Tag: TPVD / Open Source Meetings 2025

The following notes were taken from my audio recording + the video recording by Pantera (embedded at the end of this summary) of the Third-Party Developer meeting (TPVD) held on Friday, February 14th, 2025. My thanks to Pantera as always for providing it.

Meeting Purpose

• The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors to discuss general viewer development. This meeting is held once a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
• Dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they re conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.
• The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.

Vir Linden Departure

Vir Linden is one of the latest departures from Linden Lab. A long-time members of the Viewer Team and well-liked and respected for his work their and on a range of projects such as Bento (which he morphed into the Content Creators User Group), and will as running the open Source Developer meetings. No information on Vir’s departure was given, but his place for this meeting (at least) was taken by the Lab’s Director of Engineering, Signal Linden.

My personal best wishes to Vir, and thanks for all his work at the Lab, and time spent working with users.

Official Viewers

• 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.
  • Numerous crash and performance fixes.

Status

• ForeverFPS is defined as “being in a home stretch” in getting the viewer to release status.
• The focus now is on showstopper bugs and getting as much feedback as possible on the viewer.
• And upcoming version of ForeverFPS will include all the updates to Linden Water (some of which are also in the latest Firestorm Beta versions undergoing testing).
• Geenz Linden re-iterated the overall status on the work with Linden Water as stated at the last CCUG meeting, including outlining the new water exclusion surfaces (e.g. for keeping water out of boat hulls) and their limitations (e.g. they are not intended for use as exclusion volumes in underwater structures, that’s “for the future”).

Open-Source Contributions, Viewer Release Cadence and Roadmap

[Video: 3:43-5:18 and Video: 7:35-11:55]

• Signal Linden has put forward a document for improving how open-source contributions are managed, including general communications between the Lab and contributors and offering more transparency on how contributions are managed.
• Alongside of this, LL are hoping to introduce a more predictable release cadence with viewer updates, something delayed since the move to gitflow in 2024 due to the sheer volume of viewer changes and updates spread across multiple viewer RC branches which had to be directed into the core Develop branch.
• The hope is that implementing the latter will:
  • Enable TPVs to have a more predictable calendar of viewer updates they need to pull and merge.
  • Open-source contributors can have a more reasonable expectation as to when they might see contributions reach the viewer.
• The aim is to move to a monthly viewer update cadence, and to implement a viewer version numbering system which reflects this cadence (e.g. viewer version numbers with 2025.03 to indicate a March 2025 release, 2025.04 for April, etc.).
• To achieve this, the plan is to make releases smaller and more digestible for TPVs to absorb (again, making the flow of contributions and key code updates faster) rather than having them face huge merge requirements and testing.
• One possible caveat to this is might be with “significant” projects which do incorporate large numbers of changes to the viewer, leading to them being handled differently. However, exactly how they might differ will be dependent on what comes along in this regard (e.g. glTF mesh uploads (and scene imports?)) .
• To further assist in viewer development visibility, LL hope to update and be more forward in maintaining a visible viewer roadmap, together with “public planning meetings”.
• [Vide0: 28:50-37:45] A discussion on ways of highlighting issues among the 700+ LL have in github for which they really need help from TPV / open-source developers, including some form of rewards system (in addition to the SEC bounty payments) as used to be done with LL merchandise, credits in the viewer Help →  About, etc.

In Brief

• [Video:  43:25-End]  Account Takeovers:
  • LL recently blogged on matter of account and L$ balances security, the post came in the wake of LL noting a rise in reports of what they call “account takeovers”.
  • One specific vector used for phishing for account credentials is the use of links sent via Group (or even direct) IMs and within Profiles which carry the user to a fake SL website (e.g. a false Marketplace page), encouraging the user to enter their credentials, or which hide a potentially malicious webpage with in link.
  • Given this, Philip Rosedale asked for ideas on how such false flag links might be better countered / reduced in their threat level.

  • 

    Numerous suggestions were made, including: new accounts shouldn’t be able to start a large group chats; only Group owners and moderators can share links; posting links in Groups should be made a specific Group ability to be granted by the owners / moderators; making users more aware that hovering the mouse over links in chat, Profiles, etc will reveal the link URL; having a dialogue interdict clicks on links which displays the URL and requests the users to confirm whether or not they wish to go to the website (as with licking in-world items with embedded links (see right); force the URL to be the link (rather than hidden behind text).

  • This discussion also encompassed logging-in and alerts based on geo-location (e.g. in cases where user X traditionally logs-in from one country, but suddenly logs-in from the other wise of the world, so they get an alert to confirm they are actually logging in).
  • Please refer to the video for the specifics of the discussion.
• Still no firm date on when Voice services will become WebRTC only (and the Vivox service turned off), outside of “hopefully, early this year”. Several factors are delaying this, including the number of users who are not utilising WebRTC-enabled viewers (predominantly those who have not moved to a PBR-capable viewer).
• Havok physics in the viewer: over a decade ago, Havok sub-libraries were added to the viewer specific to assist with Pathfinding mesh uploads.
  • These libraries are starting to prove problematic in various areas (e.g. getting the viewer to run with native Apple Silicon support).
  • As a result, there have been discussion internally at LL about removing Havok support from the viewer.
  • One suggestion for doing so is to switch over to the open-source Recast Navigation for Pathfinding, and to use a convex hull decomposition library for mesh uploads.
• A general discussion on text rendering in-world on prims, etc., such as by using Signed Distance Field (SDF).

Next Meeting

• Friday, March 14th, 2025 at the Hippotropolis Theatre.

† 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 gathering 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 my audio recording + the video recording by Pantera (embedded at the end of this summary) of the Third-Party Developer meeting (TPVD) held on Friday, January 17th, 2025. My thanks to Pantera as always for providing it.

Meeting Purpose

• The TPV Developer meeting provides an opportunity for discussion about the development of, and features for, the Second Life viewer, and for Linden Lab viewer developers and third-party viewer (TPV) / open-source code contributors to discuss general viewer development. This meeting is held once a month on a Friday, at 13:00 SLT at the Hippotropolis Theatre.
• Dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar, and they re conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.
• The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.

Official Viewers Status

[Video: 1:13-2:17 and [4:07-4:45]

• Release 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 7.1.12.12793544240, January 17, 2025.
  • Numerous crash and performance fixes.

Upcoming Viewers

• ForeverFPS surfaced somewhat faster as an RC viewer than had been anticipated at the CCUG meeting.
• Other plans for viewer updates are under review; there a numerous code commits in the Develop branch awaiting a viewer, but collectively, they are regarded as to many to all go into a single viewer update, so the order of release over several viewer updates needs to be determined.

WebRTC / Updating to Viewers with WebRTC Support / Rendering Holdbacks

[Video: 5:22-24:14]

• Further re-iteration of the desire to see as many users as possible to move from viewers which lack WebRTC support (e.g. Firestorm 6.6.17) to those (predominantly PBR-based) viewers with the WebRTC support, so that the Vivox service can be turned off across the grid.
• A further request was made as to why people are resistant.
  • Once again, the response was largely around the quality of the reflections / general look of the Linden Water plane on PBR viewers, lack of exclusion volumes for water; darker ambient tones to natural lighting.
  • Ambient issues, particularly with legacy EEP skies should have been largely corrected in ExtraFPS.
  • It was also pointed out that there are cohorts of users who are happy with what works for them, even if half their in-world view seems to be “broken” in some manner, and simply will not update as long as the viewer they use can still access SL.
• A particular issue here with regards to WebRTC, is that while a high percentage of users are not updating to viewers with PBR + WebRTC support, it is not clear how many would be adversely affected by the loss of Vivox voice, given that many in SL rarely, if ever use Voice.  If the number is small, turning off Vivox might not be an issue; if the number is large, it could cause people to abandon SL.
• It was also suggested that wider communications from LL (and TPVs) on the nature of upcoming changes like WebRTC might help to make users more aware of what is going on.
• In response to exclusion volumes and water quality  / reflections, Geenz Linden noted:
  • There might be a way to provide exclusion volumes for water (e.g. to prevent water rendering inside boat hulls, etc.), but the issue is complicated.
  •  There has been a regression in the way water appears and generates reflections; part of this was the result of the “pre-PBR” means of rendering water required multiple passes, which became a performance issue. However, improving water is on his list of things to do, and he hopes that some of the ideas he has will also help improve screen space reflections (SSR) .
  • However, he also indicated that bring back “full real-time reflections” on water  is a not insignificant ask, and will likely only be possible after the moiré system has been further optimised, as  reflection generation will likely piggyback off of that. As such, the work to recover water reflections will take time and will be iterative in nature, and there may be impacts on the general appearance of water.
• Commenting on SSR, Geenz also noted that while improvements can be made, it will be “really hard” to return SSR quality to pre-PBR – but then, pre-PBR SSR had its own performance issues. As such, work in this area requires careful consideration on how to make improvements without impacting performance.

In Brief

• [Video: 2:17-4:07] A further announcement on the departure of Runitai Linden (see: Runitai Linden departs LL for public service).
• [Video: 24:14-29:30] General discussion / opinions on how and where to present assorted graphical settings and options within the Preferences / debugs, and how users understand / learn about the viewer’s internals.
• [Video 30:16-32:25] Discussion on graphics and lighting – improving HDRi rendering, ambient like, introducing punctual lighting, using physical units for lighting.
• [Video: 37:14-43:40] EventQueueGet is 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. However, a number of defects in the design and maintenance of this capability have been found (see here for both defects and proposals to resolve).
  • Monty Linden  has implemented a “phase 1” project to address some of these issues, and has set-up a channel of several regions on Aditi (the Beta grid) for public testing of the changes to validate that they do not in fact break anything. He has also published information on how users can help with the test and what is involved in the “phase 1” work.
  • During the meeting, he requested that people take the time to visit the test regions, carry out TPs and physical crossing between regions, leaving suitably scripted objects running on the regions, etc., per the testing information forum topic and report back via the topic or via the Feedback Portal.
  • This work may become part of the Banana Bread simulator release (still in the process of being defined), and further references to the work will most likely be via the Simulator User Group meetings.
• User groups for discussing Project Zero / SL Mobile:
  • The Project Zero viewer-in-a-browser project is open for discussion at the Web User Group (as Sntax Linden leads both the WUG group and Project Zero); and it has been indicated it might spin-up its own user group in time.
  • There are internal discussions going on in the Lab about starting a SL Mobile User Group. More to follow on this.

Next Meeting

• Friday, February 14th, 2025 at the Hippotropolis Theatre.

† 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 gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.