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This Week in OpenSim Dev - week ending Saturday 28th November 2009

justincc — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:42:30 +0000

Hello everybody. This is a short summary of OpenSim development for the past week up until the end of last Saturday. The letters in brackets after bug and feature points are the Git revision identifiers in which the work appears. We only give the first 6 characters of each revision but this should be enough to identify it.

The changes described here appear only in OpenSim’s cutting edge Git ‘master’ branch. Please do not attempt to use code taken directly from ‘master’ in any production environment. At particular points in time 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 OpenSim 0.6.7 (released on 14th October 2009).

This week in OpenSim ( 999779 - 9fd921 ).

General news

Testing began on the ‘release candidate 1‘ stage for OpenSim 0.6.8. This was branched from master on 23rd November 2009 though it will incorporate selected bug fixes from the master line. If you’re familiar with OpenSim, are comfortable with building it from source code and would like to contribute to the release process then please follow the instructions on the mailing list and get testing!

Features & bug fixes

Teravus fixed a landing problem if the avatar was moving forward above a certain speed (c15509).
Teravus fixed a problem where dragging a physical prim would sometimes corrupt the physics representation, resulting in a never-ending spew of error messages to the console (9ba10a).
Teravus added code to stop the avatar sometimes performing a ‘double jump‘ when it collides with a prim (21f80b).
Adam added a facility to restore deleted and updated inventory items and folders. This stores one restoration sql file per use per day. To enable, setrollback = “true”
rollbackdir = “”/absolute/path/to/rollback/storage/dir”

in the [InventoryService] section of bin/config-include/GridCommon.ini (hence this may not yet work for standalone OpenSim instances). This functionality should probably be considered experimental for now (b516fe).
Teravus fixed a problem where avatars had been unable to walk up steep mountains (3ebb52).
I added the ability to merge OpenSim Archives (OARs) via a –merge switch on the “load oar” command. In other worlds, one OAR can now be loaded on top of an existing OAR in the region simulator while keeping the existing objects, terrain, region settings and parcel data. See the wiki for more details (a4d2a9).
Mic Bowman contributed a patch that fixes a problem with the avatar landing animation on long running regions (a3755d).
Teravus fixed an issue with the llSetRot() method if the object is not physics-enabled. This may resolve problems with certain scripts such as those which rotate doors (a5f280).
I fixed a problem where an Inventory Archive (IAR) load did not preserve creator information if the required user profiles were present (2bc19a).
Jeff Lee contributed osGetRegionStats() script function to return a number of sim statistics (9d0596).
Melanie fixed a problem with llDie() (3ae3cd).
I 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 (32ef1b).
Alex Welch contributed a patch that stops llParcelMediaCommandList() failing on group deeded land (25e2b1).
KittyLiu contributed a patch that fixes locking issues where many scripts are running and some are crossing between regions (2e47e5).
Revolution contributed a patch that implements god mode freezing and unfreezing of individual users (e078fb).

Infrastructure

Teravus refactored the giant LLClientView incoming packet handling switch to individual methods.
Melanie started to fix problems that occur when a prim tries to cross a region boundary. Trusted script crossings (when TrustBinaries = true in OpenSim.ini) should now work again. Please note that TrustBinaries should only be used if all simulators are utterly trustworthy (probably operated by a single party).

Load OpenSim Regions (OARs) directly from the web

justincc — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:40:35 +0000

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 Week in OpenSim Dev - week ending Saturday 21st November 2009

justincc — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:11:20 +0000

This week in OpenSim ( 999779 - 2c8fbc ).

General news

None this week

Features & bug fixes

I made a change so that LSL “for” control loops that contain expressions surrounded by brackets, e.g.
```
for ((i = 0); (i < 10); (++i)) { ... }
```
now compile successfully. Unfortunately, this does not solve compilation problems with other similiarly legal LSL such as
```
(llSay(0, "This is a test"));
```
This stops OpenSim currently working well with LSLPlus, which appears to generate lots of such extra parentheses. Thanks to Roger Wellington-Oguri for this information (8f0db6).
Teravus made a fix so that avatars can now automatically land on prims again (f7916d).

Infrastructure

Melanie started to add infrastructure for storing generic data under MySQL.

Update sculpties in OpenSim from scripts?

justincc — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:36:09 +0000

Inspired by a few Tweets and a blog post from Rich White, I took a look yesterday at a program called PloppSL, derived from the Plopp children’s drawing package.

Plopp allows you to draw 2D objects and convert them into 3D at the touch of a button. For example, a circle drawn on the screen will become a sphere when converted to 3D.

PloppSL modifies Plopp by adding a function to export the drawing into pair of Second Life textures - a sculptie texture and an ordinary texture. You can then import these into Second Life or OpenSim via the client’s upload functions to produce the sculptie in-world.

Rich’s point was that OpenSim could achieve a closer integration with PloppSL by allowing the user to update a sculptie already in world whenever it was modified by PloppSL. OpenSim already has a script function called osSetDynamicTextureURL() that can dynamically create textures from images found at URLs. So why not do the same for sculpties with a method such as osSetDynamicSculptieURL(), as shown below?

In principle, I don’t see why this shouldn’t be possible. In an osSetDynamicSculptieURL() function one might always want to try and make sure that both a sculptie and an ordinary texture are uploaded at the same time, otherwise the intermediate results could be a little odd.

I’m interested in whether this would be useful to people. PloppSL itself is closed source and hasn’t been updated for a while (the last messages in the forum are from 2007). It’s also very much oriented towards kids. But I know there are other programs out there which could use the same facility.

Any thoughts?

This Week in OpenSim Dev - week ending Saturday 14th November 2009

justincc — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:54:22 +0000

This week in OpenSim ( 81c439 - d5c18f ).

General news

None this week

Features & bug fixes

Snoopy contributed a patch which fixes issues that occurred when group owned land was abandoned by the land owner or reclaimed by an estate manager or a god (81c439).
Snoopy contributed a patch that makes it possible for users to buy land directly for a group (81c439).
I fixed a bug with Inventory Archives (IARs) where “load iar” would fail if any item names or folder names contained a forward slash (”/”). New IARs will now load and save correctly (668850).
I fixed a bug where an inventory path containing a forward slash “/” could not be specified to the “load iar” or “save iar” IAR commands. These can now be escaped with a blackslash (”\/”). Backslashes that actually are in the path themselves have to be escaped (hence “\\”). (a3105a).
I changed the “av_capsule_tilted” setting to be “false” by default. This makes the avatar walk more smoothly without sinking into the ground when using the Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) engine. I just flipped the switch, all the hard work to implement was done by nlin. This doesn’t appear to have the same effect on OpenSim 0.6.7, though you may want to experiment if your avatar is getting that sinking feeling (a88a46).
jhurliman made a change that may stop attachments occasionally disappearing. This will not apply when using the SQLite database plugin since SQLite does not persist attachments yet, as far as I remember (5145df).
Melanie added a facility to invoke region module commands via in-world scripts. The script executes the command
```
modSendCommand(string module, string command, string k)
```
where module is the name of the module to invoke, command is the command itself and k is some mysterious undocumented parameter (I’m guessing it could be used to hold a key by which the reply (which comes back as a link_message with link id 1) could be associated with the request. See the commit message for more details (ba9908).
Adam added a further facility to return statistical data from a simulator. This data is in XML format and can be accessed at
```
http://:/monitorstats/
```
See the commit message for more details (90b15a).
I stopped OpenSim.Grid.GridServer.exe from being built in the master branch since it now only exists in a ROBUST service (9cb0c7).
I stopped Inventory Archive (IAR) saving from failing if a corrupt asset was encountered (bb92ba).
Plugh contributed a patch that implements osGetMapTexture() to retrieve the current region’s map texture UUID from within a script, and osGetRegionMapTexture(), which allows the textures of other regions to be retrieved (fe8247).

Infrastructure

No news this week.

This Week in OpenSim Dev - week ending Saturday 7th November 2009

justincc — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:06:30 +0000

This week in OpenSim ( 711dde - 5300e8 )

General news

None this week

Features & bug fixes

CasperW submitted a patch that fixes a failure in the Remote Admin shutdown method (f4e980).
jhurliman fixed some scene related race conditions. This may increase stability when manipulating scene objects (192794).
Melanie reverted XEngine script loading to occur serially rather than in parallel. This may reduce script engine failure. The original problematic change was probably introduced after 0.6.7 was branched (001308).
Melanie improved inventory data retrieval by clients from a region (30a241).
Revolution contributed a patch to implement friends permissions (ability to see where a friend is, edit their objects, etc.). Melanie made some further changes to activate this (b09857).
I added the ability to save inventory items and folders containing a “/” character to an Inventory Archive (IAR). Previously, such inventory nodes would cause “load iar” to fail, since / is also used as a path separator (345ddc).

Infrastructure

Dahlia updated prim collision meshing.
Adam started adding an additional scene monitoring framework. The data can be seen by typing “monitor report” on the console. It may be that this needs to be combined with/supersede the data shown by “show stats”.
Melanie disabled the CAPS inventory request mechanism.

This Week in OpenSim Dev - week ending Saturday 31st October 2009

justincc — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:35:34 +0000

This week in OpenSim ( 730930 - 58c260 )

General news

Mono 2.4.2 or later is now required to build or run OpenSim. This will take effect for users when the next version (probably 0.6.8) is released.

Features & bug fixes

RemedyTomm contributed a patch that may improve bulk data transfer between the region simulator and the viewer (1209db).
Dan Lake contributed a patch that reduces memory usage in the Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) OpenSim physics plugin (428bd7).
jhurliman introduced the option to run some scene operations asynchronously. This will increase performance on multi-core systems (0b1726).
jhurliman increased the priority of avatar baked texture requests. This should make them rez faster than other scene textures (3a1ee7).
jhurliman switched from using OpenJPEG to CSJ2K in the Meshmerizer. This will probably improve reliability of the Meshmerizer (322b39).
Fredo Chaplin contributed a patch that allows objects to be deleted by UUID from the region simulator command line. Melanie made further tweaks (c17359).
jhurliman fixed the standalone login so that the “requested region, default region, any region” sequence is honoured (b81c82).
jhurliman fixed Mantis 4329 where the llDialog box had stopped working (a05c67).

Infrastructure

jhurliman continued to work on the new Linden Lab client-server protocol stack implementation.
jhurliman updated the version of libomv used by OpenSim to 0.8.0-pre.
jhurliman removed the DotNetEngine scripting engine.

DotNetEngine scripting engine removed from OpenSim master

justincc — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:07:30 +0000

Hello folks. As of Tuesday 27th October (today), the old “DotNetEngine” scripting engine has been removed from OpenSim’s trunk codeline in commit 27ee49.

DotNetEngine was our first scripting engine written by Tedd back in the day (alright, a couple of years ago). Naturally, it was a great thing since it marked the beginning of Linden Scripting Language (LSL) support in OpenSim.

However, in the last year or so it has been surpassed by XEngine which is now also the default scripting engine (and has been for some time). Therefore, to reduce maintenance requirements in the codebase and simplify configuration, DotNetEngine has been deleted from OpenSimulator’s master codeline.

This will show up for users in the next release (0.6.8). Hopefully, it will be a fairly invisible change since XEngine can do everything that DotNetEngine can do and because XEngine is already the default scripting engine. However, if you’ve been using OpenSimulator for a while and have explicitly configured the use of DotNetEngine then this is something to bear in mind when you upgrade.

This Week in OpenSim Dev - week ending Saturday 24th October 2009

justincc — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:31:55 +0000

This week in OpenSim ( b4526a - 2c3461 )

General news

None this week.

Features & bug fixes

jhurliman improved prim loading performance from the region database with MySQL (b4526a).
jhurliman optimized terrain data sending (0a6ea3).
snowcrash contributed a patch that fixes an index error in llList2String() (182693).
Melanie changed script commands to more fully obey scripting delays if these are turned on. Delays can be changed by tweaking the ScriptDelayFactor variable in OpenSim.ini (624af6).

Infrastructure

jhurliman continued to work on the new Linden Lab client-server protocol stack implementation.

This Week in OpenSim Dev - week ending Saturday 17th October 2009

justincc — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:35:56 +0000

This week in OpenSim ( 41b27e - a3f93c )

General news

None this week.

Features & bug fixes

Dan Lake contributed performance improvements to general scene object handing code and objects using the Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) physics plugin (5976ac).

Infrastructure

jhurliman continued to work on the new Linden Lab client-server protocol stack implementation.