Load OpenSim Regions (OARs) directly from the web
Hi folks. A little known feature of the “load oar” command for loading OpenSim region archives is the ability to load an OAR directly from the web.
Inspired by OpenVCE and Clever Zebra’s release of a conference/education OAR yesterday, I’ve now tweaked the code to make such direct web loading a bit easier (essentially I just removed strict policing of the MIME type).
So to try out OpenVCE/Clever Zebra’s region, all you need to do is start up an OpenSim instance and on the OpenSim command line type
load oar http://openvce.net/resources/downloads/opensim-openvce.oar
This will fetch the OAR directly from the web and load it into your current region. Here’s a picture of my load of the OpenVCE/Clever Zebra OAR using the command above.
Unfortunately, this OAR load does have some issues. Namely,
- The scripts don’t appear to start up and
- Odd chunks of the terrain that were previously on the region sometimes remain. For instance, in the picture the raised bit of land just outside the ampitheatre is a left over from before the OAR load!
The scripts problem needs investigation though it’s not universal - I’ve recently loaded other OARs where scripts do correctly start up. The terrain issue is a more general problem that also needs work. However, the terrain is being correctly stored in the simulator - you just need to relog your viewer to get rid of any anomolies.
Of course, loading via the web doesn’t just work with the OpenVCE/Clever Zerba OAR - you can load in any OAR available via HTTP. There are some more available via OpenSimWorlds and rexxed. For example
load oar http://www.gomaya.com/glyph/opensim_dp/maya3.oar load oar http://www.secondlifelab.it/downloads/cyberlandia.tar.gz
The cyberlandia OAR appears to have some prim corruption issues though it does successfully load. And the nuathens.zip on these sites will not load directly because it’s actually a zip of an OAR rather than the OAR itself!
I’m quite excited about this functionality, if only because I’m very lazy and one command is far better than two (or three, or four). As well as being available in trunk this functionality will be in the next OpenSim release. I’m also planning to put the same ability into OpenSim Inventory Archive (IAR) loading.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Julius Balogh, Justin Clark-Casey. Justin Clark-Casey said: New blog post - Load OpenSim Regions (OARs) directly from the web - http://bit.ly/8Ovh9C [...]
If executed via a script this would seem to not be terribly far off from the dynamic sculpty loading! A mashup of sorts between dynamic textures and something along these lines
@rich - Unfortunately, the principles will be different since the sculptie upload will need to convert from texture to jpeg2000 format, as well as other miscellaneous operations.
via Twitter, @RichWhite just pointed me at a very interest blog post of his showing Cobalt doing something very similar to this! Of course, in my cause I’m waiting for viewer developers to provide the fancy interface :).
Seriously, if anybody out there does want to do it then please contact me and I can make the functionality available via a capability.
Oops, I should say that the blog post is http://roots.greenbush.us/?p=867
[...] Load OpenSim Regions (OARs) directly from the web | justincc.org [...]
[...] Load OpenSim Regions (OARs) directly from the web | justincc.org [...]
[...] removed strict MIME type checking when loading OpenSim Archives (OARs) directly from the web. This functionality was present previously but this change makes things a little easier [...]
On further testing, it looks like the scripts do start up (I can touch the screen near the middle of the region and get a response). However, the chair scripts may be slightly wonky - if I sit immediately I end up facing the wrong way, but if I edit a chair script and then sit, I sit in the correct position.
Not sure why this is - could be a general OpenSim bug rather than anything OAR related.