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.
Default viewer: Flat UI – 26.2.0.25386466510, -“flat” UI and font update, dated May.
Second Life Project Viewers – Lua Editor Alpha viewer 6.1.0.23768336784, April 29.
Viewer Notes
26.3 is still slated to be the next viewer to be issues, but when is currently TBD.
Lua (with Linux support) will be the next viewer after 26.3.
The next major update after Lua is likely to be vcpkg (under-the-hood viewer packaging), but this is probably going to be late summer before this surfaces.
Some upcoming viewer-side WebRTC updates:
libwebrtc is to be updated to m144
The issue with p2p/adhoc/conference calls dropping when opening Voice Preferences is getting a fix.
(Also, on the back-end, the WebRTC Voice-to-text experimentation is continuing.).
Geenz Linden is working on a pipeline split in the background that should make getting off of OpenGL generally easier. This won’t move the needle over night, and thus far is mostly code clean-up.
OpenGL, Vulkan
The majority of the meeting was a discussion on succeeding OpenGL, with a focus on Vulkan.
Geenz noted:
There are “a few plans brewing for Vulkan/Metal/D3D12 support”. For MacOS a rendering hardware interface (RHI) to target Metal.
Broadly speaking, there does not appear to be anything “super high risk under Vulkan”, but the Lab still needs to approach things with care.
Based on available stats, the number of people using “pre-Vulkan” hardware is no longer extensive & the viewer also logs the number of people using systems capable of Vulkan support.
However, the problem is not so much who can / is using Vulkan, but rather how up-to-date are people’s drivers and, “are there any landmines lurking in that specific driver/hardware combo” because SL still has to support hardware that doesn’t get driver updates, etc.
The work he did for masked water in things like boat hulls should be relatively easy to port.
One of the major questions with Vulkan support will be can users’ hardware support modern Vulkan extension (such as bindless, which is liable to be a major optimisation for SL if it goes the Vulkan route).
In terms of the general plan for switching APIs away from OpenGL, Geenz noted:
Right now the plan is vaguely shaped as: split out LLPipeline and related components (including the draw pools), setup a general interface for the viewer “core” to talk to “a renderer”, amber the OpenGL renderer beyond minor development as our “classic” renderer, and have a separate renderer that at first will be off by default until we’re confident we’ve taken care of everyone’s bugs sufficiently. The devil is in the details of course, but generally we want to avoid another PBR-shaped release where we’re having to speed towards shoving everyone onto something that needed more feedback before it released. So, people get a choice for a while with the target for the new stuff being “similar+”
So short term at least people with be able to switch between renderers, where “short term” is likely measured in years.
The chances are as LL gain confidence in different set-ups they will start enabling it by default for certain detected hardware.
Concern was raised that a switch-over could result in a “ALM moment” (ALM=Advanced Lighting Model) where peopl didn’t use the renderer because of the way it changed the appearance of scenes. However, the changing of APIs / providing different rendering APIs shouldn’t be such as issue, as scenes should look pretty much the same either way.
Other Items
The question of gathering region data for the purposes of producing things like 3D terrain maps was again raised. This has been passed around the majority of User Group meetings in a attempt to understand any limitations on the use of bots for this purpose. Ideally, the data would come directly from LL; however Geenz noted that LL cannot provide the data in its raw form, but it might be possible to get height / elevation data into the Map service.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, June 23, 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
The Loganberry RC is now grid-wide.
The next simulator update will be called Mango.
In Brief
Rider Linden:
Has some fluent interfaces for the Lua project, with what he believes is a final version, with a PR in lsl_definitions.
Is now going to his object publishing work (a websocket API, to edit objects and their inventory, to allow things like vscode to see inworld objects and their contents etc., see here).
Note that this API will not recognise remote connections, but should be between the viewer and an external editor running on the same machine.
He also noted that LSL function interfaces and Lua function interfaces are both built from the same source file. So anything in one, should be available in the other.
Leviathan Linden:
Has added added OBJECT_LOCKED to llGetObjectDetails() via the Lua project. The new enum is available to LSL and will work in the mono runtime… but it won’t be delivered until the Lua project ships.
Has also been working to port Wolfgang’s game-control work from Alchemy to the official viewer game-control project. This is a work in progress, and some changes will be required.
Still needs to do some follow up work on Navmesh crash fix he was working on in week #23.
Roxie Linden noted that:
The WebRTC team is still working on some evaluation of options for voice-to-text transcription.
This work is still very much at the experimentation stage, so people should not expect to see it suddenly appearing.
There will need to be some tuning of sound filtering and voice activity detection for any transcription service to work, but this should not affect Voice quality.
Harold Linden (LUA):
Has mostly been on housekeeping work.
Is going to merge the work from the Lua branch back into the main server branch (with Lua still flagged off) so they get out of sync less.
He also plans to pull the new Luau changes from upstream since LL is a little behind with this.
Noted that as well, classes and Lua integers will be flagged off until they firm up, but the code will be part of the repo.
Noted in the general discussion that the Lua scheduler only gets one time slice per frame (its the same scheduler as used for Mono).
Overall, believes the project is now approaching “release quality”.
Monty Linden noted that lsl-definitions have been updated recently but not baked into a release and cycled around yet – this will happen “soonish”.
General Discussion
Please refer to the video below for more on the following.
The issue of teleport disconnect viewer crashes was raised again.
As has been previously noted within SUG meetings, there is no singular cause of TP disconnects / crashes. LL have been looking into causes and have been working to fix some of the causes.
Anecdotal evidence indicates that recent fixes have (in the current release viewer – “Flat UI”) have helped improve some issues.
There have been reported of IM chat failures occurring with the notification: Chat Session Aborted.
Two causes for these issues have been identified, and a fix for one was released as part of the Loganberry simulator update.
LL is actively working on the second, which appears to be one of the IM chat server misbehaving. The hope is that a fix will be deployed soon.
There was a discussion around the Lua scheduler (some of which is noted above) between 34 and 42 minutes of the meeting.
A general discussion on animations, including the potential for Lua to simplify things by using fewer scripts and for WIBNIs such as an IK system that simply directs where body parts should be (e.g. “bum on this cushion; elbow on this armrest”).
This included a discussion on llGetVisualParams, revocation of scripted animation permissions, etc. Please refer to the video.
Date of Next Meetings
Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, June 30, 2026.
Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, July 7, 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.
The Trust and Safety User Group is to provide a forum to discuss topics relating to safety and security in Second Life. However, please note that for matters of privacy and personal safety, the following will not be openly discussed by members of the team:
Reports of abuse, together with the outcome of investigations or actions taken in response; specific account information (including terminations, suspensions, warnings, etc.); DCMA or copyright issues; internal processes; ToS interpretations.
The meetings:
Are held on the 3rd Tuesday of the month, at 11:00 SLT.
For descriptions on all SL user groups and their purpose please refer to SL Official User Groups.
Phishing Links
Second Life dialogue boxes have sometimes been used to trick users into entering their passwords – if you see something like this – always click Ignore, never enter information personal information.
Phishing issues have become an increasing problem over the last several years, with people placing URL links into group and IM messages which are inherently untrustworthy (e.g. fake SL Marketplace URLs leading to sites designed trick users into users into revealing personal information, such as passwords, etc.).
These links have been made harder to identify as they can be easily disguised as innocuous text links which can be easily clicked (tip: hover the mouse over the text link to show the actual URL in tooltip format before clicking).
A good point of reference for avoiding phishing attempts and what to do if caught by one has been written by Pantera Pólnocy on the Firestorm wiki.
Steps have been taken at various times to try to reduce the risk of such exposure via routine warnings issued by LL, through the implementation of the SL eye-in-hand logo appearing next to official URL links (those to https://xxxx.secondlife.com, where xxxx might be something like marketplace), which has also bee adopted by Firestorm, although this particular approach is not foolproof.
Firestorm 7.2.4 has also introduced a “URL unmasking” option for added safety.
LL are aware of the concerns and are looking to implement further protections of their own against such attacks.
However, there is a duty of care among users to exercise common sense as well. For example, where the URL is fully exposed, checks that it is valid. for example:
Marketplace links always have the format “https://marketplace.secondlife.com” (no misspellings of “marketplace”, etc.) with item links following-on from this in the format: “/p/item-name-with-hyphens/item listing ID number (e.g. 11223344556)”.
If the URL is embedded in text, hover the mouse over the text link to show the actual URL in tooltip format, per the comment above.
Capabilities such as providing Group owners / moderators to whitelist “allowed” links, etc., have been requested and are being considered.
Multi-Factor Authentication
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) remains the preferred way to protect a Second Life account.
Additional instructions can be found here, if required.
There have been multiple requests for LL to improve MFA, including a means to use it via er-mail, plus ability to recover without requiring a support ticket to be filed.
Additional options for MFA are being discussed by Trust and Safety (including automated recovery), but no specific updates or new capabilities had reached a point where they are ready for discussion with users.
Under Construction – the Trust and Safety in-world offices, which will be home to information on matters of trust and safety and governance in Second Life
General Discussion
General harassment / abuse using alt accounts:
Questions were asked in both general terms and with specifics on the use of multiple accounts to harass / abuse others.
As per the guidelines for the meeting, specific cases were not open to discussion.
However, Alabaster Linden (Trust and Safety team supervisor) did confirm there are specific bad actors who routinely appear within Abuse Reports, and there are discussions going on internally within the team as to how:
A more proactive approach can be taken with regards to instances of harassment at places like welcome hubs to prevent general harassment.
A more rapid response can be given to cases of repeat harassment.
With regards to the latter, Alabaster Linden also indicated that there is work going on in the background that will hopefully make it easier to manage / reduce the impact of repeat harassment via identified individuals.
It was also reiterated that all issues of harassment / abuse should be filed with LL as Abuse Reports (see my Abuse Reports tutorial, if required).
Abuse Reports:
Trust and Safety receive around 50o abuse reports a day (approx. 2500-3,000 per working week).
All reports:
Do get reviewed, but obviously, and wherever possible, high-priority items (e.g. immediate cases of harassment or griefing) tend to get the most immediate treatment.
Are investigated and are not handed off for automated processing via AI tools or similar.
Unfortunately, sometimes it can take time for some issues to be addressed (e.g. land encroachment on Mainland).
Abuse Reports can be submitted from any viewer, use of the official viewer is not required.
Abuse reports do not have to be filled out in full, but should contain as much pertinent information as possible.
Again, please refer to my Abuse Reports tutorial (written in consultation with the Governance Team – as it used to be called).
Data gathering:
There have been recent concerns about the use of bots for data-gathering in Second Life, particularly since the BonnieBots were completely banned.
These concerns related to legitimate use of such bots for gathering non-intrusive information (e.g. such as with Grid Survey, or gathering region data which can be used in the production of heightmap / 3D renderings of regions, etc), and have been passed from user group to user group.
As such, guidelines are being sought as to what is / is not regarded as a legitimate use of bots for data gathering and (on a more technical level) whether some data on regions can be made available less intrusively than via the use of bots.
The second part of this question is something that requires more internal discussion at LL.
The first part of the question is difficult to answer, as some are more tolerant of bot use than others.
It was suggested that the issue is more comprehensively written-up in a support ticket (or similar), outlining things like data usage, concerns, what is being sought, etc., so there can be a more direct conversation on the matter, rather than it being passed from user group to user group.
Alabaster Linden also offered to go through the various policies provided by the Lab on the use of bots, etc., and see if there is something specific that can be published by way of a blog post as a part of the promised outreach by the Trust and Safety team to help clarify matters.
A question was asked on what is allowed within region maturity ratings – the clearest answer is via the Maturity Ratings guide. There is also the Adult Content FAQ.
The last 15-20 minutes of the meeting are general conversation.
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.
Default viewer: Flat UI – 26.2.0.25386466510, -“flat” UI and font update, dated May.
Second Life Project Viewers – Lua Editor Alpha viewer 6.1.0.23768336784, April 29.
Viewer Notes
26.3 is still slated to be the upcoming performance viewer, but people are currently spread out on some other priorities such as the new compositor work which will hopefully pave the way for XUI moving onto its own thread.
Currently, the Lua editor is getting reworked into a “sooner rather than later release”, which means a Linux flavour of the official viewer will finally get released.
The next major update (after Lua?) is probably going to be vcpkg (under-the-hood viewer packaging), but this is probably going to be late summer before this surfaces.
The Graphics Care Package (GCP) viewer is now anticipated as not happening “for the next few months”.
Overall, LL is working on refining the release train and figuring out what is to move forward, with Geenz Linden noting:
We’re trying to be a bit more flexible with our releases, and we’re having a ton of internal discussions about how we want to move forward with things like feature releases. So we might have something split those up along the way, we’ll see.
Other Items
Roxie Linden noted:
That there are some WebRTC Voice fixes on the current simulator RC version.
There are some potential CEF/Dullahan improvements in the wings.
There are some server-side solutions for Voice-to-text transcription being evaluated.
There are reports that changes to MapBlockRequest blocks limit (so it only accepts requests for up to 64 blocks on the current simulator RC release, when it used to accept up to 256 block requests) has broken the World Map in some viewers.
This is currently being discussed internally, and there may be more news on this by the time of the next Server Group Meeting (if not before then).
There was a general discussion on which Linux distro will be used for the official Linux viewer, the favoured approach currently being “something Arch based”.
A general discussion on scripting, notably around the availability of Lua scripting in viewers + back-end compilation, and which bumped into Mono and LSL scripting, ran through the second half of the meeting – please refer to the video.
A concern was raised over Firestorm’s introduction of an option to disable the masking of URLs in the viewer, and how it could break some content. The general feedback from the Lab is that the feature exists as a toggle and does not break the shared experience, ergo, they have no problem with it. However, Geenz is happy to raise concerns (both for and against) internally.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, June 9th, 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
Wednesday June 10th should see the Loganberry RC deployed to all RC simulator channels.
An update to the Lua simulator code is due to appear Soon™.
In Brief
Rider Linden:
Has been on-call this week so most of his attention has been on some old clean-up issues.
He has also hunted down a race condition that occurs when you crash and log back in right away, and believes he has a fix in the works for that.
He is also due to start a review some of the simulator-side Lua build work, it having been suggested internally that a different approach to some of the work might be preferable.
Harold Linden (LUA):
Has merged the Loganberry simulator code base with the the Lua development branch. This work should include the cross-region collision script failure fixes he’s also been working on, together with his changes to how setprimitiveparams is wrapped.
Is still waiting for integers and classes to stabilize upstream (they’re still feature flagged) before he pulls it into the Lua development branch. He does not believe there are any No existing major crashers / blockers noted for Lua in this work, but doesn’t want to endanger that until there’s something worth picking up from upstream.
He may still pull in the latest changes even with integers flagged off, since there’s a number of performance-related fixes that LL is behind on.
It is believed there are very few crashers left within the Lua code base.
Region holders wishing to be on the Lua simulator should submit a support ticket to have their region moved. Note that requests will only be approved if the region is not directly adjacent to any non-lua regions.
Pepper Linden:
Has been working on “a chat-related project” (the Chat Modernisation work?).
Has also been looking at a server bug / griefer mode, where you can be spammed by a bunch of conference chats.
Monty Linden:
Gave a heads-up that LL has been working on authorisation functions, and a few people are having log-in problems as a result. Do, if you find your password is not being honoured, it may not be your end of things.
Noted that Lua documentation is getting some attention, and there are refinements coming to the collaboration model and processes (Second life Creation portal). Should see some more PR movement soon.
General Discussion
Please refer to the video below for more on the following.
Allow custom values for llGetHTTPHeader() was raised, with Rider Linden noting there is a wider look at script HTTP on the drawing board at LL, which will include the current header restrictions. However, this is not in a position to go on the roadmap for implementation at the time of the meeting.
This sparked a general discussion on script HTTP.
Clarification on the use of bots for data-gathering (and where they cross the line) was again requested – and this was redirected towards the upcoming Trust and Safety User Group meetings – see here for more.
The end of the meeting included a discussion on Ternary and/or Null coalescing operators in Lua (which went right over my head and clean past the wicket keeper…).
Date of Next Meetings
Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, June 16, 2026.
Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, June 23, 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.
On Tuesday, June 9th, 2026, Linden Lab announced the launch of the Trust and Safety User Group, together with a note that there will be an increase in communications on Trust and Safety matters.
The new Trust and Safety User Group will effectively replace the former Governance User Group meetings (Governance effectively having been rolled in Trust and Safety). As such, the new user group will generally take place as follows:
The third Tuesday of the month between 11:00-12:00 noon SLT.
The first meeting will therefore be on Tuesday, June 16, 2026.
Meetings will be chaired by Melody Linden and at times feature other members of the Trust and Safety team and Linden guests.
Details on the user group are now available on the User Group Meeting page in the SL Wiki. It is not clear from the blog post as to the format of the meeting – Voice or local chat or a mixture; however, I would suspect the latter would seem to be the most likely.
Linden Estate Services: Trust and Safety User Group meeting place
The user group is to provide a forum to discuss topics relating to safety and security in Second Life. However, please note that for matters of privacy and personal safety, the following will not be openly discussed by members of the team:
Reports of abuse, together with the outcome of investigations or actions taken in response.
Specific account information (including terminations, suspensions, warnings, etc.).
DCMA or copyright issues.
Internal processes.
ToS interpretations.
In addition, topics which are considered sensitive or outside of the scope of Trust and Safety may been declined comment / discussion during meetings.
Trust and Safety Office and Blog Posts
Alongside of the User Group meetings, the Trust and Safety announcement indicates that the Team:
Will begin releasing regular Community Blog posts to assist in keeping the community informed and educated on various topics. These blogs will include topics related to maintaining good account security practices, tips and tricks, and helpful how-to guides.
Will shortly be opening a new in-world Office Second Life users will be free to visit outside of the User Group meetings. Details on this will be made available once the Office has opened.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 