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

This week in OpenSim ( 74e5fe5 - 374807d ).

General news

• None this week.

Features & bug fixes

• I fixed a bug where items given through llGiveInventory() disappeared.  This regression has probably been present since OpenSim 0.7, though OpenSim 0.6.9 should be unaffected.  The problem may still be present for Hypergrid setups.  This should be addressed shortly (c72d298).
• Apelsin contributed a patch that fixes the behaviour of llSetPos() and llGetLocalPos() for attachments.  Thanks to Marck for packaging this.  See Mantis 3923 for more details (a7a45cb).
• Melanie fixed a problem where some outgoing HTTP forms requests were unreliable due to an early closing of the outgoing stream (604423d).
• I increased locking in order to make object linking/delinking more reliable rather than occasionally failing (1c0b445).
• I reinstated the LLUDP client protocol ‘kill guard’ in order to stop viewers receiving object updates after they had been told the object had been deleted.  Receiving late updates could make undeletable ‘ghost’ objects stay behind until the client was relogged.  The kill guard was present in OpenSim 0.6.9 but had been accidentally dropped for OpenSim 0.7 (d99c601).
• Diva fixed issues with the DataSnapshot module (used by search and other things).  See Mantises 4984 and 4985 (436fdc2).
• I made a change so that Inventory Archive (IAR) loading paths can now start with a slash.  For instance, load iar /Objects and Objects are now both valid (86937d0).
• I finally reinserted the KickFlags parameter for a received GodKickUser packet from the client.  This appears to allows Gods to kick, freeze and unfreeze users.  Not sure where the corresponding functionality is on the viewer.  Thanks to Revolution for the original patch and Fly-Man for bringing this to my attention (374807d).

Infrastructure

• No news this week

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

This week in OpenSim ( d3c2424 - 8d8436e ).

General news

• None this week.

Features & bug fixes

• I added extra textures to OpenSim’s built-in asset library to replace those no longer shipped with Linden Lab’s Viewer 2 and derivatives.  Linden Lab provides these under a license which allows them to be included in OpenSim.  Remaining problems for OpenSim compatibility with viewer 2 include (a) the inability to initially set the appearance on new avatars and (b) the world map always displaying Linden Lab’s own grid map.  One can work around the appearance issue by setting all body parts, pants and shirt with a Viewer 1.23 or derivative.  The world map issue can probably be resolved for Linden Lab Viewer 2.1 and later by sending a MapURL on login (this will require an OpenSim code change) (11db33d).
• Melanie added some map tile generation options to OpenSim.ini.example.  This includes whether to generate them at all, how long to wait between refreshing them and which texture to show if no maptiles are being generated (ae554a4).
• Melanie removed all use of the estate_settings.xml file.  Estate settings should now be changed via the facilities provided by the viewer (f445659).

Infrastructure

• Diva continued to work on improvements and bug fixes for Hypergrid 1.5.

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

This week in OpenSim ( cd2c7b9 - 96e4099 ).

General news

• OpenSim 0.7.0.1 was released!

Features & bug fixes

• Melanie added a ‘DisableFacelights‘ option to OpenSim.ini.example.  This disables all attachment light effects except for those attached to the hands (cd2c7b9).
• Marck00 contributed a patch that implements distance sorting for fallback regions (used when a user’s desired login location is not available) (a5e4a2b).
• Diva restored the GridInfoService for standalone installations (it has always been present for a grid installation).  This is a service that can return information to the viewer about a grid.  Some viewers (such as Hippo) used this to auto-configure certain parameters.  See the OpenSim wiki for more details (144fc20).
• I fixed a bug where setting parameters on all prim faces at once (e.g. setting a texture on all faces of a cube) would sometimes only set some of the faces.  This was also ported to 0.6.9-post-fixes and 0.7-post-fixes but did not make it into 0.7.0.1 (a5dab07).
• I fixed a bug where shift-copying an object in-world would leave non-root prims of the original object phantom, even if the object was not marked as phantom (2a1c11f).
• Marck contributed a patch to make a prim color change generate the CHANGED_COLOR change() scripting event (4f62f00).
• randomhuman contributed a patch to fix the create_region command on RemoteAdmin.  This now properly supports setting estate details on region creation (8eeb3f2).
• Marck contributed a patch so that included configuration files can be read from relative paths that include the parent directory.  This has been broken since OpenSim 0.6.6 (ae43a07).
• Valy- contributed a patch that fixes land permission flags when using OpenSim on big-endian architectures (1463691).

Infrastructure

• No news this week.

As it’s very high level right now it tends, unfortunately, to gloss over the bugs.  Hopefully, the picture will become more accurate over time.  At the very least, this will give some guide to what is implemented in OpenSim and what isn’t.

There may be a little confusion since some people are already talking about OpenSimulator 0.7.1.  This might be because 0.7.1 (Dev) is the version number in the Master development branch.  However, this is not yet in release phase - the latest release remains OpenSimulator 0.7.0.1 for now.

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

This week in OpenSim ( 93532a9 - ab5a461 ).

General news

• None this week

Features & bug fixes

• Melanie removed the buggy implementation of llPointAt() for LSL.  This is officially deprecated and never worked on the LL grid (8e37e7e).
• I merged the ‘iar-merge’ branch into master.  This adds a –merge option to the Inventory Archive load command “load iar”.  If set, this flag merges the loaded IAR into the user’s existing inventory folders, rather than creating new folders.  This makes it easier to restore inventory backups to existing users, among other things.  Documentation will follow, hopefully pretty soon (1cffeab).
• Melanie added a grid service configuration parameter to set default region flags.  This has not yet been documented (16bdb53).
• Melanie stopped hover text colour changes from firing the changed LSL event (1869572).
• Melanie started caching llRequestAgentData() results to reduce user service load (db2f637).
• gcrim contributed a patch to fix llSetLinkPrimitiveParams() so that PRIM_POSITION sets the position of a child prim relative to the root prim, rather than the region (cc05fc4).
• Melanie fixed landmark properties (00fd2e0).

Infrastructure

• I merged the shared media/media on a prim OpenSim code into the master branch.  If you find any bugs with this feature please file a Mantis report as normal (127072).

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

This week in OpenSim ( 696b6c7 - c4ecbd1 ).

General news

• None this week

Features & bug fixes

• Melanie made a change so that gods and estate managers/owners are unaffected by parcel bans (696b6c7).
• Melanie made a change so that the dataserver() LSL event returns a zero UUID if a user is offline, instead of timing out.  See Mantis 4894 for more details (2257e39).
• Snoopy contributed a patch that fixes llSetPos() for child prims that are more than 10 meters away from their root prim in a linkset (168a8e9).
• Marck contributed a patch to implement the command “show hyperlinks” on the console.  This is the region console for standalone and whichever ROBUST instance is running the grid service in grid mode (f91ec19).

Infrastructure

• I continued to work on OpenSimulator’s Shared Media/Media On A Prim implementation.  This included adding MySQL support and fixing issues when prims with media textures were shift-copied in-world.

I also included some diagrams to illustrate the basic differences between standalone and grid configurations.  Here’s the standalone diagram.

As you can see, in standalone mode both grid services (login, assets, inventory, etc.) and the region simulator itself are contained within the same process (OpenSim.exe).  Viewers simply connect to this one instance.

On the other hand, even a very simple grid setup is considerably more complicated.

In OpenSimulator 0.7 a process called Robust.exe runs all the grid services.  Instead of using their own local services, each simulator (OpenSim.exe) connects to this common set of services, usually across a network.  And once a network gets involved there’s considerably more to go wrong - simulators may encounter both network congestion and a delayed response from the central services if they’re overloaded with requests.

In grid mode, simulators also need to communicate with each other.  For instance, since all regions are on a common grid, an avatar may teleport to a region running on another machine, or cross an in-world border between regions hosted on different computers.  Both teleports and border crossings involve an intricate data handoff between the origin simulator and the destination simulator.  The less reliable the network between the simulators, the worse the teleport or crossing experience will be.  Naturallly, this is often worst in the case where these simulators are communicating over the Internet.

Another interesting thing to note about this diagram is that all communication between the viewer and the virtual environment (apart from initial login, which isn’t shown here) occurs through the region simulator that the avatar is currently in.  This applies not only to things such as walking about and creating objects (both of which naturally belong there anyway), but also to operations such as inventory retrieval and texture fetch.

This is one reason why the current grid model is a centralized one, even though OpenSim instances themselves are distributed across different machines.  Anyone wanting to add a new region simulator to a grid is forced to store their assets and inventory in the single set of services provided by that grid operator - they can’t choose some independent third party or provide their own data store.  Equally, anyone adding a simulator has to be trusted by the grid operator since the guy (or gal) running the simulator potentially gains access to the assets and inventory of that grid.

That’s what makes efforts like the hypergrid, http texture fetching and VWRAP so interesting - I think that they’re all trying to lever open the door to a genuinely distributed, more web-like network of virtual environments.  A network where anybody can set up their own simulator without requiring the trust of every other operator, yet receive visitors with the same ease that one can click on a web hyperlink today.  A network where visitors retain their own appearance and are safe in the knowledge that the items in their inventory are not exposed to the simulator that they happen to be visiting (unless they rez them there).  It’s a massive challenge but one that could really transform the landscape.

Anyway, enough architectural rambling :-).  The OpenOffice draw source files for the diagrams above are linked from the configuration wiki page if anybody wants to use them further.

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

This week in OpenSim ( f798679 - aa7cadc ).

General news

• OpenSimulator 0.7 was released! Pretty much all the bug fixes described here made it into that release.

Features & bug fixes

• Diva fixed a nasty problem where script editing and loading would sometimes freeze a region.  See Mantis 4858 for more details (7c124a5).
• I readjusted broadcast blue box notices to only go out to avatars that were actually in the broadcasting sim (rather than those also in neighbours) (e46c0a0).
• Melanie made a change to allow friends with permissions and shared group members to copy and move items out of prims (ea51bea).
• Melanie made a change to allow megaregions to start properly after an unclean shutdown (ac1a347).

Infrastructure

• I continued to work on OpenSim’s shared media/media on a prim implementation, concentrating on improvements to the messages and data communicated between the server and the client.  One effect of this was to get URL drag and drop to a prim surface working.

When you run 0.7 for the first time with 0.6.9 databases the upgrade should be automatic but since this is a complicated procedure you will absolutely want to take database backups first.  We also recommend that you don’t copy old configuration files since the absence of some new settings may cause problems.  See the 0.7 upgrade notes for more details.

As always, OpenSim is an alpha level project, which means that there remain many, many bugs and various missing features.

Many, many thanks to Diva for very patiently managing this release and fixing a load of bugs on the way!