Tag: Simulator User Group 2026

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, October 6, 2026 Leviathan Office Hour, the “off-week” sessions of the Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the meeting by Pantera is embedded at the end of this summary – 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 “Leviathan Office Hour” meetings are held on the Tuesdays which do not have a formal SUG meeting, and are chaired by Leviathan Linden. They are more brainstorming / general discussion sessions.
• Meetings are held in text in-world, at this location.

Simulator Deployments

• No updates, only restarts.

General Updates

Game_Control

• Game_control has now been been remerged with the 26.5 Chat Modernisation viewer code.
• This means game_control should start appearing as part of future updates to the current RC version of 26.5 and will be a part of the viewer when it is promoted to release status.
• Current points of note:
  • Game_control is be positioned behind a feature flag so it won’t send the GameControlData UDP message to simulators without the required back-end support in order to prevent crashes.
  • “Send GameControl Data to server” option is also disabled by default in Preferences UI.
  • The reason for the above is if the GameControlData UDP message is sent to a simulator without the required game_control support, the simulator will take the message as an “attack” or a hacked viewer, eventually dropping the UDP circuit to the viewer AND the region would put that UserID + computer_fingerprint on a short-term blacklist – logins to that region would fail for several minutes unless the user migrates to a different computer.
• Whilst the current simulator release (code-named Nectarine) is grid-wide, it doesn’t have the necessary code to correctly set the feature flag to the viewer (and so issues can occur). The next simulator version – Olive (in development at the time of writing) – will have the required code.
• During discussions a bug with game_control in which buttons don’t appear to fire when used in Mouselook. Leviathan is going to look into this.
• Leviathan further noted:
  • Items “not set in stone” for game_control: default mappings and the full list of client-side actions available to be mapped.
  • Items “pretty much” set in stone: the UDP message format and the LSL constants (new constants can be added, but existing ones cannot be changed).
  • Items seen as “missing right now”: the ability to navigate the viewer UI with a game controller.

New Group Ability to Define Who Can Post Links to Group Chats

• Leviathan Linden has developed a new Group Role ability to define who can post random web links in group chat.
• This capability will:
  • Allow the posting of URLs to be set to the default Everyone, Owner and Officer roles, with Group Owners and moderators will be able to set it as required to other roles.
  • Include a defined “whitelist” of LL domain URL links which can be posted regardless of who is positing them and whether or not the ability has been set. This list may include certain recognised third-party website URLs as well, and may be subject to expansion.
  • Not (initially?) include support for user-defined whitelists of URLs.
• This new ability will be deployed as a part of the upcoming Olive simulator update. However, as it requires corresponding viewer updates and back-end database changes, it will initially be set behind a feature flag. The viewer-side updates should be made available in viewer 26.5.
• Per my notes from the previous SUG meeting:
  • Messages posted with URL links by those not authorised to do so will see the message go through, but the URL will be redacted.
  • This is part of the on-going work to limit the ability of some to post scam and phishing links to Group chats.
• In this meeting, Leviathan indicated the new ability will be “on” by default for the default roles mentioned above; this brought forward understandable requests that the Everyone role does not have the ability to post links be default.
  • This would more effectively deal with issues of phishing in existing Groups, notably those Groups which no longer have an active Owner or assigned Officers who can adjust Role abilities.
  • Currently, the plan appears to be to only have the ability to post links toggled of the the Everybody role when creating new Groups.
  • Leviathan noted the final decision on how the ability should be set is down to the Product Team, but he would relay the feedback to them.
• Broadly speaking, the time frame for this ability is possibly going to be: simulator  updates (Olive simulator release): late October / early November; viewer-side support (26.5 release): and the database updates: by late December.

General Discussion

Please refer to the video, below.

• The Group Role ability news led to a discussion on Group abilities and capabilities (e.g. renaming a Group, providing additional information within Groups – date Group created, date someone joined, managing groups where the Owner is no longer active and there are no active Officers, etc.).This ran through the second quarter of the meeting.
• Kyle Linden noted he has “a long list of group improvements in my back pocket,” and is writing Product Requirement documents for them one at a time.
• Leviathan Linden is trying to track down some physics crashes on the simulator  – although it is providing difficult to identify the cause.
• The Puppetry project remains shelved. However, there have been some internal discussions / questions asked around it in terms of possible future capabilities for the viewer – but this does not mean the project is about to (or will) resume, just that aspects of the work – such as Inverse Kinematics (IK) might be looked at again in the future with the hope of enabling “simple” actions: holding hands, touching a light switch, etc.
  • This led to a discussion on IK, animation, etc. during the last quarter of the meeting.

Date of Next Meetings

• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, October 27, 2026.
• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, November 3, 2026.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, October 13, 2026 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the meeting by Pantera is embedded at the end of this summary – 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 “Leviathan Office 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

• The Nectarine update (simulator code version 2026-09-28.36457939353) was deployed to the SLS Main grid, on Tuesday, October 13, 2026, making it grid-wide.
• RC channels will be restarted on Wednesday, October 14, 2026, but no ne deployment.
• A reminder that the Breeze RC channel, covering “almost all” of the Blake Sea regions on the Main grid (Agni) contains Pepper Linden’s region crossing code improvements for vehicles, and they are requesting people test the code as much as possible, particularly corner-to-corner crossings between regions.
  • Feedback can be presented via this Canny.
  • If all goes well, these updates will likely be included in the Olive update.
• The next update for the simhost servers have been code-named Olive.

Updates

Also refer to the video.

New Group Ability to Define Who Can Post Links to Group Chats

• Leviathan Linden is developing the new Group ability I’ve previously mentioned to define who can / cannot post non-Whitelisted LL domain URL links to Group chat.
  • The Whitelist of allowed URLs  – those anyone can post, regardless of whether or not they have the ability to do so – will be limited to trusted domains from LL – such as the Marketplace,  the SL blogs, secondlife.com, etc.
• This ability will be toggle on/off, per other abilities and will be added to the default Everyone, Owner and Officer roles, with Group Owners and moderators able to set it as required.
• Messages posted with URL links by those not authorised to do so will see the message go through, but the URL will be redacted.
• There is a chance that the ability might be disabled when Olive is initially deployed in the coming weeks, as it also requires both a new viewer-side UI element to set it, and various internal database updates.
• This is part of the on-going work to limit the ability of some to post scam and phishing links to Group chats.

Lua Updates

• Harold Linden has finished the bulk of the migration preparation work for the next Lua server release. This basically takes all the lessons learned from Lua deployments to date & the compatibility breaks which have occurred in the past as combines them to design a file format that better handles backwards and forwards compatibility between servers on different versions.
• For those keeping an eye on the SLua Github repository, Harold has also “been doing quite a lot of work filing off the final sharp edges of the API so we have something we can happily make generally available”.
• In addition, he has rebased SLua on the latest upstream Luau release to make sure LL keep pulling in the newest work. He notes this does not off classes as yet.
• Next Lua server up liable in the next couple of weeks.
• Documentation on Lua is still being progressed.
• Contrary to rumour, Lua will be deployed simulator-side through the normal RC channels then Main SLS channel route.
• It was noted that during the eventual deployment, Lua regions will inevitably end up running alongside non-Lua regions – and it should be noted that where this is the case – Lua scripts will not survive the crossing into the “non-Lua” region (they will likely crash).
• Please refer to the video [22:11-end] for this full Lua conversation.

General Updates

• Rider Linden has been:
  • Focusing on trying to resolve “some server crashes that could occur on large/complex regions at start-up”.
  • Looking into a very old issue with Group notices simply disappear into the ether for some users in large groups. He believes he now has a fix for this.
  • Both of these fixes should be going into the Olive update.
• As well as working on the new Group roles ability, Leviathan Linden  is also working on getting game-control into Olive with anew flag which allows a server to advertise that it supports the GameControlData UDP message.
  • To balance this, the game-control viewer will get a feature flag switch where it will only send that UDP message to regions that advertise support for it.
  • This should help eliminate issues of versions of the game control viewer being disconnected and temporarily hardware banned from regions without game_control support as a result of sending unrecognised UDP messages, until such time as game_control is grid-wide.
  • He reiterated that full keybinding with game_control will not be initially possible, but he might be willing to expand the capability in the future.
  • This led to a general discussion on game_control interwoven with the Lua discussion. See the video [37:28-end].
• Monty Linden is going to have a technical discussion on EventQueueGet in the forums, and invites all those with an interest to add their thoughts / comments.

Date of Next Meetings

• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, October 20, 2026.
• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, October 27, 2026.

Updated, October 8, 2026 – see Region Crossings, below.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, October 6, 2026 Leviathan Office Hour, the “off-week” sessions of the Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the meeting by Pantera is embedded at the end of this summary – 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 “Leviathan Office 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

• The Nectarine update is across all RC channel regions.
  • This will be updated on October 7 with “final” fix for the issue affecting some UDP format ObjectUpdate messages.
  • This bug can occasionally impact the 26.4 viewer (currently available as a Release Candidate viewer), he expects this to be included in the in-development 26.5 viewer – and a Pull Request (PR) will be made available for TPVs wishing to pull the fix into their code.
• The SLS Main channel (the majority of simulators on the grid) was restarted on Tuesday, October 6, without any update to the simulator version. This shows up in the viewer logs and effectively is a form of packet-loss if the viewer tosses the data, or ignores the final block of data there.

Region Crossings and Game_Control

Region Crossings – Pepper Linden

Update, October 8, 2026: The Breeze mini-RC channel is now live on Agni (the Main grid) with “almost all” of the Blake Sea regions running on it. Testing – particularly vehicles carrying multiple avatars on corner-to-corner crossings – is encouraged. 

• As per the previous full SUG meeting, the plan remains to get Pepper’s updated region crossing code to a collection of simulators running on a small RC channel of simhosts put together for testing.
• This channel will likely be given the code name “Breeze”, but is currently being referenced as a Snack channel (“Snack” being the catch-all name for small testing channels of simulators).
• Breeze will likely include some / all of the Blake Sea regions to allow for testing.
• The updates have been rebased on the Nectarine update to be deployed on October 7, but at the time of this meeting it was not clear if the deployment would occur with the general RC roll or at a later date.

Game_Control – Leviathan Linden

• Game_control has been re-based on the in-development 26.5 viewer code base. a new pre-release viewer version, but further work on the viewer code is required.
• This means game_control could be included in the 26.5 viewer when it services – however, the code has not yet been merged into the development branch of 26.5.
• Note: while there are pre=Alpha versions of the game_control viewer available, if used on the Main grid (Agni) they can lead to immediate issues of crashes and temporary SL connection blocking due to unsupported UDP messages if the viewer connects to a “non game_control” region – which is the majority at this time). Therefore, I’m not including links to said viewers in this summary, although they are mentioned in the meeting.
• In the meantime, Leviathan is working to track down a persistent bad avatar texture bake problem on two accounts which the usual tools are fixing to fix, and so need a deeper investigation on the Bake Service code.

General Discussion

• SuzannaLinn announced she and SungAli will be running a series of classes on Media On  a Prim (MOAP) for those who would like to learn this sometimes arcane capability. Details are here.
• There were user-centric discussions on UDP messaging (and hand-offs between regions), script-hand-offs between regions, etc., and better management of Auto-Return.
  • The latter is something LL has earmarked for possible future improvement, but no details offered at the meeting.
  • I’m not qualified to comment on any of these subjects, so please refer to the video.
• “Non-Cartesian” region crossings (e.g. entering, say, a tunnel in region Y and emerging half way across the grid / in another continent or distant region without the appearance of teleporting. This has been discussed a lot at LL over the years, but only as a novelty idea, not as a potential project.

Date of Next Meetings

• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, October 13, 2026.
• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, October 20, 2026.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 29, 2026 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the meeting by Pantera is embedded at the end of this summary – 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 “Leviathan Office 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

• The Nectarine update has a “pretty persnickety issue” at the network layer.
• This is the ObjectUpdate UDP messages issue record in my previous leviathan Hour summary. Overall, there has been some problems with reliability reproducing the problem. given this, at the time of the making, a decision had yet to be made on the best route for a fix.
  • As noted in the Leviathan OH meeting, this issue can affect the 26.4 viewer, and a fix for that is also to be worked on.
• It’s likely that any fix will go to the RCs, on September 30.

General Updates

Also refer to the video

• Rider Linden is back on-call and investigating a couple of simulator crashers.
• Leviathan Linden indicated that approval has been given for game_control to be included in the 26.5 viewer (set to be the last viewer release of 2026, once it surfaces).
  • At the time of the meeting, the game_control code still had to be merged into the 26.5 branch.
  • It has been suggested that the mouse cursor is hidden and hovertips are disabled when flycam is being used with a controller, and this is on Leviathan’s list of work to be done. He is also considering a sub-tab for future game_control options / toggles.
  • This led to another discussion on what game_control does (in short: allow game controller to be used with Second Life, including for moving vehicles, the avatar and camera and other typical game controller capabilities, etc.; however this does not support more advanced options such as virtual keyboards + provide some LSL support).
• Harold Linden (Lua) continues to work on backwards compatibility with script serialisation which will hopefully be the end of any “breaking rolls” when deploying future Lua updates.
• The engineering team is still trying to get a selection of regions put together specifically for region crossing testing.
  • When sorted, this will likely be available through a Snack RC channel, (that is, a mini-channel of regions intended for specific testing).
  • This work has been delayed by the focus on the ObjectUpdate UDP messages issue on Nectarine.
  • Leviathan Linden further noted that Pepper Linden has a proposal for patching their region crossing work to avoid the worry of any performance exploit at the server for misbehaving clients, as noted (again) in the previous Leviathan Office hours summary, linked-to above.
  • This led to the inevitable discussion on region crossing improvements & their availability.

General Discussion

Please refer to the video for details on the following:

• A general discussion on avatars being able to pick-up object / grab object in-world (a goal the long-suspended Puppetry Project had hoped to achieve). The ran through the middle third of the meeting.

Date of Next Meetings

• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, October 6, 2026.
• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, October 13, 2026.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 23, 2026 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the meeting by Pantera is embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks to her for providing it, and to Erik Mondrian for the chat transcript after my ISP suffered issues and disconnected me from the world.

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 “Leviathan Office 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

• The Nectarine update was deployed to the BlueSteel RC in week #38. However:
  • It has a bug  that causes it to leave a bad zero-coded block on some ObjectUpdate messages. This shows up in the viewer logs and effectively is a form of packet-loss if the viewer tosses the data, or ignores the final block of data there.
  • Leviathan has been working on a fix for the issue, and if it passes QA, it will deployed to BlueSteel as an Nectarine update, with the updated code also being deployed to the remain RC channels.
  • This bug can occasionally impact the 26.4 viewer (currently available as a Release Candidate viewer), he expects this to be included in the in-development 26.5 viewer – and a Pull Request (PR) will be made available for TPVs wishing to pull the fix into their code.

Game Control

• Game_control has been re-based on the in-development 26.5 viewer code base. a new pre-release viewer version, but further work on the viewer code is required.
• This means game_control could be included in the 26.5 viewer when it services – however, the code has not yet been merged into the development branch of 26.5.
• Leviathan is looking for feedback on the current pre-release builds of game_control, particularly:
  • Whether the default mappings of actions to buttons correct; are there any actions that should be made mappable that are not yet available; and what features are missing that MUST be in the initial release.
  • However, time is limited for getting suggestions in.
• There is still work to be carried out to ensure that game_control doesn’t impact the current SpaceNavigator 3D mouse support.
• A discussion on keyboard mapping to game_control (currently, it is not possible to map keyboard keys to arbitrary gamepad buttons).

General Discussion

• When it surfaces, 26.5 will likely be the last major viewer release for 2026; Olive (which will follow Nectarine) will likely be the last simulator update for the year.
• Region crossings:
  • Pepper Linden’s region crossing updates also introduced a subtle protocol change which had been previously tried – and had to be rolled back.
  • This does not mean Pepper’s fixes do not work; rather that there isn’t a lot of confidence that they are ready for full deployment. Right now, it isn’t clear  whether the existing system can be fixed or if LL need to move to a new QueueEventGet protocol.
  • More internal discussions are required on this, but Pepper’s work has renewed a desire to get more region crossing fixes into the works.
  • This sparked conversation on region crossings and vehicle use.
• The latter half of the meeting was devoted to region / simulator capabilities – number of avatars support, number of objects, resource overheads, region pricing, and – yes – “megaregions” (those larger than the current 256×256 sq m size) + more.
  • This was a fairly wide-ranging discussion, and so please refer to the video below.
• The above was intertwined on some history of SL provided by Leviathan Linden touching on the early attempts at social engineering (e.g. originally limiting the build height to 768 metres and limiting flying height to encourage people to remain near the ground and socialise more).
  • Again, please refer to the video for more.

Date of Next Meetings

• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, September 29, 2026.
• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, October 6, 2026.

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, September 15, 2026 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the meeting by Pantera is embedded at the end of this summary – 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 “Leviathan Office 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

• The Nectarine update is due to be deployed to the BlueSteel RC channel on Wednesday, September 16, 2026 providing it encounters no issues during it time with QA.
  • This  will include the server-side support for game_control, but may not have full LSL support, due to last-minute bugs.
• The next update after that is codenamed Olive – details still TBD.

General Updates

• Rider Linden is working on the last of the known bugs with the latest version of the VSCode plugin.
• Leviathan Linden (via proxy in the form of Rider Linden) indicated there is a new test version of the game_control viewer (note this link will have a limited lifespan, pending the next update).
  • A request was made for game_control to include separate Flycam input for gamepads/controllers around axis control. A request was made for this to be formally filed via Canny to ensure it gets responded to.
  • This led to a general discussion on camera control (or lack thereof, depending on your point-of-view!), with the acknowledgement that “post game_control” scripted support for camera movement will need to be expanded.
• Harold Linden (Lua) is working through a major refactor to hopefully ensure that following the upcoming update (which will break existing Lua scripts, requiring they be recompiling / resetting), there will be no further breakages with future deployments.
  • This led to a general discussion on Lua support interwoven with the discussion of game_control / controller / joystick, etc., support.
  • Kyle Linden noted there will be a new Lua portal on the SL Wiki “soon”.

General Discussion

Please refer to the video for details on the following:

• A call for feature requests led to two region traffic-related requests which amounted to much the same thing: a new traffic metric that didn’t reward accounts standing in place 24 hours a day / only counts avatars that move. Together with a suggestion that “traffic” as a metric is done away with in favour of an “engagement” metric.
  • Another request was for a specific Group role for posting links to Group chats (as a further means of defeating phishing spams). Rider indicated there were “a few things coming” with regards to link posting, but did not have the details to hand.
  • The above led to a lengthy debate among users at the meeting on how to handle / mange links and the ability to post them in Group chats.
• A general discussion of region / simulator restarts – particularly with regards to LL not running them during geographic peak hours of use (i.e. the Tuesday / Wednesday restarts run during the peak used of SL in Japan).
  • Monty Linden reminded people that the restarts are simhost server-based, not purely the simulators / regions running on it, and are required to also restart all underpinning services as well.
• Inventory and storing items / use of inventory links and outfits manage also came up for user-led discussion / debate.
• llStartObjectAnimation() & llStopObjectAnimation() no longer works on Animesh characters has been raised and is under active investigation.
• Further confusion between water exclusion surfaces (which hide Linden Water when viewed from above, and water exclusion volumes, which would (if they existed) hide all Linden Water and its properties when seen from above and under water.

Date of Next Meetings

• Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, September 22, 2026.
• Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, September 29, 2026.