This week in OpenSim Dev – week ending 8th September 2012

September 12, 2012
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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 0.7.4 (released on August 31st, 2012).

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

This week in OpenSim ( f7b88d1 – 783ee94 ).

General news

  • None this week.

Features & bug fixes

  • SignpostMarv contributed a patch to add an osGetNumberOfAttachments() OSSL function.  This returns the number of attachments given a list of attachment points.  This function may be of limited use until OpenSimulator supports multiple attachments on a single point, though it would still tell you whether or not there was any attachment there or not.  See Mantis 6208 for more details (a858c5d).
  • SignpostMarv contributed a patch to add an osMessageAttachments() OSSL function.  This allows one to send a link message to a selection or all of an avatars attachments.  See Mantis 6208 for more details (ff867b5).
  • I improved the experimental ReuseDynamicTextures option to not reuse dynamically generated textures that have a very small data length in comparison to their pixel area.  This works around a current viewer bug where such textures are not properly redisplayed if pulled from the viewer cache.  This is controlled via the ReuseDynamicLowDataTextures = false option in the [Textures] section of OpenSim.ini (d2b0074).
  • Robert Adams of Intel continued to work on the BulletSim plugin, making it compatible with megaregions amongst less user-facing changes (32b534f).
  • SignpostMarv contributed a patch to allow the size of linksets to be restricted.  This only applies to new linksets.  This can be controlled by setting a non-zero LinksetPrims value in the [Startup] section of OpenSim.ini (783ee94).

Infrastructure

  • No news this week.

4 Responses to This week in OpenSim Dev – week ending 8th September 2012

  1. September 12, 2012 at 6:17 am

    Regarding improperly displayed dynamic textures…

    I’ve used them quite a bit, and have occasionally noticed them display as inverted or distorted. I was wondering if that’s what was being referred to here.

  2. Greybeard Thinker
    September 12, 2012 at 10:35 pm

    Re linkset size restrictions, please ensure the needed ini settings are actually included in all files, (unlike the NonPhysicalPrimMinimumSize) it will stop considerable hair tearing and gnashing of teeth

  3. justincc
    September 18, 2012 at 11:46 pm

    @Greybeard – Please raise that as a Mantis report.

  4. justincc
    September 18, 2012 at 11:49 pm

    @Marcus – Distortion perhaps, as that’s what it looks like to me when one fails to see the final texture resolution. Also viewer dependent – the last version of imprudence, for instance, had some kind of http texture bug which often didn’t display the full resolution for dynamic textures.

    I do recommend trying the ReuseDynamicTextures switch actually – it does speed things up a lot.

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ABOUT ME

Hi, I'm Justin Clark-Casey, an OpenSim core developer and professional software engineer.

On the Linden Lab grid I go by the name of Lulworth Beaumont. On other grids I'm just plain old Justin Clark-Casey.

I'm currently working as a freelance consultant specializing in OpenSimulator and related technologies. If you're interested in learning more then please read the Hire Me page.

I've also written a paper on distributed virtual environments, which examines how virtual worlds could become more like the web, rather than individual silos of users and content.

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