OpenSim News

Hi folks.  Just a brief note to say that I’ll be speaking at the Nordic Virtual Worlds Network’s “Innovation in Virtual Worlds” seminar tomorrow (Wednesday 1st February 2012).  This is in Linden Lab’s Second Life grid at the Stockholm School of Economics Island.

I’m going to be on the Future of VW Platforms panel (Session II – 16.15-18.00 EET (GMT +2) / 6:15-8:00 am SLT) which should be a lot of fun.  I think we’re only in the middle of the prologue of the story of virtual spaces, so there’s huge scope for a great discussion .

The seminar is free to attend and there are other interesting talks in the (European) afternoon.

Hello everybody.  This is a summary of the last week of development in OpenSimulator.  Except where otherwise specified, the changes described here appear only in OpenSimulator’s cutting edge Git ‘master’ branch. Only changes that I think will be interesting to end users are listed.  Please do not attempt to use code taken directly from ‘master’ in any production environment.  Sometimes this in-development code may not work or may even cause data corruption. If you are not a developer or tester, please treat this summary instead as a preview of what will be coming up in the next release. The latest official release is OpenSimulator 0.7.2 (released on Oct 7th 2011).

The letters and numbers in brackets after some entries tell you the latest git commit to which they apply.

This week in OpenSim ( 82ad9d4 – 32d58d6 ).

• OpenSimulator git master is currently unstable due to quick changes made to database tables associated with future telehub functionality that were not associated with migrations.  Please see this mailing list post for more details.  This kind of thing happens in the development branch occasionally.  As ever, I recommend that if you are following it then take regular database backups or be prepared to manually revert errant changes.

• Bluewall added a JSON handler for grid info (ef5575b).
• Bluewall fixed the osGetGrid*() OSSL functions to correctly return information from the [GridInfo] section set up in the ROBUST service in grid mode.  Before, they were returning information from the simulator’s config, which mean having to set this data in every single simulator (9ed9720).
• Bluewall added an osGetGridCustom() OSSL function to allow any property to be retrieved from grid info.
• Bluewall added an osGetGridHomeURI() OSSL function.  This allows a script to retrieve the Hypergrid address of the current grid (8f871cc).
• I fixed a bug where a texture download request via UDP that failed due to an unanswered asynchronous request to the asset service could block all subsequent UDP texture requests of lower priority.  However, this may well not be the cause of all or even most grey avatars.  Version 3 viewers still receive baked avatar textures via UDP even where other textures are fetched via HTTP (ea72428).

• No news this week.

Hello everybody.  This is a summary of the last week of development in OpenSimulator.  Except where otherwise specified, the changes described here appear only in OpenSimulator’s cutting edge Git ‘master’ branch. Only changes that I think will be interesting to end users are listed.  Please do not attempt to use code taken directly from ‘master’ in any production environment.  Sometimes this in-development code may not work or may even cause data corruption. If you are not a developer or tester, please treat this summary instead as a preview of what will be coming up in the next release. The latest official release is OpenSimulator 0.7.2 (released on Oct 7th 2011).

The letters and numbers in brackets after some entries tell you the latest git commit to which they apply.

This week in OpenSim ( 266167f – 2e4fbe6 ).

• None this week

• BlueWall fixed teleport routing so that non-owner avatars teleporting to a parcel are placed in the position and look direction given in the parcel settings (b3a1216).
• Diva fixed an issue where avatars arriving via Hypergrid to a parcel with a landing point were being placed at (0, 0, 0) (7b84942f).
• Mic made a change so that on OpenSim Archive (OAR) and Inventory Archive (IAR) loading, the simulator checks whether an asset with the same UUID already exists before uploading it to the simulator.  Contrary to the commit log comment, sending it up to the server won’t overwrite anything already there but doing a separate initial check may reduce archive loading times, particularly if the asset is already cached on the simulator (5f7e392).
• I changed IAR loading so that a failure to deserialize an object asset won’t stop the load at that point (38db874).
• Bo Iwu contributed a patch to allow the update of user entries temporarily stored on the simulator.  This is required to improve the operation of Hypergrid friends.  See mantis 5847 for more details (6214e6a).
• Diva changed the Hypergrid ‘profile’ url to be called the ‘home’ url instead.  This requires changes in both the simulator configuration and the service/ROBUST configuration.  The ProfileServerURI attribute is renamed to HomeURI and drops any path it had (e.g. ProfileServerURI = “http://127.0.0.1:9000/profiles” in [HGInventoryService] in StandaloneCommon.ini becomes HomeURI = “http://127.0.0.1:9000″.  At this development stage, please see the commit itself for more details.  There might currently be a small bug in the new GridCommon.ini.example configuration according to Ai Austin (Mantis 5852) (8bdd80a).
• I changed the existing osNpcCreate() so that it creates an ‘owned’ NPC by default instead of an ‘unowned’ one.  An unowned NPC can be manipulated by any script that knows the NPC avatar UUID and has access to the osNpc methods.  An owned NPC can only be manipulated by scripts that have the same owner as the script that originally created the NPC.  I don’t like to change functions that have been working in an OpenSimulator release, but owned NPCs appear the far better default than unowned ones and I don’t anticipate this change causing too many problems at this early stage.  However, if you require the old unowned behaviour, there is now an osNpcCreate() method that takes an options parameter to which OS_NPC_NOT_OWNED can be specified.  Please see the OpenSimulator wiki for more details (3b59af2).
• BlueWall fixed an issue were the RegionReady module (which stops clients logging in before scripts have finished loading, sends out alerts when a region is available, etc.) was triggering an alert when the first script was added to an empty region (57ba9ef).
• BlueWall updated the RegionReady module so that it will prevent new logins whilst an OAR is being loaded.  Mic made a further fix so that this doesn’t fail if no alert URI is set (2e4fbe6).
• Mic added support for incrementally rotating physical objects in llLookAt() and llRotLookAt().  However, this does not use physics to do it.  The rate of change is currently 1 / PI * strength (e1a2c44).
• I fixed an issue where every single script would register a register the UrlModule as a listener to the script remove event on the script engine.  On Mono-run regions with many scripts (2000 plus) this would lead to a stack overflow failure.  This might also be an issue on Windows .NET (b5bb559).
• Nebadon removed the hard-coded checks that would stop osTeleportAgent() from working if the script wasn’t in a parcel that was owned by the owner of the script.  These restrictions can now be enforced via the more flexible and configurable OSSL permissions system (e.g. Allow_osTeleportAgent = PARCEL_OWNER).  The osTeleportAgent() threat level was raised to severe to make it less likely that it would be accidentally enabled for everyone (43173f1).

• No news this week.

Hello everybody.  This is a summary of the last week of development in OpenSimulator.  Except where otherwise specified, the changes described here appear only in OpenSimulator’s cutting edge Git ‘master’ branch. Only changes that I think will be interesting to end users are listed.  Please do not attempt to use code taken directly from ‘master’ in any production environment.  Sometimes this in-development code may not work or may even cause data corruption. If you are not a developer or tester, please treat this summary instead as a preview of what will be coming up in the next release. The latest official release is OpenSimulator 0.7.2 (released on Oct 7th 2011).

The letters and numbers in brackets after some entries tell you the latest git commit to which they apply.

This week in OpenSim ( 8737427 – 32eb7dd ).

• None this week

• sendapatch submitted a patch so that an unsuccessful llHTTPRequest() correctly returns the body in the http_response event rather than the status description.  See Mantis 5836 for more details (8737247).
• I renamed the “show digest” region console and ROBUST service command to “show asset“.  I also extended it to show more information, such as whether the asset is temporary.
• Melanie added a new “NoAccess” threat level to OSSL scripting.  This allows one to start with all OSSL methods disabled and selectively enable just the ones wanted (fbb2a7e).
• Melanie changed OpenSim so that if a script that is no copy is dragged into user inventory it is first stopped in the scene (f81c15d3).
• Melanie changed OpenSim so that scripts deleted from a prim go to the user’s inventory trash rather than disappearing (f8c15d3).
• I implemented the FetchInventory2 capability in addition to the existing FetchInventoryDescendents2 capability.  This allows more inventory items to be fetched over HTTP.  However, bugs may still remain, in particular when it comes to linked items.  This is not yet enabled by default (5f682b5).
• John Cochran contributed a patch to replace the llRot2Euler() function with one that doesn’t return inaccurate results at the +/- pi/2 singularity (8c445da).
• John Cochran contributed a patch to fix llAngleBetween() to allow denormal rotations (ff5a83d).
• Michelle Argus contributed a patch to standardise the region ID parameter to the RemoteAdmin module (3073370).
• I fixed a bug where making a falling avatar start flying again (for instance, by tapping home) would stop the avatar from being able to make any move except start falling again.  Avatars can now move freely after flying from a fall (c5c079f).

• Bluewall updated aspects of the profile connector to make configuration less error prone and to allow HG support by third party profile services.  One such is the one on gforge developed by kcozens, Bluewall et. al.

Hello everybody.  This is a summary of the last two weeks of development in OpenSimulator.  Except where otherwise specified, the changes described here appear only in OpenSimulator’s cutting edge Git ‘master’ branch. Only changes that I think will be interesting to end users are listed.  Please do not attempt to use code taken directly from ‘master’ in any production environment.  Sometimes this in-development code may not work or may even cause data corruption. If you are not a developer or tester, please treat this summary instead as a preview of what will be coming up in the next release. The latest official release is OpenSimulator 0.7.2 (released on Oct 7th 2011).

The letters and numbers in brackets after some entries tell you the latest git commit to which they apply.

This week in OpenSim ( 6baee2e – 56dbcae ).

• None this week

• Diva fixed a bug where the avatar would occasionally go under the terrain when region crossing in certain directions (25cbba9).
• Diva changed region crossings so that the source region no longer needs to wait for confirmation from the destination region.  This may improve region crossings (4699558).
• Mic changed the code so that objects that fail a region crossing or objects that somehow attempt to cross into a region that does not exist do not generate a continuous stream of border crossing failures.  Instead, such objects are placed at their last good position.  If the object is physical it is made non-physical (456c89a).
• Diva fixed an issue where standalone map tiles in older viewers were not properly updated (56dbcae).

• Diva made various adjustment to get Hypergrid to work better with the SimianGrid services system (an alternative system to ROBUST).