Category: Simulator User Group

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, March 25th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from my chat log of the meeting – sorry, no video from Pantera 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

• On Tuesday March 25th, the SLS Man Channel was updated with any deployment.
• On Wednesday March 19th the Durian Scones update should be deployed to all remaining RC channels RC – this update incudes the SSL certificate renewal – see below for more.

Production Grid SSL Certificate Renewal

• The SSL certificate for the Second Life Production Grid is set to expire on April 16th, 2025 02:40 GMT.
• A new certificate anchored by DigiCert started deployment via the BlueSteel RC on Wednesday, March 19th, and will progress across the RC channels and to the SLS Main Channel in the normal cadence of simulator releases, to be completed in advance of the old certificates expiring.
• Testing of this certificate can be done either within the nominated simulator channels as it is deployed, or on Aditi (the beta grid), on the following regions:
  • Bonifacio.
  • Blake Sea (Very nearly the entire set of regions).
  • Cloud Sandbox 1 through 4.
•  For full details on the re-certification, please read Monty Linden’s forum post and thread, or the Lab’s official summary blog post.

Planned Updates – LI Calculation Change

• Signal Linden highlighted a Feedback Ticket he has raised, proposing the removal of scale from Land Impact calculations.
• This is being possibly earmarked for a simulator update after Durian Scones.
• This essentially means that the LI of object should not dramatically change as a result of resizing (particularly when increased in size). It could also mean that some large objects in world could see LI reductions.
• Understandably, this announcement led to a lot of discussion / debate throughout the meeting.
• Signal also stated that the Lab will like – at some point also take a look at Mesh uploads and use: Incentivize correct use of LODs, which is currently being tracked.

SL Viewer Updates

• Default viewer: 7.1.12.13550888671, formerly the ForeverFPS, dated March 1, 2025, promoted March 5th – No change.
  • Numerous crash and performance fixes.
  • Water exclusion surfaces.
  • Water improvements.
• Second Life Release Candidate viewer 2025.03 version 7.1.13.13906285233, March 20th – NEW.
  • New UI element for water exclusion surfaces: Build / Edit floater → Texture Tab → Hide Water checkbox.
  • The maximum amount of Reflection Probes can now be adjusted to better accommodate low VRAM scenarios.
    • Values will be set automatically depending on your chosen graphics quality. OR
    • Use Preferences → Graphics →  Advanced Settings →  Max. Reflection Probes to manually set.
  • An issue with being unable to see Sky Altitude values in the Region/Estate window has now been resolved.
  • Preferences → Graphics → Max. # of Non-Imposters has been renamed Max. # of Animated Avatars for clarity.
  • Bug and performance fixes and memory optimisations.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha, version 7.1.12.13973830462, March 20th, 2025 – NEW.
  • Will only work on Aditi. Blog post: Lab officially announces Luau Alpha testing.

In Brief

Please refer to the the video for details on the following.

• A SLua update was deployed to Aditi during the meeting, containing the requested JSON and the B64 stuff in it.
• Signal indicated that LL’s visit to the 2025 Game Developer Conference (March 17th-21st, 2025) in San Francisco to promote Second Life appears to have been well received, the the stand receiving a lot of visitors and interest.
• There has been some discussion in the Content Creation channel of the Second Life Discord Server about allowing rezzing of prims and meshes larger than the current 64m limit, either for everyone, or as a switch which could be set at the estate/region level. LL are tracking this.
  • However, Signal and Leviathan Linden noted that in terms of meshes exceeding 64m in size, some research into potential physics impacts might be required.
  • Signal further suggested that if there are physics issues, such large meshes could be made non-physical on rezzing.
• On the subject of physics, there have been reports of objects getting “stuck” with a convex version of their physics mesh until are selected by their owner, and also that sometimes the simulator forgets the mesh physics type and sets it to convex hull.
  • Rider Linden noted he spent some time trying to trace down a similar issue some time ago, without success.
  • Leviathan Linden would like to look into these issues, so Feedback reports would likely be appreciated, with logs.
• Signal again indicated a preference to get the Havok sub-libraries out of the viewer, replace the decomp. library with an open-source one, and replace Navmesh with a solution “that isn’t janky”. However,  decisions on all of this have yet to be taken.
• A discussion on the “energy” effect within llPush – where it has use (e.g. feeding into impact damage calculations for weapons), issues, etc., and whether or not there is a case for it being removed for SLua scripts (but not Lua VM to run LSL, so as to maintain compatibility), if at all possible (possibly not).
• Signal Linden also dropped a request into the meeting:

If you would be seriously interested in contract work to convert the LSL wiki over to readme.com, including a Github action to generate LSL/SLua function documentation from a giant LLSD manifest, drop me a line. One thing I’m thinking about is improving documentation. Readme.com is the same platform VRchat uses for their docs rather effectively, and it would allow us to accept changes from unregistered users once again.

† 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, March 18th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from Pantera’s video of the meeting, which is embedded at the end – 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 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

• On Tuesday March 18th, the SLS Man Channel was updated with any deployment.
• One Wednesday March 19th:
  • Durian Scones should be deployed to the BlueSteel RC – this update incudes the SSL certificate renewal – see below for more.
  • The rest of the RC channels should be restarted without update.

Production Grid SSL Certificate Renewal

• The SSL certificate for the Second Life Production Grid is set to expire on April 16th, 2025 02:40 GMT.
• A new certificate anchored by DigiCert in being deployed, starting with the BlueSteel RC on Wednesday, March 19th.
• Testing of this certificate – particularly with accessing the grid from older viewer versions is recommended.
• In addition, the certificate can be tested on Aditi (the beta grid), on the following regions:
  • Bonifacio.
  • Blake Sea (Very nearly the entire set of regions).
  • Cloud Sandbox 1 through 4.
•  For full details on the re-certification, please read Monty Linden’s forum post and thread, or the Lab’s official summary blog post.
• The plan is to complete deployment of the new certificate ahead of the old certificate expiring.

SL Viewer Updates

• Default viewer: 7.1.12.13550888671, formerly the ForeverFPS, dated March 1, 2025, promoted March 5th – No change.
  • Numerous crash and performance fixes.
  • Water exclusion surfaces.
  • Water improvements.
• Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha, version 7.1.12.13858460198, March 14th, 2025 – NEW.
  • Will only work on Aditi, within the following regions: [Luau Yardang], [Luau Tombolo], [Luau Mesa] and [Luau Tideland].
  • Blog post: Lab officially announces Luau Alpha testing.

In Brief

Please refer to the the video for details on the following.

• A discussion on encrypting local chat  – or at least moving it from UDP to HTTP2. No so much due to chat passing through the Lab’s servers, but due to concerns about external agents eavesdropping.
• A general discussion on SLua and updates, and on issues and requests.

† 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, March 11th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from Pantera’s video of the meeting, which is embedded at the end – 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 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

• On Tuesday, March 11th, 2025, the SLS Main channel was updated with the Carrot Cake update should be deployed to all RC channels. This includes:
  • A patch for issues found with the version of Carrot Cake already deployed to BlueSteel, together with a fixed for issues in trying to deploy some of the new benefits announced as a part of the “March Membership Madness” month.
  • Monty Linden’s work on EventQueueGet (a simulator Capability that delivers messages from a simulator to viewers over HTTP using a long-poll scheme. It is core functionality without which viewer/simulator coordination is impossible).
  • In addition, an update combining Carrot Cake and the WebRTC back-end was deployed to the Preflight RC channel.
• On Wednesday, March 12th, 2025, the remaining RC channels will be restarted without update.

SL Viewer Updates

• Default viewer: 7.1.12.13550888671, formerly the ForeverFPS, dated March 1, 2025, promoted March 5th – NEW.
  • Numerous crash and performance fixes.
  • Water exclusion surfaces.
  • Water improvements.
• Project viewer: Second Life Project Lua Editor Alpha, version 7.1.12.13526902562, March 3rd, 2025 – NEW.
  • Will only work on Aditi, within the following regions: [Luau Yardang], [Luau Tombolo], [Luau Mesa] and [Luau Tideland].

Lua(u): Initial Aditi Deployment – Recap and Update

• An initial deployment of Luau support (which will eventually replace Mono as the back-end scripting language) is opening on Aditi (the beta grid) for user testing.
• The regions running Luau support are: [Luau Yardang], [Luau Tombolo], [Luau Mesa] and [Luau Tideland].
  • These support both native Lua scripting and compiling LSL to Luau VM.
• A Luau-capable viewer is required.
  • This viewer will work on any region in SL, but will only compile scripts to Luau on the Aditi regions noted above.
• Discussion on Lua(u) is available through the scripting channel on the SL Discord server, for those with access.
• It was noted that the server support has some “sharp edges”. In addition:
  • Error reporting when compiling scripts from LSL to Luau is “quite spartan at the moment”, but will be improved “in the next update or two”.
  • If objects with compiled Luau script assets are rezzed in a non-Luau region, they won’t work.
• On the initial launch, LL constants hadn’t been exposed. Those should be available now.
  • Constants are in the global namespace now, with constant folding in the future to improve performance. Currently, there are no plans on moving them into a namespace.
• Rider Linden indicated that there has been a high volume of testing of the past week on the Luau regions on Aditi, generating high quality feedback from scripters.
• Signal Linden added that over the course of the last week, there has been some rapid development with bug fixes and features, with a new build nearly every day. Both he and Rider Linden passed on thanks to everyone who has been putting early work into testing the Lua work.

Luau Resources

• Lua FAQ – SL Wiki
• Second Life Luau Alpha – SL Wiki.
• Luau Example Scripts – SL Wiki.
• Luau Library – Luau.org
• Luau scripting demo – Luau.org
• Lua Gotchas, Footguns and Other Hazards – Roblox.

In Brief

Please refer to the the video for details on the following.

• The Durian Scone simulator update contains the new server certificate anchored by DigiCert. Monty Linden has a detailed post on the Technical forum. The Certificate supporting regions are Cloud Sandbox 1- on Aditi, and are open for testing.
• There was a general round of potential naming for the SL implementation of Lua/Luau. Ideas including: SLuau; SLua (“slew-ah”); Linden Lua(u) Language (LLL / L³).
• RegEx string functions: Rider Linden noted that he has most of the code written for some of the other RegEx things, and believes it would be mostly a matter of hooking the correct pieces together. However, work is currently focused on internal tooling, so he’s not at this point sure when he’ll be able to get back to the RegEx work. Some RegEx support can be found here.
• Leviathan Linden is hoping to port game_control back into the main SL Viewer and also to submit some patches for Cool VL Viewer when he has an opportunity to get back to that work. He also noted that for the official SL Viewer it depends on the Linux-build support getting back in place because game_control was using SDL2 for input acquisition, which was supplied by the Linux build work.
• A general conversation on the AI character tools, LSL, and opportunities.
• Linden Lab is attending the 2025 Game Developer Conference (March 17th-21st, 2025) in San Francisco to promote Second Life.

† 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, March 4th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from Pantera’s video of the meeting, which is embedded at the end – 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 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

• On Tuesday, March 4th, 2025, the SLS Main channel was restarted without anu deployment.
• On Wednesday, March 5th, 2025, the Carrot Cake update should be deployed to all RC channels. This includes:
  • A patch for issues found with the version of Carrot Cake already deployed to BlueSteel, together with a fixed for issues in trying to deploy some of the new benefits announced as a part of the “March Membership Madness” month.
  • Monty Linden’s work on EventQueueGet (a simulator Capability that delivers messages from a simulator to viewers over HTTP using a long-poll scheme. It is core functionality without which viewer/simulator coordination is impossible).

SL Viewer Updates

• Default viewer: version 7.1.11.12363455226, formerly the ExtraFPS RC (multiple performance fixes, aesthetic improvements and UI optimisations), dated December 17, promoted December 20 – No Change.
• Release Candidate: Forever FPS, version 7.1.12.13550888671, March 1, 2025 – Updated.
  • Numerous crash and performance fixes.

Lua(u): Initial Aditi Deployment

• An initial deployment of Luau support (which will eventually replace Mono as the back-end scripting language) is opening on Aditi (the beta grid) for user testing.
• The regions running Luau support are: [Luau Yardang], [Luau Tombolo], [Luau Mesa] and [Luau Tideland].
  • These support both native Lua scripting and compiling LSL to Luau VM.
• A Luau-capable viewer is required.
  • This viewer will work on any region in SL, but will only compile scripts to Luau on the Aditi regions noted above.
• A blog post will be “up soon”, and discussion on Lua(u) is available through the scripting channel on the SL Discord server, for those with access.
• It was noted that the server support has some “sharp edges”, with Signal Linden noting:

Incredibly sharp, we are expecting it to be trivial to crash regions. The goal is to experiment with what can be created with the language and how it compares to LSL

• Additional general notes:
  • Error reporting when compiling scripts from LSL to Luau is “quite spartan at the moment”, but will be improved “in the next update or two”.
  • If objects with compiled Luau script assets are rezzed in a non-Luau region, they won’t work.
• The above announcement dominated the meeting with specific questions on functions (what will be available, how Luau will handle existing LSL functions, etc.), with Signal Linden noting the plan at the moment is to have the full library of LSL functions available. Provision of new APIs is still TBD.
• Please refer to the video for details, and the resources below for specific information.

Luau Resources

• Lua FAQ – SL Wiki
• Second Life Luau Alpha – SL Wiki.
• Luau Example Scripts – SL Wiki.
• Luau Library – Luau.org
• Luau scripting demo – Luau.org
• Lua Gotchas, Footguns and Other Hazards – Roblox.

† 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 25th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from Pantera’s video of the meeting, which is embedded at the end – 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 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

• On Tuesday, February 25th, 2025, the SLS Main channel was restarted without anu deployment.
• On Wednesday, February 26th, 2025, the Carrot Cake update should be deployed to the rest of the RC channels (having already been deployed to BlueSteel). This includes:
  • Monty Linden’s work on EventQueueGet (a simulator Capability that delivers messages from a simulator to viewers over HTTP using a long-poll scheme. It is core functionality without which viewer/simulator coordination is impossible).
  • Simulator support for the  increase to viewer Profile Picks (from 10 to 20) announced as a part of the Membership Mania promotions.

Future Deployments

• The next simulator update is to be called Durian Scones. The size and content of this update is still TBA. However, Monty Linden indicated it will carry updated SSL certificates – he will be publishing details here.
  • These will be Digicert-signed, not Linden-signed.
  • Protocols should mostly be compatible. But looking to a future with old stuff being deprecated.
  • The new certificates should fix the longstanding issue of llRequestSecureURL being untrusted.

SL Viewer Updates

• Default viewer: version 7.1.11.12363455226, formerly the ExtraFPS RC (multiple performance fixes, aesthetic improvements and UI optimisations), dated December 17, promoted December 20 – No Change.
• Release Candidate: Forever FPS, version 7.1.12.12999043440, February 4, 2025 – No Change.

In Brief

Please refer to the video below for the following:

• Leviathan Linden is working on the issue of objects not rendering on logging-in. He describes his work as not yet having found a cause, but working on a new theory. This led to a discussion on whether the issue is within the viewer (e.g. caching errors, issues with objection occlusion calculations) or a simulator-side issue (e.g. Interest List transmission problems). This discussion is woven through most of the meeting.
• A discussion on improving the calculations used to determine the LI of Animesh objects, which also touched on the LI calculation formula being revisited as a whole “at some point”.
• Combined with the above was a discussion on optimising LOD / incentivising better LOD generation on the part of creators.
• A general discussion on gravity and changing it, revolving around this suggestion.  As Rider Linden noted, fiddling with SL’s gravity is both difficult and can have unforeseen outcomes.
• A general discussion on when Lua(u) will be surfacing (Rider Linden: “VERY VERY VERY VERY soon!”), with a reiteration that LSO is not going to be deprecated; however Mono will eventually be removed, with LSL compiling to Lua. This included a discussion on preserving data stored in script memory in transitioning away from Mono to Lua when it comes to in-world scripts that are running.

† 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 18th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from Pantera’s video of the meeting, which is embedded at the end – 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 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

• On Tuesday, February 18th, 2025, the Banana Bread update was deployed to the SLS Main channel This update includes expansions to llGetObjectPermMask that let you get an object’s permission mask taking into account the permissions on its inventory, and that ability has been added to llGOD.
• On Wednesday, February 19th, 2025:
  • Carrot Cake should be deployed to the Bluesteel RC. This includes Monty Linden’s work on EventQueueGet (a simulator Capability that delivers messages from a simulator to viewers over HTTP using a long-poll scheme. It is core functionality without which viewer/simulator coordination is impossible).
  • The remaining RC channel will be restarted without any deployment.

SL Viewer Updates

• Default viewer: version 7.1.11.12363455226, formerly the ExtraFPS RC (multiple performance fixes, aesthetic improvements and UI optimisations), dated December 17, promoted December 20 – No Change.
• Release Candidate: Forever FPS, version 7.1.12.12999043440, February 4, 2025 – No Change.

In Brief

Please refer to the video below for the following:

• Leviathan Linden has been been working with another Lab developer to improve avatar loading. He believes they have been able to make a few improvements, particularly in improving near-to-far sorting for avatar loading, with those nearby loading the fastest.
  • He hopes that the work will surface in a viewer update in March.
  • This is seen as offering “small” improvements, as further work will be required on the simulator end so the server sorts avatar data at its end rather than just sending it, but this has yet to be done.
• Leviathan also noted that the packet loss / UDP data loss noted in the last SUG meeting appears to be a result of the viewer allowing the network socket buffer (the one managed by the OS) to overflow, which can happen when the viewer experiences a long frame. It can also affect avatar loading, so his fix for the issue is going into that work.
• Region crossings / Disconnects: More reports of issues, particularly around teleports and disconnects user Quinn Elara has been logging her experiences, which the Lab has been looking at (note: be aware if posting viewer log information to the Feedback Portal, as it can contain personal information).  This issue became a topic of conversation through a portion of the meeting.
  • The above slid into a conversation of using the BugSplat tool in the viewer for reporting data.

 

† 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.