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.
26.02 is enjoying low crash rates, confirming its status as the next viewer in line for promotion to release status.
There will likely be another RC update to this viewer prior to its promotion, which will include some “small, small” changes and fixes (e.g. making bold text easier to see, correcting some text overruns in some floaters, and correcting an extended CEF load time on the viewer splash screen).
Viewer 2026.03
This viewer is now described as “following hot on the heels of 26.02”, although it has yet to appear as either an alpha/project viewer or a beta/RC viewer.
Graphics Care Package vs. Lua Support Viewer
No firm decision as to which of these viewers is liable to progress to release status first.
The Lua viewer would appear to have the advantage given it is currently going through alpha/project viewer evolutions to move towards a beta/RC version, whereas the GCP viewer has yet for officially see the light of day.
However, the Lua viewer is dependent on the development of Lua back-end support and simulator updates, plus it is also the viewer being used to re-introduce Linux into the mix of official viewers (with limited support), and both of these might slow the viewer’s promotion to RC and then release status.
WebRTC Update
The May 5th grid-wide deployment of WebRTC went ahead as planned, so Vivox is no longer the Voice service across SL. WebRTC is.
The deployment apparently went well and there have been few reports of issues.
Moving forward, the focus will now be on fixes and updates (e.g. open chat voice attenuation) and general clean-up and the removal of unwanted code.
Once this work has been completed, attention will be turned more towards adding new features the WebRTC.
Voice-to-text transcription has been requested as one of these new features (and has been experimented with inside the La, including with multiple languages), however, no decision has yet been made as to WebRTC new features or their scheduling.
It was also requested to have the moderation tools for Voice made accessible to scripts per this feature request.
General Discussions
There are reports of what might be a bug which is causing some avatars to appear to have a 1,000,000 complexity number, when they are far below this. At the time of writing these nots it is unclear if a Canny bug report has been filed on this or not, or how widespread the issue might be.
A request was made for expanding SL material assets so they can be used to *completely* set an object’s material? So a BP tab in the material as well (e.g. the ability to drag and drop Blinn-Phong materials into a PBR asset alongside of the PBR materials, so have a complete package with the BP materials available for fallback purposes).
There are no specific plans for this. However, as Geenz linden has previously mentioned in recent meetings, there are plans in hand to add specular materials to PBR.
Will the terrain painting project be revived? Unlikely at this point is time; performance issues are the current priority and after that, there is more general PBR work to be completed. As such, the terrain painting work remains frozen.
The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday May 6th 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.
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.
Interestingly, this work is now being described as an “experiment” rather than any form of product development effort; a description which is somewhat removed from how the project was initially put forward (although it is fair to say that the Firestorm iteration of the work was more experimental by the Lab).
“A lot” has been learned from that experiment, some of which will be used to improve both the desktop viewer and Mobile App experiences.
Support has already refunded all or nearly all L$ pack purchases and are working through the list to make sure everyone gets refunded. More info is in the blog post here if you need help.
Web Services Updates
The refresh of the the official viewer log-in splash screen is now available in the current RC (and soon to be release) version of the viewer.
It has already been suggested this screen could benefit by the inclusion of the Lab’s own SLBN RSS feeds for blogs, etc, even if only in link format (as with the Firestorm log-in Splash screen).
Official blog posts are linked-to under the Events (or some reason – space?) tab, but the broader SLBN links are absent.
Surfacing the official blog and the SLBN links more clearly would benefit both official communications – given many users do not directly address secondlife.com, and help the “community” nature of SL.
The refreshed official viewer log-in splash screen, available with viewer 26.2 onwards – click for full size, if required
The refresh of the web-base land / region purchasing pages is in its first passes of “button up work”. and is currently on track to surface in the next few months. This is seen as the second part of the Land Portal overhaul which started with the refresh of the Linden Homes pages.
The Responsive Marketplace Homepage making progress, and will be passing through the design/QA gauntlet soon.
It is hoped that some of the tools used in this work can be put to use in enhancing / re-working elements of the Marketplace in general (e.g. making it more modular than monolithic) in order to add features more easily and leverage opportunities to help promote creators and stores.
This work would be subject to senior management agreement.
Internal and Quality of Life Updates
Web Search has received a range of under-the-hood updates (OpenSearch migration, Debian updates, Python upgrades), with an eye to tackle some first pass search results updates as a result of these updates in the near future.
A range of under-the-hood but necessary security update.
Mention of which again brought forth requests for more options to be added to the current MFA process, particularly e-mail support.
Wrapping up assisting teams without authentication/email upgrades.
New Joiners
Eliza Linden is a new hire, filling the role of Economy Product Manager, with responsibilities related to the Linden Dollar, the LindeX, and also producing support to the Marketplace transactions, etc. She may also become one of the Lindens attending the Web User Group meetings in the future.
Crowley Linden has joined LL as a Software Engineer with the Tools & Payments team.
Other Items
A bug report has been filed about items shown on the front page of a Marketplace Store not showing the correct price after a listing update – although the actual listing does show the correct price.
Marketplace requests:
A suggestion was made for merchants to be able to group like items together within their Marketplace stores or to have tabs within their stores so they can display items which might be brought together, etc.
It was asked if it would be possible in future to have better integration between the MP and in-world stores – such as having both Marketplace listings and store vendors pull products for delivery to customers from the same repository.
The response to these ideas was somewhat favourable, with it being mentioned that Casper (of CasperTech fame) is now looking at the MP and familiarising himself with it, and these might be things that could be incorporated into the MP alongside of features from the CasperVend system.
It was requested that the ability to review Demo items (particularly those with limited functionality) due to the negative feedback Demo items can garner for this reason.
This led to a more extensive discussion on reviews and hope to improve them.
The second half of the meeting [31:59-1:10:20] involved a user-generated presentation on Marketplace usage, featuring a series of slides. Allowing for the data being a snapshot in time (with changes occurring all the time), some of the highlights include:
The overall volume of listings has increased throughout the MP’s lifetime, despite periodic delisting exercises for items that have not sold or listings from creators who have not logged in for specified periods (e.g., 2 years or more) and things like the de-listing of Gacha items.
2016-2017 saw a large-scale jump in MP listings / activities – largely as a result of the introduction of multiple mesh bodies and the need to cater for them all with clothing and accessories, etc.
In the last decade, 16,000 MP stores have put out at least one product a year (with some releasing as many as 33 per month), and the longevity of individual products has increased (e.g. whereas merchants may have previously removed slow-/non-selling products in the past, now they are being left as listed on the MP.
The “average price” for purchased items on the MP is L$350 (obviously with a high degree of variance between low and high cost items such as fatpacks, etc.), with the suggestion that this is a good price for new creators to consider when selling their first individual products.
Gacha items appear represent a relatively low number of listings within the MP (and have been declining), but they do have a higher volume of sales.
AI use may have moved from AI generated content (peaking at around 1%of overall MP content being self-reported as AI generated) to the use of AI tools for imaging / branding. This led to a side discussion on AI and AI tools.
Please refer to the video for specifics for all of the above.
A request was made for a) the OAuth client for SL web being made available to users on external services, and b) if the SL Discord bot could do the same thing?
These questions were directed to Kermit Linden, but no specific response was offered during the meeting.
A complaint that a recent fix to logging-in to the Forums means that those with capitalisation in the middle of their users names now have the letters displaying in lower-case in their names (e.g. “Snuffyab123” instead of “SnuffyAB123”.
This issue might be related to a similar issue with SL Wiki for users with Edit rights, but this has yet to be confirmed.
Campwich Forest grounds: location for the Monthly Mobile User Group (MMUG)
The following notes were taken from the Thursday, April 30th 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.
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.
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.
Core Mobile Team
The following are core (but not necessarily the only) members of the Mobile App team:
Bridie Linden; project manager.
Radix Linden: Mobile engineering manager. A new Linden, he has a strong Unity development background and his initial focus at LL is ensuring that Mobile is a smooth, seamless experience.
A release was made on Tuesday, April 28th – Apple version number given as 0.1.163391.
At the time of writing, the update did not appear to be available for / had not fully propagated through the Google Play Store; my Android version had no update option from 0.3.1089, and any removal + reinstall still left me on 0.3.1089.
This release adds:
Display of, and interaction with, LLDialog support, allowing in-world object interaction dialogues to be displayed and used (e.g. pose menus for chairs / seats, etc.).
French UI support.
Improved Voice services – clearer microphone status; better spatial audio positioning; more consistent mute controls; user blocking / unblocking; removal of unnecessary prompts; clearer messaging when Voice or the device microphone is not available; users should be able to hear other users whether their avatar is sitting or flying, etc. (both of which could cause Voice to cut out for the seated / flying avatar); and to ensure privacy, the device microphone is off by default in the App when logging-in or re-logging.
Bug fixes:
Favourites (locations) no more duplication; no more to tap favourites to get them to respond; users new to Mobile can now Favourite a location.
Streaming audio: shows the correct status (e.g. only showing the streaming audio as muted when it is actually muted, rather than showing it as such when the audio is still playing), however, there still may be intermittent cases of this bug appearing, so if you encounter it, please file a report. Steaming audio should also be consistent across sessions (e.g. if it is turned off in one session, it should remain off in all subsequent sessions until turned on again, and vice-versa).
Multi-factor Authentication: no more need to input and authentication token every time the Mobile App is used.
Crash rates: crash rates have been greatly decreased. On Android they were above the thresholds set by Google, and have now been brought down to be well within them. There is more work to be done on iOS, but this is on the radar.
General Q&A
Chat, chat storage and chat history.
Work on “modernising” the chat UI is in progress, but is a long-term project.
Mobile has the capability to archive chat sessions – but only Mobile-to-Mobile (as indicated in past Mobile User Group summaries) and there have been requests to make this more cross-platform (e.g. combining Mobile archives with Desktop chat histories). Mobile retains chat histories on the server for up to 90 days – and a little longer locally.
The plan is to have more integration between the two, including similar storage times between the two, with full integration of chat histories between both Mobile and Desktop.
Camera movement: there are some conflicts between camera movement and Vstick tap / movement. This is something still to be addressed, although a degree of user interaction (such as how taps / touches are performed when attempting to move the camera) which can also cause the conflicts.
It was asked if there is / could be a setting to adjust the Vstick sensitivity (some someone isn’t always running everywhere). The reply was “kind-of but not quite”.
There are a couple of settings which can affect the Vstick.
However, the overall problem is that SL doesn’t have linear motion – you are walking or you are running; this results in a little too much use of the Vstick on Mobile triggers the avatar to switch from walking to running.
As such, there is no means to really make adjustments within the Vstick code; instead, the Mobile team is looking to make running a separate toggle button.
Streaks / Achievements: will be continuing for the foreseeable future.
LL would eventually like to get to incorporating Special Achievements into the App – a rotating series of “novel” things to do / discover in Second Life.
Some of these may include Linden Dollar rewards when built. If this is the case, Streaks could be phased out of the App.
The question on why more existing users haven’t come over to Mobile (asked during the March meeting) was asked again. Responses were pretty much the same as in the March meeting.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 28th, 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
No deployments planned for the week, although all server channels will be restarted. The pause is to allow for more adjustments to be made to WebRTC prior to it going grid-wide.
There will be a new simulator update – called Kumquat – which will contain the necessary infrastructure updates for the above, and which will be deployed ahead of the planned next simulator release (Loganberry).
In Brief
LL have added a new cap that delivers pre-generated configuration files for the Lua definitions and the viewer and the VS code plug-in are being updated to support this. These updates will allow for the removal all the language definition munging from the plug-in itself.
Leviathan Linden:
Has been working on updates related to the new Kumquat simulator update and “some related back-end services.
Had no progress to report on for game_control, and is hoping to get back to it soon.
Harold Linden (SLua):
Has been bundling up all the scripting-related definitions in a sensible way so they can be served.
Has also been working to complete the prim params builder RFC. He views this work as complete and warns that those will any input should “speak now or forever hold your peace”, as he will shortly start implementing it.
Harold noted that the prim params does it allow to set ‘nil’ or not provide a value or something else that would do “keep current” behaviour; it is strictly a wrapper around SetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast. He noted that requested work such at this would require an overhaul of SetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast.
The above formed the basis for a discussion through the meeting.
General Discussion
Please refer to the video below as well.
The request for llGetRegionWorldMapTile was raised. Apparently, Brad Linden has indicated implementation could be more complicated, suggesting LL should set up a web API that provides the map tile textures and make it possible for people to enable web on a prim for trusted domains.
The above led to a discussion on map tiles and options around the basic idea contained in within the feature request – such as making map tile textures function in a similar manner to Bakes on Mesh (using UUIDs – although the scale of this when using thousands of regions could be difficult / complicated).
This discussion went on through most of the meeting – please refer to the video below. The most positive idea given the amount of suggestions / confusion over map tiles, was for a design document to be put forward to allow focused discussion.
There was a report of issues with Vivox Voice service repeatedly failing at Fantasy Faire – notably within the Lost Pages region, home to the Literature, Film and Theatre festivals.
The Voice teams indicated they were not aware of any specific instability issue with Vivox – with the caveat the focus has been on WebRTC.
The question was if there are any plans to re-allow residents to upload animations with animation constraints (apparently turned off when it was found that there was no validation for chain length, which could cause a null pointer error if it goes too high up the skeleton). It was felt this has useful constraints such as “GROUND” which allow the feet to automatically IK feet to the ground, reducing the issue of an avatar floating off the ground on un-even surfaces.
Currently, there are no plans in this direction at present.
Date of Next Meetings
Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, May 5th 2026.
Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, May 12th, 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 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.
2026.02 remains the current Release Candidate viewer (next in line for promotion to release status).
This viewer will likely have a further RC update prior to any promotion. This update should result in much sharper text rendering within the UI.
Viewer 2026.03
LL are working on implementing “whatever performance wins that we can”.
This includes “batching” changes – that is, taking multiple objects within a scene and rendering them in a single pass, rather than multiple passes.
This work was initially undertaken for what is called the “simple draw pool”, which had batching logic added some time ago, but the work was never extended to the Blinn-Phong or PBR draw pools, and this is now being done.
The hope is that this change should help lower specification computers render scenes more comfortably.
General Viewer Notes
Work is currently stalled on the Graphics Care Package (GCP) viewer given the focus on performance improvements for 2026.03. However, work should resume on the graphic improvements and updates for this viewer soon.
Given the above, it is still anticipated that the Lua Editor viewer (which is currently available as a project viewer) will go to RC status and then release ahead of the GCP viewer.
WebRTC Deployment
The current deployment of WebRTC has hit a few bumps, but the Lab is hopefully the deployment will be completed in “the next two weeks”, and certainly before SL23B.
The lack of voice attenuation over distances less than 60 metres (allowing personal conversations to be heard over a large distance) will likely not be addressed prior to WebRTC deployment is complete, and will be looked at afterwards – although it was also noted that attenuation under WebRTC will be different to Vivox.
General Discussions
Question: will there will be further updates to Animesh, particularly with regards to having to click on them without having to put a transparent prim around them for interactions?
Short answer: the need to click is intentional, and currently, there is no work on Animesh any time soon.
Question: will the one-click installer process also be applied to alpha and beta/release candidate viewers, or will these have their own install options?
LL is looking at “future options to make opting-in to alphas and betas have a lot less friction”, but discussions a re ongoing and not ready to be announced.
Alpha and beta/release candidate viewers will retain their own cohorts within github, allowing people who opt to use them from the Alternate Viewers page to continue to be opted-in to updates to those viewers as they are made available.
The ability to select and download a viewer from the Alternate Viewers page will continue.
Aside from general text chat on matters such as Animesh (between users) and on Fantasy Faire, this was a quiet meeting, and as such was brought to a close after some 30 minutes.
On Tuesday April 21st, 2026, Linden Lab announced it is ending support for Project Zero, the viewer-in-a-browser application launched just 14 months ago, and which I was able to co-announce through this blog following a Zoom meeting between myself and Brad Oberwager and Philip Rosedale.
The project, which saw the viewer streamed to a person’s web browser from Amazon AWS servers remained in something of a beta state throughout its lifespan, initially overseen by Philip Rosedale and then (the now Lab-departed) Sntax Linden, with a dedicated User Group meeting being formed around it (although meetings ceased in the latter half of 2025). It also gained much interest among existing users, despite it being largely aimed at incoming new users, leaving access to it limited for established SL users.
The revised Avatar Picker for Project Zero saw the function moved out of the viewer window and displayed within the browser tab, leaving the viewer window unencumbered. This approach was ported to the SL Mobile App.
The project did see some interesting development – such as the updated Avatar Picker mechanism, which was also ported to the SL Mobile App, and at the time of its launch at the start of 2025 and through the initial six or so months of its development, there were plans to undertake a gradual rebuilding of the viewer UI as presented through a browser, using modern tools such as HTML5 and React. To further interest in streaming the viewer through a web browser, Linden Lab also worked with the Firestorm team to take a version of the latter’s viewer and present that as a streaming service as well – although this experiment was ultimately short-lived.
By September 2025, the Lab was indicating that between them, Project Zero (using the official viewer) and the SL Mobile App had lead to a “10x” increase in the numbers of people trying out Second Life when compared to the more traditional requirement to sign-up and then download the viewer (the latter having long been a break-point for sign-ups, with many would-be users turning away from the platform rather than downloading and installing the viewer on their computers). However, not long after this update, things began to go quiet on the Project Zero front.
As a part of the new user sign-up, those directed towards using Project Zero, rather than to having to download and install the viewer, were directed to a revised splash screen comprising a static backdrop and a “Polaroid snapshots” slide show whilst they were connected to a Project Zero streaming server
With the curtailment of the Project Zero User Group meetings and, later, the departure of Sntax Linden from Linden Lab, the Project as a whole seemed to go dark, with little in the way of direct news being given through any User Group meetings. As such, the announcement that the project is now being ended comes as both a surprise (given the enthusiasm for it evidenced by Linden Lab in 2025) and a non-surprise (lack of news / updates on the project through late 2025 and the start of 2026 suggesting it was perhaps withering on the vine).
The announcement blog post offers little in the way as to why Project Zero is being halted, other than the decision being based on both “feedback” and what the Lab has “learned” in running the project, and “insights gained from Project Zero will directly inform improvements” to both the Desktop viewer and the SL Mobile App. However, the beneficial nature of the project in circumventing the need to download and install the viewer is acknowledged.
As it stands, support for Project Zero will end on Friday, April 24th at 17:00 SLT.
Further:
If you have remaining paid time associated with Project Zero, you are encouraged to use it before the [project is shuttered – access allowing, given the potentially limited number of slots at any given time.
If you have any unused time on Project Zero after April 24th, please file a support ticket for a refund (which will be processed up to 30 days after the ticket is received).
Exactly “what’s next” isn’t actually indicated in the official blog post (despite the post’s title), other than
Note that the ending of Project Zero does not affect either the desktop viewer or the ongoing development on the SL Mobile App, which will “continue to operate as usual”.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 