This week in OpenSim Dev – week ending 15th September 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 0.7.4 (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 ( 8321ecb – 0e5f553 ).

General news

• None this week.

Features & bug fixes

• I added debug levels 4 and 5 to the “debug http” command.  These levels log a sample of incoming POST data for an HTTP request and the full data respectively (7df7b86).
• I made the “show http-handlers” command available for ROBUST instances as well as the simulator.  I also made it display handlers for every port listened to by the server (d53a53d).
• Diva started work again on Hypergrid 2.0, in this instance on the Hypergrid ‘suitcase’ that controls how much a user’s inventory can be accessed when they are on foreign simulators.  In this case, some work on access to appearance items was carried out but this is incomplete (190f9c2).
• Diva added adding the possibility of controlling the appearance avatars use to visit other grids via Hypergrid.  Not ready for testing (de59a24).
• Oren Hurvitz of Kitely contributed support for multi-region OAR files.  These store multiple regions in a single OAR and restore them on the target system.  Currently, only existing regions that match the relative positions of regions in the OAR file are restored.  This is controlled using the –all switch on the “save oar” region console command and should be considered experimental.  OARs saved in this format are not backward compatible with OpenSimulator 0.7.4 and earlier.  Documentation to follow, some detail from the feature proposal stage is on the wiki (ce46821).
• I made the FlotsamAssetCache always update use times of existing cached assets that are referenced in the scene.  This stops local and temporary assets that are not normally stored in the asset service, such as dynamic textures, from being expired if they are still in use.  This was the default setting in FlotsamCache.ini.example but not in the code itself (which meant that it was not done if you had not copied the file to FlotsamCache.ini.  In fact, the DeepScanBeforePurge option in [AssetCache] is now ignored since it is always performed (d5c8c6b).
• Robert Adams of Intel continued to work on the BulletSim plugin, working on vehicles, avatar and object collisions, terrain, meshing and linksets (making it compatible with megaregions amongst less user-facing changes (32b534f).