Category: SL User Group Meetings

April 2026 SL Mobile User Group 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, April 30th 2026 Monthly Mobile User Group (MMUG) meeting. These notes should not be taken as a full transcript of the meeting, which was largely held in Voice, but rather a summary of the key topics discussed.

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

Core Mobile Team

The following are core (but not necessarily the only) members of the Mobile App team:

  • Bridie Linden; project manager.
  • Radix Linden: Mobile engineering manager. A new Linden, he has a strong Unity development background and his initial focus at LL is ensuring that Mobile is a smooth, seamless experience.
  • Adam Sinewave: lead developer.
  • Beanie Linden: QA.
  • Brad Linden: developer.
  • Stray Linden: back-end infrastructure engineer.

Resources

Current Releases

See notes below.

Recent Updates

  • A release was made on Tuesday, April 28th – Apple version number given as 0.1.163391.
    • At the time of writing, the update did not appear to be available for / had not fully propagated through the Google Play Store; my Android version had no update option from 0.3.1089, and any removal + reinstall still left me on 0.3.1089.
  • This release adds:
    • Display of, and interaction with, LLDialog support, allowing in-world object interaction dialogues to be displayed and used (e.g. pose menus for chairs / seats, etc.).
    • French UI support.
    • Improved Voice services – clearer microphone status; better spatial audio positioning; more consistent mute controls; user blocking / unblocking; removal of unnecessary prompts; clearer messaging when Voice or the device microphone is not available; users should be able to hear other users whether their avatar is sitting or flying, etc. (both of which could cause Voice to cut out for the seated / flying avatar); and to ensure privacy, the device microphone is off by default in the App when logging-in or re-logging.
  • Bug fixes:
    • Favourites (locations) no more duplication; no more to tap favourites to get them to respond; users new to Mobile can now Favourite a location.
    • Streaming audio: shows the correct status (e.g. only showing the streaming audio as muted when it is actually muted, rather than showing it as such when the audio is still playing), however, there still may be intermittent cases of this bug appearing, so if you encounter it, please file a report. Steaming audio should also be consistent across sessions (e.g. if it is turned off in one session, it should remain off in all subsequent sessions until turned on again, and vice-versa).
    • Multi-factor Authentication: no more need to input and authentication token every time the Mobile App is used.
  • Crash rates: crash rates have been greatly decreased. On Android they were above the thresholds set by Google, and have now been brought down to be well within them. There is more work to be done on iOS, but this is on the radar.

General Q&A

  • Chat, chat storage and chat history.
    • Work on “modernising” the chat UI is in progress, but is a long-term project.
    • Mobile has the capability to archive chat sessions – but only Mobile-to-Mobile (as indicated in past Mobile User Group summaries) and there have been requests to make this more cross-platform (e.g. combining Mobile archives with Desktop chat histories). Mobile retains chat histories on the server for up to 90 days – and a little longer locally.
    • The plan is to have more integration between the two, including similar storage times between the two, with full integration of chat histories between both Mobile and Desktop.
  • Camera movement: there are some conflicts between camera movement and Vstick tap / movement. This is something still to be addressed, although a degree of user interaction (such as how taps / touches are performed when attempting to move the camera) which can also cause the conflicts.
  • It was asked if there is / could be a setting to adjust the Vstick sensitivity (some someone isn’t always running everywhere). The reply was “kind-of but not quite”.
    • There are a couple of settings which can affect the Vstick.
    • However, the overall problem is that SL doesn’t have linear motion – you are walking or you are running; this results in a little too much use of the Vstick on Mobile triggers the avatar to switch from walking to running.
    • As such, there is no means to really make adjustments within the Vstick code; instead, the Mobile team is looking to make running a separate toggle button.
  • Streaks / Achievements: will be continuing for the foreseeable future.
    • LL would eventually like to get to incorporating Special Achievements into the App – a rotating series of “novel” things to do / discover in Second Life.
    • Some of these may include Linden Dollar rewards when built. If this is the case, Streaks could be phased out of the App.
  • The question on why more existing users haven’t come over to Mobile (asked during the March meeting) was asked again. Responses were pretty much the same as in the March meeting.

Date of Next Meeting

2026 week #18: SUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
China Buddha Caves, March 2026 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 28th, 2026 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. They were taken from the video recording by Pantera, embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks to Pantera for providing it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas is held every other Tuesday at 12:00 noon, SLT (holidays, etc., allowing), per the Second Life Public Calendar.
  • The “SUG Leviathan Hour” meetings are held on the Tuesdays which do not have a formal SUG meeting, and are chaired by Leviathan Linden. They are more brainstorming / general discussion sessions.
  • Meetings are held in text in-world, at this location.

Simulator Deployments

  • No deployments planned for the week, although all server channels will be restarted. The pause is to allow for more adjustments to be made to WebRTC prior to it going grid-wide.
  • There will be a new simulator update  – called Kumquat – which will contain the necessary infrastructure updates for the above, and which will be deployed ahead of the planned next simulator release (Loganberry).

In Brief

  • LL have added a new cap that delivers pre-generated configuration files for the Lua definitions and the viewer and the VS code plug-in are being updated to support this. These updates will allow for the removal all the language definition munging from the plug-in itself.
  • Leviathan Linden:
    • Has been working on updates related to the new Kumquat simulator update and “some related back-end services.
    • Had no progress to report on for game_control, and is hoping to get back to it soon.
  • Harold Linden (SLua):
    • Has been bundling up all the scripting-related definitions in a sensible way so they can be served.
    • Has also been working to complete the prim params builder RFC. He views this work as complete and warns that those will any input should “speak now or forever hold your peace”, as he will shortly start implementing it.
    • Harold noted that the prim params does it allow to set ‘nil’ or not provide a value or something else that would do “keep current” behaviour; it is strictly a wrapper around SetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast. He noted that requested work such at this would require an overhaul of SetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast.
    • The above formed the basis for a discussion through the meeting.

General Discussion

Please refer to the video below as well.

  • The request for llGetRegionWorldMapTile was raised. Apparently, Brad Linden has indicated implementation could be more complicated, suggesting LL should set up a web API that provides the map tile textures and make it possible for people to enable web on a prim for trusted domains.
    • The above led to a discussion on map tiles and options around the basic idea contained in within the feature request – such as making map tile textures function in a similar manner to Bakes on Mesh (using UUIDs – although the scale of this when using thousands of regions could be difficult / complicated).
    • This discussion went on through most of the meeting – please refer to the video below. The most positive idea given the amount of suggestions / confusion over map tiles, was for a design document to be put forward to allow focused discussion.
  • There was a report of issues with Vivox Voice service repeatedly failing at Fantasy Faire – notably within the Lost Pages region, home to the Literature, Film and Theatre festivals.
    • The Voice teams indicated they were not aware of any specific instability issue with Vivox – with the caveat the focus has been on WebRTC.
  • The question was if there are any plans to re-allow residents to upload animations with animation constraints (apparently turned off when it was found that there was no validation for chain length, which could cause a null pointer error if it goes too high up the skeleton). It was felt this has useful constraints such as “GROUND” which allow the feet to automatically IK feet to the ground, reducing the issue of an avatar  floating off the ground on un-even surfaces.
    • Currently, there are no plans in this direction at present.

Date of Next Meetings

  • Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, May 5th 2026.
  • Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, May 12th, 2026.

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

2026 week #17: SL CCUG meeting summary

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

  • My chat log and audio recording  of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting of Thursday, April 23rd, 2026.
  • Please note that this is not a full transcript of the meeting 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 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  – One-Click Installer = 26.1.1.23806384790 – April 10 – No change.
  • Second Life Release Candidate (RC) viewer: Flat UI – 26.2.0.24254827122, April 15 -“flat” UI and font update.
  • Second Life Lua Editor Alpha viewer 26.1.0.21525310258, February 12.

Viewer Notes

Viewer 2026.02

  • 2026.02 remains the current Release Candidate viewer (next in line for promotion to release status).
  • This viewer will likely have a further RC update prior to any promotion. This update should result in much sharper text rendering within the UI.

Viewer 2026.03

  • LL are working on implementing “whatever performance wins that we can”.
  • This includes “batching” changes – that is, taking multiple objects within a scene and rendering them in a single pass, rather than multiple passes.
    • This work was initially undertaken for what is called the “simple draw pool”, which had batching logic added some time ago, but the work was never extended to the Blinn-Phong or PBR draw pools, and this is now being done.
    • The hope is that this change should help lower specification computers render scenes more comfortably. 

General Viewer Notes

  • Work is currently stalled on the Graphics Care Package (GCP) viewer given the focus on performance improvements for 2026.03. However, work should resume on the graphic improvements and updates for this viewer soon.
  • Given the above, it is still anticipated that the Lua Editor viewer (which is currently available as a project viewer) will go to RC status and then release ahead of the GCP viewer.

WebRTC Deployment

  • The current deployment of WebRTC has hit a few bumps, but the Lab is hopefully the deployment will be completed in “the next two weeks”, and certainly before SL23B.
  • The lack of voice attenuation over distances less than 60 metres (allowing personal conversations to be heard over a large distance) will likely not be addressed prior to WebRTC deployment is complete, and will be looked at afterwards – although it was also noted that attenuation under WebRTC will be different to Vivox.

General Discussions

  • Question: will there will be further updates to Animesh, particularly with regards to having to click on them without having to put a transparent prim around them for interactions?
    • Short answer: the need to click is intentional, and currently, there is no work on Animesh any time soon.
  • Question: will the one-click installer process also be applied to alpha and beta/release candidate viewers, or will these have their own install options?
    • LL is looking at “future options to make opting-in to alphas and betas have a lot less friction”, but discussions a re ongoing and not ready to be announced.
    • Alpha and beta/release candidate viewers will retain their own cohorts within github, allowing people who opt to use them from the Alternate Viewers page to continue to be opted-in to updates to those viewers as they are made available.
    • The ability to select and download a viewer from the Alternate Viewers page will continue.
  • Aside from general text chat on matters such as Animesh (between users) and on Fantasy Faire, this was a quiet meeting, and as such was brought to a close after some 30 minutes.

Next Meeting

Linden Lab announces Project Zero to end

Posted on by Inara Pey
via Linden Lab

On Tuesday April 21st, 2026, Linden Lab announced it is ending support for Project Zero, the viewer-in-a-browser application launched just 14 months ago, and which I was able to co-announce through this blog following a Zoom meeting between myself and Brad Oberwager and Philip Rosedale.

The project, which saw the viewer streamed to a person’s web browser from Amazon AWS servers remained in something of a beta state throughout its lifespan, initially overseen by Philip Rosedale and then (the now Lab-departed) Sntax Linden, with a dedicated User Group meeting being formed around it (although meetings ceased in the latter half of 2025). It also gained much interest among existing users, despite it being largely aimed at incoming new users, leaving access to it limited for established SL users.

The revised Avatar Picker for Project Zero saw the function moved out of the viewer window and displayed within the browser tab, leaving the viewer window unencumbered. This approach was ported to the SL Mobile App.

The project did see some interesting development – such as the updated Avatar Picker mechanism, which was also ported to the SL Mobile App, and at the time of its launch at the start of 2025 and through the initial six or so months of its development, there were plans to undertake a gradual rebuilding of the viewer UI as presented through a browser, using modern tools such as HTML5 and React. To further interest in streaming the viewer through a web browser, Linden Lab also worked with the Firestorm team to take a version of the latter’s viewer and present that as a streaming service as well – although this experiment was ultimately short-lived.

By September 2025, the Lab was indicating that between them, Project Zero (using the official viewer) and the SL Mobile App had lead to a “10x” increase in the numbers of people trying out Second Life when compared to the more traditional requirement to sign-up and then download the viewer (the latter having long been a break-point for sign-ups, with many would-be users turning away from the platform rather than downloading and installing the viewer on their computers). However, not long after this update, things began to go quiet on the Project Zero front.

As a part of the new user sign-up, those directed towards using Project Zero, rather than to having to download and install the viewer, were directed to a revised splash screen comprising a static backdrop and a “Polaroid snapshots” slide show whilst they were connected to a Project Zero streaming server

With the curtailment of the Project Zero User Group meetings and, later, the departure of Sntax Linden from Linden Lab, the Project as a whole seemed to go dark, with little in the way of direct news being given through any User Group meetings. As such, the announcement that the project is now being ended comes as both a surprise (given the enthusiasm for it evidenced by Linden Lab in 2025) and a non-surprise (lack of news / updates on the project through late 2025 and the start of 2026 suggesting it was perhaps withering on the vine).

The announcement blog post offers little in the way as to why Project Zero is being halted, other than the decision being based on both “feedback” and what the Lab has “learned” in running the project, and “insights gained from Project Zero will directly inform improvements” to both the Desktop viewer and the SL Mobile App. However, the beneficial nature of the project in circumventing the need to download and install the viewer is acknowledged.

As it stands, support for Project Zero will end on Friday, April 24th at 17:00 SLT.

Further:

  • If you have remaining paid time associated with Project Zero, you are encouraged to use it before the [project is shuttered – access allowing, given the potentially limited number of slots at any given time.
  • If you have any unused time on Project Zero after April 24th, please file a support ticket for a refund (which will be processed up to 30 days after the ticket is received).
  • Exactly “what’s next” isn’t actually indicated in the official blog post (despite the post’s title), other than

Note that the ending of Project Zero does not affect either the desktop viewer or the ongoing development on the SL Mobile App, which will “continue to operate as usual”.

Related Links

2026 week #16: SL Open Source (TPVD) meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Hippotropolis Theatre: home of the OSD/TPVD meeting
The following notes were taken from:

  • My chat log of the Open-Source Developer (OSD) meeting held on Friday, April 17th, 2026, together with my chat log of that meeting.
  • Pantera’s video of the meeting (embedded at the end of this article) – my thanks to her for providing it.
Table of Contents

Meeting Purpose

  • The OSD meeting is a combining of the former Third Party Viewer Developer meeting and the Open Source Development meeting. 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  – One-Click Installer = 26.1.1.23806384790 – April 10 – NEW.
  • Second Life Release Candidate (RC) viewer: Flat UI – 26.2.0.24254827122, April 15 -“flat” UI and font update – NEW.
  • Second Life Project Viewers:

26.2.0 – “Flat UI”

  • Now at RC status, per the Above list.
  • More updates to be made to this prior to promotion.
    • LL is working through some font kerning problems that were seemingly made much more obvious with the new font choice.
    • It was also noticed that the official viewer has been rendering fonts ever so slightly different from FS – which kicked off the above investigation.

26.3.0 – Graphics Care Package

  • The is the viewer previously known as the SL Visual Polish (SLVP) viewer.
  • The performance tweak has been ported over, and the team is now looking at additional performance work.
    • Async inventory is being parted out into easier to review chunks.
    • LL is also looking at some CPU and GPU wins overall – Geenz Linden is working on getting texture batching working for the PBR and Blinn-Phong paths. There is potentially more work on these lines, and these will likely be incorporated prior to passing the viewer to QA.

Lua Viewer

  • The Lua Alpha update that it had been hoped would surface around the start of April is now being aimed for some time in week #17.
  • The current lean at the Lab is to move this viewer through to RC status and then release before the 26.3.0 GCP viewer, but no firm decision has been made.
  • Again, this viewer will also be the first new Linux release from LL.
  • As a reminder: LL have officially dropped “SLua” (“SL Lua”) and just going with “Lua”.

WebRTC Deployment

  • The WebRTC deployment is still underway. No firm end-date as yet, although it should now be across all simulator RC channels.
  • Anyone experiencing Voice issues with WebRTC is asked to file a bug report.

General Discussion

  • The vcpkg updates for the viewer build process will not be surfacing until “after Lua at the very least”.
    • Geenz estimates it will likely not emerge until late summer, due to dependencies on work being completed vis. KDU and the removal of the Havok sub-libraries from the viewer.
    • In terms of the latter: VHACD will replace the convex decomposition for mesh upload, and server-generated path-finding mesh will replace the Havok path-finding mesh loaded by the viewer for visualisation.
    • A major reason for removing the Havok sub-licences is the impact they have on TPVs, who have to go through the process of obtaining and signing sub-licence agreements via LL, which complicates the open-source environment.
    • In this respect, if LL had a truly open-source replacement for KDU on the graphics side, they would look to make similar moves there as well.
  • Physics shapes and why and what the viewer can do with them became a topic for conversation at around the half-way point in the meeting, and this continued for around 10 minutes.
  • During the above there was a general discussion on the mesh uploader and clarifying LOD numbers for those coming into mesh creation.
  • A question was asked on interpreting section 8 part of the Unauthorized Uses of Linden Lab’s Trademarks policy – a question perhaps best dealt with via a support Support Ticket.
  • A request was made for TPVs to receive stats reports once more (use, crash rates, etc). Geenz noted in reply:
Some of that is a bit of a black box to us as far as your specific crash rates, as for viewer usage we’re bottlenecked by a single person is responsible for that so it doesn’t always get done. I’ve been hoping to get a more automatic solution for this for a while, but our metrics folks have been booked up with other things for a good bit now.
  • The question was asked about the possibility of viewer-side Lua for building custom UIs to replace some of the HUD systems people use, and whether work on this is still moving forward. Geenz repliedwith:
That’s been on the shelf for a while. Dunno if or when we’re gonna bring that one back – I think what we’d need to really look at bringing that back with a significant amount of interest is gonna be how people would want to use [it]. There’s a lot of criteria that goes into making product level decisions like that, and with the viewer side Lua stuff it was increasingly being looked at something for internal use than something like a content feature.
  • The question was asked if the puppetry project was once and for all “dead”, to which Genenz again replied:
Lots of things were learned from that project, but I wouldn’t say it’s dead necessarily. Just not a priority. There’s a lot of things that would need to happen for puppetry, and I think it’s really increasingly more of a “when we need <x> we’ll work on that part of it” sort of thing. Because like joint streaming is just generally kind of useful, but we don’t have an immediate need for it. But who knows – maybe some day. Hell, if there’s any interest in having a proper poser viewer-side that ticks all of the privacy and consent boxes that might be a potential path. But we’re nowhere near there yet.

Next Meeting

2026 week #16: SUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
Pususaari – Where spring feels gentle, February 2026 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, April 14th, 2026 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. They were taken from the video recording by Pantera, embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks to Pantera for providing it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas is held every other Tuesday at 12:00 noon, SLT (holidays, etc., allowing), per the Second Life Public Calendar.
  • The “SUG Leviathan Hour” meetings are held on the Tuesdays which do not have a formal SUG meeting, and are chaired by Leviathan Linden. They are more brainstorming / general discussion sessions.
  • Meetings are held in text in-world, at this location.

Simulator Deployments

  • No SLS Main channel deployments for the week, but the channel was restarted.
  • The WebRTC deployment will be expanded to Magnum, finally completing its deployment across all RC channels.
  • The next simulator update – Loganberry – will include (among other thinks) the performance improvement work Leviathan has been working on and the fix for avatars remaining a cloud Leviathan has also developed (which addresses causes of clouding on the simulator – viewer-side clouding is not touched).

In Brief

  • Leviathan Linden:
    • Has been ” removing use of Tilia (payments system) from our code.” Exactly what this means is unclear, given the use of the Tilia wallet and close ties between LL and Thunes, Tilla’s owners.
    • He has also spent a little bit of time trying to incorporate some suggested code changes for the game_controller code, as suggested by a user, but upon testing he found something isn’t working right, so some investigation is required.
  • Rider Linden has been working on viewer code to support the new language definition cap.
  • Monty Linden has been working with the Firestorm team on some of the TeleportFinish failure modes. One set of fixes, involving viewers simply walking away from the HTTP connection, is getting improvements so one subset of viewer-side TP/RC issues will be improved.
    • Kyle Linden noted that the SL 26.2 Flat UI Beta (releasing soon) also has a viewer-side TP disconnect fix.
  • Harold Linden (SLua):
    • There are a number of crash fixes and minor correctness fixes out on the Aditi (the beta grid), which should be coming to the Lua region on the main grid “soonish”.
    • As Rider mentioned, the scripting language definitions are going to be accessible to the viewer now, so you can always pull down the correct type definitions for whatever region you’re currently on.
    • Harold is additionally generalising his work for making llSetPrimitiveParams less annoying to use. Essentially it’ll be a fluent API where you can batch up prim params commands as you would do currently, but you do it through function calls rather than manually adding a bunch of stuff to a list.
  • Kyle Linden indicated there will be a “big push” on Lua documentation in the upcoming week(s).

General Discussion

Please refer to the video below as well.

  • It has been again reported that large linksets of prims or meshes that have alpha scripting (LSL and / or Lua) against Blinn Phong materials (apparently PBR is reported as working as expected) for certain parts of that linkset are failing to change alpha state or are slow to change. Copies of suitable linksets / a formal bug report on this were requested.
    • This sparked something of a discussion on probable causes, length of time the bug has been around, means to repo, etc., running through the mid-point of the meeting through to pretty much the end.
    • As a part of the discussion llSetLinkGLTFOverrides fails to clear alpha override was raised. No updates were given.
  • A WebRTC question was asked: the current settings seem to be 60m range, no distance attenuation. Is that the only option available?
    • Response: there should be distance attenuation. The curve is different than Vivox, though. If you’re not experiencing any distance attenuation, bug fixes are required with more details so LL can try to replicate what you’re doing.

Date of Next Meetings

  • Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, April 21st 2026.
  • Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, April 28th, 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.