This Week in OpenSim Dev – week ending Saturday 14th November 2009

Hello everybody. This is a short summary of OpenSim development for the past week up until the end of last Saturday.  The letters in brackets after bug and feature points are the Git revision identifiers in which the work appears.  We only give the first 6 characters of each revision but this should be enough to identify it.

The changes described here appear only in OpenSim’s cutting edge Git ‘master’ branch.  Please do not attempt to use code taken directly from ‘master’ in any production environment.  At particular points in time 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 OpenSim 0.6.7 (released on 14th October 2009).

This week in OpenSim ( 81c439 – d5c18f ).

General news

• None this week

Features & bug fixes

• Snoopy contributed a patch which fixes issues that occurred when group owned land was abandoned by the land owner or reclaimed by an estate manager or a god (81c439).
• Snoopy contributed a patch that makes it possible for users to buy land directly for a group (81c439).
• I fixed a bug with Inventory Archives (IARs) where “load iar” would fail if any item names or folder names contained a forward slash (“/”).  New IARs will now load and save correctly (668850).
• I fixed a bug where an inventory path containing a forward slash “/” could not be specified to the “load iar” or “save iar” IAR commands.  These can now be escaped with a blackslash (“\/”).  Backslashes that actually are in the path themselves have to be escaped (hence “\\”).  (a3105a).
• I changed the “av_capsule_tilted” setting to be “false” by default.  This makes the avatar walk more smoothly without sinking into the ground when using the Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) engine.  I just flipped the switch, all the hard work to implement was done by nlin.  This doesn’t appear to have the same effect on OpenSim 0.6.7, though you may want to experiment if your avatar is getting that sinking feeling (a88a46).
• jhurliman made a change that may stop attachments occasionally disappearing.  This will not apply when using the SQLite database plugin since SQLite does not persist attachments yet, as far as I remember (5145df).
• Melanie added a facility to invoke region module commands via in-world scripts.  The script executes the command

  modSendCommand(string module, string command, string k)

  where module is the name of the module to invoke, command is the command itself and k is some mysterious undocumented parameter (I’m guessing it could be used to hold a key by which the reply (which comes back as a link_message with link id 1) could be associated with the request.  See the commit message for more details (ba9908).

• Adam added a further facility to return statistical data from a simulator.  This data is in XML format and can be accessed at

  http://<sim address>:<sim http port>/monitorstats/<region uuid>

  See the commit message for more details (90b15a).

• I stopped OpenSim.Grid.GridServer.exe from being built in the master branch since it now only exists in a ROBUST service (9cb0c7).
• I stopped Inventory Archive (IAR) saving from failing if a corrupt asset was encountered (bb92ba).
• Plugh contributed a patch that implements osGetMapTexture() to retrieve the current region’s map texture UUID from within a script, and osGetRegionMapTexture(), which allows the textures of other regions to be retrieved (fe8247).

Infrastructure

• No news this week.