Category: SL User Group Meetings

August 2025 SL Mobile UG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Campwich Forest grounds: location for the Monthly Mobile User Group (MMUG)
The following notes were taken from the Thursday, August 28th 2025 Monthly Mobile User Group (MMUG) meeting. These notes should not be taken as a full transcript of the meeting, which was largely held in Voice, but rather a summary of the key topics discussed.

The meeting was recorded by Pantera, and her video is embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks, as always to her in providing it.
Table of Contents

Meeting Purpose

  • The Mobile User Group provides a platform to share insights on recent mobile updates and upcoming features, and to receive feedback directly from users.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
    • The last Thursday of every month at 12:00 noon SLT.
    • In Voice and text.
    • At Campwich Forest.
  • 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.

Resources

Release Updates

[Video: 0:00-8:33]

Current Releases

Version: 2025.7.560 (Android) – July 23 / 0.1.557 (iOS) – July 22.

Updates

  • Work has been focused on the next release of Mobile, including pushing updates to the Alpha group of users (those who were part of testing from the start). Two Alpha group updates for the release have gone out so far, and a third is expected “shortly”.
  • A key aspect of the next release is improving overall stability, both in itself and how it deals with “shaky” Internet connections, etc.
    • Feedback from the Alpha testers is that this work is yielding performance improvements (e.g. faster frame rates, lower battery use) on Android, and it is hoped the same holds true for iOS.
  • Network connection stability has been a particular area of work for the last 2 months.
    • Unlike apps which can download data in advance, cache it and then call upon it, Second Life Mobile requires far more of a constant stream of data due to its dynamic nature, and so is far more susceptible to signal interruptions / conflicts with other apps for bandwidth use, etc.
    • Thus, the work has been to try to make the Mobile app far more robust in how it maintains network connectivity and continues to function through such interruptions, doing all that is required of it.
    • The work has taken time and effort to get through, but it is hoped that the majority of it is now complete, and the rest can b wrapped-up within the next month.
  • Work has also been put in to trying to resolve a number of known issues (e.g. streaming audio quality on iOS devices).
  • As such, while there will be new features in the next release, the overall focus of work for the present is on performance, stability and bug fixing.
  • Additionally, a couple of further issues have been identified with avatar rendering, and so effort will be put into addressing these.

Upcoming New Features

[Video: 8:33-14:57]

  • Achievements: giving “visual rewards” to users for moving around in the Mobile app and trying-out actions, etc.
    • Details vague, as the team did not wish to give “too much away and spoil the surprise”.
    • Achievements are currently and specifically aimed towards new users.
    • They triggered automatically in some manner on completing a basic task within the app, after which a new View option is unlocked in the menu, allowing users to see available achievements and the particular level they are “at” for an achievement.
  • Camera improvements (as noted in the July meeting):
    • Reset Camera button, which will be displayed when the two-finger swipe to detach the camera from the avatar is used.
    • Rotate around current camera position when the camera is detached from the avatar.
    • Zoom in and out from the current camera position when detached from the avatar.
    • First-person (Mouselook) view.

General Feedback / In Brief

[Video 14:57-End]

Please refer to the video for details on the following and other questions which may have had a simple “yes” or “in progress” reply.

  • Conflicts between pinch actions for zooming and the joystick control for movement:
    • The joystick event capture area covered a good portion of the lower left side of the screen. Because of this, pinch or swipes commencing / overlapping this area can trigger the joystick  and avatar movement.
    • As the joystick fades to transparency between uses, this can cause confusion for users, as they start a pinch / swipe action within the lower left corner of their device screen which appears “empty”, and accidentally trigger the joystick capture event, causing their avatar to move.
    • Because of this, the joystick function is to be changed so that it is always visible, in the hope that users will not commence gestures within its event capture area.
    • It is hoped that keeping the joystick visible at all times will also alleviate new users becoming confused as to how to move their avatar when the joystick is transparent.
    • This led to a discussion across the last 15 minutes of the meeting on ways to completely disable avatar movement when not required.
  • Alpha transparencies not rendering correctly:
    • Potentially due to a number of issues (the transparent texture not being fully JPG2000 conformant; the renderer not correctly recognising the alpha channel, etc.).
    • This is known about and is being looked at to try to resolve. In the interim further reports on the problem and where encountered are requested.
  • A request was made for feedback on any quality of life issues users experience (e.g. problems with changing outfits, UI issues, etc.), as these are likely to become more of a focus as the current work on performance / stability / network improvements comes to an end.
  • Feedback requested from Alpha testers with the upcoming update (anticipated for Friday, August 29th) include: network stability (particularly when the connection switches from wifi to cellular or vice-versa) – which results in noticeable issues (such as an inability of TP); general reports of unexpected with general use – quality of life, avatar loading, avatar movement issues, etc.

Date of Next Meeting

2025 week #34: SUG meeting summary – more SLua and bits

Posted on by Inara Pey
Viper Isles – An Elysian Paradise, June 2025 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, August 19th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) off-week meeting (which I refer to as the “SUG Leviathan Hour”). These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. They were taken from my chat log of the meeting and 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

  • On Tuesday, August 19th, the simhosts on the SLS Mian channel were restarted without update.
  • on either Wednesday, August 20th or Thursday, August 21st, a new simulator update – code-named Grape Juice (Fig Newton having morphed into the network updates noted in my week #32 summary), should be deployed to one or more RC channels.

SLua Update

  • A recap of the recent work on SLua, as given by Harold Linden at the week #33 Leviathan Hour “off-week” meeting. In short:
    • Changes to the Luau garbage collector which means that it can run a lot faster now, so scripts have to pause less and run out of memory less.
    • llGetFreeMemory() and llGetUsedMemory() have been fixed “to return something sensible under SLua”.
    • This sparked a conversation on Mono memory usage, with Harold noting that the memory usage presented by ll.GetFreeMemory() in Mono has little relation to how much memory is actually being used; the value given is basically how many “memory fun bucks” a script has left. He noted it is also on his list to get an accurate measurement including JIT cache overhead, etc.
  • Limits on memory use have not been settled as yet, but testing indicates that SLua generally uses less memory than Mono under a typical workload, with Harold noting:
I imagine that no matter what we do, memory limits are going to be higher than they were on Mono. Having tiny memory limits has created perverse incentives to just do things like split things into many scripts that communicate over link messages that end up bogging the sim down more than if everything was in one script … I have felt all the multi-script pain, I’m interested in preventing that pain in SLua
    • This sparked a discussion on memory use and limits in general, which ran through the rest of the meeting.
  • Harold Linden has also drafted a proposal for event handling and multi-timer support under SLua, which is described as “roughly inspired by Node’s ‘EventEmitter’ stuff, so you can do ‘LLEvents.on(“touch_start”, some_function)’ and such”.
    • Scripters are encouraged to read and comment on it.
    • There was also a conversation on SLua event handlers during the meeting.
  • The above also folded into it a discussion of on_error events.
  • Signal Linden is working on scoping SLua milestones and shepherding release and projects, together with planning SLua documentation (wiki).

In Brief

  • Monty Linden has “up-cycled” the Experience KVP store – that is, implemented a new package with reliable data retention, under the same version number.
  • Pepper Linden noted that a new Conductor was rolled out onto Agni last week, which – subject to further adjustments – should improve packing of regions onto simhosts.
  • Rider Linden is about to start a “research spike” into creating an official SL plugin for VSCode for better external editing. He was particularly interested in hearing what people would like to see in this.
  • User Henri Beauchamp has been investigating the issue with avatar attachments rezzing (e.g. following a TP or after logging-in, particularly in “busy” regions), and noted that it appears that the server sometimes just does not send all avatar attachments.
    • A report on this issue has also been filed (see: Avatar attachments STILL failing to appear in busy regions).
    • Monty Linden noted that he is also tracking a set of attachment failures (symptoms: the TP completes (TeleportFinish received), when the avatar is in a new region but none of the scripted attachments is realized in the target region).
    • Rider Linden indicated that the Canny report has been triaged, and his hope is to fix the underlying issue(s) rather than “cover it with a band aid to hide it”.
  • A general discussion on animation improvements, notably linked to script limitations with furniture (e.g. each agent sitting on an item of furniture requiring a dedicated script to handle animations). This in turn followed into a discussion on inverse kinematics (IK).

Date of Next Meetings

  • Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, September 2nd, 2025.
  • Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, August 26th, 2025.

† 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 #33: SUG Leviathan Hour – SLua and bits

Posted on by Inara Pey
Diamond Moon Village, June 2025 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, August 12th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) off-week meeting (which I refer to as the “SUG Leviathan Hour”). These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. They were taken from my chat log of the meeting.

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

  • There are no planned deployments to any channels this week, only restarts.

In Brief

  • Harold Linden – SLua:
    • Has been working on “some major garbage collector surgery” so  that memory usage is “properly less than Mono” and general memory profiling will be much better under SLua.
    • The garbage collector is good with creation and deletion of lots of small objects, with Harold noting:
SLua is weird in that most of the objects managed by the GC are built-in things that will never go away as long as the script is running, so I’ve changed the GC to ignore those entirely to make garbage collection much much faster … I’ve added some code to the GC that’s inspired by some work that was proposed for Lua proper that makes the GC get more aggressive if it thinks it might run out of memory soon .. Luckily GC is _incredibly_ cheap now so you could run it tens of thousands of times a second and it wouldn’t make much of a dent.
The event style will be similar to the EventEmitter API in JS `whatever.on(‘someevent’, callback)` with an alternative form that’s similar to how they’re currently specified … It’ll return a handle you can use to unsubscribe … I’m writing a pure-SLua implementation of the new event API first so people can comment on it before it’s solidified as production code, I’ve got a WIP version but I’m just sorting out some unsubscription bugs; the most notable ones, lists-in-lists and the ability to use dictionaries / objects.
    • He also indicated the the LSL → SLua compiler “will be open-source once we’ve start the beta phase on Agni so people can feel free to improve it. It’s much more approachable than the current compiler.”
    • Overall, the hope is to start beta testing of SLua on Agni in the next few months; ahead of that, Harold hopes to get an updated alpha to Aditi (the Beta grid) “to make sure events are sound”.
  • Leviathan provided an update on another issue he has been looking into – a bug that would sometimes cause objects to not show up on login. In providing his update on this work, he noted:
The repro case we had was delicate and would not always show up. In any case that work finally merged into the next server update. The problem was: we were clearing out the server’s “interest list” info on login that would cause the viewer to have to re-request static/cacheable data. With the change going forward we now do a better job of resetting your interest list when you arrive at your final position in the region (on login or teleport from far away). This causes the stuff to show up maybe just a second or two sooner, and less likelihood of some stuff being missing.
  • However, regarding the issue of issue of some people experiencing failures on logging-in (see my summary of the previous Leviathan Hour), Leviathan noted the fix he thought he had isn’t going to help. Instead, he was able to get a reliable repro which has helped better pin down the problem, which he described thus:
It turns out… if you login with lots of inventory folders at a lull in the traffic in SL you will be more likely to succeed. The system will happily handle 100k inventory folders in less than 10 seconds when the database and login.cgi servers are not under load. However, when things are busy the viewer might decide to timeout after 40 seconds. So… Signal has an idea for how to reduce the problem. It turns out you can configure Mysql server and clients to use gzip data transmission. This would happen between login.cgi and the database, while the login server is trying to compile the big chunk of data that it sends back to your viewer. Perhaps that idea will just help login.cgi and the database keep up and the problem may happen less frequently. That is the status of that.

He further noted another workaround would be to tweak the viewer’s timeout on that particular HTTPS request. This approach would allow TPVs make suitable changes and help their users get around the issue.

  • Restoring LindenWorld:
    • This has been a repeated request – to have LindenWorld (the Lab’s first attempt at a virtual environment) “brought back to the grid”, which has had pretty much the same answer with each request.
    • In essence – the LindenWorld code is very different to the Second Life code; it is incompatible with the current account system. While these problems could be fixed, they would require time and effort.
    • Harder to solve, as noted by Leviathan at this meeting, are matters of all the backend support: asset system, user database, spaceserver, etc.
    • All of this would divert developer resources from Second Life, it “would require an unknown amount of backburner work. Couldn’t be done as a first priority”.

Date of Next Meetings

  • Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, August 19th, 2025.
  • Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, August 26th, 2025.

† 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 #32: 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, August 7th, 2025. Please note that this is not a full transcript, but a summary of key topics.
Table of Contents

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

August 2025 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 August 6th, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. The official video is embedded at the end of this summary.

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 Marketplace team hope to release the mobile responsive marketplace search updates in the next week or so.
    • Note this updates is only for MP search, but there will be future Mobile updates for Marketplace in due course.
  • Time is being given to some general web property quality of life updates.
  • Work is continuing on some technical upgrades to critical internal services, defined as “not very glamorous but help keep things running smoothly”.
  • New bank pay-out options are due to be deployed “in the next week or so” for Brazil, Canada , France, Germany, Lithuania, Malaysia, the UK, the USA and Turkey.
  • A reiteration on the upcoming ending of the Character Designer programme (see: LL announce a pause in the current SL AI character designer project)
  • Kermit Linden will be leading Web User Group meetings for a while, and may be willing to host twice monthly meetings.
  • There is a “new offering” due to be announced in the next couple of months.

General Discussion

  • Several issues with maps.secondlife.com were raised, with the feedback that “some” are being worked on. Those raised were:
  • CasperVend integration: reported as “no official updates but we do want to take it on soon”.
    • Kali Linden noted that she has been working with Casper to develop product specifications for integrating some CasperTech features in to the Marketplace.
  • Marketplace variants / styles (i.e. multiple option for a product (such as different colours) in a single listing: the Marketplace team has yet to “get back” to this, and the request was for people to keep asking about it.
  • A request was made for a formal means for AI-generated content to be properly disclosed on MP listings. The broad response to this was content disclosure has generally been treated as being differed to the creator.
  • The group was asked that if they could create one web feature in SL, what would it be? Responses included:
    • A 3D SL Map.
    • Marketplace:
      • An ability to users to see a 3D preview of assets on the Marketplace.
      • Formal inclusion of item creation date (not listing creation date) and and the date on which the item was last updated for Marketplace listings. This has actually been looked into, and a plan to offer something “more stable” for creation date is in development, but last update date requires more work.
      • Filter options for removing specific creators / stores from Marketplace searches.  This is acknowledged as being a popular request, and something the Lab wants to look into.
      • Ability to search the MP by body type. This is something that has been specified internally, and so seen as as something that could be delivered in the future.
      • Multiple Marketplace wish lists / favourite lists. Again, this has received a lot of requests and is being thought about.
      • A request for multiple stores under one account. This was seen as a nice idea, but currently hard to implement.
    • Making the Land Use Fees page more intuitive, and perhaps include a way to calculate group bonus, etc.
  • The use of AI agents to assist in Marketplace searches was raised, in order to increase accuracy of results, etc.
    • There is nothing specific in the works for this.
    • Training AI tools for Marketplace search was seen as a major undertaking, simply because of the size of the MP, and that search could generally be improved a lot more directly without necessarily requiring the use of AI tools.
  • A discussion on people’s favourite / least favourite things in Second Life during the past week which flowed into a general conversation – refer to the video for details.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, September 3rd, 2025.

2025 week #32: SL SUG meeting

Posted on by Inara Pey
Caerleone Manor, May 2025 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, August 5th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) off-week meeting (which I’ll be referring to as the “SUG Leviathan Hour” going forward). These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. The notes were taken from my chat log of the meeting and Patera’s video, which is embedded at the end of this article – my thanks to her 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

  • On Tuesday, August 5th, the majority of the grid – SLS Main channel and RC channels – was updated with simulator update 2025-07-25.16512260888.
  • The purpose behind this en masse restart (the first in a long time) was to account for network changes intended to allow the Lab to spread simhost servers across across multiple AWS availability zones (not necessarily AWS global regions).
  • As a result, there will be no RC channel restarts on Wednesday, August 6th.

AI Summit and Tools

  • Week #31 saw a Linden Lab summit on brainstorming how to use AI moving forward and experimenting with possible uses.
  • It is possible this summit may have caused the announcement on the forthcoming suspension / closure of the Character Generation project also made public during that week (see: LI announce a pause in the current SL AI character designer project).
  • As a result, Leviathan Linden has been exploring how hard it would be to use AI assistants to replace the llmath code in the viewer with GLM (graphics library math), a more standard and faster library; however, this is turning out to be more of a challenge than anticipated, with “lots of changes”, requiring care with the work.

SLua Update

  • Signal Linden defined the next goal for SLua is to roll it out to some Agni (Main grid) regions in a limited fashion. However there is work to be completed ahead of this happening – such as the project being made production ready, and “real” documentation assembled, and the inclusion of a new API for event handling.
  • Such a partial deployment would obviously be for testing purposes, and would mean that SLua scripts would only run on regions with the server-side support.
  • It was suggested that those regions offering building / scripting courses are considered for inclusion in Main grid SLua testing.
  • There is a concern that due to the amount of CPU time consumed even when idling, there is a concern that all script time in a region with a large number of SLua scripts could be consumed by idling scripts. This lead to a discussion on scripts, loads, scheduling and script times.

In Brief

  • As well as experimenting with GLM, Leviathan Linden has also trying to get some old server projects merged and shipped:
    • A slight speedup of scene load at login (and maybe less frequent missing content on arrival).
    • Compressed data from login.cgi for faster download of initial login data (and maybe fewer failed logins for people with lots of inventory folders).
  • Leviathan also hopes soon start working on the WebRTC voice streaming system.
  • Rider Linden is hoping to complete the LSL land functionality work he’s been developing for the Moles. This will include a llSetParcelForSale function (name still to be finalised at the time of writing).
  • Rider is also looking to expand llRequestInventoryData. There have already be requests for it to encompass to get information like tint and alpha from PBR textures, and sound and animation length.
    • Additional suggestions include PBR properties like metallic/roughness; animation priority; last attach point/position/rotation for a worn item, and last rezzed/in-world position/rotation.
  • Pepper Linden:
On the Conductor front, it’s been moving through QA, and we anticipate an Aditi and Agni rollout within the next week. During the initial roll out, we’ll be keeping the packing mode the same, and later on, turning on our new ‘packing’ logic (how we place regions on servers).
Some minor notes on our Discord integration for community servers, I had promised that we’d get that out relatively soon but unfortunately Discord has rolled out a UI change to profiles that’s now hiding the connection details, so that’s something we’ll need to figure out and handle before releasing it.
  • Monty Linden is finishing-up work to move the experience KVP store.
  • Signal Linden has been working on multiple projects:
    • Putting together release plans for the next viewer release.
    • Coordinating with contributors on viewer Discord integration, apple silicon support and other projects.
    • Following up on the August 5th deployment, and preparing to put some simhosts into another AWS availability zone.
  • As noted in my week #31 TPVD meeting notes, Camera Constraints Bug (below -0 metre altitude) has been filed. This affects all v7 viewers – but Kirsten Lee (Kirsten’s Viewer) has filed a possible fix.
  • The mention of the llSetParcelForSale function resulted in a discussion on land rentals in the second half of the meeting – specifically around the use of texture  / signs at altitude advertising regions / parcel available for rent, when looking at the world map.

Date of Next Meetings

  • Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, August 19th, 2025.
  • Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, August 26th, 2025.

† 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.