This week in OpenSim Dev – week ending 12th May 2012

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 0.7.3.1 (released on March 30th 2012).

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

This week in OpenSim ( b60f51d – 9d66792 ).

General news

• None this week

Features & bug fixes

• Melanie from Avination fixed a bug where updating an object position would send out updates for all its prims rather than just the root prim.  This should improve the network efficiency of such operations, whether they come from a user or from script commands such as llSetPos() (b60f51d).
• I fixed a bug where friends online/offline status was often not properly updated on the viewer (cd497ab).
• I fixed a bug where the osGetGridNick(), osGetGridName(), osGetGridLoginURI() and osGetGridCustom() OSSL functions would not work on standalone simulators because they were attempting to read from a [GridInfo] section rather than [GridInfoService] (a82dc26).
• I fixed a possible race condition where link ordering could be screwed up if linking/delinking and object duplication (by shift-copy on the region) were done in very quick succession over a low quality network link between the viewer and the simulator (abbd050).
• Talun contributed a patch to fix same region teleport of a sitting avatar.  The avatar now correctly stands up and can move once it reaches the target co-ordinates (c21c9e1).
• Talun contributed a patch to implement llGetAgentList() (61e99bcd).
• I improved escaping and unescaping of XML element names for communication between the simulator and services and between services.  This allows one to now use AvatarService over the network, which wasn’t possible before due to escaping issues (e813f41).
• Mic Bowman from ScienceSim improved the speed of saving estate data.  Since this is down every time a region starts up this may improve startup time for simulators with an extremely large number of regions (though it isn’t generally a good idea to do this in OpenSimulator due to performance and stability issues) (de44734).

Infrastructure

• No news this week.