Category: Content Creation User Group

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, September 4th, 2025, and the official video is embedded at the end of this article. Please note that this is not a full transcript, but a summary of key topics.

Table of Contents Meeting Purpose Official Viewer Status Viewer 2025.07 General Discussion – In Brief Next Meeting

Meeting Purpose

• The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with related viewer development work.
• This meeting is generally held on alternate Thursdays at Hippotropolis.
• Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they are conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.

Official Viewer Status

• Default viewer 2025.06 7.2.1.17108480561 – August 29.
  • Inventory Favourites System, plus assorted new features.
  • Improvements to avatar system; camera and movement; chat; voice; content creation tools.
  • Mesh uploader updates.
  • Text & UI polish.
  • Fixes for Environment and Rendering; stability and crashes; UI.
  • System improvements.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13.

Viewer 2025.07

• This is now in development.
• Will likely include (although the list is subject to possible change as the viewer develops):
  • “Proper Discord support” for those with a Discord account  – further clarification to follow as the viewer is developed.
  • Native Apple Silicon support, which should see a performance boost for those running Apple Silicon.
  • A Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF) update (used to power the in-viewer browser, media on a prim (MOAP), etc.), which should bring some performance and security improvements – although the former will not necessarily be observed in regions / parcels making heavy use of MOAP (e.g. in arcades, and similar).
    • This also might include a code contribution which enables  PRIM_MEDIA_FIRST_CLICK_INTERACT within the viewer, allowing the user to interact with a media without an initial “focus” click, as well as passes hover to the media.
    • As a side note: a code contribution included in 2025.05 7.2.0.16729091892 (current release at the time of writing) allows media Autoplay turned off, whilst still allowing it to work on HUDs using MOAP.
  • New performance metrics which should allow the Lab to gather data on the likely performance impact new features might have on the viewer. This should benefit updates such as the improvements to screen space reflections (SSR), which have been parked in a viewer branch pending the ability to better assess how these updates might impact the average user’s experience in terms of frame rate (speed, smoothness, etc.).
• It was indicated that 2025.07 could act as a baseline for updates to SLua support in the viewer.

General Discussion – In Brief

• Alpha / Gamma issues (linear alpha blending):
  • In order for PBR lighting to render anywhere close to correctly, alpha blending had to be switched from SRGB to linear colour space. This can cause some older content using Blinn-Phong, to look either more opaque or more transparent than in did pre-PBR.
  • A suggested fix for this would be to give people the ability to adjust the alpha/gamma on per texture entry for the object (including no mod items), and this had been scheduled in 2024 for release “after the  ExtraFPS viewer”.
  • However, as this was essentially a “permission hack”, the update got held-up. It has now been decided to default all old content to gamma space blending, to bring back some of the “old” alpha blending functionality
• Extracting Sky and Water Settings assets from a Day Cycle was filed a year ago and noted as tracked (also: https://github.com/secondlife/viewer/issues/2887), but progress may have stalled. As such, a effort will be make to raise its priority, although it still likely will not surface in a viewer until at least the 2025.09 release.
• Issues with updating alphas on PBR materials was raised (currently, it is not possible to change the alpha without also changing the colour/tint. llSetLinkGLTFOverrides can be of some help with certain issues, and Brad Linden indicated that a Canny on the matter is working through the system, which should also help.
• Custom Skeleton support: Geenz noted that the move to glTF mesh import was primarily to address the fact that COLLADA .DAE is increasingly unsupported by content creation apps, and thus SL needed to update to a “newer” format.
  • However, the manner in which the work has been done could support the use of custom skeletons in the future.
  • But, in order for this to be possible, several other hurdles would have to be cleared first (such as updating the internal SL mesh file format to support custom skeletons and without breaking existing content).
  • As such, any such support would need further consideration and prioritisation against other updates / projects before getting on the roadmap.
• Vulkan support: this was referred to as still being “some way off” and requiring some extensive work, including cleaning-up how the view handles OpenGL.

General Questions

• Questions were asked about both segmenting regions / parcels into vertical zones; the status of further work on Combat 2. and on Land impact calculations. These were questions more specific to Rider Linden (who was unfortunately unable to attend the meeting) / the Simulator User Group, and as such were redirected to the latter.
• The question was raised if the developing Lobby capability for SL Mobile (which will eventually allow people to use some aspects of the Mobile app such as chat without them appearing as on-line to others) could be implemented within the viewer.  It was indicated that this might be possible in the future, although there is no current work in this direction at present.
• This above encompassed a conversation on where conversation logs are currently stored (on the local device, be it computer or Mobile) vs. being stored in a manner that makes it accessible to all devices a user might employ to access Second Life. This is something the Lab is looking at, allowing for the privacy / data protection concerns of storing logs on third-party services, and would likely be an opt-in service
• Additional questions on cashing-out, lifetime memberships, etc., were similarly pointed towards the relevant user group meetings, as no-one from the Lab at the CCUG in involved in these areas.

Next Meeting

• 13:00 SLT, Thursday, September 18th, 2025, at the Hippotropolis Campsite.

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, August 7th, 2025. Please note that this is not a full transcript, but a summary of key topics.

Table of Contents Meeting Purpose Official Viewer Status glTF Mesh Uploader 2025.06 Viewer In Brief Next Meeting

Meeting Purpose

• The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with related viewer development work.
• This meeting is generally held on alternate Thursdays at Hippotropolis.
• Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they are conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.

Official Viewer Status

• Default viewer 7.2.0.16729091892, issued August 5, promoted August 8 – New.
  • glTF mesh import (should have similar constraints to COLLADA upload, but does not support a unified material upload solution).
  • Media changes including support for PRIM_MEDIA_FIRST_CLICK_INTERACT and HUD autoplay (see https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlGetPrimMediaParams).
  • Fixes related to memory allocation, inventory floater, world map and Picks performance.
  • Fixes for OpenJPG, PBR Texture Panel Repeats per meter improvements and sky ambient colour not blending during day cycle among others.
  • Fixes for image rendering.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

2025  glTF Mesh Uploader

• There were multiple requests for the behaviours within the glTF mesh uploader that do not much the COLLADA .DAE uploader to be revised so that they do conform with the latter.
• These had to be shut down, largely due to technically limitations within SL’s internal mesh formats.
• The hope is that over time, these limitations can be “peeled” back, and mesh import as a whole improved, most likely by using a new internal mesh format.
• No details on what the new internal format will be, as this is still subject to internal discussions at the Lab, but the aim is to make things easier for both content creators and content consumers.

2025.06 Viewer

• The next viewer in development is 2025.06, which is described as “not very ground breaking”.
• It contains a lot of work and bug fixes original intended for the Maintenance C viewer from 2024, and prior to the viewer release process being revised.
• The key feature in this viewer will be Inventory Favourites.
• Currently, the viewer is going through a stabilisation process with the aim of releasing an RC Beta as soon as possible.
• The aim of the 2025.06 release is to raise the cadence of official viewer releases. This is seen as beneficial on a number of counts:
  • It allows individual releases to become more iterative in nature, building capabilities and allowing better response to feedback from users.
  • It breaks the cycle of long delays between viewer releases while the Lab tries to deliver an entire project in a single viewer drop.
  • It will hopefully allow the Lab to be more nimble with releases, allowing them to come back to major updates and adjust them / add to them based on longer-term feedback, rather than appearing to simply drop a project into a viewer release and then never come back to it with significant updates / improvements.

In Brief

• Removing Scale From LI Calculations (Recap/Update):
  • Signal Linden highlighted a Feedback Ticket he has raised, proposing the removal of scale from Land Impact calculations, which has been touched upon at the last couple of SUG meetings.
  • However, numerous caveats / issues with the proposal arose as it was further investigated, including potential impacts on physics, issues for streaming calculations, etc., all of which caused a slow-down in the idea.
  • Rider Linden provided an update, noting that scale land impact is so closely tied into an object’s triangle count that there is no easy way to extricate the two, leading to the risk of small items with a high tri count suddenly exploring in their LI is scale was removed from the equation.
• Support for Vertex Animation Textures (VAT) – a means to create complex and non-traditional animations in real time using textures and shaders to achieve the visuals on the GPU, thus having a much lighter performance impact on the CPU when compared to traditional skeletal mesh animations.
  • Allowing for the complexities of SL, concern was raised over use of VAT “overloading other systems”, with the view that providing support for blend shapes could actually be preferable.
  • However, given the age and complexity of the SL internal mesh format, adding things like blend shape support (and / or) vertex support, is seen as a “pretty involved effort” with a number of potential complications.
• The above led to a more general discussions on animations for things like plants, the LI cost of Animesh and how it precludes it from widespread use; the balance between having lots of animated elements in-world versus potential performance cost; options for baking animations into meshes, etc.
• Make Scale/Offset/Rotation PERSIST when switching PBR Materials (e.g. not having any scale, offset and / or rotation set for a surface cleared why swapping one material on that surface for another, as is currently the case):
  • The reason this happens is that (unlike Blinn-Phong, where the offset, scale and rotation are set against the object surface) with glTF materials, that are set against the material itself (as per the relevant glTF specification extension); ergo, changing the material reset them.
  • This behaviour could potentially be changed through the addition of an override to give more consistency in behaviour between PBR materials and Blinn-Phong; however, any such update comes down to a matter of prioritisation. This prompted an invitation to any interested open source developer to submit a suitable update.
  • One concern over a possible solution is the need for additional UI elements in what is already regarded as a complicated Build / Edit floater.
• Support 16-bit grayscale terrain import: this has been acknowledged by the Lab as a problem that needs to be addressed, but as yet, there has not been the opportunity to take a deep look into possible causes of issues with the RAW terrain file import, and what the correct solution(s) might be.
• Nothing on the cards for further .glTF extensions at this time, however, with the glTF importer now in the release viewer “the door is open to a lot more possibilities for what we could do” (e.g. removing the “old” .glTF importer used purely for materials and allowing the “new” importer to handle them, making it much easier to add further .glTF extensions in the future).
• A general discussion on scripted animation, inverse kinematics (IK), puppetry, and similar. In short:
  • Puppetry remains frozen.
  • It is recognised the proper IK would allow for a range of capabilities (e.g. animation retargeting)
• A general discussion on controls and the game_control work. As the latter is Leviathan Linden’s project, and he was not at this meeting, I’ll leave updates on this to the Server User Group summaries.

Next Meeting

• 13:00 SLT, Thursday, August 21st, 2025, at the Hippotropolis Campsite.

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, July 17th, 2025. Please note that this is not a full transcript, but a summary of key topics, and timestamps are to the official video, embedded at the end of this report.

Table of Contents Meeting Purpose Official Viewer Status glTF Mesh Uploader Lighting Discussion Viewer-side Havok Sub-library and Pathfinding In Brief Next Meeting

Meeting Purpose

• The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with related viewer development work.
• This meeting is generally held on alternate Thursdays at Hippotropolis.
• Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they are conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.

Official Viewer Status

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

 glTF Mesh Uploader

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

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

Lighting Discussion

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

Viewer-side Havok Sub-Library and Pathfinding

[Video: 25:39-32:38]

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

In Brief

Please refer to the video as well.

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

Next Meeting

• 13:00 SLT, Thursday, August 7th, 2025, at the Hippotropolis Campsite.

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, May 15th, 2025. Please note that this is not a full transcript, but a summary of key topics, and timestamps are to the official video, embedded at the end of this report. .

Table of Contents Meeting Purpose Official Viewer Status and Updates Viewer Status 2025.04 and Upcoming 2025.25 RC Viewers glTF Mesh Uploader In Brief Next Meeting

Meeting Purpose

• The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with related viewer development work.
• This meeting is generally held on alternate Thursdays at Hippotropolis.
• Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they are conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.

Official Viewer Status and Updates

Viewer Status

• Default viewer: 2025.03 7.1.13.14343205944, issued April 9th and promoted April 15th.
• Release Candidate: 2025.04 – 7.1.14.14911904105, May 13th 2025 – Updated.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha, version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13th – Updated.
  • Will only work on Aditi. Blog post: Lab officially announces Luau Alpha testing.

2025.04 and Upcoming 2025.25 RC Viewers

[Video: 5:55-7:01]

• The feature set for the 2024.04 RC viewer remains as per the currently available version:
  • Chat Mentions (Early Support): Type @ then pick a name. To follow: audible alerts and highlight colour pickers.  This does not support generic mentions such as @everyone or @here.
  • My Outfits subfolders: now supports the use of subfolders.
  • Hover height: the minimum/maximum is now +/- 3 meters.
  • UI Quality of life improvements.
  • Use the release notes link, above, for full details.
• The upcoming 2025.05 RC looks set to include:
  • A “catch-up merge” of fixes and updates from the old Develop / Maintenance C branches.
  • Inventory Favourites (described at the meeting as “a little bit buggy”). As per [Video: 11:41-13:30], this is  a capability originally designed in 2024, and will see the addition of an Inventory tab where selected favourite items can be listed.

 glTF Mesh Uploader

[Video: 3:51-5:54 + as noted below]

• The decision has been made to move this out of the upcoming 2025.05 RC viewer.
• This decision also means that the Lab is evaluating what will be required to get PBR material imports working as part of the mesh upload process at the same time (rather than just having only the Base Colour uploaded).
  • Under previous plans, it had been stated that direct import of a full set of glTF materials as a part of a glTF mesh requires an large refactoring of code; so the initial release of the uploader would only support Base Colour, with other maps to be added in the future.
  • It also marks a switching away from discussions at the last CCUG, where creators expressed a preference to upload meshes with all materials and just have blank faces to which they could they apply their materials post upload. This is because the Lab would rather provide a complete drag-and drop solution, if this can be done.
  • The unspoken element of this update suggests that if direct upload of materials with meshes does prove to be complex, providing uploads with blank faces will likely be the fallback approach.
  • Either way, the ability for people to apply their own materials to objects that are Modify will remain unchanged.
• [Video: 7:02-8:31] As to when an in which viewer the mesh uploader will surface is TBA, and subject to further internal discussions at the Lab.
  • There is currently a issue in getting rigged meshes (full avatars, as provided for testing by content creators, rather than individual items) to upload correctly.
  • LL is not opposed to shipping the uploader as a Project viewer once suitable for testing. This is liable to occur “sooner rather than later”, subject to the above mentioned issue.
• [Video: 8:55-9:55] Will the glTF uploader support large meshes / those with more than 8 faces, rather than breaking them up?
  • The 8-face constraint a current system constraint and requires potentially significant simulator codes changes. As such, it is liable to remain “for now”
• Implementation of a glTF mesh uploader will not mean the end of COLLADA (.DAE) upload support for SL – this will remain available. However, as modelling tools, etc., are deprecating COLLADA support, there is a recommendation that if creators wish to continue supporting their old mesh content, then they convert it to glTF .

In Brief

• [Video: 13:32-15:00] Feature Request Add Custom Tags to Inventory Items – was raised at the end of 2024, and is currently marked as Tracked.  It was raised again at this meeting. Kyle Linden confirmed that a design for such tagging in on the viewer roadmap.
• Terrain:
  • [Video: 15:15-16:12] Potential for better terraforming tools: Described as something LL would like to get to, including higher resolution texture support; the (currently on-hold) Terrain Painting work, etc. However, nothing is currently being worked on, and suggestions for terrain improvements request through the Feedback Portal.
  • [18:04-20:26] New terrain textures for Mainland: seen as a “nice to have”. However, given issues around enabling HDR skies to make PBR look good on Mainland (and the resultant “dim/dark” look to the skies) + the number of people still not using PBR-capable viewers (although this number is falling), LL is cautious about making widespread changes to Mainland. Nevertheless, updating terrain textures is something (per the above) LL “would like to do” in time.
  • [Video 44:41-46:26] WRT terrain and texturing a question was asked on whether it would be possible to have a “grass” functionality at so point, allowing land holder spawn grass on their land, rather than just having a texture. This does (to a point) exist in the viewer through the Build floater → plant rez option, although this is admittedly old and can be LI intensive, so likely needs revisiting in the future to update. Canny requests on what people would like to see with this were requested.
• [Video: 17:10-17:45] It was asked if there was any further news on feature request: Make Appearances Height = Prim Height, noted at the last meeting as “something that could be looked at”.
  • Short answer: no.
  • The discrepancies in height are something LL would like to address, but involves where they are and what needs to be done (even different viewers can report different heights for the same avatar). But is it not something currently in progress.
• [Video: 20:33-24:39] A discussion on being able to “share” attachments (e.g. one person being able to have a pizza box attached to them, and others being able to “take” a slice of pizza from the box a) without any complex means of taking an attachment to inventory and adding it (or similar) and b) having the corresponding slice of the pizza “vanish” from the box.
  • Rider Linden confirmed two approaches (to meet different use-cases) are “on the drawing board” to address this. One involves the use of Experience capabilities; the other enabling attachments to be made directly from an object’s inventory. However, neither option is currently being worked on.
• [Video: 24:51-29:21] A request was made for further attachment points.
  • Providing additional attachment points is seen as sub-optimal, simply because of the additional rendering load / script processing requirements doing so will bring.
  • Rather, and while not currently on the roadmap, LL might look towards allowing customs skeletons (when supported) to have their own attachment structures, with a proxy system to offer back compatibility with the existing attachment point system.
  • This discussion touched on the Permissions system (e.g. allowing no modify items to be linked to others), which is really a no-no among many (although subject to debate within and without LL), as so unlikely to change in the foreseeable future, if at all.
• [Video: 29:50-31:20] The above flowed into a discussion on the proposed permissions “bypass” that had been put forward by Geenz Linden for resolving issues of alpha/gamma issues causing some hairstyles to look “wrong” under PBR lighting.
  • This would have enabled uses to make a change through the viewer to enable “legacy” blending on the hair, even if it was No Modify. However, this was not seen as an optimal route to take by some at LL.
  • As such, the fix remains on hold until either those at LL can be persuaded that allowing such a bypass of permissions is not so bad, or an alternative solution can be determined, which could be used to detect all instances where legacy alpha blending is required.
• [Video 33:22-34:55] Imposters and mesh proxies:
  • It is acknowledged that the current avatar imposter system is looking increasingly outdated.
  • The idea of providing some form of proxies (e.g. “visible triangle only” when seen from a distance) has been discussed internally at LL, however, this is not something being actively worked upon, nor is it part of any scheduled future work.
• There were also general discussions around Gacha (more policy than content creation) and this Canny report; new user on-boarding; content being ripped from SL (or other platforms) and (re)uploaded to SL for sale (file a DMCA Take-Down request); LL addressing quality of life issues (usability) – being addressed, file Cannys!; items awaiting better prioritisation (e.g. dynamic Landmarks). Please refer to the last 20 minutes of the video for more on these.

Next Meeting

• 13:00 SLT, Thursday, June 5th, 2025, at the Hippotropolis Campsite.

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, May 1st, 2025. Please note that this is not a full transcript, but a summary of key topics, and timestamps are to the official video, embedded at the end of this report. .

Table of Contents Meeting Purpose Official Viewer Status and Updates Viewer Status Upcoming Viewers More on the glTF Mesh Uploader In Brief Next Meeting

Meeting Purpose

• The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with related viewer development work.
• This meeting is generally held on alternate Thursdays at Hippotropolis.
• Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they are conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.

Official Viewer Status and Updates

Viewer Status

•  Default viewer: 2025.03 7.1.13.14343205944, issued April 9th and promoted April 15th.
  • New UI element for water exclusion surfaces: Build / Edit floater → Texture Tab → Hide Water checkbox.
  • The maximum amount of Reflection Probes can now be adjusted to better accommodate low VRAM scenarios.
    • Values will be set automatically depending on your chosen graphics quality. OR
    • Use Preferences → Graphics →  Advanced Settings →  Max. Reflection Probes to manually set.
  • An issue with being unable to see Sky Altitude values in the Region/Estate window has now been resolved.
  • Preferences → Graphics → Max. # of Non-Imposters has been renamed Max. # of Animated Avatars for clarity.
  • Bug and performance fixes and memory optimisations.
• Release Candidate: 2025.04 – 7.1.14.14742193597, Issued May 2nd 2025.
  • Includes the following new features:
    • Chat Mentions (Early Support): Type @ then pick a name. To follow: audible alerts and highlight colour pickers.
    • My Outfits subfolders: now supports the use of subfolders.
  • Key updates:
    • Build Floater improvements: increase to scale boundaries; Physics Material Type now updates when selecting linked objects; Repeats per Meter value no longer incorrect for non-uniform sized objects.
    • Hover height: the minimum/maximum is now +/- 3 meters – requires a simulator-side update, currently in the process of being deployed.
    • Snapshot floater: L$ balances can be hidden independently of the rest of the UI.
    • Preference Search bar: general usability and readability improvements.
  • Refer to the release notes for full updates and fixes.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha, version 7.1.12.14175675593, April 2nd.
  • Will only work on Aditi. Blog post: Lab officially announces Luau Alpha testing.

Upcoming Viewers

[Video: 2:22-5:16]

2025.04

• See above.

2025.05

• Internal discussions on what form this should take remain in progress.
• As a result of delays with 2025.03 and 2025.04, coupled with a need to consider how to better offer viewers with features / capabilities user will find valuable, rather than simply lobbing buckets of changes and updates into each release, the viewer team is backing off of the idea of a monthly release cadence for the immediate future.

More on the glTF Mesh Uploader

[Video: 7:41-12:22]

• Overall, the focus remains on getting the flow of model uploads working smoothly and in providing the same capabilities when uploading glTF models as is currently the case for COLLADA models.
• However, there will be some constraints on capabilities:
  • Higher vertex limits on uploads will not be supported for glTF, as it is described as requiring a “whole mesh format upgrade”, which requires further thought before moving in that direction. As such the current 65K vertices per face limit will apply to glTF model uploads.
  • Due to the complexity, and until things can be re-thought, glTF materials cannot be imported as a part of a glTF mesh (outside of the Base Colour map); they must be imported separately and then applied.  Direct import of glTF materials as a part of a glTF mesh requires an large refactoring of code which is not possible in the immediate future.
  • The above point prompted the question from Geenz on whether people would prefer the Base Colour to be uploaded, or simply just have a blank face provided until such time as full glTF materials can be imported with the mesh. Opinion at the meeting leaned towards the blank surface.

In Brief

• [Video: 6:02-7:10] Feature request: Make Appearances Height = Prim Height – responded to as “something that could be looked at”.
• [Video: 15:25-20:21] Are there plans to support Unreal Engine? – No, and defined as “probably never happening”.
  • This led to a question about supporting Unreal Engine plug-ins and perhaps getting plug-in support for Marvelous Designer, often used as an adjunct to making and rigging SL clothing (in fact, Linden Lab struck a deal with MD so a plug-in could be provided for the Sansar platform and its avatars).
  • While not averse to the idea of plug-in support, it was noted that in respect of rigging to the avatar skeleton, the latter would need additional work to make it offerable to third-parties to support.
  • This led to a general acknowledgement and discussion on the need for better pipelining to support popular tools, what those tools might in fact be, beyond Blender, how widespread is their use, availability of SDKs, convergence in trends (e.g. towards OpenUSD) – although how this might all be achieved is a head-scratcher.
  • Overall, such work is seen as “worth discussing” but well beyond the current roadmap.
• [Video: 20:24-25:52] In terms of the SL skeleton, it was stated that “everyone” uses Avastar – including the Lab -(although the MayaStar plugin by Cathy Foil also gets good usage), due to the SL skeleton having issues.
  • Geenz suggested the way to offer easier compatibility between the SL skeleton and commercial tools like MD would be to get the skeleton files updated and offer them as glTF and / or OpenUSD downloads.
  • This grew into a general discussion on the skeleton, its complexity compared to other games / platforms, etc.
• [Video: 25:52-33:30] A general discussion on the Avatar Welcome Pack, specifically some of the shortfalls in how it has been put together.
  • Some of the issues are known, and have been raised by the creators who provided the content for LL to bring together, others may not have been identified.
  • The request is for any issues identified by experienced users opting to try / test the avatar, etc., to be filed as a bug report.
  • It was also noted that clearer instructions were not provided with the Avatar Welcome Pack – such as *copying* a body folder / outfit from the Library to Inventory, rather than adding / wearing an avatar or outfit directly from the Library (and thus spawning multiple copies in Inventory.
  • In relation to the above, Kyle Linden suggested the Lab offer the pack’s contents on a Lab-driven Marketplace store to help with discoverability, and this was positively received.
• [Video: 33:35-38:24] A discussion on lighting  – “block” (aka volume) lighting, improving the flexibility of lighting in SL, implementing physically based lighting capabilities, etc.
  • See also: Support for physically based light intensity; Support for light probes separate from reflection probes; Support for more than two shadow casting lights and Light leak / shadow bug (among others).
• [Video: 41:20-46:29] A discussion on filling the “voids” between continents and regions with water / air open space to allow free passage to boats and aircraft, and why this currently in not feasible on technical or financial grounds.

The system complexity of doing is so enormous … to do that, we’d have to either run a single server in each one of the void spaces, which would obviously put us out of business overnight [fees to Amazon] or… to build mega regions. But the trick to those mega regions need to sit on top of existing regions, or something. Because otherwise, you have the protocol for cross-region communications at the boundaries, and you no longer have cardinal boundaries. Every programmer here can imagine the horror of going from having one neighbour to your left to having between 1 and 600 neighbours to your left, or something. We just didn’t code Second Life that way, so that we could have regions of different size adjacent to each other. I don’t know how to solve that … I don’t have an easy answer off the top of my head.

Philip Rosedale

• [Video 48:13-54:30] General comments on providing VR support – options, issues, technical hurdles.

Next Meeting

• 13:00 SLT, Thursday, May 15th, 2025, at the Hippotropolis Campsite.

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, April 17th, 2025. Please note that this is not a full transcript, but a summary of key topics .

Table of Contents Meeting Purpose Official Viewer Status and Updates Viewer Status Upcoming Viewers Removing Scale From LI Calculations (recap/update) In Brief Next Meeting

Meeting Purpose

• The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with related viewer development work.
• This meeting is generally held on alternate Thursdays at Hippotropolis.
• Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they are conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.

Official Viewer Status and Updates

Viewer Status

•  Default viewer: 2025.03 7.1.13.14343205944, issued April 9th and promoted April 15th – NEW.
  • New UI element for water exclusion surfaces: Build / Edit floater → Texture Tab → Hide Water checkbox.
  • The maximum amount of Reflection Probes can now be adjusted to better accommodate low VRAM scenarios.
    • Values will be set automatically depending on your chosen graphics quality. OR
    • Use Preferences → Graphics →  Advanced Settings →  Max. Reflection Probes to manually set.
  • An issue with being unable to see Sky Altitude values in the Region/Estate window has now been resolved.
  • Preferences → Graphics → Max. # of Non-Imposters has been renamed Max. # of Animated Avatars for clarity.
  • Bug and performance fixes and memory optimisations.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha, version 7.1.12.14175675593, April 2nd.
  • Will only work on Aditi. Blog post: Lab officially announces Luau Alpha testing.

Upcoming Viewers

2025.04

• The 2025.04 viewer is “still progressing”.
• There is an issue described as “not all of the glTF meshes not coming in”, including those with less than 65K vertices. The cause for this is still under investigation and is currently preventing the viewer progressing to an RC release.
• This viewer is provisionally targeting:
  • The glTF mesh uploader (based on the current .DAE mesh uploader and doing pretty much the same). Again, please note that this is not the full glTF scene importer which has been discussed at previous CCUG meetings; that work is being broken down into smaller, more easily managed projects.
  • Possibly – and subject to confirmation – re-enabling subfolders within the My Outfits folder.
  • Hover height improvements.
• The glTF issue coupled with an elevated crash rate issues discovered in 2025.03 and affecting 2024.04 means that this viewer will be running behind the planned schedule for releases.

2025.05

• Internal discussions on what form this should take are in progress.
• One option is to have this release comprise entirely of updates originally planned for inclusion in the 2024 Maintenance C release prior to that being put on hold when the focus shifted to addressing performance issues, etc., in the wake of the initial PBR release.
• One of the updates for this viewer is likely to be Inventory Favourites (presumably somewhat similar to the Firestorm Favourite Wearables).

Removing Scale From LI Calculations (Recap/Update)

• Signal Linden highlighted a Feedback Ticket he has raised, proposing the removal of scale from Land Impact calculations, which has been touched upon at the last couple of SUG meetings.
• However, there are now a few caveats starting to appear possibly impacting “everything from rendering to physics”, which require further internal discussion at LL.
• One of these is the LI goes in both directions – so while removing scale from the calculation may be positive for a net reduction in the LI of objects that have been scaled up in size – it could have a net negative for objects scaled down (e.g. you have a group of objects each with 20 LI, and have scaled them down so each only has 10 LI, removing scale would reset them to 20 LI apiece).
• Further, the Lab needs to re-evaluate LI as a whole and where there could be potentially “bad” impacts on LI changes as a result of scaling – such as with streaming calculations, which are entirely based on scale.
• As such, this work is now in the column of “something we want to do, but we need to do it responsibly”.

In Brief

• Blue tint on reflective surfaces: this is largely the result of one of two things:
  • Outdoors, the fact that automatic  / void probes will be reflecting the ambient lighting and when outdoors there is rather a lot of sky, and so they is going to give reflections a blue tint.
  • Indoors: no internal reflection probe has been placed to override the automatic / void probes, so the sky reflections will be used via the automatic probes. Solution (not always ideal / possible): install a reflection probe indoors.
• PBR metallic “vs.” PBR specular: it was acknowledged that general control of reflectiveness in surface could be – to a degree – better managed through the support of PBR specular rather than relying solely on PBR metallic (as is currently supported), and adding PBR specular is being considered.
• Terrain:
  • Significant updates to SL terrain (e.g.  terrain painting (summarised here), increasing the terrain geometry, potentially implementing better terrain LODs, etc), all all either on-hold (terrain painting) or seen as a much larger undertaking that needs to be focused solely on terrain improvements.
  • As such, they are currently viewed as “down the road projects” while the focus remains on providing content creators with more immediately benefits (such as the taking mesh models, etc., directly from their preferred workflows and dropping them into SL without additional faffing).
• Lighting:
  • Geenz Linden has broken down what he refers to a “super Canny” feature request on lighting into a number of smaller requests. All are tracked – but this does not mean they are currently being worked upon, but rather are things Geenz would like to get to as time allows:
    • Support for more than two shadow casting lights (shadow map impacts allowing – each light requires its own shadow map, impacting local performance).
    • Support for light probes separate from reflection probes.
    • Support for physically based light intensity.
  • Path Traced Global Illumination (PTGI) described as “not any time soon”.
  • Environment versioning: to help track chances to the environment rendering, versioning of assets has been introduced. whereby if the parameter ranges of an asset are changed by LL, then the “old” version of the asset becomes locked and the revised parameters only apply to  new asse version (which requires a new viewer version).
  • Light sources on water (outside of the Sun and Moon: not going to be “coming back” any time soon.
• Some confusion around glow and emissive mask on PBR. The best place for information on PBR, Blinn-Phong (“legacy”) materials + capabilities) is Kirsty Aurelias’ handy (invaluable) guide.
• Changes to Blinn-Phong alpha-gamma (as has been discussed in previous meetings) is currently on hold and subject to on-going discussions within the Lab on how to best proceed.

Next Meetings

• 11:00 SLT, Saturday, April 26th, 2025 at the Hippotropolis Campsite.
• 13:00 SLT, Thursday, May 1st, 2025, at the Hippotropolis Campsite.