Category: TPVD / Open Source User Group

The following notes were taken from: My chat log of the Open-Source Developer (OSD) meeting held on Friday, April 3rd, 2026, together with my chat log of that meeting. Pantera’s video of the meeting (embedded at the end of this article) – my thanks to her for providing it. Please note that this is not a full No video this week, as Pantera was absent the meeting.

Table of Contents Meeting Purpose Official Viewer Status Viewer 2026.01 – On-Click Installer / Velopack Other Viewers WebRTC Deployment General Discussion Next Meeting

Meeting Purpose

• The OSD meeting is a combining of the former Third Party Viewer Developer meeting and the Open Source Development meeting. It is open discussion of Second Life development, including but not limited to open source contributions, third-party viewer development and policy, and current open source programs.
  • This meeting is generally held twice a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre and is generally text chat only.
• Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.

Official Viewer Status

• Default viewer  – Legacy search; WebRTC improvements; QoL improvements – 26.1.0.22641522367 – March 12.
• Release Candidate viewer – one-click installer = 26.1.1.23806384790 – March 31 – NEW.
• Second Life Project Viewers:
  • Second Life Project Flat UI – 26.2.0.22829286351, March 20 -“flat” UI and font updates.
  • Second Life Lua Editor Alpha viewer 26.1.0.21525310258, February 12.

Viewer 2026.01.01 – One-Click Installer / Velopack

• Now available as a RC viewer – see above.
• This could be promoted as early as week #15, depending on how it performs (crash rates, etc.), over the next few days..

Other Viewers

• 2026.02 – “Flat” UI and Splash Screen Refresh – this is due to have an Alpha update issued on April 3rd.
• The Lua Alpha viewer is also due to have an update issued on April 3rd.
  • Note, LL are now officially dropping “SLua” (“SL Lua”) and just going with “Lua”.

• The viewer formerly known as the Second Life Visual Polish viewer (SLVP) is now known as the Second Life  Second Life Graphics Care Package.
  • The hope is to get that into alpha soon – but only after we get the necessary server work done and get some regions up on ADITI.

WebRTC Deployment

• The WebRTC deployment has hit a “hiccup”.
• As a result the deployment has slowed, with WebRTC liable to remain only on the RC server channels (Le Tigre, BlueSteel, Magnum, etc.) and covering about14% of the Main grid until the problem is resolved.
• Anyone experiencing Voice issues with WebRTC is asked to file a bug report.

General Discussion

• There is an increasing issue of AI driven pull requests.
  • This appears to be a case of people trying to make claims via the bounty programme for code submissions without actually putting any effort into the work.
  • Commenting on the matter, Geenz Linden noted:

If you’re using LLMs to submit pull requests, that’s not an automatic no. However, blatantly vibe coded submissions, submissions that are effectively taking stuff from other viewers without any kind of attribution or permission and so on, and anything that just generally reads as super low effort just to claim a bounty is likely to be closed without comment in a worst case, or otherwise scrutinized in order to ascertain the individual’s understanding of what that code actually does vs. how much is just prompting to see if they can land something. We don’t want to shut down utilizing AI in people’s processes, but certain things are gonna get PRs shut down or scrutinized more heavily. So please keep this in mind.

• • This called into question the value of the bounty programme, with the fair point being made that TPV developers have spent years developing code for their viewers and submitting much of it to LL without any thought of reward other than improving people’s SL experience.
  • Geenz further noted the the bounty programme is due to get reviewed “sooner [rather]than later”, although it is likely “some form” of it will be kept, as it has also led to useful code contributions – such as those for getting the Linux viewer back into the frame (due to surface with the Lua viewer) and the viewer vcpkg work.
  • The suggestion was made that a contract programme – whereby an external coder is contracted to produce work – might be more beneficial than the current bounty programme. Again, this was pretty much the case for Linux and vcpkg.
  • A further suggestion was made to offer general bug / feature request bounties in L$ only – potentially making them less attractive to those trying to bend the system and earn US $ using AI LLMs.
• The question was asked if Leviathan Linden’s work on server-viewer messaging would be surfacing in one (or an) Alpha viewer soon – the reply was that discussions on where and when to place this work are still ongoing, in order to ensure the viewer work and server work appear pretty much together.
• Suzanna’s excellent write-up on the latest Lua release gained a further shout-out. On this (again):
  • This release will be deployed to Aditi (the Beta grid) first for testing.
  • It requires all Lua scripts to be recompiled in order to keep working.
• Tis last 10 minutes of the meeting was spent discussion whether “SLua” should be retained as the name for the Lua project, or if “Lua” was better (certainly more widely recognised) given it is an implementation of Luau.

Next Meeting

• OSUG: 13:00 SLT, Friday, April 17th, 2026, at the Hippotropolis Theatre.

The following notes were taken from: Pantera’s video (embedded at the end of this article) and my chat log of the Open-Source Developer (OSD) meeting held on Friday, March 20th, 2026, together with my chat log of that meeting. Please note that this is not a full transcript of the meeting but a summary of key topics.

Table of Contents Meeting Purpose Official Viewer Status Upcoming Viewers Viewer 2026.01 – On-Click Installer / Velopack Viewer 2026.02 – Flat UI + Splash Sceen Viewer 2026.03 – Maintenance Release Viewer 2026.04 – SLVP or LUA (TBD) WebRTC Deployment General Discussion Next Meeting

Meeting Purpose

• The OSD meeting is a combining of the former Third Party Viewer Developer meeting and the Open Source Development meeting. It is open discussion of Second Life development, including but not limited to open source contributions, third-party viewer development and policy, and current open source programs.
  • This meeting is generally held twice a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre and is generally text chat only.
• Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.

Official Viewer Status

• Default viewer  – Legacy search; WebRTC improvements; QoL improvements – 26.1.0.22641522367 – March 12.
• Second Life Project Viewers:
  • Second Life Project Flat UI – 26.2.0.22829286351, March 20 -“flat” UI and font updates.
  • Second Life Lua Editor Alpha viewer 26.1.0.21525310258, February 12.
  • Second Life One Click Install viewer 26.1.0.21295806042, January 26 – one-click viewer installation.
  • Second Life Voice Moderation viewer 26.1.0.20139269477, December 12, 2025 – Introduces the ability to moderate spatial voice chat in regions configured to use webRTC voice.

Upcoming Viewers

Viewer 2026.01.01 – One-Click Installer / Velopack

• Remains the current viewer development focus, with a beta (RC) update targeting a potential availability in week #13 (week commencing Monday, March 23rd). Actual promotion to release status depends on how long the viewer may ned to remain at RC status.
  • There is one major blocker to promotion, which is being worked on, but otherwise, it is “very close” to being a candidate for release, user feedback allowing.
• Geenz Linden noted that the repo for the viewer is getting updates to more easily ship updates for those TPVs opting to adopt Velopack as their updater.
• Velopack benefits:
  • The move to Velopack allows LL and TPVs  to move off from VVM with the exception of cohort management, and allows LL to discontinue the old SLVersionChecker all of which should streamline the viewer install and update processes as experienced by users.
  • Velopack also opens the door to partial viewer updates  – although LL are still in internal discussions on when to actually start doing this.
• A side effect of this viewer, when generally available, is that it will not automatically uninstall versions of the viewer using the old install / update processes, and there will be no requirement to manually uninstall such versions (although users can if they wish). The reason for this latter point is a concern that inexperienced users will simply click YES when asked if they wish to remove all their settings, etc., and thus lose them.
• Testing of this viewer against incoming new users to SL saw a “not insignificant” increase in day 1 user retention..

Viewer 2026.02 – “Flat” UI and Splash Screen Refresh

• An alpha version (see viewer status, above) was released on Friday, March 20th, but without the log-in splash screen updates. These will be in an upcoming update.
• This viewer includes the “flat” UI design, font updates and WebRTC voice moderation capabilities to help align viewer-side WebRTC updates more with the server-side.

Viewer 2026.03 – Maintenance Release

• 2026.03 will now see the return of official viewer maintenance releases, with the initial focus on viewer performance improvements, together with a focus on top crashers and regressions, up to a certain limit, so they can be kept as relatively small releases rolled out on a reasonably fast basis.
• 2026.03 should see (partial list):
  • A backporting of the texture streaming changes at the very least, with Geenz particularly focused on getting lower RAM usage in general.
  • Kitty Barnett’s long-waiting avatar appearance fixes.
• Geenz also hopes to get some work done on lightening the main thread burden in the viewer – which is potentially more difficult, and may take longer.
• A hope with this cycle of maintenance releases is to put a reasonable dent in some of the debt we’ve accumulated with PBR’s release.

Viewer 2024.04 – SLVP or LUA (TBD)

• The 2026.04 viewer release is liable to be either the Second Life Visual Polish (SLVP) release (containing all of the SSR, PBR Specular, and HDR EEP parameters work), or a SLua release.
• Work on improving mirrors for SLVP is currently on hold whilst 2026.01.01 and 2026.02 is on the table.
• SLVP is liable to spend a long time at alpha status (which may be why SLua moves ahead of it in the order of things).

WebRTC Deployment

• This commenced on Wednesday, March 18th, with a deployment to the BlueSteel RC channel covering approximately 3.4% of the grid.
• This early release allows us to verify performance, stability, and compatibility in real-world conditions before expanding further.
• Users in the release candidate channel may experience:
  • Failure of peer-to-peer (P2) Voice calls between regions on WebRTC and the rest of the grid. These will not be fully resolved until WebRTC is grid-wide.
  • Differences in audio quality depending on being in or out of the release candidate channel.
  • Ongoing tuning and iteration as we gather feedback.
  • For more details, see: WebRTC Voice in Second Life — Limited Release Begins March 18, 2026.
• The next, larger deployment is currently scheduled for week #14 (commencing Monday, March 30th). However, a smaller deployment might be made in week #13.
• There are thoughts being given to next steps for WebRTC: transcription, the ability in-preferences to hear how you sound, etc. (a replacement for echo canyon), but these are subject to other priorities.
• The existing Vivox Voice service is liable to be shut down “a few months” after the WebRTC deployment has been completed. However, no target date has as yet been decided.
  • During the deployment phase, Vivox, users on the latter will not have spatial Voice when in WebRTC regions, although they should have p2p/conference/group voice with others on Vivox regions.

General Discussion

• Mesh Convex Hulls:
  • The new physics choice for mesh uploads is currently available on ARM Macs, and on the “to do” list for other viewers.
  • Geenz’s first choice for the role choked on a lot of content for SL, so VHACD is the choice of libraries.
  • As has been previously mentioned, the aim is to remove the Havok sub-libraries from the viewer entirely – but this a process several steps down the line.
• There was a general discussion on performance, lightening the load on the viewer’s main processing thread (some noted above).

Next Meeting

• OSUG: 13:00 SLT, Friday, April 3rd, 2026, at the Hippotropolis Theatre.

The following notes were taken from: Pantera’s video (embedded at the end of this article) and my chat log of the Open-Source Developer (OSD) meeting held on Friday, March 6th, 2026, together with my chat log of that meeting. Please note that this is not a full transcript of the meeting but a summary of key topics.

Table of Contents Meeting Purpose Official Viewer Status Upcoming Viewers Viewer 2026.01 Viewer 2026.1.1 – One Click Install Viewer 2026.02 Viewer 2026.03 Grid-Wide WebRTC General Discussion Next Meeting

Meeting Purpose

• The OSD meeting is a combining of the former Third Party Viewer Developer meeting and the Open Source Development meeting. It is open discussion of Second Life development, including but not limited to open source contributions, third-party viewer development and policy, and current open source programs.
  • This meeting is generally held twice a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre and is generally text chat only.
• Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.

Official Viewer Status

• Default viewer 2025.08 – 7.2.3.19375695301 – maintenance update with bug fixes and quality of life improvements – December 2.
  • Notable addition: new VHACD-based convex decomposition library for mesh uploads.
• Second Life Release Candidate viewer  2026.01 – 26.1.0.22641522367 , March 5.
  • Legacy search; WebRTC improvements; QoL improvements.
• Second Life Project Viewers:
  • Second Life Lua Editor Alpha viewer 26.1.0.21525310258, February 12.
  • Second Life Voice Moderation viewer 26.1.0.20139269477, December 12.
    • Introduces the ability to moderate spatial voice chat in regions configured to use webRTC voice.
  • Second Life One Click Install viewer 26.1.0.21295806042, January 26, 2026 – one-click viewer installation.

Upcoming Viewers

Viewer 2026.01

• Was lined up for promotion to release status, but LL has ben seeing some suspiciously low fault rates – less than 1%, rather than the more usual average fault rate accounting for freezes and crashes being closer to something like 5-7%.
• As a result, the view is going to be left at RC status through until early in week #11.

Viewer 2026.1.1 – One Click Install

• 2026.1.1 is the new designation for the one-click install and velopack viewer (currently 26.1.0.21295806042).
• This is unlikely to move to release status for at least a couple of weeks as it works through QA testing, particularly given this viewer represents a pretty big migration from the old updater to the new one. 

Viewer 2026.02

• This viewer is about to undergo an “Alpha” update, designed to gather feedback from users.
• This is the viewer with the new “Flat” UI updates, font changes and WebRTC voice moderation capabilities, and  might additionally receive some backported updates to texture streaming.

Viewer 2026.03 -“SL Visual Polish” (SLVP)

• 2026.03 is set to include:
  • The “long baking” SSR improvements that were started last year. This version of the viewer will likely have a long beta soak time to allow feedback on these changes to be gathered.
  • PBR specular for residents who are more familiar with the old Blinn-Phong workflow. This will:
    • Include another texture slot (tint of the specular reflection).
    • Work with metallics.
    • Follow the glTF specification, but will likely initially be without glTF overrides, as this requires server-side work.
    • This work is currently being wrapped-up.
  • HDR controls in EEP so residents can decide how bright or dark things should be. This work does require simulator-side updates. This will likely initially have server-side support on Aditi (the Beta grid).
• It may additionally include:
  • Further mirrors optimisations and a new “Ultra” quality setting that will enable a system mirror for water. A caveat on this work is that while this “water mirror” might up the quality of water reflections, it will do so at a performance hit; SSR for water will always be faster and less intensive.
  • Inclusion of an emissive strength setting for PBR.
  • Further performance optimisations.
• The current repository for this viewer (valid March 6th, but may change) is available here.
• This viewer may be in a head-to-head with the SLua viewer as to which gets promoted first when the time comes.

Grid-Wide WebRTC

• A small deployment to the Preflight simulator Release Candidate channel was made on Thursday, March 5th, intended to address some server stability issues.
• It is hoped that the deployment will quickly move to the BlueSteel RC.
• There is still no Voice echo canyon for WebRTC for self-testing your own Voice system. However, one is still under consideration.

General Discussion

please refer to the video as well.

• Geenz Linden has not had time to address the much-requested alpha-gamma fixes due to a focus on the SLVP viewer. It is also anticipated this work will require a decent bit of scoping, including understanding what needs to remove server-side to avoid a potential permissions hole.
• Geenz has also has made further commits for the reimplementation of SSR after he found a good way to get hierarchical Z tracing working in the viewer.
• He has also finally got the separable SSR pass working from another branch, which leads to a ton of optimisation potential for SLVP. For example, this now allows rendering of SSR at half or even quarter resolution, while the output for glossy SSR can be filtered, leading to less graininess on PBR surfaces and water.
• There is also now a mirror for water reflections – which as was noted above, requires the Ultra quality setting and will impact viewer performance. but which is independent to SSR for water reflections.
• The long-awaited Appearance fixes, as supplied by Kitty Barnett, are being targeted for the 2026.03 viewer.
• There has been some musing on re-working the viewer graphic settings to make them easier to parse (such as making options drop-downs grouped by the Low to Ultra quality settings, with only the relevant options appearing for each. However, this work is only at the musing stage, not something being pursued.
• A general discussion of texture handling – including the option to add blank texture detection and reduced these to 1×1 to help reduce the RAM load with textures.
• A general discussion on a number of issues bugs (e.g. the AMD bug which sees the avatar textures broken on newer AMD GPU drivers  – which is hopefully being addressed by AMD; MOAP input handling bugs on Linux & Apple, said to make playing some games in SL impossible, etc- see the last 15 minutes of the video for more).

Next Meeting

• 13:00 SLT, Friday, March 20th, 2026, at the Hippotropolis Theatre.

The following notes were taken from: Pantera’s video (embedded at the end of this article) and my chat log of the Open-Source Developer (OSD) meeting held on Friday, February 27th, 2026, together with my chat log of that meeting. Please note that this is not a full transcript of the meeting but a summary of key topics.

Table of Contents Meeting Purpose Official Viewer Status Upcoming Viewers Viewer 2026.01 Viewer 2026.02 Viewer 2026.03 General Viewer Notes Grid-Wide WebRTC Deployment Next Meeting

Meeting Purpose

• The OSD meeting is a combining of the former Third Party Viewer Developer meeting and the Open Source Development meeting. It is open discussion of Second Life development, including but not limited to open source contributions, third-party viewer development and policy, and current open source programs.
  • This meeting is generally held twice a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre and is generally text chat only.
• Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.

Note: The OSD/TPV meeting has tended to occur in the same week as the content Creation User Group meeting over the last several months, resulting in a lot of repetition of information between the two meetings (and combined summaries on this blog). An attempt is being made to break this cycle by having the next OSD/TPV meeting on Friday, March 6th, 2026 before reverting to the usual every other week format (so the meeting after that will be March 20th, 2026) – thus putting the OSD/TPV meeting and the CCUG on alternate weeks.

Official Viewer Status

• Default viewer 2025.08 – 7.2.3.19375695301 – maintenance update with bug fixes and quality of life improvements – December 2.
  • Notable addition: new VHACD-based convex decomposition library for mesh uploads.
• Second Life Release Candidate viewer 2026.01 – 26.1.0.22359044520 , February 25 – NEW
  • Legacy search; WebRTC improvements; QoL improvements.
• Second Life Project Viewers:
  • Second Life Lua Editor Alpha viewer 26.1.0.21525310258, February 12.
  • Second Life Voice Moderation viewer 26.1.0.20139269477, December 12.
    • Introduces the ability to moderate spatial voice chat in regions configured to use webRTC voice.
  • Second Life One Click Install viewer 26.1.0.21295806042, January 26, 2026 – one-click viewer installation.

Upcoming Viewers

Viewer 2026.01

• Remains the current viewer development focus with the release of the beta (RC) version, although this will be shifting more to 2026.02.
• The velopack one click installer / updater is not in the initial beta, and may now in fact slip to 2026.02.
• 2026.01 includes a high priority fix for specific Bluetooth headset configurations which will benefit WebRTC.
• Now available as an alpha viewer (above).
• As the name suggests, triggers a one-click install / viewer update process.
• Also includes improved monitoring / logging of viewer freezes and crashes, etc.

Viewer 2026.02

• 2026.02 remains on track for the “Flat” UI and font updates.
• It now also includes the WebRTC voice moderation capabilities (as seen in the project viewer) to help align viewer-side WebRTC updates more with the hoped-for server-side deployment (see below for more).
• This viewer might additionally receive some backported updates to texture streaming.
• No Alpha / Beta viewer is available as yet for this release..

Viewer 2026.03 -“SL Visual Polish” (SLVP)

• 2026.03 had been looking to an April release, however, it might slip back to 2026.04. Part of the decision-making on this is related to upcoming server-side updates to EEP and glTF which are seen as being required prior to SLVP shipping.
• It will likely to include:
  • The “long baking” SSR improvements that were started last year. This version of the viewer will likely have a long beta soak time to allow feedback on these changes to be gathered.
  • PBR specular for residents who are more familiar with the old Blinn-Phong workflow. This will:
    • Include another texture slot (tint of the specular reflection).
    • Work with metallics.
    • Follow the glTF specification, but will likely initially be without glTF overrides, as this requires server-side work.
  • HDR controls in EEP so residents can decide how bright or dark things should be. This work does require simulator-side updates. This will likely initially have server-side support on Aditi (the Beta grid).
• It may additionally include:
  • Further mirrors optimisations and a new “Ultra” quality setting that will enable a system mirror for water. A caveat on this work is that while this “water mirror” might up the quality of water reflections, it will do so at a performance hit; SSR for water will always be faster and less intensive.
  • Inclusion of an emissive strength setting for PBR.
• The Pull Request  for this work can be found here – #5385.

General Viewer Notes

• Firestorm hosted a Townhall recently, with Lab presence, to try to determine why a percentage of Firestorm users remain reluctant to move away from a 6.x version of that viewer to a PBR-supporting version. The predominant issues appear to be concerns over performance and the degraded water visuals seen with PBR viewers.
  • One aspect of people refusing to move is hearsay: “X said PBR sucketh and has poor performance, therefore I will not even try it”, regardless as to whether this might be true for them or not; another is, potentially, people’s general unwillingness to change from what they like.
  • Exactly how to address such issues / beliefs/perceptions is no easy task.
  • A suggestion was made to have “toggle” in the viewer so users can determine which rendering system they wish to use (e.g. “legacy” or “PBR”). This is far more complicated than it sounds, requiring continued support of two rendering pipes in the viewer, potentially leading to multiple complications and the potential content breakage. As such, it is not going to happen.
• Geenz Linden is continuing to work with texture streaming and resolutions, with some of the work possibly surfacing in 2026.02 as noted above. He further noted that:
  • Work is not stopping at texture streaming improvements; the Lab is laying plans to deal with some of the “bigger performance bullet points”.
  • It is known that PBR  has introduced performance bottlenecks, many of which have been dealt with, others of which still need work. To this end, the Lab may start running Tracy “very, very regularly” to identify bottlenecks so they can be addressed.
  • The hope is that when adding a new PBR feature / capability, at least one existing bottleneck will be corrected.
• As noted in the 2026 week #5 OSD meeting, there are potential changes coming to the viewer build chain. These involve updates to CMake and a Pull Request relating to vcpkg. The latter is still under review, and is likely to be implemented “bite by bite”, rather than all at once. It will also be likely to go into its own branch and not emerge until after the SLua /Linux viewer work reaches release status, so as to not over-complicate things for TPVs.
• TPV Developer Henri Beauchamp (Cool VL Viewer) suggested splitting the viewer’s main thread so that the rendering code can be separated from messaging and objects updates, thus smoothing frame rates in the viewer.
  • Geenz Linden indicated that this had been looked at by a Product Engine engineer, and that it was felt that doing so would help out massively with porting the viewer to other graphics APIs.
  • However, actual work on this has not as yet started, as there is a need to “chip away” at getting approval together with a need to avoid disrupting existing releases.
  • Such is the scale of the work, it could involve “a few quarters” of effort to implement.
  • It was noted that while some multi-threading has been introduced to the viewer, this is mostly “lighter work” more easily removed from the main thread, which still does most of the heavy lifting via a single CPU core.
• The last point rotated into a more general discussion on the viewer, threads, the future potential for removing coroutines and fibers in favour of “actual” threads, etc. Please refer to the last 10-15 minutes of the video.

Grid-Wide WebRTC Deployment

• This was targeting a March 2026 deployment, following the usual simulator-side deployment process (a selected RC channel or channels for the first deployment, followed by deployment to all remaining RC channels usually a week later, then a final deployment to the SLS Main channel, usually a week after that).
• However, it now appears hat the deployment is likely to be delayed, although no specifics have been given on why or when. .

Next Meeting

• OSUG: 13:00 SLT, Friday, March 6th, 2026, at the Hippotropolis Theatre.