October 2026 brought steady progress on simulator stability and new capabilities, the advancement of the 26.5 viewer release candidate with chat modernization and game-controller support, and a major Firestorm release. Grid operations remained stable with routine restarts and minor maintenance. Work continued on Lua/SLua scripting, region-crossing improvements, and anti-spam measures in group chat. The default official viewer stayed at the 26.4 series throughout the month.
I did run into 3 region restarts this month. Not on a Tuesday or Wednesday as I would expect. But odd days, a Friday and Saturday. This is unusual. Since I haven’t got caught in an unexpected region restart for over a year. So, I am not at all sure the grid is ‘more’ stable.
Official SL Platform Updates
Early to mid-October: The Nectarine simulator update (code version 2026-09-28.36457939353) reached the main channel around October 13, becoming grid-wide. It included bug fixes for avatars sliding on moving platforms, attached scripts in no-script parcels at elevation, intermittent voice issues after server restarts, heavy-script framerate regressions, and some crash modes. Features included a reworked LSL Game Control system (new permission and functions such as llGetGameControlMode, llGetGameControlModeAxes, and llGetGameControlModeButtons) plus new llGetObjectDetails constants (OBJECT_VOLUME_DETECT and OBJECT_LOCKED). Some earlier zero-coding changes were reverted to avoid malformed UDP packets. Known issues remained around certain game-control event handling.
October 27: Simulator release 2026-10-21.39669442371 was noted in release notes. Bug fixes addressed SSL certificate verification failures that caused llHTTPRequest to return 499 errors on some sites, game-control events failing after agents left and re-entered regions, reliability of simstate saving on high-object/script regions, blocked-object IMs being forwarded as offline emails, llParcelMediaCommandList loop settings, and some group-notice delivery problems. New features included a group role ability “Post links in chat” (enabled by default; group administrators can disable it). Non-whitelisted (non-secondlife.com-domain) URLs posted by members without the ability are redacted by the simulator to reduce phishing/spam. The feature was disabled during initial rollout and scheduled to activate after full grid support. Additional changes covered region-crossing improvements and fixes, a feature flag informing viewers whether game control is available in a region, and better internal logging for unauthorized eject-style scripts.
Late October (Olive rollout): Beginning October 28, the Olive simulator update was deployed to the Breeze and Ferrari release-candidate channels. It incorporated Pepper Linden’s vehicle region-crossing improvements (already testable on much of Blake Sea), the group chat link-posting ability (full activation delayed until grid-wide), and support for the game-control feature flag so viewers can safely send GameControlData UDP messages. Full RC deployment was planned for the week of November 2, with main-channel rollout targeted for November 10, contingent on testing.
Lua/SLua development focused on documentation, debugging tools, compatibility file-format work, and performance-metrics improvements before further server-side refreshes. Known issues such as a crash in Lua memory accounting for temporary attachments and llSetMemoryLimit behavior were slated for the next release. No major new public Lua server deployment occurred in October.
Grid status remained largely operational. Routine rolling restarts occurred on main and RC channels; short maintenance windows affected billing (October 27), voice (October 21), support channels, and the wiki (brief unscheduled work October 21). No major outages were reported.
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