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, January 13th, 2026.
- Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, January 20th, 2026.
† 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.
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