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.
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:
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.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 15th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from my chat log of the meeting and Pantera’s video, embedded at the end of this piece.
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.
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.
Simulator Deployments
This week will see all channel restarted without and deployments.
Upcoming Deployment – Recap
This next simulator update will be called Elderberry. Among other things, this should include:
A new option to llDerezObject – DEREZ_TO_INVENTORY, which returns the targeted object to inventory and saves its current state (e.g. has the same behaviour as Build → Object → Save Back to Object Contents.
llIsLinkGLTFMaterial – which can can determine if a face on a linked prim is PBR.
REZFLAG_DIE_ON_NO_REZZER – which will cause a rezzed prim to die if its rezzer is no longer present in the region.
Updates to llSetAlpha will have a caveat: if alpha is set to >0.85, it will switch the overrides to opaque; setting under that value sets them to blend. This is because there seem to be some serious rendering issues with blend mode and an alpha near 1, per this image.
llSetGLTFOverrides, rather than changes to llSetColor and llSetAlpha to work with PBR, as changing the latter was “starting to lead down some very scary paths WRT ‘What is the right thing to do'”.
SL Viewer Updates
Default viewer: 2025.03 version 7.1.13.14343205944, dated April 9th, 2025, promoted April 15th, 2025.
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 7.1.12.13907344519, April 2nd.
Please refer to the the video for details on the following.
A general discussion llDerezObject and whether an object being taken back by an object has been renamed will result in a copy being generated, or the original still replaced (answer: still replaced).
As a result, a DEREZ_TO_INVENTORY_COPY parameter has been requested, and could be suppled in the simulator update after Elderberry.
Rider Linden also noted he may need to disallow a reclaim on coalesced inventory objects, as once in-world, acoalesced object becomes a grouping on independent objects, with not connection between them or any means to re-group them.
Discussion around this functionally and iiDerezObject continued through most of the meeting.
Progress on SLua is described as being “good”, but as per the pervious meetings (SUG and TPVD), there is more back-end work to be done before the SLua project moves to a “beta” on Aditi.
Following the discussion on World → Show → Land Owners has been broken since the release of PBR such that all owners, regardless of type are only shown as red, rather than in different colours based on ownership (see Land owners colour), it was noted that a fix for the issue should be in the next RC viewer update – 2025.04.
† 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 following notes were taken from my chat transcript + the video recording by Pantera (embedded at the end of this summary) of the Third-Party Developer meeting (TPVD) held on Friday, April 11th, 2025. My thanks to Pantera as always for providing it.
Meeting Purpose
The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors to discuss general viewer development. This meeting is held once a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
Dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they are generally conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.
The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.
Official Viewers
Default viewer: 7.1.12.13550888671, formerly the ForeverFPS, dated March 1, 2025, promoted March 5th.
Numerous crash and performance fixes.
Water exclusion surfaces.
Water improvements.
Second Life Release Candidate: 2025.03 7.1.13.14343205944, April 9th, 2025.
Will only work on Aditi, within the following regions: [Luau Yardang], [Luau Tombolo], [Luau Mesa] and [Luau Tideland].
See below for more.
Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha, version 7.1.12.13907344519, April 2nd.
The 2025.03 RC is now in “crash fixes only” mode, and LL are still hoping to get it promoted to de facto release status “soon”.
Due to the focus on 2025.03, the 2025.04 viewer update is still in development, but its appearance as an RC viewer is likely to be delayed. As a re-cap: this viewer will include:
Hover height improvements.
The ability to have sub-folders within the Outfits system folder.
The introduction of the glTF mesh importer.
As a reminder, as as per recent CCUG meetings the glTF mesh importer:
Is purely for glTF format mesh models – it is not the full glTF scene importer that had been in development.
Will initially operate pretty much as per the current COLLADA .DAE importer (e.g. anything that can be done with that importer can be done with glTF mesh imports).
Is only a first cut with glTF imports, and will be enhanced over time.
Is not a replacement for COLLADA .DAE support – LL hope to continue to support COLLADA alongside glTF for as long as is realistically feasible.
2024.03 might additionally include Inventory Favourites and foundational work on RLVa inclusion. However, both of these might simple to the 2025.05 viewer.
In Brief
This meeting was held entirely in text as an experiment as decisions are made on the future of both the TPV Developer meeting (generally held in Voice) and the Open Source Development meeting (held in text), and potentially combining them.
The official Second Life Discord Channel now has a TPV role / channel to go alongside the opensource role / channel.
In order for someone to be eligible for the TPV role, they must be a part of a viewer team that is in the TPV programme and gain confirmation from LL to access the channel.
There is to be a “renewed push” to get the Voice service switched over to WebRTC across all simulators – although there are remaining bugs to be resolved before that happens, together with a back-end update required to allow for better service scaling.
The switch-over will follow the simulator update schedule: remaining updates will be deployed to RC channels first (with the switch from Vivox to WebRTC), then to the Main SLS channel.
The SLua alpha testing on Aditi has progressed well, and LL are now working towards a follow-up beta test.
The work on Linux support has been intentionally removed from the viewer repositories for the time being, while LL reviews Linux and determine its overall maintainability.
† 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 gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.
The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 8th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from my chat log of the meeting and Pantera’s video, embedded at the end of this piece.
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.
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.
Simulator Deployments
This week will see all channel restarted without and deployments.
Upcoming Deployment
This next simulator update will be called Elderberry. Among other things, this should include:
A new option to llDerezObject – DEREZ_TO_INVENTORY, which returns the targeted object to inventory and saves its current state (e.g. has the same behaviour as Build → Object → Save Back to Object Contents.
llIsLinkGLTFMaterial – which can can determine if a face on a linked prim is PBR.
REZFLAG_DIE_ON_NO_REZZER – which will cause a rezzed prim to die if its rezzer is no longer present in the region.
llSetAlpha will have a caveat: if alpha is set to >0.85, it will switch the overrides to opaque; setting under that value sets them to blend.
This is because there seem to be some serious rendering issues with blend mode and an alpha near 1, per this image. Rider Linden added:
Also. It bears repeating… since I forgot. BP colours (what you set with llSetColor) are in sRGB space. PBR is linear. I’m doing the conversion internally so it should be the same colour in both cases.
SL Viewer Updates
Default viewer: 7.1.12.13550888671, formerly the ForeverFPS, dated March 1, 2025, promoted March 5th – No change – crash and performance fixes; Water exclusion surfaces and water improvements.
Second Life Release Candidate viewer 2025.03 version 7.1.13.14174767759, April 2nd.
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 7.1.12.13907344519, April 2nd.
Please refer to the the video for details on the following.
A request was made to have changes to releases on the SLua test regions on Aditi added to the release notes mechanism so that those using the regions can see when / why things are going to change or are going to change.
This is going to be looked into. In the interim, Rider Linden is going to try to to provide notification of updates to the Second Life Discord server.
World → Show → Land Owners has been broken since the release of PBR such that all owners, regardless of type are only shown as red, rather than in different colours based on ownership (see Land owners colour).
A status update was requested for work on providing a means to ease issues of ban line collisions and vehicle loss, and having the simulator provide more timely information on parcel access permissions before a vehicle is on top of a parcel in which access is denied for the avatars riding it.
This is something Rider Linden is hoping to get to in the simulator release after Elderberry).
The discussion broadened through the when and how the simulator should provide parcel information to the viewer – e.g. in general or on demand, and what information could be provided, having a mandated delay on security systems on the Mainland to prevent the enter parcel / immediate teleport / ejection situation.
Still no news on when the Mainland legacy EEP setting (now seen as dim and murky post PBR deployment), although it is believed the Moles are working on Mainland region settings.
† 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.
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: 7.1.12.13550888671, formerly the ForeverFPS, dated March 1, 2025, promoted March 5th – No change.
Second Life Release Candidate viewer 2025.03 version 7.1.13.14174767759, April 2nd – New.
Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha, version 7.1.12.13907344519, April 2nd – New.
The current version of 2025.03 will remain in soak for the next few days in the hope that it will be ready for promotion to de facto release status “in the very near future”.
The April release – 2025.04 – 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.
In short: it should be taken that whatever can be done within the existing .DAE uploader will remain so for uploading glTF mesh models at the first pass, and enhancements will come later.
This means that anything that is compliant with COLLADA which can be currently imported to SL via the uploader will work under glTF.
Any “new” capabilities not available to the current uploader will then be duly considered an implemented over time.
This is not a replacement for COLLADA format uploads – it is an addition to; uploading of .DAE objects will remain possible unless support for COLLADA becomes untenable.
The reason for this approach is to avoid having a large-scale glTF import project (variously referred to has “scene import” or the “Post-Materials Features Project” or PMFP), which would take months / years to develop, enhance and ship, and instead be more spritely in development and improvements.
This does not mean that everything that had been targeting the scene import / PMFP work will be abandoned.
Rather, it means those aspects which could end-up delaying it due to the amount of research, development and testing required to support them (e.g. custom skeletons / rigged meshes) can be put to one side for future development, rather than preventing the foundations to enable them from being laid.
The back-end format for imported mesh objects (“SL mesh”) will not be changing at this time. One of the reasons for this is the “SL mesh” format allows for easy upload of selected LODs.
However, this does not mean the format will not be improved upon in the future (and even a possible hybrid glTF / SL Mesh format implemented).
One aspect of the new mesh uploader will be the potential for adding materials-related glTF extensions to the current Khronos glTF specification.
These include (but are not limited to) the likes of the glTF specular extension, transmission, IOR, iridescence, emissive strength etc.
Geenz Linden is particularly interested in these, as the uploader allows them to be quickly added, and he would like to put together a package of extensions that a) creators can readily use; b) help move things towards being better placed to support other aspects of the PMFP work.
There was more discussion on support for uploading complete mesh region surrounds – this again was seen as something for consideration after the initial phases for implementing the glTF upload have been completed, and something possibly requiring the implementation of something like a node hierarchy.
Texture “Stutter” Issues
The recently introduced changes to texture use of VRAM have resulted in some users experiencing “viewer stutter” when the viewer is loading / uploading textures in a scene.
As a result, the options to define texture VRAM settings have been disabled in the 2025.03 RC.
Geenz Linden is anticipating being able to work on this issue later in April with a view to determine the cause and hopefully rectifying it.
This work will likely also look at texture streaming in general and make adjustments where textures tend to get loaded at resolutions that “don’t make sense” at the time of loading, and so improve that.
It is not anticipated that this work will start to surface much before the 2025.06 viewer development cycle.
Removing Scale From LI Calculations
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).
In Brief
Allowing larger Linksets: raised at recent SUG meetings as well, this has not been ruled out for the future, but has some inherent issues, notably:
Limitations within the current physics engine, which would probably have to be updated.
Interest List issues – if a scene has a particularly massive linkset within it, it could simply fail to render in a viewer using a limited Draw Distance, simply because the root prim is outside of the viewer’s DD, even if child elements of the object are within range.
PBR Bakes on Mesh: this is seen as having a minimum of two requirements:
Providing PBR specular support.
Being able to set blend modes for different layers. This has some added complications in how blend modes should work for different types of maps, and this needs to be worked through in terms of implementation.
Rider Linden will try to get at least llSetAlpha and llSetColor updated to support PBR (with intelligent switching between the use of linear and RGB colour space depending on whether BP or PBR is being affected) within the next simulator update, which is currently being put together.
The viewer / graphics roadmap is being reviewed, and it is hoped that and updates / decisions on direction will be available for discussion at the next CCUG meeting.
The is no time frame on the delivery of “water exclusion volumes” (i.e. the ability to hide Linden Water entirely from the inside volume of an underwater room). Again, it is not because this cannot be done, but rather there is other work deemed as having a higher priority LL wish to address.
It was found that the water shoreline fade was causing issues with shoreline water effects (e.g. things like mesh shoreline elements using alphas to simulate the ebb and flow of shoreline tide looking broken / patchy / flickering), and so the fading has been disabled until the issue can be corrected.
It is possible this might for a wider piece of work to improve water / sky environment assets in general to make the ambient environment rendering less likely to break content.
Improving light sources (e.g. punctual lights, better point lighting, etc.) is seen as a future issue to be addressed before of current limitations within the current forward rending. Forward+ is one potential way forward, but this would require proper scoping ahead of any attempt to change the current rendering system.
The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday April 2nd, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript.
A video of the meeting, recorded by Pantera Północy, is embedded at the end of this summary, with sections of this summary times stamped to the relevant points in the video for those wishing to refer to the audio. My thanks as always to Pantera for recording it and making it available.
The Web User Group exists to provide an opportunity for discussion on Second Life web properties and their related functionalities / features. This includes, but is not limited to: the Marketplace, pages surfaced through the secondlife.com dashboard; the available portals (land, support, etc), and the forums.
As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
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.
Fixes for spaces within Map links, with more fixes for incorrect spaces in links still to come.
Requests were again made to be able to search maps.secondlife.com by region name, which is apparently a little harder to implement than had been thought.
Minor fixes to the Marketplace:
See Mature Content link was not working as expected.
Translations updates and added.
Project Zero / Firestorm Zero (SL in a Browser) Update
Recent work has been focused on stability and performance.
Work has resumed on the new viewer UI for the Project Zero SL Viewer, and the first iteration, featuring very small changes should be released “pretty soon”.
Firestorm Zero
A core focus has been on the Firestorm version of Zero (Firestorm Zero, launched in March), running through bugs and issues reported with that. Some issues include:
People purchasing time and having issues launching a session.
People being locked-out of Firestorm Zero after a session (or even during) – most likely as a result of Cookies being corrupted, thus requiring Cookies to be cleared from the browser & the browser restarted.
It’s also been suggested that using a private / incognito version of a browser works better, as this should clear all Cookies on exiting.
Note: I have experienced multiple “locks-outs” (one both “public” and “private” browsers – Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Brave) and have found that clearing / resetting Cookies within the browser does not work, and it requires LL to bang on things (indeed, as of this moment, I cannot access Firestorm Zero!). If you encounter the same, please file a report.
General to Both
It was acknowledged there there is a degree of confusion around Project Zero and Firestorm Zero, and the fact there are differences between them:
Project Zero is effectively the official viewer, offered on a limited capacity basis, with the focus more towards incoming new users / returning users.
Firestorm Zero is the “paid” service utilising the Firestorm viewer and focused more towards current users.
Some aspects of this confusion might be seen in:
The link found at the top of the Second Life Dashboard (Launch Second Life in a Browser) will launch Firestorm Zero.
The fact that at the WUG meeting, people conflated issues of logging in to Project Zero which were likely due to the limited capacity / new user focus more than anything else, with a discussion on specific issues those attempting to use Firestorm Zero were experiencing.
As a result, Sntax Linden noted that there should be more / better differentiation between the two.
Shortfalls with both Zero and Firestorm Zero were (again) noted as:
Lack of ability to directly upload (mesh, textures, etc.) to your account.
Lack of ability to save snapshots, etc., to a local disk.
The noticeable latency in camera movement (and similar) for those more distant to the host computer running the viewer. [It has been hinted that this could be address by relocating host computers for Project Zero / Firestorm Zero in additional Amazon GameLift end-points such as Éire.]
A feedback request to Add marketplace policy regarding AI generated content sparked a request for clarification on what people would like (e.g. disclosure of the use of AI generated content / listing images; outright banning of anything related to the use of AI tools; filtering out content made purely with generative AI (as opposed to content which has been created by someone and which happens to use some AI elements), something in-between; limiting some forms of AI content, etc.).
Within the meeting, disclosure (e.g. clearly indicating a item uses AI generated content / the listing images are AI generated, etc.), was preferred by most.
It was noted that using purely AI-generated images (e.g. created using Midjourney) as a non-representative means to promote / sell content on the MP is already against policy (misleading advertising) and so can currently be reported.
Kali Linden indicated LL are looking to add reasons for flagging content, and something along the lines of “violates LL policy” might be considered, to make such reporting easier.
It was acknowledged that those using generative AI tools (e.g. Meshy) for content on the MP probably are not going to self-identify through marking check-boxes etc.
It was also noted that some people using generative AI images for advertising on the MP are not doing so with intent – but rather because it is the New Shiny for them to play with, and so some allowance should be made for this.
There’s also the issue with people who may take images of their creations and then heavily post-process them to the point where they are no longer fully representative of the item it promotes – so what should be done in these cases? Or with those using art pulled from the physical world?
Part of this conversation inevitably rolled over the idea of AI “companions” / bots and an expressed desire to “ban everything” about AI – including bots, despite there being nuances – such as with the latter (e.g. in-store CSRs, more dynamic role-play NPCs, etc.).
In Brief
Please refer to the video for details on the following.
[Video: 1:32-4:44] General discussion on the Second Life booth at the 2025 Games Developer Conference, which some at the meeting felt to be underwhelming based on the photographs posted to social media, etc.
LL also appear to have received feedback from the SL creators who attended the event, and it appears lessons are being learnt for future possible events / appearances.
[Video 17:32-18:50] Further discussion over the lack of a visible-by-default chat bar in the official viewer.
[Video: 22:03-35:15] Discussion on use of the in-viewer browser vs. using an external browser – most preferred the external browser option.
However, most browser-based shopping stats the Lab has for the Marketplace point to the viewer’s internal browser being primarily used for purchases.
Sntax Linden noted that as the internal browser is the only option for accessing the web from within Project Zero / Firestorm Zero, LL do want to improve on it – such as making the responsive MP not only work on small device screens, but also work better within the in-viewer browser.
Traditionally, the in-viewer browser has been avoided due to concerns of general security (e.g. clicking on phishing links and opening them within the in-viewer browser). This led to a discussion on ways to block “bad links”.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 