Category: Simulator User Group

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, March 3ed, 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

• Not deployments are planned for the week, channels will be restarted.
• It had been planned to slot the initial deployment of WebRTC  between the 2026.02  Kiwi update (currently grid-wide), and the next formal RC release 2026.03 Loganberry. However a last-minute issue was discovered, delaying WebRTC whilst it is fixed.
• The release to follow Loganberry will be 2026.04 Key Lime).

WebRTC Deployment

• As noted above, the WebRTC deployment has been delayed, primarily for a couple of reasons:
  • LL is addressing some server issues that resulted in very occasional ‘drop from voice’ problems.
  • The WebRTC team is also digesting feedback from the recent Firestorm Town Hall in which firestorm users who have not moved away from a version 6.x (pre-PBR) version of Firestorm to a PBR-enabled version.
• It is hoped the delay will not be longer than a week or so, so as to allow it to commence in March, but an update on this will be made soon.

In Brief

• Rider Linden has just finished a tricky bit of infrastructure work and is now focusing on some the simulator aspects of the SLua project, including changes for being able to select a default script. A side effect of that is the ability for a viewer to specify a template script on create without the tricky copy stuff that the viewer was doing for that.
• Leviathan Linden:
  • Has just finished fixing the “can’t save avatar action remap” problem with game_control but has not pushed the changes to a viewer repo as he working to clean the code up and produce documentation.
  • He regards this particular work as useful as it has reminded him of what remains to be done for game-control. In particular, remapping of controller buttons is not yet enabled in the preferences UI, although there should be work to support that already done under the hood.
  • He has not made any progress on Henri Beauchamp’s idea for solving the “perpetually cloudy avatar problem” see previously SUG summaries). It is coded on the server,  but he hadn’t been able to test it.
  • His next project is to audit how some “reliable” UDP messages are sent between viewer and server. There is a possibility he can fix some of the login/teleport/region-crossing connection failures with some work there. One of the message pairs to be looked at are CompleteAgentMovement/AgentMovementComplete. Dropping these is the source of quite a few B&W screens every day.
• Monty Linden has been:
  • Working on meta problems, such as identifying Voice issues.
  • Talking to Brad Linden about making it easier to include logs in reports generated in the viewer.

General Discussion

Please refer to the video below as well.

• An extensive discussion on llSetAgentRot and how it works and how it and avatar rotation / camera rotation/movement might be improved.
• A short discussion on text-to-speech and how favourable (or not) it might be, based off of this feature request.
  • It was noted that transcription – speech to text – is already being experimented with using WebRTC.
• Regio  Crossings:
  • It is being reported that for the last week or so, region crossings – physical vehicle or teleport – have been getting worse.
  • In addition, it is being claimed that, after an extended period of time in a region, people are finding their avatars being “soft disconnected” from the simulators: they can still move around and communicate within the region, by any attempt to move out of it results in a complete disconnection – and allegedly a full disconnect can occur just by rezzing / deleting an object or changing outfits.
  • There have been no apparent changes to the simulator code that would account for a worsening of region crossings, and it’s not entirely clear how widespread the issues are.
  • However, Monty linden has requested logs from anyone encountering these issues.
  • This discussion took up the latter half of the meeting (and beyond the end of the meeting), mixed in part with the rotation discussion noted above,
• A discussion on releasing SLua grid-wide without complete documentation, or waiting until a full set of documentation is ready for what is being released, and then updated as code updates are made.

Date of Next Meetings

• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, March 10th, 2026.
• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, March 17th, 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.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, February 17th, 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

• Tuesday, February 17th, 2026:  the SLS Main channel simhosts were restarted and updated to simulator release 2026.02 (Kiwi). This includes:
  • LL’s annual server certification changes – some outstanding changes are required to Aditi (the Beta grid), Agni is fully up-to-date.
  • “PERMISSION_PRIVILEGED_LAND_ACCESS”, allowing the llSetParcelForSale function to be used (and potentially other parcel settings in the future), but will require a viewer-side update in order to be accessed.
  • A bug fix to llTransferOwnership that was stripping out items that it shouldn’t have.
• On Wednesday February 18th, all simhosts on the RC channels should be restarted without any updates.
• The next simulator release is now officially 2026.03 – Loganberry; no details are currently unavailable.

In Brief

Please also refer to the video, below.

• Rider Linden is currently engaged on some under the hood backlog fixes that have been needed for quite a while.
• Rider also raised two “how much will this break?” questions:
  • Right now LL’s LSL Regex operates on 8 bit characters. A bug report has been submitted about it not supporting unicode. So the question is: what if LL switched to using unicode under the hood. Another option on that would be to add a flag at the end (like “/i”) that would indicate it should unicode? The favour shown at the meeting was an under-the-hood unicode change although concerns was raised over the potential for implement work-arounds to the issue which might be in widespread use.
  • The second question was on change notification on texture changes – and the fact that LL aren’t sending them; the notifications are available on a scripted texture change, but are not being fired. This discussion got mixed in with  discussion on “Second Life II” (which Sansar sort-of wasn’t, although also kind-of was) please refer to the latter half of the meeting for details.
• Leviathan Linden:
  • Is working on “some final changes to my workaround for the “cannot change mesh face” problem. After code review some changes were determined to be necessary.
  • He has also implemented a submission from Henri Beauchamp (Cool VL Viewer) to try to resolve the issue of “perpetually cloudy avatars” by resending avatar attachment info whenever the viewer requests avatar textures. This still requires further refinement and addition to a simulator update, but it is progressing.
  • A bug report about too many listen events when creating similar llListen() filters; this is now seen as a bug and a fix from Leviathan will be a part of 2026.03 Loganberry.
  • Leviathan has also received a bug report against the game-control viewer pre-release: custom key (button?) mappings are not being saved. He has not as yet been able to dig into it, but wanted people to know it is on his radar.
• Harold Linden (SLua):
  • Has added a couple of things: `table.append()` and `table.extend()` so that it’s much less annoying to work with lists of rules as is typical in existing functions like set primitive params/. This will be deployed in an upcoming TBD simulator update, as it still needs a couple of “tweaks”.
  • Harold is also working on a fix for `string.gsub()` and `table.sort()` and friends killing your script if they run too long.
  • Various questions throughout the meeting on SLua – please refer to the video.
• SLua Resources (as it was asked during the meeting):
  • 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).
• The subject of region crossings causing issues and the need for them to be a “top priority” for “fixes”.
  • Harold Linden has done some work on some work to improve the testing situation there. Now that LL has codified how it (mis)behaves, he hopes LL can define a path for the correct behaviour while ensuring fixes don’t break existing viewers that rely on the broken behaviour
• Roxie Linden repeated her update that WebRTC is tentatively targeting a March deployment for WebRTC. When it happens, it will be a typical server rollout (week one: limited simulator RC channel deployment; week 2: deployment to all remaining simulator RC channels; week three deployment to the rest of Agni). However, if anything comes up, one or more stages of deployment may be delayed for fixes.
• Another viewer side-track for a server meeting, this time questioning the arrived of the “visual polish” viewer with SSR updates, something covered at the Content Creation User Group (attended by the individual raising the question at this meeting).
• I had to depart the meeting early; please refer to Pantera’s video (blow) for the final 20 minutes.

Date of Next Meetings

• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, February 24th, 2026.
• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, March 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.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, February 10th, 2026 Simulator User Group (SUG) off-week meeting (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 Pantera’s video is embedded at the end of this article – my thanks to her, as always, for recording and 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.

Mesh Face Count Mismatch Bug

• This is a long-term bug whereby some mesh objects fail to accept a texture change on some faces. The texture change shows up on the viewer, but if you take to inventory or relog the texture change vanishes.
• The problem appears to require changes on both on the simulator side and on the viewer.
• Leviathan describes the bug a a form of protocol bug introduced by an old asset-upload-pipeline bug, which he believes has been complicated by a viewer-side bug.
• In short:
  • LL pack texture data using a variable-length scheme, depending on whether all faces are the same or there are differences, but the actual number of faces is not encoded; instead the simulator has been relying the number of faces being implicit to the “VolumeParams” of a prim (this approach pre-dating mesh).
  • LL then introduced meshes with up to 8 texture faces.
  • This, combined with a potential bug in the asset upload pipeline which caused the number of faces in the asset to be wrong, caused errors on the server side of things.
  • A fix for the upload problem was implemented, but the the issue persists for mesh objects uploaded prior to any fix for uploads being applied.
• Leviathan has a fix for the simulator issue(essentially a means to encode the number of faces into the legacy texture encoding without breaking protocol and without eating many bytes).
• However, in testing it, he found a viewer-side issue in loading and updating / recording mesh face textures data. He’s still working on this issue, but believes the viewer and server will have to have an updated protocol interpretation so they can communicate how many faces they think there are in an object. the data will live in the new object created by making any changes to a rezzed item.
• He noted that such a fix might also correct the issue of LSL not seeing the right number of faces.
• This discussion also involved some confusion over sculpties and their  total number of faces, and the actual total number of faces (8 or 9 – it’s 8 hard-coded on the simulator).

In Brief

• Leviathan has a fix for the problem whereby when sometimes rezzing an object on a mesh surface will fail and supply an incorrect or misleading message (e.g. not having parcel rez rights or something). See: FIRE-15429 and Beq Janus’ blog Coming to Firestorm soon… A couple of new features for builders and non-builders alike. It is currently in a Pull Request.
• There are no updates on the status of the game_control work,  and the pre-release of the game-control viewer remains unchanged.
  • Moving this project forward is dependent on the progress of the new SL Linux viewer build.
  • The next steps are to make some UI adjustments and identify any further changes required to get the code through QA for release.
  • As a reminder, game_control provides some keyboard mapping options from the existing avatar control actions:
    move forward, strafe, turn, jump, fly, and (maybe) crouch. It doesn’t currently support “all the keys” input.
  • The reason for game_control is to provide LSL scripts access to game controller input. But how the controller interacts with avatar-control, fly-cam, and keyboard mapping complicated things.
  • There was talk during the early days of the project the game_control could be made to handle MIDI inputs; however this is currently not supported.
  • This led to an extended discussion on key mapping options.
• Leviathan expressed an interest in turning to support the current drivers for the Connexion 3D Mouse devices (e.g. SpaceNavigator, etc.), given the current working driver for SpaceNavigator is badly out-of-date, and more recent versions. However, this is an interest, not a commitment to actually do so.

Date of Next Meetings

• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, February 17th, 2026.
• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, February 24th, 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.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, February 3rd, 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

• Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026:  the SLS Main channel simhosts were restarted without any deployments.
• Wednesday, February 4th, 2026:
  • Simulator release 2026.01 (Kiwi) should be deployed to the BlueSteel and preflight RC channels.
  • All remaining Release Candidate channels will be restarted without any deployment.
  • A new server-side SLua update will be deployed to the SLua Beta regions. This will support a new permission “PERMISSION_PRIVILEGED_LAND_ACCESS”, allowing the llSetParcelForSale function to be used (and potentially other parcel settings in the future), but will require a viewer-side SLua update.
• 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.

In Brief

Please also refer to the video, below.

• Leviathan Linden had two announcements concerning his current work:
  1. He has a proposed resolution for the false error report when failed rez on mesh, whereby an attempt to rez from inventory onto some mesh surfaces result in a failure to rez and incorrect error message.
     • He describes the resolution as “a workaround hail mary” rather than an outright fix: if the first attempt fails, the serve will try again try again using the bounding box of the mesh object. See: also: Why can’t I rez on my mesh table/floor/bed in Coming to Firestorm soon… A couple of new features for builders and non-builders alike.
     • He further noted that during the rezzing request to the simulator, the viewer supplies a line segment: ray_start and ray_end, and it is possible that ray_start and ray_end might be insufficient to actually hit the mesh object’s collision shape when that shape is different from its visible shape.
     • The led to an on-going discussion in the meeting.
  2. He has also started a further look into issue #3469, comment 2819987122, whereby some uploaded assets have the incorrect number of faces on the server, and trying to set the textures on those faces appears to work on the viewer but a) if the object is cloned, the new clone doesn’t have the texture changes and / or b) the original object will revert to a pre-texture change state at a later date. He has an idea for a possible fix, but is not sure it will work, so wishes to test the idea before passing further comment.
• Monty Linden indicated the annual simhost certification work is still in progress. He further noted:
  • The Kiwi release includes an update which should be highly compatible with the current certificates. But if anyone who has experienced issues with past certification updates should test on the Preflight or BlueSteel RC channels following the Wednesday deployment.
  • Current relevant expiration dates are: Agni – 23:59:59 GMT on March 13th, 2026; Aditi – 23:59:59 GMT on February 28th, 2026.
  • As per the last formal SUG meeting, he hopes to automate the recertification later in 2026, and the certification process will change slightly at that time.
• Harold Linden has been “working on a lot of things surrounding SLua but not specifically SLua itself. These include:
  • Refactoring  the definitions repo where all LSL constants and functions and how they behave are documented, because the repo was becoming unwieldy. He passed on thanks to all those who have helped contribute to the repo.
  • Further work on the `require()` RFC. The new release that’s coming out won’t have any new features, but the release after that should have `table.append()` and `table.extend()`, and _maybe_ some of the SetPrimParam list-building wrappers., adding: “Basically, if you’ve noticed how annoying it is to build list for setprimparams, it’ll be much better with these changes. Hopefully.”
• Roxie Linden gave an overview of recent WebRTC updates:
  • Most WebRTC improvements are going into the voice servers, so the simulators shouldn’t have and effect on WebRTC quality.
  • LL is working on spatialization improvements, which might be released as soon as this week.
  • The latest updates to the WebRTC server appear to have fixed the majority of crash issues.
  • March remains the tentative release month for grid-wide WebRTC, the the sawp-over occurring as a part of the normal simulator deployment cycles.
• A broad discussion on scripted capabilities (e.g. giving inventory to attachments (possible) and deleting inventory from attachments (not possible); setting script pin from setlinkprimparams (on Rider’s personal roadmap); adding inventory operations for other prims in a linkset.
• General disucasions:
  • SLua: it has (TimeProviderFactory.new():build()):askForTime() – equivalents to NUX time.now) a discussion on the SLua editor and its capabilities, SLua and HTTP.
  • LL is not currently carrying out any keyframe motion (KFM) work. This expanded into a general discussion on ideas for KFM work.
  • Ideas for better LOD performance.

Date of Next Meetings

• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, February 10th, 2026.
• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, February 17th, 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.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, January 2th, 2026 Simulator User Group (SUG) off-week meeting (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 Pantera’s video is embedded at the end of this article – my thanks to her, as always, for recording and 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

• There were no planned deployments for the SLS Main Channel.
• Wednesday, January 28th might see the next simulator update 2026.01 (Kiwi) to one or more simulator RC channels. However, this is an assumption given the status of the release last week, and no confirmation was given at this meeting.

Game Control Update

• Leviathan Linden has cut a pre-release of the new game-control viewer, thanks to work by Rye of the Alchemy Viewer.
• If anyone tests on Linux or MacOS, Leviathan would love to have direct feedback on success/failure, either via the SUG meetings or via IM in-world.
  • In this he noted that “MacOS does some silly proprietary checks and only supports a small set of officially sanctioned controllers” and LL are limited to whatever Apple support, as otherwise the viewer doesn’t even see see hardware detection events ton Mac OS.
• He also noted that one feature of game-control is you can allow normal avatar control inputs (either from keyboard or the UI widgets) to be interpreted as game-control events that get sent to the server. But – that mode doesn’t provide access to all the possible buttons that a game controller has: just a few of the buttons, because the game-control feature is a work in progress (WIP) and he hasn’t as yet worked out how best to map everything.

Game_Control Resources

• Game control – Second Life Wiki.

SLua Mini-Update

• General appreciation for the work Harold Linden has put into the project, and requests at LL keep him on for the future – although he has indicated he is happy working as a contractor.
• No news on when the latest simulator-side updates to SLua will see the light of day, but they are not in the upcoming 2026.01 (“Kiwi”) release. They Might make the cut for the follow-on 202602 (“Loganberry”) update.
• The SLua beta viewer is progressing, and will progress to release status in due course.

SLua Resources

• The nine beta test regions are centred on SLua Beta Void (mind the water!).
• Official blog post on Slua.
• 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

• Leviathan gave insight into some of his work remit, and those of other members of the simulator engineering team:
  •  Some of his work is visible to residents, but he also work on internal problems: things that are causing headaches for other developers, the support team, etc.
  • Currently, he working on an issue whereby simulator states (simstates) sometimes fail to save. These appear to be related to LL’s use of a new compression scheme for simstates: zstd. This should offer faster compression/decompression and smaller packages. However, it is reporting failures every once in a while. These, Leviathan believes, appear to occur during simulator rolls. He’s still investigating this.
  • Like other members of the simulator engineering team, he is on pager duty for the week. This occurs once every four weeks, and when on pager duty, the team member is typically working on maintenance issues: bugs and such.
• In addition, Leviathan is continuing to investigate / fact-find about the issue whereby when sometimes rezzing an object on a mesh surface will fail and supply an incorrect or misleading message (e.g. not having parcel rez rights or something).
  • Firestorm has a bug post on this – FIRE-15429.
  • Beq Janus also provided a blog post offering a workaround for the issue  see  Why can’t I rez on my mesh table/floor/bed in Coming to Firestorm soon… A couple of new features for builders and non-builders alike.
  • Leviathan suspects the problem has something to do with a failure of the viewer to supply info the server needs, so Leviathan is attempting to try to learn more and find out where it needs to be fixed.
• No work has been started on addressing the wrong-number-of-faces-on-old-mesh-uploads problem yet. However, Leviathan hopes that if he can find time to start looking at this again.
• The search for a new Senior Vice President of Engineering is on-going, and the Lab is “see great candidates”.
• There is a reported workaround for avatars becoming stuck on a region crossings when riding a vehicle:
  • It appears possible to escape from the broken state after a failed region crossing by deleting the sit target, forcing the simulator to recompute what’s sitting on what, and seems to unjam left-behind avatars. If this works, they should be able to walk to the vehicle and re-sit (or RLV potentially used for a re-sit, if available.
  • The workaround is described as “a horrible hack”, but appears to be the best temporary “solution”.
  • Leviathan indicated he will look at it as well.
• A general discussion on the missing SIT_FLAG_INVISIBLE, which also included llSetLinkSitFlags, a working SETMASS() flag – and its workaround and avatar bounding boxes. Please refer to the video for details.
  • The request for a working llSetMass() script method was being requested by some race bicycle creators who wanted to eliminate some variance in vehicle performance.
  • The above rolled into more general discussions and WIBNIs (“wouldn’t it be nice ifs”).
• General discussions on the discrepancy between avatar height and prim height as reported on most viewers and avatar movement (e.g. introducing mousewalking to the official viewer) – again, please refer to the video.
• From comments passed at the end of the meeting, it would appear that the work on implementing RLVa into the official viewer, initiated by Kitty Barnett and Vir Linden (prior to his departure from the Lab) may have been stalled.
• It was suggested that LL carry out a limited survey of TPV users and request then list their top X TPV features that prevent them from using the official viewer. These could then be collated in terms of common requests and used as an initial starting point for possible prioritisation  / integration.
  • Exactly how a good cross-section of TPV users could be found was an open debate.
  • Managing such a task might be problem for LL, as it would require input from all of the core engineering teams to offer their input – deflecting many of them (approx 45 LL employees) for core activities.
  • Contextual note: “approx 45” does not mean that this is the total number of developers work on SL – the Lab utilises contractors on and individual and company (ProductEngine) contractors, plus a lot of general operation on the server-side are now handled through AWS.

Date of Next Meetings

• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026.
• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, February 10th, 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.

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.