Category: Simulator User Group

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, July 29th, 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

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

In Brief

Also refer to the video for the full meeting.

• Leviathan has turned his attention back to the issue of some people experiencing failures on logging-in, which he describes thus:

So… the problem is the login.cgi computes a big “viewer return value” (aka the VRV) which it sends back [to the viewer]. It has “Content-type: llsd+xml” header on it, and can be several MB in size. It contains, among other things, the list of your friends, groups, and a skeleton summary of all of your inventory folders. When the data package is very big and your download rate is low… it can take a while for it to arrive. If it takes too long the viewer can timeout on the request… even though login.cgi thought it “succeeded” and sent an alert to the Region where you were supposed to arrive.

– Leviathan Linden

Leviathan believe one aspect that makes the VRV so big is the number of folders within inventory (not the contents of folders, just the count of folders). However, Leviathan believes he has a solution (which is pending deployment):

So anyway: a relatively simple change on the login server allows the data to be gzipped, which can speed up the transmission … The Second Life Viewer (SLV) uses libcurl for its http requests, and it can handle gzipped data implicitly. Any viewer that picked up that capability from SLV should see benefits when login gets the update.

– Leviathan Linden

• Another issue Leviathan is looking into a bug where Premium+ users can’t upload mesh for L$0 after crossing a region boundary, although he hasn’t found a root cause as yet.
• There is apparently some exploratory work going on with in the engineering team(s) on the potential to use AI tools for code generation.
• An update to SLua is in development, and might be deployed to Aditi (the beta grid) in the next week or so.
• A general discussion on the (currently stalled) game_control project. As noted in my previous Leviathan Hour summary, the game_control work (and the work for a Linux version of the SL Viewer) is currently archived during the most recent switch to the viewer development and release workflow.
• A Function to Detect Right click (which has it own debate) was raised. Leviathan Linden noted there subject is stalled. This led to an extended discussion on the ticket, and the issue(s) it encompasses. This discussion extended to one on Touch Pointer Capture, together with ideas for extended mouse hover operations, and expanded use of the mouse scroll wheel.

Date of Next Meetings

• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, August 5th, 2025.
• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, August 26th, 2025, due to Leviathan being on vacation (unless he can find a volunteer to fill-in for him).

† 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, July 15th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting (“off week”). They 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  – no video this week.

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.
• These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Every other Tuesday from July 8th, 2025, at 12:00 noon SLT.
  • In text (no Voice).
  • 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.
• The term “off week” is used to describe meetings held by Leviathan Linden on those weeks when a “full” Simulator User Group meeting is not scheduled to be held.

Simulator Deployments

• There are no planned deployments to any channels this week, only restarts. Although the Main channel apparently had some issues on Tuesday July 22nd, leading to multi restarts for some regions.

In Brief.

• Rider Linden is working on a few new script features that the moles need for an upcoming project. These mostly deal with land and being able to transfer or sell land using a script.
• Pepper Linden has been working on a re-write of LL’s Conductor service, and is currently wrapping this up as it goes through QA. The Conductor service is responsible for placing regions onto servers, and the re-write is designed to allow the team responsible to more optimally place regions and prevent things like ‘hot-spots’ (e.g. one region on a host using more resources than it should and starving other regions of CPU time).
•  Signal Linden is working on number of projects:
  • Making “shovel-ready” tasks for open source contributors. This includes: bringing back legacy search; implementing drag-and-drop uploads; resizing large textures before uploading; etc.
  • Looking at bounty/reward platforms for compensating people for working on initiatives LL hasn’t got much traction on.
  • Getting budget approval for taking SLua to production and merging some “nice small fix-up PRs” on the LSL-definitions repo.
• The idea in having a series of defined tasks for contributors is to have more people contributing upstream to the viewer and providing “ready to go” code and thus free the Lab’s core viewer team to focus on larger viewer projects.
• Having the ability to replace mesh / prim HUDs with something more suitable was discussed. One suggestion has been the development of an HTML5/CSS/JS solution of some sort. However, this would require quite a bit of both viewer and server work; as such, a proof of concept from the community would go a long way towards getting some server attention on it.
  • Some concerns were raised about this leading to people having to connect to unknown external websites.
  • Another suggestion was for a  small mobile subset of SVG within SL, although this is a potential awkward solution as it doesn’t allow thing like buttons lighting up on HUDS when moused-over.
  • This led to a discussion on options (HYML5, SVG, some form of modal system built-into the viewer, using MOAP / CSS, with various opinions being expressed.
• glTF mech import:
  • As reported in my CCUG meeting notes, this is to go to “beta” with the next viewer update.
  • Full glTF scene import is regarded as “seriously deprioritised”, with Signal Linden expressing a preference for keeping it so until it can be implemented server-side.
  • There s a report that a change in the glTF uploader broke the glTF scene rendering. no further details available.
• The plan to replace the SL Wiki (powered by Media Wiki) with a new documentation platform was discussed (see:  Modern Documentation Platform: docs.secondlife.com).
• As of the next official meeting, the Simulator User Group will be at a new location (still TBC at the time of writing). What this should look like was a source of extended discussion, as was whether or not Simon Linden’s home (the meeting place until now) should be left intact or destroyed (“destroyed” won that part of the discussion).

Date of Next Meeting

• Tuesday, August 5th, 2025 – venue TBA (check the SL Public Calendar and/or User Group wiki page for updated SLurl).
• Unofficial meeting (TBC): Tuesday, July 29th, Venue: TBC.

† 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, July 15th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting (“off week”). They 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.
• These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Every other Tuesday from July 8th, 2025, at 12:00 noon SLT.
  • In text (no Voice).
  • 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.
• The term “off week” is used to describe meetings held by Leviathan Linden on those weeks when a “full” Simulator User Group meeting is not scheduled to be held.

Simulator Deployments

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

SL Viewer Updates

• Default viewer 7.1.15.15596336374 promoted June 12 – No Change.
• Second Life Project glTF Mesh Import, version 7.1.14.15976006598 July 2 – No Change.
  • This is an early Alpha release with some of the rough edges and already resolved many bugs and crashes, although more are to be found, together with general feedback from the community. Please read the release notes if you intend to test this viewer.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

In Brief

Also refer to the video for the full meeting.

• Leviathan has been working on resolving a exploit which – although this is not certain) he may have accidentally introduced into the simulator code during her first stint at the Lab(!).
• Further work on the game_control project for the viewer remains in hibernation.
  • The core code was in a viewer development branch that was archived during the most recent switch to the viewer development and release workflow.
  • While much of it has been “salvaged” from the retired dev branch, it still needs to be approved for porting and merging into a current development repository.
  • There are also functional questions to be addressed – such as what to do about keyboard-only users and game_control.
• Work on the Linux version of the official viewer also appears to be “stuck” in the archived develop branch.
• Leviathan asked if anyone has tried to use the SL raw terrain save/load system, and if so, whether they have found it works correctly. There are apparently some bugs within it, and he’s trying to determine how best to prioritise it for fixing.
  • The general consensus at the meeting was getting the OK to update, port and merge the game_control code should be a higher priority than the terrain save/load.
• A general discussion on porting features / capabilities to / from Firestorm (and on offering Pull Requests to Firestorm for code such as game_control).
• A brief indication of “prioritisation competition” for viewer-side features at the Lab: some developers prefer to develop the code and build a functional UI to access it, then polish the latter; others (and management?) prefer code that is put forward with a complete, polished UI design.

Date of Next Meeting

• Tuesday, July 22nd, 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.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, July 8th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They 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.
• These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Every other Tuesday from July 8th, 2025, at 12:00 noon SLT.
  • In text (no Voice).
  • 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.

Simulator Deployments

• There are no planned deployments to any channels this week, only restarts (RC channels subject to confirmation at the time of the meeting).
• The next simulator release is estimated to be around two weeks from being ready for deployment.

SL Viewer Updates

• Default viewer 7.1.15.15596336374 promoted June 12 – No Change.
• Second Life Project glTF Mesh Import, version 7.1.14.15976006598 July 2 – New.
  • This is an early Alpha release with some of the rough edges and already resolved many bugs and crashes, although more are to be found, together with general feedback from the community. Please read the release notes if you intend to test this viewer.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

Upcoming Changes to the Simulator User Group Meetings

• As from this meeting, the Simulator User group will be moving to every other week, rather than weekly. So the next formal meeting will be on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2025.
• However, for the foreseeable future, Leviathan Linden plans to make himself available to hold informal meetings on the “off” weeks – so he will be available on Tuesday, July 15th.
• In addition:
  • The format of the meeting will also be changing to include a “dev stand-up” in which the members of the engineering team who are present can provide a short “here is what I’m working on” summary.
  • The meeting might also include a mail box so that questions which cannot be addressed at the current meeting can be submitted and answered at the next.
  • The location of the meeting will be changing (and at the time of writing is TBA).
  • The meeting will remain text-only – although this may change when speech-to-text becomes available.

In Brief

Also refer to the video for additional discussions.

• Puppetry:
  • The Puppetry project remains in hibernation, awaiting work on things like getting inverse kinematics (IK) into the viewer.
  • There has been some internal talk of animation streaming (which had been experimented with during the Puppetry work) at the Lab, but this has yet to the thrashed out enough to get close to getting on the development roadmap.
• SLua:
  • Leviathan Linden has been working on an optimisation to address a SLua bottleneck with llSetLinkPrimitiveParams(). This work has resulted in object FullUpdates measurably faster when viewed via debug timings, although the difference is not noticeable is term of user experience.
  • He also noted that he didn’t really drop the number of function calls all that much, but that “they are doing less work, but still about the same number of them”.
  • As such the work needs to progress further, but is once again paused whilst Leviathan addresses some high priority bugs.
• Rider Linden is working on on expanding llRequestInventoryData, allowing it to take advantage of metadata in other assets (e.g. materials, animations, textures, sounds) which could prove useful for scripts.
• Questions were raised on accessing Aditi, the beta grid. Those trying to do so / having issued should refer to this help desk article.
• Map Tiles:
  • Individual Map tiles have a UUID (as well as a URL to allow them to be shown on web pages); however, 4, 16, 64, etc., region tiles only have a web URL.
  • A script function to confess the UUID for a region’s map tile has often been requested. Pepper linden noted that LL have have the mapping of region id to texture tile UUID, so the latter can be exposed via an LSL function, but the work to do so has yet to be prioritised.
  • The process for pruning stale Map tiles from the map, as there is a bug in the mapgen that results in “chunks of the map disappearing.”  As a result map tile removal is back to a manual process.
• The request to “bring back LindenWorld” made at SL22B (and raised at just about every User Group meeting since), prompted Leviathan Linden to note:

It is an interesting idea. Although [the] LindenWorld feature set is very buggy/outdated. It isn’t compatible with modern SL accounts. I wonder how we would do auth? It would probably have to be rewritten for it to actually work. From a developer’s perspective: it would be a lot of work to host a LindenWorld grid. Just to build the ancient LindenWorld client… big long overhaul of legacy C++ code which no longer builds with modern compilers/libraries/APIs.

• A general discussion on terrain, adding more geometry detail to the terrain per metre, the raw terrain export/import.
• A discussion on water, the water plane, exclusion volumes, “physical” water, etc.

Date of Next Meeting

• Tuesday, July 22nd, 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.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, July 1st, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They 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. No video this week.

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.
• These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Every Tuesday at 12:00 noon SLT.
  • In text (no Voice).
  • 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.

Simulator Deployments

• There are no planned deployments to any channels this week, only restarts (RC channels subject to confirmation at the time of the meeting).
• The back-end work which had stalled simulator updates over the last few weeks is now largely completed, and Rider Linden is hoping to get a cut of the simulator release to QA for week #28. The backend migration was about storing of build pipeline assets (libraries, docker images, etc) from one cloud service to another. While this was in progress, the opportunity was taken to do “a lot of clean-up and fresh implementation” of using Github workflow jobs.

SL Viewer Updates

• Default viewer 7.1.15.15596336374 promoted June 12 – No Change.
• Second Life Project glTF Mesh Import, version 7.1.14.15830455952 June 24 – NEW.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

In Brief

• SLua:
  • Rider Linden hopes to return to a half-finished project of speeding up some permissions calculations that happen when changing primitive parameters via LSL/Slua. This is a hot spot that Harold Linden noticed when benchmarking SLua scripts.
  • The overall memory limit for SLua scripts has not yet been settled. However, as the bytecode is smaller, even if the current Mono limit is kept, SLua programs will have more room to work.
  • Rider Linden indicated he would nudge Harold and Signal Linden about updating the current SLua servers on Aditi.
  • It has not yet been decided how require, include, etc., will work with SLua, and a determination will likely be made during the beta – although there is no time frame when the latter will commence.
  • One of the things Harold Linden has done is move the definition of the LSL API to a config file, allowing some of the Mono boilerplate to be autogenerated from it.
• A general discussion on coding and how SLua might be handled, caveated with reminders that LL is trying to maintain LSL compatibility; and in LSL once a prototype is set and published changing it becomes breaking.
• Linden Lab is considering setting up a public repo (or similar) which could be used to publish the XML used to define the LSL commands.
• [Feature Request] llLinksetDataWriteWithValidation() has been filed, and is see as an “outstanding proposal”.
• A discussion on experiences and the KVP database (e.g. experience permissions, allowing “purchasable” access to larger amounts of KVP storage, use of external storage and LSL access to it. This was largely driven by users.
• A general discussion on a modal generating capability via LSL for HUDS, etc., together with approaches and pros and cons.

† 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, June 24th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They 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. No video this week.

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.
• These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Every Tuesday at 12:00 noon SLT.
  • In text (no Voice).
  • 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.

Simulator Deployments

• There are no planned deployments to any channels this week, only restarts (RC channels subject to confirmation at the time of the meeting).
• The back-end work which had stalled simulator updates over the last few weeks is now coming to an end.

SL Viewer Updates

• Default viewer 7.1.15.15596336374 promoted June 12 – No Change.
• Second Life Project glTF Mesh Import, version 7.1.14.15361077240 June 2 – No Change.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha (Aditi only), version 7.1.12.14888088240, May 13 –  No Change.

In Brief

• The subject of holding the meeting every other week was raised again, somewhat supported by those who have only been attending since the simulator release cycle had been put on hold. The majority still favoured a weekly meeting, with the chair possibly rotated between those Lindens who regularly attend.
• Leviathan Linden:
  • His work to try to fix the “sometimes not all content shows up at login” problem is awaiting review. If it passes, it could be in the next simulator update (Fig Newton / Fig Pudding – whichever name is now en vogue).
  • Has an idea as to what might be causing missing content on sim crossing and inter-sim TPs, but needs time to dig into it and try to come up with a solution.
  • Also hopes to finish working on a slight speed-up of the code that generates full object updates so that SLua scripts don’t seem slow when processing such updates.
  • Further noted that reports that the new version of Firestorm causing the server to suffer low FPS (45 → 35) for 1 – 4 seconds, every 60 or 90 seconds when driving a vehicle might also be related to object update issues, although he has yet to carry out a detailed investigation to determine a) if it is real; b) what might be causing it.
• Monty Linden:
  • Has been tracking down the cause of the issue of corrupted Linden grass on and simulator restart (see this report as a reference).
  • Is doing some maintenance work on the Key Value Pair (KVP) store (associated with Second Life Experiences), but noted there are currently no plans for more in-depth work on the KVP store at present, although some plans are being considered.
  • Responding to
  • Allow llHTTPRequest to request application/x-ndjson, noted it would have to be reviewed and that LL’s  http library insists on interpreting response bodies even though it shouldn’t (e.g. can’t do ‘Range’ if a fragment of json or other structured language is to be returned).
• A request was made for a native HTTP library for SLua, with Leviathan Linden noted there would probably be no special path for SLua http; rather, the plan is for any custom script callback operations to be uniform across the various script engines.
• A further discussion on issues of people being being able to select non-owned vehicles / having a scripted ability to report when someone else touches a person’s vehicle / attempt to interfere with vehicles.
• A further discussion on SLua capabilities, with a comment from Leviathan Linden that Rider Linden (on vacation) and Harold Linden (not available for the meeting) would likely be better placed to answer in detail.

† 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.