Category: SL User Group Meetings

2026 week #4: SUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Reality Escape, January 2026 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 20th, 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

  • All simhosts are undergoing restarts this week, with no deployments.
  • The next simulator release  – 2026.01 (Kiwi) is currently with QA.
  • The simulator release to follow that – 2026.02 – has been given the code-name of Loganberry, but it’s too early in development for details to be provided.

Game Control

  • Leviathan Linden had planned to try to get a project viewer branch put together for his game_control work, but has been sidetracked in dealing with issues with the Kiwi simulator code.
  • He still hopes to be able to cut that branch “on the side” and see if he can create an installable that can be used to check to see if the game_control code actually works with the port to the current viewer code branch.

Grid-Wide WebRTC Deployment Announcement

  • As per the most recent OSD meeting, LL is hoping to deploy WebRTC grid-wide in March 2026.
    • This is not a set-in-stone target, and further updates will be made.
    • This means that Vivox, whilst still being held in reserve, will no longer be available as a Voice service – so those using Voice and using a non-PBR  / WebRTC viewer will need to update.
    • The Lab is currently looking at a March deployment of WebRTC voice across the grid.
  • The public beta for WebRTC has expanded – see this official blog post for details –  and Roxie Linden and her team hope the beta expansion will provide more feedback from users on voice quality, voice stability, etc.
  • Transcription using WebRTC is being poked at by the Lab, but will not be a part of the initial deployment.

SLua Work

  • Harold Linden has a rough draft on how `require()` has to behave to make sense both in VSCode and in-viewer. This is very much a work-in-progress.
    • In short: if you’ve ever had to edit someone’s preprocessed LSL script without all the #includes they had on their disk, and had to wade into the generated code + //#line comment soup, this should be a more readable way to bundle together all the code so editing is nicer.
    • This prompted a series of question on the documentation – please refer to the video.
    • Having the include/require path include object inventory for scripts in objects was noted as future work.
  • A new SLua editor will be available with upcoming viewers which should have much faster script editing.
  • Rider Linden indicated he would like to add something to the VSCode plugin that would provide access to scripts in inventory – and noting a concern in giving anything automated access of any kind to agent inventory.

SLua Resources

  • The nine beta test regions are centred on SLua Beta Void (mind the water!).
  • Official scripting portal (this is a work in progress and open to contributions – Github for the latter here).
  • The Second Life official Discord server / channels.
  •  Suzanna’s SLua Guide (Suzanna  Linn).
  • Official VScode plugin notes:
    • It is not yet available on the VScode marketplace.
    • Issues and PRs for code submissions can be made here, and the plugin downloaded.
  • VSCode plugin + documentation (Wolfgang Senizen – likely be discontinued and contributions shifted to support the official documentation).

In Brief

Please also refer to the video, below.

  • Monty Linden indicated the annual simhost certification work is now in progress. Overall, very little is changing, so no problems are anticipated.
    • The new certifications are being used by the 2026.01 code running on the release test regions on Aditi (the beta grid).
    • Monty plans to automate the recertification later in 2026, and the certification will change slightly at that time.
  • A request was made to allow scripts to exchange messages (or streams of messages) with the viewer using by using llOwnerSay (sending towards viewer), and listen on certain channel (receiving from viewer) but directly without a listen.
    • Apparently a feature request for this is in development for submission to Firestorm.
    • Rider Liden expressed an interest in seeing that request once written.
    • This also sparked a discussion on how llOwnerSay works across region boundaries (e.g. with the help of child agents).
  • A general discussion on Drawer Distance and how to extend it beyond 1024 metres (e.g. via anchoring the camera in a region and flycamming to another and anchoring there – or by using a 3D Mouse such as SpaceNavigator  – my preferred choice).
  • Further requests for the Mainland default EEP setting to be adjusted and  on the status of llSetLinkGLTFOverrides fails to clear alpha override. The former will be referred back to the LDPW and Patch Linden (again), no answer was provided on the latter (it may have been missed in the chat).

Date of Next Meetings

  • Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, January 27th, 2026.
  • Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

2026 week #3: SL CCUG and Open Source (TPVD) meetings summary

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

  • My chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, January 15th, 2026 and my chat log of that meeting
  • Pantera’s video (embedded at the end of this article) and my chat log of the Open-Source Developer meeting held on Friday, January 16th, 2026.
Table of Contents

Please note that this is not a full transcript of either meeting but a summary of key topics.

Meeting Purpose

  • The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with related viewer development work.
    • This meeting is generally held on alternate Thursdays at Hippotropolis and is held in a mix of Voice and text chat.
  • The OSUG meeting is a combining of the former Third Party Viewer Developer meeting and the Open Source Development meetings. It is open discussion of Second Life development, including but not limited to open source contributions, third-party viewer development and policy, and current open source programs.
    • This meeting is generally held twice a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre and is generally text chat only.
  • Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.

Official Viewer Status

  • Default viewer 2025.08 – 7.2.3.19375695301 – maintenance update with bug fixes and quality of life improvements – December 2 – No Change.
    • Notable addition: new VHACD-based convex decomposition library for mesh uploads.
  • Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha version 7.2.3.19911032641, December 5 –  No Change.
  • Second Life Project Voice Moderation viewer 26.1.0.20139269477, December 12 – No Change.
    • Introduces the ability to moderate spatial voice chat in regions configured to use webRTC voice.

Upcoming Viewers

Viewer 2026.01 – One-click Installer / Updater

Viewer 2026.01 is in progress. This will include:

  • Improved bugsplat support (we want better reporting for freezes, and just generally better crash reporting). This work builds on the successes of 2025 in detailing with viewer crashes and reducing overall causes for crashes.
  • A new one-click installer, which in brief:
    • Will be powered by a new dependency called velopack, and will allow a single-click installation of the viewer (with a brief pop-up message), with the viewer launching once the install process is complete.
    • Will default to installing under Apps/Local on windows; will remain as a drag-and-drop process on Mac OS, while Linux is currently TBD. It will still be possible to install the viewer to a custom location, initially via a command line argument.
    • Will not change the install location of config files, or anything that counts as user data.
  • Development work on this did hit a delay, which has now been cleared, the hope remaining to get an Alpha (previously known as Project) viewer out with the update code in place sooner rather than later.
  • As an added benefit to the switch to velopack for TPVs, LL will be providing a solution to add auto-update functionality to TPV projects, if TPVs wish to leverage it. More information on this is due to be made available in the next week or so.

Viewer 2026.02 – “Flat” UI, Font Changes

  • This viewer is to be part of the Lab’s “first impressions” push to make SL resonate more with incoming new users and hopefully encourage them to keep logging in.
  • This first impression work is on multiple fronts, and for the 2026.02 viewer will be a switch to the “flat” UI seen in the Project Zero (viewer in a browser) version which comprises things like a font change, a colour scheme change,  and generally giving the viewer a more “modern” look and feel.
  • The font update:
      • Should not impact people’s use of unicode.
    • Will require XUI updates which will likely require updates for TPVs using their own custom XUI – TPVs are advised to keep an eye on Discord and Github for more information on these changes as they develop, and to particularly track this github issue.

General Viewer Notes

  • Linux support will likely ship as a part of the in-progress SLua beta viewer.
  • The viewer development roadmap is still being worked on in terms of fixes and updates and actioning feature requests, the focus being to work these into the viewer without disrupting major initiatives the Lab is looking to develop (such as the “first impressions” drive).
  • 2026.02 might include some screen space reflections (SSR) updates to help improve the appearance of Linden Water under PDR/HDR.
  • The avatar appearance fixes contributed by Kitty Barnett and intended to make the current outfit folder more reliable when changing outfits, messing with outfits, etc., may get to see the light of day in viewer 2026.03 – but this had yet to be confirmed.

Grid-Wide WebRTC Deployment – Initial Announcement (OSD Meeting)

  • The Lab is currently looking at a March deployment of WebRTC voice across the grid.
  • The schedule is not firmly set as yet, but will follow the usual server-side deployment routine: first to one (or more) simulator RC channels, then to all simulator RC channels (if not all rolled at once), and then a week after this, deployment to the Main simulator channel.
  • The important point in this is that once grid-wide, WebRTC will completely supplant Vivox Voice, and those who use Voice by who are not running a WebRTC voice capable viewer (which generally means anyone not on a non-PBR supporting viewer) will be unable to use Voice.
    • This does not mean that the Vivox service will be immediately shut-down. It will remain an option for the Lab to re-enable until such time as LL is confident in the WebRTC service and no surprises have come to light.
  • There is one remaining WebRTC critical issue in the viewer that makes the experience not great for a small body of users:
    • People with certain network characteristics may see a dropout because the WebRTC provider is not properly handling renegotiation.
    • LL has a fix which should be deployed with viewer 2026.01. However, TPVs wishing to merge it now can do so via Pull Request 5126.
  • In the meantime, the beta for WebRTC has expanded – see this official blog post for details.
  • Roxie Linden also indicated that LL is experimenting with speech-to-text using WebRTC, but does not as yet have anything available for public demonstrations.
  • The issue of Linux builds not using Pulseaudio but with the WebRTC code crashing on start-up was reiterated at the meeting. Whilst this might not be a widespread issue, the feeling was that it should be looked at; however, if the pool of impacted users is liable to be very small, it will not be seen as a reason to block / delay WebRTC deployment as a whole and any fix is liable to be prioritised in terms of resources / impact of the issue, post-deployment.

General Discussion – Both Meetings

  • Avatar support related:
    • Shape key support and / or custom bone hierarchies – seen as complex area of work, and not being looked at.
    • While the current avatar does technically use shape keys, it is very different to how modern blend shapes are used.
    • SL’s internal format also doesn’t store bones.
  • Questions were raised on the status of game_control. This is more a subject for the Simulator User Group meetings, where Leviathan Linden indicated he was trying to resume work on the code. However, it was also indicated during this meeting that Leviathan had again been “borrowed” to work on other code.
  • Despite rumour to the contrary, Puppetry is not currently set for revival or on the current 2026 roadmap.
  • Geenz noted that while work on things like new tools, updates to the GLTF uploader, etc., are not “done”, the focus for the time being in more on dealing with technical debt together with the aforementioned “first impressions” initiative, etc.
  • Questions were asked on auto / planar-aligning PBR materials  – see: Aligning Faces when using PBR and Planar face alignment with PBR GLTF materials. This is something the Lab has yet to resolve, and has offered a contribution bounty for any developer who is able to provide a solution. Geenz also indicated he would try to get bugs like this better prioritised.
  • A general discussion on ideas for improvements to chat, including: ability to have a “last unread” indicator in chat when logging-on; having the chat rings on the mini-Map on by default, some idea about a special chat tab that would allow region-wide chat (presumably at the region owner’s discretion to enable), ability to correct text in chat / IM after sending(!), etc.
  • The You Tube embedding issues was again raised (see here for more), with a possible (if hacky) workaround. LL are looking to You tube to address the problem, as they created it.
  • There was a general discussion on the complexities of Land Impact, particularly – but not restricted to – mesh objects. In short, LI is a complicated subject, and not easily addressed; hence why the Lab backed away from the subject recently. This also strayed into the equally complicated realm of LOD generation.
    • On the subject of LOD generation, it was suggested that the Lab should look to implement a LOD generator and then inform creators LODs have to be generated  to fit a defined set of criteria – or defaults will be forced.
  • A discussion on the choice of VHACD over HACD as a replacement for Havok in mesh decomposition. The latter is seen as more mature, but LL opted for VHACD is a “middle ground” solution as it is more regularly maintained, it is also apparently more reliable when dealing with the “weirder meshes” some SL creators produce, when compared to something like CoACD. However, Geenz indicated it would be “nice” to have “swappable”  convex decomposition solutions at runtime.
  • A further request for Error creating thumbnail” message on SL wiki, breaking images  to be addressed.

Next Meetings

January 2026 SL Web User Group

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday January 14th, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. Pantera’s video is embedded at the end of this article, my thanks to her for providing it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Web User Group exists to provide an opportunity for discussion on Second Life web properties and their related functionalities / features. This includes, but is not limited to: the Marketplace, pages surfaced through the secondlife.com dashboard; the available portals (land, support, etc), and the forums.
  • As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
    • On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
    • In both Voice and text.
    • At this location.
  • Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
  • Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Updates

  • The past month hasn’t been very active for the web team due to the holiday season. There has been a focus on internal updates, security patching, and clean up.
  • Some of the above include:
    • Additional security features around marketplace to increase security and add resilience.
    • Version upgrades to LL’s internal services for security upgrades.
    • Upcoming security feature to nudge residents to update and verify their email address on file.
  • There is also something of a focus on trying to clear-up outstanding Canny issues (so maybe this and this will get addressed?).
  • There is a hope that the focus on back-end services, whilst not necessarily visible to users will this help to see the overall experience of using the Marketplace, etc., become far smoother with fewer outages, issues with people being overcharged for product listing enhancements (PLEs), etc.
  • A significant push for 2026 will be “first impressions” / the new user experience -trying to further improve things so that incoming users have a generally positive experience which encourages them to keep logging-in.

In Brief

  • Kali Linden departed the Lab around the end of November / beginning of December to become VP of system security at a new start-up. Many thanks to her in absentia for all her work a LL.
    • As a result of this, the Lab’s web engineering are operating on a “shared ownership” basis until someone can be hired-in to fill Kali’s role.
    • Kali’s departure also means that some of the planned roadmap for web properties (e.g. the Marketplace UI overhaul) are being reassessed in terms of what can / should be achieved, etc.
  • There have been reports of the SL forums running “slowly” for people in the UK (and Europe?). The Forums are operated by a third-party supplier, and somewhat outside of LL’s direct control. This has been escalated to the forum vendor, but not other updates at present.
  • A request was made to be able to transfer L$ amounts between accounts / to others via a user’s secondlife.com Dashboard – with suitable security in place.
    • This was seen as an “interesting” idea, but would likely require some additional security – such as being tied-into MFA.
    • No commitment was made towards implementing the idea at this time, because further investigation on requirements, etc., would be required.
    • A suggestion was made to set a limit on how much a user directly transfer – or allowing a user to set a limit on the amount (e.g. account-to-account, rather than via a vendor or similar system) at any one time, in order to safeguard accounts against being emptied if successfully hacked. This was also seen as potentially interesting, but could be a  dynamic / fluid set of rules.
  • LindeX use, transaction fees, etc., came up for discussion (although perhaps better placed at the content Creation meeting, where people who routinely cash-out from SL are liable to be in attendance).
    • A loose consensus at the Web meeting was that greater clarification should be given as to what can be paid for directly using L$ / the USD wallet &without incurring additional processing fees (e.g. some users apparently think they have to convert L$ to dollars in order to pay their tier, etc.).
    • A clearer break down of the current transaction fees in a single place (buy for L$, credit processing for cashing-out, cost for subscribers, etc.) could perhaps be given within the Dashboard.
  • A discussion on SL maps – including searching by region name, improving World Map tile resolution, enhancing the map capabilities in general, etc.
    • A fair point was made that the maps are a core way of expressing the size and persistence of SL – yet the capability and the functions around it are perceived as being of little interest to LL management when it comes to prioritising updates, etc., with the focus appearing to be only on areas that directly affect commence in SL.
    • Maps are a vital component in the “first impression” aspect of Second Life – if incoming users can be encouraged to understand the SL is bigger than the welcome hubs and the selected destinations beyond them – and that they can, using the maps – explore on their own / in conjunction with the Destination Guide, then there is a motivation for them to keep logging-in and to start exploring.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, February 4th, 2026.

2026 week #1: SUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Natthimmel: The Keepers of Twin Lights, St. Castoris, December 2025 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 6th, 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

  • All simhosts appear to be undergoing restarts this week, with no deployments.

Game Control

  • Leviathan Linden had planned to try to port game_control back into the develop-Linux branch, but was beaten to the line bye Rye of the Alchemy viewer, show has submitted a Pull Request.  Rye’s submission looks good, but has yet to be built.
  • This means that if the Linux build passes muster, it can join with the Windows and Mac builds and be passed into the main develop branch.
    • However, it has been a report of issues with Rye’s build on systems not using Pulseaudio, which tend to crash on start, so this will have to be investigated, although the overall impact on Linux users was the subject of debate.

SLua Work

  • No indication on when the SLua viewer will be promoted to release status – but that is a question more for viewer meetings.
  • Harold Linden noted his personal “to do” list for SLua is mostly around improving testing / allocation strategy in general, and noted that it is currently growing as LL find usability issues they think are worth pushing the viewer release back for, in order to get them included.
    • One of the things Harold would particularly like to see working is setting link primitive parameters “in a sane way to be less-bad by the time we go general availability for sure”.
    • He also noted he’d like a `require()` function that works correctly with the built-in editor as well.
  • Harold further noted that there is some rearchitecting that needs to go on behind the scenes, and the viewer definitely needs to be in a better state prior to promotion.
  • This led to a further conversation of possible SLua inclusions / updates, and on things like script scheduling – LSL vs. SLua (should be no difference), and script execution.
    • Harold further noted he is refactoring the script scheduler is he goes to try to improve things but in terms of scheduling and execution, and so the simulator isn’t spending “a lot of time figuring out that it has nothing to do”.
    • Multi-threading isn’t seen as an answer for this, because some scripts may be waiting on work being carried out by scripts currently running, and multi-threading could being this dependency.

SLua Resources

  • The nine beta test regions are centred on SLua Beta Void (mind the water!).
  • Official scripting portal (this is a work in progress and open to contributions – Github for the latter here).
  • The Second Life official Discord server / channels.
  •  Suzanna’s SLua Guide (Suzanna  Linn).
  • Official VScode plugin notes:
    • It is not yet available on the VScode marketplace.
    • Issues and PRs for code submissions can be made here, and the plugin downloaded.
  • VSCode plugin + documentation (Wolfgang Senizen – likely be discontinued and contributions shifted to support the official documentation).

In Brief

  • As well as working on Game Control (documentation here), Leviathan Linden has been trying to track a crash/corruption bug he accidentally introduced into the development simulator branch. The impact of this should be very limited – has only thus far shown up on the SLua test regions.
  • Leviathan also noted that there are been no progress on:
    • Experimenting with adjusting avatar bounding box size.
    • Enabling avatars to turn to face the direction of travel of travel when walking backwards (on the official viewer).
    • No progress on fixing the mesh mismatch issue.
  • Monty Linden warned that the Lab is coming up on the “annual simhost certification dance”, and will be part of the 2026.01 “Kiwi” release.
    • This should be invisible to everyone with one weird exception: The ‘TLS Web Client Authentication’ in the EKU is now *strongly* deprecated at all certification authorities. Monty noted that “No one should care unless they extended/ported the SL viewer’s fussy cert code that checks the server part of this”.
  • Henri Beauchamp (Cool VL Viewer) put forward a lengthy outline for solving the issues of avatars already in a region appearing as clouds to those newly arriving – which appears to be a largely server-side issue. He has developed a viewer-side workaround, and proposed a server-side messaging fix which would negate any need for viewer-side workarounds.
    • Both Leviathan and Monty Linden have an interest in trying to eliminate cloud avatars, and Leviathan indicated he would look at Henri’s proposed fix.
    • This extended into a discussion on solving the issues of missing attachments on visible avatars when people TP into a region, etc.

Date of Next Meetings

  • Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, January 13th, 2026.
  • Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, January 20th, 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.

2025 week #51: SL CCUG and Open Source (TPVD) meetings summary

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

  • My chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, December 18th, 2025 and my chat log of that meeting
  • Pantera’s video (embedded at the end of this article) and my chat log of the Open-Source Developer meeting held on Friday, December 19th, 2025.
Table of Contents

Please note that this is not a full transcript of either meeting but a summary of key topics.

Meeting Purpose

  • The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with related viewer development work.
    • This meeting is generally held on alternate Thursdays at Hippotropolis and is held in a mix of Voice and text chat.
  • The OSUG meeting is a combining of the former Third Party Viewer Developer meeting and the Open Source Development meetings. It is open discussion of Second Life development, including but not limited to open source contributions, third-party viewer development and policy, and current open source programs.
    • This meeting is generally held twice a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre and is generally text chat only.
  • Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.

Official Viewer Status

  • Default viewer 2025.08 – 7.2.3.19375695301 – maintenance update with bug fixes and quality of life improvements – December 2.
    • Notable addition: new VHACD-based convex decomposition library for mesh uploads.
  • Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha version 7.2.3.19911032641, December 5.
  • Second Life Project Voice Moderation viewer 26.1.0.20139269477, December 12.

Viewer Updates

Viewer Side Voice Moderation

  • Introduces the ability to moderate spatial voice chat in regions configured to use webRTC voice.
  • Allows region  / parcel owners (the latter subject to local region permissions) to moderate Voice chat (i.e. muting people if required) on their land.
  • Allows existing Group moderators to moderate Voice chat, if used within their groups.
  • This function is viewer-side and limited to muting people.
    • Muting remains active through the muted individual’s log-in session (i.e. if they TP out of a parcel where they are muted, then TP back, they will still be muted; however, if they log out / in, then they will be unmuted until moderation is re-applied).
    • This approach is to make the moderation more a social tool – e.g. muting someone who has left their microphone open and are accidentally flooding the channel with background sounds whilst AFK.
  • For more obnoxious users on Voice, the currently-existing ban methods are recommended.

Viewer 2026.01 – One-click Installer / Updater

Viewer 2026.01 is in progress. This will include:

  • Improved bugsplat support (we want better reporting for freezes, and just generally better crash reporting). This work builds on the successes of 2025 in detailing with viewer crashes and reducing overall causes for crashes.
  • A new one-click installer:
    • To be powered by a new dependency called velopack.
    • The process will literally be: click once, and a (small) pop-up is briefly displayed stating the viewer is being installed, and the viewer is launched when done.
    • On Windows, the viewer will default to installing under Apps/Local; on Apple OS it will remain as a drag-and-drop; Linux is still TBD.
    • It will be possible to tell the installer to install to a custom location, if preferred, but initially, this will be via a command line argument.
    • Config files and such are not changing. Anything that counts as user data will not change. It’s only where the viewer is installed by default that is changing.
    • In addition:
      • Older viewers will need to be uninstalled.
      • NSIS installer scripts will still be around for projects that prefer that.
      • Velopack does output “portable” viewer installs – literally a zip file with everything needed to install the viewer, if required.
      • The new installer will be offered as an opt-in to TPVs wishing to make use of it.
    • The one-click install capability will likely be an alpha (formerly project) viewer, which will be made available “in the coming days” in order to gain some user feedback.
    • These changes will not affect the current viewer repos, channels, cohorts, etc., as currently used by TPVDs.
  • It is also hoped to include a new updater to make viewer updates more transparent, running the the background without the need for direct user intervention.
    • So, when there is a new version of the viewer available and a user attempts to launch their current version of the viewer, the new version will be downloaded, installed and launched.
    • It will still be possible to disable automatic viewer updates from within the Viewer Preferences.
  • The idea behind the new installer  / updater is to make installing and updating the viewer a less onerous task for newer users.

General Viewer Notes

  • Viewer 2026.02 will likely be UI-focused. This might include:
    • Changes to the UI font See: https://github.com/secondlife/viewer/issues/2023), which will likely require some updates to various floaters and panels in the viewer.
    • Adoption of some of the UI updates made to the Project Zero (viewer in a browser) version of the viewer.
    • More information will be available on this viewer as plans are settled.
  • As a general note on viewer performance, and within the official viewer, Geenz Linden notes that at the start of the year, LL was tracking an average viewer FPS of around 40 on the official viewer, but as the end of year approaches, the average has “moved well past that”, and “getting pretty close” to tracking above 50 FPS.

General Discussion – Both Meetings

  • No plans to offer larger sizes for prim creation at present.
  • WebRTC voice:
    • Still needs further adjustments (e.g. such as with voice roll-off with distance).
    • Can have issues of “muffling” when moving the camera, and these are still being looked at.
    • Is now available on the Project Zero viewer.
  • A general discussion on colour palette spaces in the colour picker for saving colours (e.g. providing more, and whether it might be better served as a list).
  • A further debate on having a dedicated chat bar exposed in the official viewer.
  • A general discussion on the derender capability found in various TPVs (very useful for photographers / machinima makers; silencing noisy  / spammy objects, etc).
  • A discussion in the OSUG on the upcoming viewer font update.

Next Meetings

2025 week #49: SL CCUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Hippotropolis Campsite: venue for CCUG meetings
The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, December 4th, 2025 and my chat log of that meeting.
Table of Contents

Please note that this is not a full transcript of the meeting but a summary of key topics.

Meeting Purpose

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

Official Viewer Status

  • Default viewer 2025.08 – 7.2.3.19375695301 – maintenance update with bug fixes and quality of life improvements – December 2 – New.
  • Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

General Viewer Update

  • 2025.08 is largely a maintenance release. However:
    • For Apple Silicon it includes a new VHACD-based convex decomposition library for mesh uploads, so creators on Apple Silicon should be able to upload meshes using it. If this library proves useful on Apple, then it will be implemented for Linux and Windows viewers, allowing the current Havok sub-library to be deprecated.
  • The first planned viewer for 2026 (2026.01) is being referred to as First Impressions. As the name suggests, the focus will be on refining the user experience for those who are coming into Second Life for the first time. Details to follow in the new year.

SLua Update

  • As per the official blog post, the SLua beta on Agni (the Main grid) has been officially announced.
  • The viewer is still a beta RC version, and an updated version is due out “soon”.
  • Official VSCode Plug-in (Recommended).
  • Official scripting documentation.
  • Third-party transpiler (LSL to SLua). Note that whilst viewed as workable, the use of this transpiler might not be as efficient as writing SLua code.
  • The nine beta test regions are centred on SLua Beta Void (mind the water or just search “slua” in the viewer’s World Map)..

WebRTC Voice Update: Speech to Text

  • There has been an LL-internal demonstration of Voice-to-text using WebRTC (transcribing Roxie Linden’s speaking into local chat in the viewer).
  • When used, the generated text is shown in local chat using a different colour to typed text.
  • Transcriptions are currently to English only (although Philip Linden indicated this will be from multiple languages).
  • The demonstration was described by Kyle Linden as “a little rough around the edges, but working.”
  • The process is direct – from voice to text, currently without any need for user intervention.
    • However, given the need for voice to be passed to the WebRTC server, then passed for transcription into text and then passed to the chat service for injection into local chat, there might be a degree of latency between someone speaking and seeing their words appear as text (around 1 second).
    • Going via the WebRTC server rather than using any form of plug-in with the viewer means that anyone using voice will have their words transcribed to text only once, rather than multiple plug-ins receiving the voice and then pushing it to a transcription service before receiving it back (which would be a non-trivial cost – e.g. 100+ plug-ins requesting the transcription of someone speaking at a Linden Community Round Table as opposed to the WebRTC server requesting the transcription once and broadcasting it to local chat).
  • One of the things LL are cognizant of is the tension between providing a fully automated service, which may tread on exiting solutions which meet specific needs, and potentially working to open the capability to allow it to work alongside of existing solutions / assist them.
  • As the transcribed text is pushed to local chat, then it is likely than worn translations tools will pick-up on the text and translate it as well; this many be both beneficial and annoying (beneficial, a non-English speaker can read the translated text just like anything else typed into local chat; annoying as it could result in someone using a worn translation tool constantly receiving walls of text (the spoken word transcribed to English text and then the translated text). As such, it was acknowledged some additional controls might be required.
  • A key point with this functionality is that it is a work-in-progress and not yet ready for formally release (WebRTC has yet to be fully deployed anyway), and once it is available, it will continue to be refined and enhanced (e.g. one enhancement might be to translate voice rather than just transcribe to English) .

In Brief

  • Default viewer chat bar. The independent chat bar was removed with the implementation of the the CHUI (communication hub user interface – the integrated chat and IMs floater) in around 2013 for the official viewer, although some TPVs re-implemented it not long after.
    • Requests have long been made for LL to return the chat bar functionality to the official viewer – and this is now being done, starting with Project Zero (the viewer in a browser).
    • However, if a TPV with the chat bar functionality were to submit a pull request to LL, then consideration would be given to taking the code as-is and implementing it into the 2026.01 viewer.
  • The bug relating to scale / offsets, etc., not being persistent on PBR when switching materials has now been addressed.

Next Meeting