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This Week in OpenSim Dev - week ending Saturday 6th March 2010

justincc — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:26:46 +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 0.6.8 (released on 23rd December 2009).

This week in OpenSim ( db24e57 - 2dcf73d ).

General news

The cutting edge OpenSim Git master code is still unstable following the final merge of the ROBUST server migration on the 1st March 2010. I very strongly recommend that you don’t update to this code unless you are a developer or tester - please stick with official releases such as OpenSim 0.6.8. If you do need to update, here are some work-in-progress migration instructions.

Features & bug fixes

I fixed a bug where just under half the time, a new HUD attachment would only rez it’s root prim until right-clicked (or otherwiseupdated) (edb1764).
Daedius contributed a patch that implements llSetLinkTextureAnim(), llLinkParticleSystem(), llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast() and llGetLinkPrimitiveParams(). There were introduced by Linden Lab in their version 1.38 server (c0bc250).
Daedius contributed a patch that implements llTextBox() (2dcf73d).

Infrastructure

Various fixes were carried out by Diva, Melanie and myself after this weeks ROBUST merge. OpenSim Git master is still unstable.

This Week in OpenSim Dev - week ending Saturday 27th February 2010

justincc — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:43:49 +0000

This week in OpenSim ( d761d1 - 1daabc ).

General news

The finally part of the ROBUST server migration was merged in on Monday (Monday 1st March). So I recommend that anybody following Git master back up their data before updating their source code. You may also need to change your OpenSim configuration as detailed on this wiki page.

Features & bug fixes

I fixed a bug with loading OpenSim ARchives (OARs) where loaded region settings were not being persisted (so after a server restart the old settings would come back unless the user had made a change in the meantime) (93967d).

Infrastructure

Diva and Melanie continued to work on migrating the legacy user service into a number of separate ROBUST services (presence, user accounts, authentication, etc.). The branch was merged into Git master on Monday 1st March 2010.

A word of caution when trying the Second Life Viewer 2 Beta with current OpenSim

justincc — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 01:35:11 +0000

Hi folks. Just a brief blog post to remind people to take care when experimenting with Linden Lab’s Beta Second Life Viewer 2 with the current OpenSim builds. I’ve seen mixed reports of how well it works with OpenSim at the moment (some people seem to suffer a crash almost immediately while others seem to be able to use it to some extent).

However, according to John Hurliman the version of the OpenMetaverse library currently being used by OpenSim has a problem dealing with at least one of the new inventory packets in the 2.0 Viewer. This means that it’s not impossible that using the viewer with OpenSim today could inadvertently destroy some of your inventory items.

This is certainly not deliberate in any way - it would be a result of the mismatch between the viewer’s expectations of the server-viewer communications protocol and OpenSim’s (via libOpenMetaverse).

John says there are also issues with the viewer no longer shipping with default terrain textures, making OpenSim regions using those textures appear all white (if only it were still Christmas). So it sounds like experimentation is best done with an alt avatar for now.

The viewer itself looks very interesting and I look forward to trying it out when I next get an opportunity. Not sure how long it will take to get support in OpenSim but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if people aren’t already working on it. John himself says he’s looking to get various issues resolved though it’s not at the top of his priority stack at the moment.

This Week in OpenSim Dev - week ending Saturday 20th February 2010

justincc — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:44:39 +0000

This week in OpenSim ( 9821c4 - d1f2fa ).

General news

None this week

Features & bug fixes

Revolution contributed a patch that fixes undo (9821c4).
Revolution contributed a patch that adds redo support (9821c4).
Revolution contributed a patch that adds land undo support (9821c4).
Revolution contributed a patch that stops avatars already in the region from appearing in the T-pose on login (9821c4).
Revolution contributed a patch that may stop avatar feet sinking in to the ground (9821c4).
Revolution contributed a patch that completes the implementation of llSetStatus() (9821c4).
Revolution contributed a patch that implements llLoopSoundSlave(), llLoopSoundMaster() and llTriggerSoundLimited() (9821c4).
Revolution contributed a patch that completes the implementation of llLookAt() (9821c4).
Revolution contributed a patch that implements llPointAt() and llStopPointAt() (9821c4).
Revolution contributed a patch that implements llGetCenterOfMass() (9821c4).
Revolution contributed a patch that implements llGroundRepel() (9821c4).
Revolution contributed a patch that implements llSetVehicleFlags() and llRemoveVehicleFlags() (9821c4).
Revolution contributed a patch that implements llSetInventoryPermMask() (9821c4).
Revolution contributed a patch that adds PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_TEXTURE, PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_URL, PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_TYPE, PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_SIZE and PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_DESC to llParcelMediaCommandList() (9821c4).
All this apparantly leaves just one unimplement LSL function and two unimplemented events. Thanks Revolution!
Melanie changed the handling of the SYSTEMIP value in ExternalHostName in a region setup so that it chooses the first network address or the loopback address if no network address is found (842b68).

Infrastructure

Diva and Melanie continue to work on migrating the legacy user service into a number of separate ROBUST services (presence, user accounts, authentication, etc.). This is currently being done on a separate presence-refactor branch. This will be merged soon.

Educators - what would you most like to see next in OpenSim?

justincc — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 19:24:46 +0000

Hi folks. I might not have talked about this much before but one of my chief interests is finding ways in which OpenSim can be better adapted for education and business uses, either as a standalone installation or as part of a larger grid.

I do think that it’s still very early days yet for virtual environments (VEs). Graphically, clients are primitive, especially compared to the latest video games. Outside of research labs and universities input devices are poor - trying to navigate a 3D scene using a 2D mouse is very unintuitive. And backend VE infrastructure systems are either proprietary or only just beginning to gather steam (OpenSim, for instance, still being alpha level code with its fair share of bugs).

Perhaps more importantly, I think that it’s also still extremely early culturally. To me, it’s a bit like the early days of the cinema where people where early films were little more than a fixed camera pointing at a stage. We’re only just groping beyond the naive ideas of ‘3D websites’ and exact in-world replicas of classrooms and offices. I think that it’s going to be quite a while before we really know how to use the medium.

Nonetheless, I’m always fascinated to hear of how people are experimenting with OpenSim and other virtual environments, with an eye to using them to achieve their goals. For instance, it was great yesterday to read Paul Sweeney’s report on a lessons-learned meeting for UK-funded virtual-world education projects, a meeting at which OpenSim was mentioned quite a few times. Among other things, this adds to the discussions of emerging educational VE uses in last month’s UK Virtual World Watch report and to the earlier activites in this space.

In fact, what I’d like to do today is concentrate on educators (in which I also include trainers, museum curators and anybody else providing a learning experience) and ask them a question. What would you most like to see next in OpenSim? Here are a few (!) candidates off the top of my head.

Higher stability and reliability.
Mesh-based objects instead of/as well as prim-based ones.
Easier configuration.
Better integration with existing Second Life based educational system such as SLoodle.
A proper guest system where users can log in with guest accounts (e.g. Purple Guest, Blue Guest, White Guest) without needing to create an avatar account first.
Implementation of missing Second Life features such as the ability to take groups of objects into inventory.
Bundling within OpenSim of currently 3rd party-sourced components such as Groups and Search.

Don’t restrict yourself to this list - please feel free to nominate anything you like. To simulate the limited resources available, it would be really great if anybody commenting could restrict themselves to just one (primary) choice.

I should also make the disclaimer that I probably won’t get much free time to implement any of these soon - already I’ve had to put experiments with updating sculpties from scripts on the backburner. But I’d be very interested to hear from educational users what their priorities are and this may still influence others in the community both directly and indirectly (that’s one of the great things about open-source).

This Week in OpenSim Dev - week ending Saturday 13th February 2010

justincc — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 20:42:51 +0000

This week in OpenSim ( 3e697a - 454931 ).

General news

None this week

Features & bug fixes

John Hurliman changed OpenSim to use MySQL’s own connection pooling rather than our homebrew solution. This should resolve some issues where MySQL connections would previously timeout (e1b5c6).
Melanie put a tool (OpenSim.Tools.Configger.exe) which will dump the configuration to stdout as a condensed .ini file, an xml file or a set of mysql insert statements (5ddd99).
I fixed a problem with avatar appearance so that eyes and hair no longer stubbornly remain white when running in the Standalone configuration (802a96).
VikingErik contributed patches which may remove various problems (such as persistently logging in 10km high) for users running with locales that use different numerical separators than those used by en_US. See Mantis 3522 for more details (00800c).
Teravus made some changes which may allow the SQLite database adaptor to once again work with Mono versions later than 2.4.2.3 (such as 2.4.3). See Mantis 4437 for more details (454931).

Infrastructure

Diva and Melanie continue to work on migrating the legacy user service into a number of separate ROBUST services (presence, user accounts, authentication, etc.). This is currently being done on a separate presence-refactor branch. This will take a few more weeks.

This Week in OpenSim Dev - week ending Saturday 6th February 2010

justincc — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:36:35 +0000

This week in OpenSim ( 19d486 - 4a092b ).

General news

None this week

Features & bug fixes

I fixed the internal EventManager.OnAttach event to actually fire when a scene object was attached to an avatar (4c1740).
I moved the prim face colour setting code down into SceneObjectPart so that callers other than scripts can use it (3863cd).
Robert Adams contributed a patch that allows terrain collision events to be detected after the regular collision checks (88d0fc).
I changed the internal EventManager so that any exceptions generated by event subscribers are caught by OpenSim, logged but not propogated. This helps prevents bugs in modules bringing down OpenSim or stopping other module code from executing (cd4651).
Misterblue contributed a patch to fix ODE physics stickiness (8556a9).

Infrastructure

Diva and Melanie continue to work on migrating the legacy user service into a number of separate ROBUST services (presence, user accounts, authentication, etc.). This is currently being done on a separate presence-refactor branch. This will take a while yet.

This Week in OpenSim Dev - week ending Saturday 30th January 2010

justincc — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:24:45 +0000

This week in OpenSim ( 19d486 - 4c1365 ).

General news

None this week

Features & bug fixes

I fixed a problem where llDie() was often leaving ‘dead’ prims behind - prims which had been deleted in OpenSim but which the client thought still existed (38cfc9).
Melanie added a region_manager_is_god setting in OpenSim.ini. If this option is set then estate managers entering god mode will have god powers (ee12b0).
Revolution contributed a patch so that holding down the left mouse button on a prim with touch registered scripts will now send a stream of events when the mouse is moved. This conforms with observed behaviour on the Linden Lab grid (05a3e3).

Infrastructure

Diva and Melanie continue to work on migrating the legacy user service into a number of separate ROBUST services (presence, user accounts, authentication, etc.). This is currently being done on a separate presence-refactor branch. The latest info is that it probably won’t be merged for a few more weeks, possibly longer.

OpenSim London Meetup Report

justincc — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:32:00 +0000

Hi folks. As many of you know, last Sunday (Tuesday 2nd Feb 2010) we had an OpenSim real-world meetup at The Jugged Hare in London. It was a really good event - lots of very interesting people came along and we had some great conversations about all kinds of OpenSim related topics - grids, development, education, applications - pretty much everything. Unfortunately, I had a problem with my camera but Tipton Cole of lovejoysim was able to take some photos (apologies in advance for the blurriness).

Here’s Sean Doherty, Digital Strategy Director of Maverick Media related his adventures with OpenSim on OSGrid. He looks very pleased about having his photo taken

Olli Aro of Second Places came along and told us about the interesting stuff he’s doing with OpenSim and education at The Content Grid.

Chris Hart, CTO of Reaction Grid had some great feedback on the experience of running public OpenSim installations.

Here’s a real power discussion - core developers Darren Guard (OpenSim founder and consultant currently working for Rezzable) and Melanie Thielker of Careminster Limited and 3D Hosting finally meet face to face.

As usual I (on the left) look incredibly fat in photographs (not helped by the fact that I actually am too fat). Bob Wellman of PMGrid (only just visible facing the camera) and Kevin Buckley of Immersv join in the discussion.

And thanks to Peter, Aron, Deepwire, Dr Olinkha Gustafson-Pearce, SlimWarrior, Mal Burns, Will Jeffery (MD of Maverick Media) and everybody else who came along (please, please e-mail me if I accidentally left you out or mislinked to you). You guys really made it a successful event. We should definitely have another one, quite possibly in the second half of this year, if not sooner.

This Week in OpenSim Dev - week ending Saturday 23rd January 2010

justincc — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:56:27 +0000

This week in OpenSim ( 3ff28e - 316503 ).

General news

None this week

Features & bug fixes

CasperW contributed a patch that fixes a security problem with osSetDynamicTexture() (3ff28e).
Mic Bowman contributed a patch that makes all console command output print directly to the screen rather than via the log. This means that you no longer need to have a log level of INFO to see command output (c211a1).
Revolution contributed a patch that fixes llSetDamage() (14e62c).

Infrastructure

Revolution contributed a patch that changes all the region modules bundled with the OpenSim project from the old style to the new Mono.Addins style. Documentation for the new style does not appear to be complete - I should think that the old style modules will continue to work for at least the next few releases, if not longer.
Diva and Melanie continue to work on migrating the legacy user service into a number of separate ROBUST services (presence, user accounts, authentication, etc.). This is currently being done on a separate presence-refactor branch.