Category: SL User Group Meetings

March 2026 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 March 4th 2026. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. Pantera’s video is embedded at the end of this article, my thanks to her for providing it.

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.

Friday February 27th Marketplace Outage

On Friday, February 27th, 2026, the Marketplace suffered an outage resulting in delays to item deliveries, background check-outs and viewer notifications for approximately 5 hours. This was apparently caused by a degradation in the MP asynchronous workers during a deployment, resulting in a backlog in the MP queuing system. The backlog should be clear now, and there have been no recent reports of missing / delayed items or notifications.

Updates

  • Changes are being made to the email verification prompt that comes up on the Second Life dashboard – those who have verified their email won’t see anything (“for a while”). Those who haven’t verified their email address for contact are advised to do so.
  • Updates to the web maps to allow searching by region name is still “slotted” for implementation.
  • Updates are in progress for the buying land experience – the look and presentation of the pages, UI changes, etc. – not changes to current land pricing.
  • The viewer splash screen will be changing soon as a part of the viewer UI / font changes contained in the upcoming 2026.02 viewer.
  • Work on making the Marketplace home page more responsive on Mobile devices is continuing, with small changes already made to the sidebar.
  • Quality of Life / Internal updates:
    • Further guardrails have been placed around Marketplace Product Listing Enhancements (PLEs) to prevent users being double-charged.
    • Multiple bug fixes related to wishlist displays, language selections and display name synchronisation, and similar.
    • Upgrades are being made to some web-related AWS services.

Marketplace

  • Th question was asked if people felt it would be worth a break of 12-18 months on work on all Marketplace development (bug fixing, etc., still continuing), in order to get variants / styles (e.g. multiple colour options, etc.,) in a single listing produced and released.
    • Whilst stated that a “year / year-and-a-half” was “very conservative”, it was still something of a surprised given that in late 2022, Reed Linden stated variants would be the “first deployment” in 2023.
    • Spidey Linden noted that the biggest hurdle with the project is actually migrating users as smoothly as possible from having multiple listings for the same item (but in different colours) to having all options in the one listing.
    • There was support for the idea and variants  / styles is something that has long been promised and has been a popular request.
  • The above spun-out into a discussion on “Marketplace 2.0”.
    • Currently there are no plans for a “Marketplace 2.0”, so this was more a “throw out ideas” session.
    • This discussion also spun out into requests for “social” elements to be included on MP listing, such as a indicator as to when a store owner last logged-in to SL, the date any item was posts to the MP (already available via some 3rd party browser plug-ins, support Firefox, Edge and Chrome and its variants – I use it with both Brave and Gener8).
  • An alterative question regarded on “Marketplace 2.0”, were it to be developed, is whether merchants would access not having any migration mechanism and having to go through and manually re-list all their items on the new version.
    • This caused something of a divided response, with some seeing it as not being a problem for MP stores with large inventories, as it was argued (not unreasonably in the case of clothing), that the reason for many stores having large numbers of listings is because they have multiple colour version of each item, each with it own listing – which any new Marketplace would solve by allowing multiple variants in a single listing.
    • Others felt any requirement to manually upload to a new MP would slow adoption.
    • Still others felt that having a new MP with “more features” would still be worth the effort to give them a new, cleaner & more functional store.
  • It was suggested that some of the pain in moving to a “new” MP could be eased by offering an extended transition period to allow creators to gradually make the move.
    • However, it was pointed out that running two systems side-by-side will incur additional cost and so a) would have to be factored-in to the transition period; b) would likely preclude both the current MP and “MP 2.0” running side-by-side indefinitely; sooner or later merchants would have to move.
    • There is also the risk of consumer confusion over where to find items if the transition period is drawn out to the point where creators migrate their listings in small quantities (“one or two a week” was mentioned), which could then impact sales.
  • Calls were made to simply delete stores from the Marketplace on the basis of the creator not logging-in to SL for a given continuous period (currently, listings are made “inactive” if the owner has not logged-in during a certain period). This is a potentially damaging approach, as it could unfairly penalise users who are forced into a more restricted ability to log-in to SL due to social circumstance, illness, etc.
  • The discussion on “MP 2.0” spun out to include integration of CasperVend and the ability to see through the MP and via in-world vendor kiosks.
  • A request was make to solve the “translation issue” whereby automatic translation of products leads to things like the wrong colour being delivered (e.g. a translation referencing the “pink” item for delivery, whereas the listing shows the “red” version.

Other Items

  • Community Pages / Forums Changes:
    • Concerns were raised over recent changes to the Community pages (e.g. the official blogs) / Forums — notably around logging-in.
    • These concerns took two parts:
      1. The fact that the logging-in process has been changed by the third party providing the community pages / Forum platform (Invision) to use OAuth as their authentication method, rather than the Lab’s own MFA;
      2. There was no announcement of the change by Linden Lab via blog or Forum post, in advance of it being made by Invision across their services.
    • The concern over the use of cookies seems to be (in part) born of misunderstanding: cookies are a “standard” means of maintaining login session IDs. However OAuth appears to be retaining the cookie after a user has physically logged-out from the Community pages via the sign-out option (which does not mean logging-out of SL), which appears to be the problem.
    • Kermit Linden offered to look into the authorisation flow.
Invision has implemented a new verification process outside of the lab’s MFA (which not everyone uses) for accessing the Community pages (official blogs, the forums, etc.), they host on LL’s behalf. The process was introduced without any communication from LL, and utilises cookies, which has raised concerns.
  • The issue of  SL wiki thumbnail images not displaying has been partially resolved, but more work is required to completely resolve it.
  • A request was made to add a further SL Discord generic category for those whose blogs fall outside the current three categories of  fashion, home & garden and bloggers-streamers.
  • Complaints that 2 clicks to reach a person’s transaction history on the SL dashboard, and Marketplace is too hard and the labelling is not precise (which is fair).
  • A general discussion on web search and its perceived drawbacks (such as being unable to exclude display Names from People searches, thus leading to “false positives” when seeking user names etc.)..
  • A discussion on being able to “register” brand names with LL to prevent things like copycat stores using the same name, or having stores using the sane name / word in their keywords coming ahead of registered stores in MP searches.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, April 1st, 2026.

2026 week #10: SUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
A view of Isola Sirena, Second Life - the main island summit village
Isola Sirena, January 2026 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, March 3ed, 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

  • Not deployments are planned for the week, channels will be restarted.
  • It had been planned to slot the initial deployment of WebRTC  between the 2026.02  Kiwi update (currently grid-wide), and the next formal RC release 2026.03 Loganberry. However a last-minute issue was discovered, delaying WebRTC whilst it is fixed.
  • The release to follow Loganberry will be 2026.04 Key Lime).

WebRTC Deployment

  • As noted above, the WebRTC deployment has been delayed, primarily for a couple of reasons:
    • LL is addressing some server issues that resulted in very occasional ‘drop from voice’ problems.
    • The WebRTC team is also digesting feedback from the recent Firestorm Town Hall in which firestorm users who have not moved away from a version 6.x (pre-PBR) version of Firestorm to a PBR-enabled version.
  • It is hoped the delay will not be longer than a week or so, so as to allow it to commence in March, but an update on this will be made soon.

In Brief

  • Rider Linden has just finished a tricky bit of infrastructure work and is now focusing on some the simulator aspects of the SLua project, including changes for being able to select a default script. A side effect of that is the ability for a viewer to specify a template script on create without the tricky copy stuff that the viewer was doing for that.
  • Leviathan Linden:
    • Has just finished fixing the “can’t save avatar action remap” problem with game_control but has not pushed the changes to a viewer repo as he working to clean the code up and produce documentation.
    • He regards this particular work as useful as it has reminded him of what remains to be done for game-control. In particular, remapping of controller buttons is not yet enabled in the preferences UI, although there should be work to support that already done under the hood.
    • He has not made any progress on Henri Beauchamp’s idea for solving the “perpetually cloudy avatar problem” see previously SUG summaries). It is coded on the server,  but he hadn’t been able to test it.
    • His next project is to audit how some “reliable” UDP messages are sent between viewer and server. There is a possibility he can fix some of the login/teleport/region-crossing connection failures with some work there. One of the message pairs to be looked at are CompleteAgentMovement/AgentMovementComplete. Dropping these is the source of quite a few B&W screens every day.
  • Monty Linden has been:
    • Working on meta problems, such as identifying Voice issues.
    • Talking to Brad Linden about making it easier to include logs in reports generated in the viewer.

General Discussion

Please refer to the video below as well.

  • An extensive discussion on llSetAgentRot and how it works and how it and avatar rotation / camera rotation/movement might be improved.
  • A short discussion on text-to-speech and how favourable (or not) it might be, based off of this feature request.
    • It was noted that transcription – speech to text – is already being experimented with using WebRTC.
  • Regio  Crossings:
    • It is being reported that for the last week or so, region crossings – physical vehicle or teleport – have been getting worse.
    • In addition, it is being claimed that, after an extended period of time in a region, people are finding their avatars being “soft disconnected” from the simulators: they can still move around and communicate within the region, by any attempt to move out of it results in a complete disconnection – and allegedly a full disconnect can occur just by rezzing / deleting an object or changing outfits.
    • There have been no apparent changes to the simulator code that would account for a worsening of region crossings, and it’s not entirely clear how widespread the issues are.
    • However, Monty linden has requested logs from anyone encountering these issues.
    • This discussion took up the latter half of the meeting (and beyond the end of the meeting), mixed in part with the rotation discussion noted above,
  • A discussion on releasing SLua grid-wide without complete documentation, or waiting until a full set of documentation is ready for what is being released, and then updated as code updates are made.

Date of Next Meetings

  • Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, March 10th, 2026.
  • Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, March 17th, 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.

2026 week #9: SL Open Source (TPVD) meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Hippotropolis Theatre: home of the OSD/TPVD meeting
The following notes were taken from:

  • Pantera’s video (embedded at the end of this article) and my chat log of the Open-Source Developer (OSD) meeting held on Friday, February 27th, 2026, together with my chat log of that meeting.
  • Please note that this is not a full transcript of the meeting but a summary of key topics.
Table of Contents

Meeting Purpose

  • The OSD meeting is a combining of the former Third Party Viewer Developer meeting and the Open Source Development meeting. 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.

Note: The OSD/TPV meeting has tended to occur in the same week as the content Creation User Group meeting over the last several months, resulting in a lot of repetition of information between the two meetings (and combined summaries on this blog). An attempt is being made to break this cycle by having the next OSD/TPV meeting on Friday, March 6th, 2026 before reverting to the usual every other week format (so the meeting after that will be March 20th, 2026) – thus putting the OSD/TPV meeting and the CCUG on alternate weeks.

Official Viewer Status

  • Default viewer 2025.08 – 7.2.3.19375695301 – maintenance update with bug fixes and quality of life improvements – December 2.
    • Notable addition: new VHACD-based convex decomposition library for mesh uploads.
  • Second Life Release Candidate viewer 2026.01 – 26.1.0.22359044520 , February 25 – NEW
    • Legacy search; WebRTC improvements; QoL improvements.
  • Second Life Project Viewers:
    • Second Life Lua Editor Alpha viewer 26.1.0.21525310258, February 12.
    • Second Life Voice Moderation viewer 26.1.0.20139269477, December 12.
      • Introduces the ability to moderate spatial voice chat in regions configured to use webRTC voice.
    • Second Life One Click Install viewer 26.1.0.21295806042, January 26, 2026 – one-click viewer installation.

Upcoming Viewers

Viewer 2026.01

  • Remains the current viewer development focus with the release of the beta (RC) version, although this will be shifting more to 2026.02.
  • The velopack one click installer / updater is not in the initial beta, and may now in fact slip to 2026.02.
  • 2026.01 includes a high priority fix for specific Bluetooth headset configurations which will benefit WebRTC.
  • Now available as an alpha viewer (above).
  • As the name suggests, triggers a one-click install / viewer update process.
  • Also includes improved monitoring / logging of viewer freezes and crashes, etc.

Viewer 2026.02

  • 2026.02 remains on track for the “Flat” UI and font updates.
  • It now also includes the WebRTC voice moderation capabilities (as seen in the project viewer) to help align viewer-side WebRTC updates more with the hoped-for server-side deployment (see below for more).
  • This viewer might additionally receive some backported updates to texture streaming.
  • No Alpha / Beta viewer is available as yet for this release..
Example of the upcoming flat UI. Via: Geenz Linden / Github #4681/2

Viewer 2026.03 -“SL Visual Polish” (SLVP)

  • 2026.03 had been looking to an April release, however, it might slip back to 2026.04. Part of the decision-making on this is related to upcoming server-side updates to EEP and glTF which are seen as being required prior to SLVP shipping.
  • It will likely to include:
    • The “long baking” SSR improvements that were started last year. This version of the viewer will likely have a long beta soak time to allow feedback on these changes to be gathered.
    • PBR specular for residents who are more familiar with the old Blinn-Phong workflow. This will:
      • Include another texture slot (tint of the specular reflection).
      • Work with metallics.
      • Follow the glTF specification, but will likely initially be without glTF overrides, as this requires server-side work.
    • HDR controls in EEP so residents can decide how bright or dark things should be. This work does require simulator-side updates. This will likely initially have server-side support on Aditi (the Beta grid).
  • It may additionally include:
    • Further mirrors optimisations and a new “Ultra” quality setting that will enable a system mirror for water. A caveat on this work is that while this “water mirror” might up the quality of water reflections, it will do so at a performance hit; SSR for water will always be faster and less intensive.
    • Inclusion of an emissive strength setting for PBR.
  • The Pull Request  for this work can be found here – #5385.

General Viewer Notes

  • Firestorm hosted a Townhall recently, with Lab presence, to try to determine why a percentage of Firestorm users remain reluctant to move away from a 6.x version of that viewer to a PBR-supporting version. The predominant issues appear to be concerns over performance and the degraded water visuals seen with PBR viewers.
    • One aspect of people refusing to move is hearsay: “X said PBR sucketh and has poor performance, therefore I will not even try it”, regardless as to whether this might be true for them or not; another is, potentially, people’s general unwillingness to change from what they like.
    • Exactly how to address such issues / beliefs/perceptions is no easy task.
    • A suggestion was made to have “toggle” in the viewer so users can determine which rendering system they wish to use (e.g. “legacy” or “PBR”). This is far more complicated than it sounds, requiring continued support of two rendering pipes in the viewer, potentially leading to multiple complications and the potential content breakage. As such, it is not going to happen.
  • Geenz Linden is continuing to work with texture streaming and resolutions, with some of the work possibly surfacing in 2026.02 as noted above. He further noted that:
    • Work is not stopping at texture streaming improvements; the Lab is laying plans to deal with some of the “bigger performance bullet points”.
    • It is known that PBR  has introduced performance bottlenecks, many of which have been dealt with, others of which still need work. To this end, the Lab may start running Tracy “very, very regularly” to identify bottlenecks so they can be addressed.
    • The hope is that when adding a new PBR feature / capability, at least one existing bottleneck will be corrected.
  • As noted in the 2026 week #5 OSD meeting, there are potential changes coming to the viewer build chain. These involve updates to CMake and a Pull Request relating to vcpkg. The latter is still under review, and is likely to be implemented “bite by bite”, rather than all at once. It will also be likely to go into its own branch and not emerge until after the SLua /Linux viewer work reaches release status, so as to not over-complicate things for TPVs.
  • TPV Developer Henri Beauchamp (Cool VL Viewer) suggested splitting the viewer’s main thread so that the rendering code can be separated from messaging and objects updates, thus smoothing frame rates in the viewer.
    • Geenz Linden indicated that this had been looked at by a Product Engine engineer, and that it was felt that doing so would help out massively with porting the viewer to other graphics APIs.
    • However, actual work on this has not as yet started, as there is a need to “chip away” at getting approval together with a need to avoid disrupting existing releases.
    • Such is the scale of the work, it could involve “a few quarters” of effort to implement.
    • It was noted that while some multi-threading has been introduced to the viewer, this is mostly “lighter work” more easily removed from the main thread, which still does most of the heavy lifting via a single CPU core.
  • The last point rotated into a more general discussion on the viewer, threads, the future potential for removing coroutines and fibers in favour of “actual” threads, etc. Please refer to the last 10-15 minutes of the video.

Grid-Wide WebRTC Deployment

  • This was targeting a March 2026 deployment, following the usual simulator-side deployment process (a selected RC channel or channels for the first deployment, followed by deployment to all remaining RC channels usually a week later, then a final deployment to the SLS Main channel, usually a week after that).
  • However, it now appears hat the deployment is likely to be delayed, although no specifics have been given on why or when. .

Next Meeting

February 2026 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, February 26th 2026 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

Please note: the meeting experienced assorted voice issues and drop-outs, making transcribing difficult, with some of the issues also resulting a poor sound quality in the video recording.

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

SL Mobile (Beta) version 2026.2.1079 (A) / 0.1.1079 (iOS) – February 24 – Object chat support and Bubble Chat updates; single tap interactions (see below for more).

Recent Updates

  • Release 0.1.1078 (February 5th) introduced Bubble Chat:
    • Allows chat and incoming IM’s to be viewed over the in-world scene (for approx. 8 seconds), and enables tap-to-reply.
    • In the initial iteration, tapping a message to reply will take the user back to the menu to show the keyboard.
  • Release 2026.2.1079 (February 23rd) added:
    • Bubble chat enhancement to display object names & support messages from objects.
    • Object chat support (but not, as yet, llDialog support (see below for more on this).
    • Single tap interactions – no need to use a long press to interact with avatars and objects. Tapping on an avatar or object should generate a blue outline around them indicating they have been selected, together with a basic menu of options which can be expanded via the More option for a full context menu.
  • It is hoped that these features will help users understand more of what is going on around them whilst also allowing for better interactions and social engagement through chat, etc.
  • All three features will be enhanced in future releases (such as by making it possible to respond to Bubble chat without have to go via the Chat menu, resolving issues of objects occluding one another and preventing one-tap / “chick through” interactions, for example).
    • This work should allow for fixing other issues as well, such as adjusting the camera position so that it doesn’t end up on the wrong side of a wall, for example.
  • All of these features have received generally positive feedback from users attending the meetings.

Upcoming Updates

  • AI integration:
    • Currently, when creating a new account, a user will receive a canned welcoming message on logging-in to SL.
    • However, new users are responding to the message – which the service is not capable of ‘seeing” or making a response -something that might upset new users because it appears like they are being ignored.
    • To this end, Brad Linden is working on hooking this process up to a chatbot so that users at lease get the sense of a meaningful exchange (and might thus be encouraged to contact others around them).
  • LL utilises crash reports supplied by Google and Apple to identify specific crash bugs / issues for rectification. This work has seen a noticeable improvement in SL Mobile’s stability on Android, although so new crash issues have crept in as well. As such:
    • Further Android crash fixes can be expected in the next release(s).
    • Work is ongoing to deliver the same of iOS.
  • Work is finally starting on adding support to SL Mobile for llDialog, to ensure support for interactive dialogue menus associated with scripted items. This is fairly involved work, so no target date for possible release is being given at this time.
  • Synchronising chat history across Mobile and the viewer: again, this is a complex task, but “good progress” is being made.
  • Localisation in the app (local country languages) is underway, but also no tentative release date for the the initial work as yet.
    • Supported languages will likely be the same as those supported in the viewer.
    • Feedback and assistance with localisation (e.g. ensuring idioms translate, etc.), will be sought from users wishing to help with the work, once the first iteration of the work surfaces in the app. Such feedback should be made via the SL Feedback Portal.
    • This work will also allow manual setting of a preferred language, rather than simply having the app simply utilise the language set in the device operating system.
  • Voice improvements – particularly WRT making the initialisation of Voice in the app less disruptive for users trying to enable it. This work is currently with QA.

General Q&A

  • At least one user has reported incidents of Mobile suffering from freezing at times – although this is not tied to time of day or specific activities, but the reporter does have a high ping rate as they are across the Atlantic from SL.
    • This particular issue has been hard to repro at the Lab (due to a lower ping rate & less in the way of message dropping. etc?).
    • There are also a number of fixes in the works for crashes, lock-ups etc., one (or more) of which might incidentally resolve the issue. Beanie  Linden (Mobile QA lead) is going to have further goes at trying to repro the issue and, if possible, test it against these fixes.
  • A question was asked about what kinds of data is collected by the app, and for a clarification as to what the “track your activity across other apps” pop-up means.
    • Rather than gathering user data, this capability is more aligned with the ongoing drive to try and push new users to try the SL Mobile app via advertising – e.g. to gather data and information related to the ads and to those signing-up in response to the ads. The idea here being to help determine the efficacy of such advertising / drives.
  • A general discussion on feedback relating to to positive benefits of Bubble Chat and object chat, and ideas for future enhancement (e.g. toggle options to turn it on and ) – some, if not all of which are likely to be looked at in the future as the capability further matures.

Date of Next Meeting

2026 week #8: SUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Sable Hound Hollow – Romantic Reverie, January 2026 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, February 17th, 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

  • Tuesday, February 17th, 2026:  the SLS Main channel simhosts were restarted and updated to simulator release 2026.02 (Kiwi). This includes:
    • LL’s annual server certification changes – some outstanding changes are required to Aditi (the Beta grid), Agni is fully up-to-date.
    • “PERMISSION_PRIVILEGED_LAND_ACCESS”, allowing the llSetParcelForSale function to be used (and potentially other parcel settings in the future), but will require a viewer-side update in order to be accessed.
    • A bug fix to llTransferOwnership that was stripping out items that it shouldn’t have.
  • On Wednesday February 18th, all simhosts on the RC channels should be restarted without any updates.
  • The next simulator release is now officially 2026.03 – Loganberry; no details are currently unavailable.

In Brief

Please also refer to the video, below.

  • Rider Linden is currently engaged on some under the hood backlog fixes that have been needed for quite a while.
  • Rider also raised two “how much will this break?” questions:
    • Right now LL’s LSL Regex operates on 8 bit characters. A bug report has been submitted about it not supporting unicode. So the question is: what if LL switched to using unicode under the hood. Another option on that would be to add a flag at the end (like “/i”) that would indicate it should unicode? The favour shown at the meeting was an under-the-hood unicode change although concerns was raised over the potential for implement work-arounds to the issue which might be in widespread use.
    • The second question was on change notification on texture changes – and the fact that LL aren’t sending them; the notifications are available on a scripted texture change, but are not being fired. This discussion got mixed in with  discussion on “Second Life II” (which Sansar sort-of wasn’t, although also kind-of was) please refer to the latter half of the meeting for details.
  • Leviathan Linden:
    • Is working on “some final changes to my workaround for the “cannot change mesh face” problem. After code review some changes were determined to be necessary.
    • He has also implemented a submission from Henri Beauchamp (Cool VL Viewer) to try to resolve the issue of “perpetually cloudy avatars” by resending avatar attachment info whenever the viewer requests avatar textures. This still requires further refinement and addition to a simulator update, but it is progressing.
    • A bug report about too many listen events when creating similar llListen() filters; this is now seen as a bug and a fix from Leviathan will be a part of 2026.03 Loganberry.
    • Leviathan has also received a bug report against the game-control viewer pre-release: custom key (button?) mappings are not being saved. He has not as yet been able to dig into it, but wanted people to know it is on his radar.
  • Harold Linden (SLua):
    • Has added a couple of things: `table.append()` and `table.extend()` so that it’s much less annoying to work with lists of rules as is typical in existing functions like set primitive params/. This will be deployed in an upcoming TBD simulator update, as it still needs a couple of “tweaks”.
    • Harold is also working on a fix for `string.gsub()` and `table.sort()` and friends killing your script if they run too long.
    • Various questions throughout the meeting on SLua – please refer to the video.
  • SLua Resources (as it was asked during the meeting):
    • 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).
  • The subject of region crossings causing issues and the need for them to be a “top priority” for “fixes”.
    • Harold Linden has done some work on some work to improve the testing situation there. Now that LL has codified how it (mis)behaves, he hopes LL can define a path for the correct behaviour while ensuring fixes don’t break existing viewers that rely on the broken behaviour
  • Roxie Linden repeated her update that WebRTC is tentatively targeting a March deployment for WebRTC. When it happens, it will be a typical server rollout (week one: limited simulator RC channel deployment; week 2: deployment to all remaining simulator RC channels; week three deployment to the rest of Agni). However, if anything comes up, one or more stages of deployment may be delayed for fixes.
  • Another viewer side-track for a server meeting, this time questioning the arrived of the “visual polish” viewer with SSR updates, something covered at the Content Creation User Group (attended by the individual raising the question at this meeting).
  • I had to depart the meeting early; please refer to Pantera’s video (blow) for the final 20 minutes.

Date of Next Meetings

  • Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, February 24th, 2026.
  • Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, March 3rd, 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.

2026 week #7: SL CCUG and Open Source (TPVD) meetings summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Hippotropolis Campsite: venue for CCUG meetings
The following notes were taken from:

  • My chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, February 12th, 2026.
  • Pantera’s video (embedded at the end of this article) and my chat log of the Open-Source Developer (OSD) meeting held on Friday, February 13th, 2026, together with my chat log of that meeting.
Table of Contents

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 OSD 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 2025.08 – 7.2.3.19375695301 – maintenance update with bug fixes and quality of life improvements – December 2 – No Change.
    • Notable addition: new VHACD-based convex decomposition library for mesh uploads.
  • Second Life Beta (RC) viewer 26.1.0.21522948608, February 12 – NEW.
    • Legacy search; WebRTC improvements; QoL improvements.
  • Second Life Project viewers:
    • Second Life Lua Editor Alpha version 26.1.0.21525310258, February 3 –  No Change.
    • Second Life Voice Moderation viewer 26.1.0.20139269477, December 12 – No Change.
      • Introduces the ability to moderate spatial voice chat in regions configured to use WebRTC voice.
    • Second Life One Click Install viewer 26.1.0.21295806042, January 26, 2026 – one-click viewer installation.

Upcoming Viewers

Viewer 2026.01

  • Remains the current viewer development focus with the release of the beta (RC) version, although this will be shifting more to 2026.02.
  • The velopack one click installer / updater is not in the initial beta, but is “off to one side” whilst being allowed to “cook” for longer. This may get folded back into 2026.01, but the Lab is not “super married” to this being the case.
  • 2026.01 includes a high priority fix for specific Bluetooth headset configurations which will benefit WebRTC.
  • Now available as an alpha viewer (above).
  • As the name suggests, triggers a one-click install / viewer update process.
  • Also includes improved monitoring / logging of viewer freezes and crashes, etc.

Viewer 2026.02

  • 2026.02 remains on track for the “Flat” UI and font updates.
  • It now also includes the WebRTC voice moderation capabilities (as seen in the project viewer) to help align viewer-side WebRTC updates more with the hoped-for server-side deployment currently targeting March 2026.
  • No Alpha / Beta viewer is available as yet for this release..
Example of the upcoming flat UI. Via: Geenz Linden / Github #4681/2

Viewer 2026.03

  • 2026.03 is described as a “visual polish” for the viewer. This viewer is likely to include:
    • The “long baking” SSR improvements that were started last year. This version of the viewer will likely have a long beta soak time to allow feedback on these changes to be gathered.
    • PBR specular for residents who are more familiar with the old Blinn-Phong work flow. This will:
      • Include another texture slot (tint of the specular reflection).
      • Work with metallics.
      • Follow the glTF specification, but will likely initially be without glTF overrides, as this requires server-side work.
    • HDR controls in EEP so residents can decide how bright or dark things should be. This work does require simulator-side updates. This will likely initially have server-side support on Aditi (the Beta grid).
  • The Pull Request  for this work can be found here – #5385.
  • 2026.03 is looking towards an April release.

General Viewer Notes

  • Viewer-side Blinn-Phong alpha-gamma improvements were raised as possible inclusion for 2026.03. The Lab’s viewer is that while these will be coming, it will not be until after supporting server-side updates have been made in order to avoid what the Lab sees as potential content breakage. This matter was viewed as “not up for debate”.
    • There is a chance that the server-side work might be undertaken and completed in time for the viewer-side fixes to be included in 2026.03, but currently, Geenz isn’t willing to commit to this due to other on-going work.
  • User Animats is developing the Sharpview viewer. This includes an “infinite draw distance” – see this video as an example.
    • The Lab has been looking over this work internally, and there has been some discussion on supporting the work and giving it more of an official path.
    • Geenz noted having the map system provide terrain heightmaps could be a start.
    • Geenz also suggested having prim stand-ins for distant objects, but noted that this is a “down the road thing”.
  • Geenz Linden has requested developers put their eyes on PR #5429.
    • The release ordering for this would b after the SLua works reaches release status, due to both that viewer and this work having ties to the the official Linux viewer build.
    • It is unlikely the SLua work will be merged into a main viewer code until around the 2026.04 viewer, which means the work in PR#5429 is unlikely to reach a viewer release until summer.
    • Given the changes it may bring to some TPVs, this is seen as no bad thing, as it gives the opportunity for feedback and planning, etc.
  • A general discussion on re-enabling water reflections as a part of the upcoming SSR / HDR improvements. Options were mentioned, and Geenz seemed to lean towards “a slight optimization to mirrors on thin probes is not out of the question to help ‘backfill’ probe data”, before noting this would have to be very narrowly scoped for inclusion in the 2026.03 viewer.
  • The transmission index of refraction (IoR – good for water reflections) project is seen as requiring more time and input than the PBR specular work, despite a good amount of work being done on the transmission / IoR work. As such, it is awaiting a re-prioritisation to continue – and this might be a while before it is forthcoming, because there is still a fair amount of complexity involved in any implementation.
  • A general discussion towards the end of the OSG meeting on HDR, HDR skies, improving the brightness of the SL Sun, etc.

Grid-Wide WebRTC Deployment

  • The Lab is currently looking at a March deployment of WebRTC voice across the grid, but this is subject to possible change.
  • The viewer server is currently in a beta soak test (see: WebRTC Voice Open Beta is Expanding).
  • Deployment will follow the usual simulator update route:
    • First week: limited deployment to selected RC channels (e.g. Bluesteel / Preflight).
    • Second week (providing no significant issues occurring): wider deployment to all RC channels.
    • Third week: deployment to the Main SLS channel, marking WebRTC as grid-wide.
  • As noted in the viewer notes above, there are fixes going into the upcoming 2026.01 viewer related to WebRTC:
    • These are each described as affecting a “small number” of users.
    • The first fixes an issue where some people may lose voice without reconnecting once in a while.
    • The second relates to problems with certain Bluetooth headsets losing audio after toggling PTT.
    • LL would ideally link to see TPVs cheery-pick these fixes for inclusion in their viewers so as to be available to users as WebRTC commences deployment.
  • A server-side  fix to address a spatialization bug was released on Monday February 9th, and appears to have dealt with the last known significant server bug.

CCUG Meeting General Discussions

  • A request was made for a check box to be added to the PDR editing tools to ignore the alpha channel in order to allow Blinn-Phong specular textures could be re-used.
    • This was seen as a “little tricky” given the way BP specular has been implemented in SL, which have resulted in some compatibility between BP and PBR (e.g. the colour RGB parts), whilst others are not.
    • Whilst some comprises could potentially be mead, they would deviate away from the glTF specification, which is not what LL wants to do.
  •  Geenz indicated he is mulling the idea of possible adjustments to texture streaming to help improve it – such as streaming specular, metallic and even base colour at lower resolutions, whist keeping the normal map at the required resolution. This, he feels would compensate for any loss of detail on specular, metallic or base colour, whilst decreasing the overall streaming load.
  • Scriptable IK was raised as an idea. This was something the currently suspended Puppetry Project was looking at, as well as things like use of webcams for animations, etc. It is not clear if / when this work might be re-animated (no pun intended).
  • Blend shapes / custom rigs were again raised for discussion, with Geenz again noting that the issue is in part a problem with the internal SLMesh format used by SL not being particularly flexible.
    • Before anything could be done to support things like custom rigs and similar, there would need to be a new implementation of the SLMesh pipeline.
    • This would allow LL to develop a new, more flexible SLMesh format, which is more resilient to things like unexpected data and would also allow support for new fields (e.g. bland shapes – which could even be hooked up to the current slider system and / or be scriptable, etc).
    • However, such a project would be relatively long-term and require consideration of other issues (e.g. support for over 20 years of animations which will continue to require support and thus would need things like retargeting).
    • Therefore how to fit it into the roadmap and ensure the required resources are available is not currently clear given the number of other priorities already in play / awaiting attention.
  • The above encompassed a discussion on external tools which might help in look creation, clothes fitting, etc., such as Character Creator and Marvelous Designer, which can be used with SL as an external tool, whilst having a good level of integration into Sansar .

Next Meetings