New is a relative term and very much an individualized concept in Second Life®. This new stuff is not the ‘Monthly New Stuff’ I usually report on. And it is a couple of months since it first appeared.
For now, this is about the new SL Forum software that dropped in December 2025. In particular, about how to format a post’s text. I am into that. I like to make words pleasantly readable and my tendency to post WALLS of text creates readability problems.
So, what is available?
Examples Shown in SL Forum
I experimented to find out what is in there. That experiment is online HERE.
Of course, what is available for formatting is on the page’s Edit/Compose window. See below. There are no [BBCode] short codes as in O L D forums. (AFAIK)
Several of the options are in drop downs. You have to click the down chevron. So, they are not so noticeable.
I spend time helping people in the SL Forum, mostly in Answers. A question came in about making a Cover Photo… a what?
SL Forum Profile with Cover Photo
When logged into the forum open your profile. There are a couple of ways to do that. Up in the upper right click your name and select Profile. Or on any forum page where you have posted click your profile image.
Adds Feature: BUG-40871 Add new llGetEnv() constant “region_object_bonus”
Internal Changes
These features haven’t made it to the wiki yet. They are at this point beta versions of the functions. The SLOTS_AVAILABLE item is for those working with Experiences. It is handy to know if an avatar has used up all the attachment slots before trying to attach something else to the avatar.
Yesterday Linden Lab posted in their blog about new improvements coming to Second Life. If you follow my blog, Ciarans’s or Inara’s, you already know most of what they wrote about.
Snapshot_029
Project Valhalla is the project viewer where they are changing from Webkit to Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). I’ve been writing about this change since 4/2014 (Reference – speculation). They Lab started talking publicly about the coming viewer change in early 2015.
Rendering Complexity / Quick Graphics – I’ve been writing about doing something like The Avatar Render Complexity feature since late 2014. I filed a feature request in December 2014 (BUG-7928). I doubt mine is the reason we got the feature. I suspect the reason for getting the feature was mostly discussion in Oz Linden’s Monday morning Open Source meeting. Whatever the case, it is close to being added to the main SL viewer.
Notifications – This viewer feature is a change in how we will receive notifications. This feature came on the radar in July 2015.
Mesh Importer – This improvement has been in discussion for a couple of months and made it to the main viewer a couple of months ago.
Inventory Robustness – It is hard to say when work on this change started. The Lab has worked on and been adding inventory improvements for a long time. This particular problem of losing no-copy-items that failed to rez is more recent.
If you follow the Server Deploys notices in the SL Forum, you probably had not have realized this feature rolled out.
HTTP Project – this is actually a much larger project than they convey in their post. It has been on going for a couple of years and appears will be continuing for some time. Parts get added as they are completed.
SecondLife.com – The SL Web Site is changing. They are removing Flash and if any QuickTime was used then likely that too. They are moving up to HTML5. CEF is how HTML5 handling is added to the viewer. These changes sort of go together. Parts of the web site are used by the SL Viewer, i.e., search, profiles, etc.
Since the viewer will real soon now be able to handle HTML5 via CEF it makes since for the web site to abandon Flash.
Not So New
Between Inara, Ciaran, and myself there are a few thousand SL Users that keep up on SL Development news. That is out of several hundred thousand monthly users. The SL Blog doesn’t show how many people have read a post. The forum does. It is rare any post in the forum gets a thousand readers. But, as the blog articles are in the splash screen of the SL Viewer, more people may read the blog.
So, while the news may be old to you, for most SL users their post is news.
