Legal Notice

Legal notice

This page mirrors NOTICE.md in the repository, which is the canonical version.

SLTextureDecoder is an educational and research tool for people who want to understand how a Second Life / Firestorm texture cache is laid out on disk and how JPEG 2000 codestreams are reassembled from it. It is not affiliated with, authorised by, endorsed by, sponsored by or supported by Linden Research, Inc. ("Linden Lab", "Second Life") or the Phoenix Firestorm Project, Inc. ("Firestorm Viewer"), and it is not a Second Life client of any kind.

What the software does

• It reads a texture cache directory that is already present on the machine where it is started - the files the locally installed viewer wrote for the account of the person running it (texture.entries, texture.cache and the 0..f/<uuid>.texture shards).
• It reassembles the codestream bytes from those files, decodes them locally with OpenJPEG and writes the result as a PNG file of the user's own choosing.
• It never connects to the Second Life grid, never authenticates anywhere, never downloads assets, never reads another user's cache, and never modifies or deletes the cache it reads (the cache is opened read-only).

What the software does not do

• It is not a viewer, a bot, a scraper or a network tool, and it does not interact with any Linden Lab or Firestorm service.
• It does not break, bypass or remove any protection measure. The cache is not encrypted and is not protected against reading; the tool only joins two parts of a file the viewer itself wrote for the same user, and it does not grant access to anything that was not already accessible to that user.
• It does not include, redistribute or reconstruct the Second Life client, the Firestorm viewer or any of their source code.

Rights in the decoded content

The PNG files this tool writes are copies of textures that the user's own viewer downloaded while they used Second Life. Copyright and all other rights in those textures and in any other in-world content belong to their respective creators and/or Linden Research, Inc.; this project claims no rights in them, and the LICENSE of this repository does not apply to them.

Reading the cache and keeping decoded copies of it on your own machine is a matter between you, the Second Life Terms of Service (https://www.lindenlab.com/legal and https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Terms_of_Service), the licence of the viewer you use (the Firestorm viewer is distributed under the GNU GPL v2) and copyright law (in the United States, the DMCA, 17 U.S.C. § 512 and § 1201 ff.). Users are solely responsible for having the right to access the files they point this tool at, and must not use it to obtain, copy, publish, sell or otherwise exploit textures or other content they are not entitled to use, nor to circumvent any technical protection measure.

In particular: do not redistribute decoded textures, do not use the tool against a cache that is not yours, and do not use it in any way that infringes the rights of others or violates the applicable terms of service.

Trademarks

"Second Life" and "Linden Lab" are trademarks of Linden Research, Inc. "Firestorm" is a trademark of the Phoenix Firestorm Project, Inc. "Qt" is a trademark of The Qt Company Ltd. "OpenJPEG" and "Portable Network Graphics" refer to projects of their respective owners. All names are used here descriptively only, to state which file format and which software this independent tool interoperates with; no affiliation, sponsorship or endorsement is implied in either direction.

Test data in this repository

tests/data/ contains a ~70 KiB slice extracted from a cache (a few record headers, small .texture bodies and a decoded 16x256 pixel reference dump). It exists solely as a test vector, so that the unit tests can verify the reassembly and the component order without access to a live cache. No rights in that data are claimed; the slices are the minimum needed for the tests. A rightsholder who objects to any file in this repository can open an issue and it will be removed or replaced immediately.

Licence

The original source code and documentation of this repository are released under the MIT licence - see LICENSE. That licence covers the source code only: it grants no rights in any texture, image, model or other content the tool may read, decode, convert or write, nor in the test data described above. Such content remains the property of its respective rightsholders and is governed by their own terms, by the Second Life Terms of Service and by applicable copyright law.

Third party components keep their own licences: OpenJPEG (2-clause BSD), libpng (libpng licence), Qt 6 (LGPL v3 / commercial) and GoogleTest (BSD-3-Clause).

No warranty

The software is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind - see LICENSE. The authors are not liable for any use of the software or of its output, including any claim by a third party arising from that use.