This week in OpenSim Dev – week ending 21st July 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 ( ee7478f – ac612e2 ).

General news

• None this week

Features & bug fixes

• I fixed a bug where a warning/error was printed out to the OpenSimulator log if the WebStatsModule was enabled and the user teleported into another region in the same simulator that was not next to their source region.  This is probably a fairly recent regression that took place in the last few months (ed14dac).
• I fixed a regression where the llGiveInventory() LSL function had stopped asking receivers of inventory who were not the original owner whether they wanted to decline the offer.  This has probably been broken since commit db91044 in Mon Aug 22 2011 (48a5f10).
• I removed the one-time 15 second start pause if an object containing a script was rezzed on a region that hadn’t previously run a script (64bd0bc).
• I made instant message handling asynchronous rather than synchronous.  When large folders of items were given from one avatar to another a number of inventory service lookups had to take place and this would pause all other inbound packet processing from viewers.  This should no longer be the case (dad331a).
• SignpostMarv contributed an osIsUUID() OSSL scripting function.  This tests a string to see whether it is a UUID/key (644fb6b).
• SignpostMarv contributed support for returning UUIDs in lists from custom script functions that are added using the modInvoke mechanism (a4281ca).
• I introduced an OS_NPC script constant to supersede the existing OpenSimulator specific NPC constant.  This is to avoid a possible future problem if Linden Lab decides to create an NPC constant that acts differently to the current OpenSimulator NPCs.  llAgentSensor() will still accept the NPC script constant but its use will be deprecated in OpenSimulator 0.7.4.  llGetAgentType() will now set the OS_NPC constant flag if an NPC is detected.  If the NPC was originally created with the OS_NPC_SENSE_AS_AGENT option it will also set the AGENT flag (ecf7bb2).

Infrastructure

• Robert Adams from Intel did a large amount of work on the OpenSimulator BulletSim physics module.  He is working on many different aspects of physics, including vehicle support.