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 ( 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.

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 ( 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 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.

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 ( 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.

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 ( 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.

The OpenSim 0.6.7 release was branched from trunk on the 28th September 2009.

As usual, please bear in mind that Opensim is still at the alpha code quality stage with documentation to match (improvements in the opensim wiki are always welcome!).  Only minimal testing has been performed on this release.

Here are some highlights of the changes between 0.6.6 and 0.6.7.  Apologies in advance for any inaccuracies (corrections again welcome

• Asset and Inventory services have been moved to the new ROBUST infrastructure.  The User, Grid and Messaging servers still exist as specific executables.
• A Vivox voice module was introduced.
• Inbound LSL HTTP functions were implemented.
• The inventory service was overhauled to fetch folders and items individually as required rather than all at once.
• Experimental OpenSim Inventory Archives (IARs) were introduced.
• A console for remotely controlling region simulators and ROBUST servers was introduced.
• The Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) physics module was made the default physics implementation.  This means that 64 bit Windows users will have to use the OpenSim.32BitLaunch.exe executable rather than OpenSim.exe.
• Experimental megaregions were introduced.
• A massive number of performance improvements and other bug fixes were made.

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 0.6.6 (branched at old Subversion revision r9962).

This week in OpenSim ( 0cbd9e - 017838 )

General news

• The trunk OpenSim code was able to handle 85 avatars in a test this week before a crash occurred.  This is quite an achievement and many kudos to all those involved in fixing up various crashes and memory leaks.  Special thanks to John Hurliman, Diva Canto, Melanie Theilker and Nebadon Izumi who did a lot of the work on this.

Features & bug fixes

• Diva tied up situations where file streams were not being closed when code failed (b5b53d).
• Dan Lake contributed more patches to improve memory usage (6d5297).
• I changed the default OpenSim inventory and grid service configuration ports to match that used by ROBUST (port 8003).  This included wiki instruction changes.  The user service (which by default runs on port 8002) has yet to be moved to ROBUST (99c85b).
• Rob Smart added a hair item to the default wearables for a new client (though as before, none of them appear in inventory yet).  This should fix the problem where newly created avatars are clouds (1c220e).
• Teravus made a fix in a method that handles physics collisions.  This may stop the avatar ‘flailing‘ effect seen when an avatar walks over downward sloping ground.  Kitto Flora also contributed a fix which raises the falling velcoity that triggers flailing.  Teravus then made further improvements upon this.  (827152).
• dmiles contributed a patch that fixes a problem where users couldn’t buy objects that were on sale for L$0.  Melanie made an adjustment to the position of this fix (ef03b2).

Infrastructure

• Dahlia carried out collision mesh related work.
• Diva, jhurliman and Melanie continued working to improve the texture pipeline.
• Michael Cortez contributed groups module bug fixes.
• jhurliman created a new Linden Lab client-server protocol stack implementation to replace the existing one.  Diva and Melanie contributed further tweaks and fixes.

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 0.6.6 (branched at old Subversion revision r9962).

This week in OpenSim ( 5d09c5 - 2d9c27)

General news

• None this week.

Features & bug fixes

• Diva finished moving the Grid server to the ROBUST server infrastructure (de4811).  This will require the addition of a [GridService] section in your bin/config-include/StandaloneCommon.ini or bin/config-include/GridCommon.ini files.  See the UGRM to URM migration instructions on the wiki or Mantis 4197 for some more information.
• Diva added a fix-phantoms console command to see if that may counter an issue where approximately 20% of prims are phantom after importing an OAR to a region that forms part of a megaregion (bc892c).
• Alan M Webb contributed a patch that stops some phantom objects behaving as if they weren’t phantom, which also caused llVolumeDetect() to return somewhat random results (2a7bed).
• James J Greensky contributed some patches that improved performance (44776f).
• Dr Scofield added parcel serialization to OpenSim Archives (OARs).  This means that parcel information will now be saved and restored when using OARs (3c271b).

Infrastructure

• Diva, jhurliman and Melanie started some great work on tracking down where texture related problems and memory leaks are occuring.  At the time of writing this work is hopefully nearing completion - there’s still at least one unexplained new thread deadlock in the updated code.

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 0.6.6 (branched at old Subversion revision r9962).

This week in OpenSim ( 9027d4 - a7f3d0 )

General news

• None this week.

Features & bug fixes

• Intari contributed a patch that implements llHttpResponse() and makes the hostname used in llRequestURL() and llRequestSecureURL() configurable.  This should more or less complete OpenSim’s LSL http server functionality (97c18c).
• Alan M Webb contributed a patch that fixes an occasional script compilation failure due to occasional mono failures both in the compilation mechanism and through file system latency (b7265a).
• I changed the Inventory Archive (IAR) mechanism so that saves and loads work properly again in grid mode.  This requires the user service to also be at this revision or later (9249c0).
• Teravus fixed teleporting within HG enabled megaregions (0a0b53).
• Teravus fixed attachment issues when traversing megaregions (2bb513).

Infrastructure

• Diva worked on moving the Grid server to the ROBUST server infrastructure.

The current situation

For any object, the OpenSim Archive (OAR) format (as of OAR version 0.2) saves the creator’s unique system UUID, such as 517d9f5d-2ef2-49ba-a47c-c1658ffe715f.  This means that the creator details are preserved only if the OAR is loaded on the same system.  If the OAR is loaded to another OpenSim installation then the creator defaults to the master avatar since that target system has no profiles that match the unique ID.

IARs (as of IAR version 0.1) go one step further by saving the creator’s name rather than the ID. This is done in a prototype format known as an OpenSim Profile Anchor (OSPA).  This is buried in the XML that describes an item in an IAR.  Here’s an example.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<InventoryItem>
  <Name>boxee</Name>
  ...
  <CreatorUUID>ospa:n=Justin Clark-Casey</CreatorUUID>
  ...
</InventoryItem>

In this case, the boxee item was created by me.  So the OSPA is ‘ospa:n=Justin Clark-Casey’ where the n attribute is my name.  When the IAR is loaded to another OpenSim installation, if a profile exists with this name, then that profile is registered as the creator.

Possible futures

This is a little better but clearly still far from ideal.  Most OpenSim installations onto which an IAR is loaded will not have a user profile for the given creator.  Furthermore, the target system may have a different user with the same name (though I’m not sure if there’s more than one Justin Clark-Casey in the world), or more than one user could have the same name (which is defacto possible in OpenSim though not recommended).  In these cases the loaded item may end up being associated with the wrong person.

Copy the profiles

One solution would be to save the entire creator’s profile into an IAR.  That way, if the creator doesn’t exist when the IAR is loaded then their profile can be recreated.  But this doesn’t really address the issue of different users on the target OpenSim with the same name (should the existing user profile be registered as the creator or an imported one?).  It also can result in the creation of lots of profiles on big OpenSim grids.  Nonetheless this may still be a good solution for small specific-purpose grids or OpenSim applications.

Put profiles on the web

A more adventurous approach is to include a URL pointing to an external profile somewhere on the web.  The OpenSim installation to which an IAR is loaded would store creator URLs in its database rather than UUIDs.  When the profile is needed it would be fetched from the web.

This is what OSPAs were looking to accomodate.  Under this system, a creator reference might look something like

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<InventoryItem>
  <Name>boxee</Name>
  ...
  <CreatorUUID>ospa:n=Justin Clark-Casey,p=http://justincc.org/my-vw-profile</CreatorUUID>
  ...
</InventoryItem>

where the p attribute contains the URL referencing an external profile. The n attribute remains as well in case the URL can’t be retrieved (somewhat analagous to alt attributes in HTML).

This scheme solves the doppelganger problem (users with the same name) since URLs are unique to a particular creator.  There’s also the added bonus in that the creator can update their profile after the content has been released.

However, there are still major problems to overcome. One is that it’s very difficult to shoehorn OSPAs into the Second Life system.  Second Life expects UUIDs everywhere and OpenSim has inherited this tendency.  Storing OSPAs means storing arbitrary strings rather than just UUIDs - this requires messy OpenSim architectural compromises and the evolution of existing internal data formats.

The current SL protocol also expects to reference profiles by UUIDs. not by arbitrary strings or URLs.  The workaround is to create ‘temporary’ profiles in OpenSim where OSPAs are hashed to UUIDs.  This is a very complicated task that creates a lot of holes to seal up.  I was some way down the path with this earlier this year but unfortunately I’ve since had to deprioritize the work.

In conclusion

Preserving creator identities when transferring content between separate grids is a challenge.  Nonetheless, I believe that it’s an important feature that could further promote the evolution of the OpenSim content ecosystem.  I also believe that it’s possible with the current Second Life infrastructure, albeit with a number of hacky compromises and workarounds. Luckily, in the open-source world even imperfect solutions light the onward path.

I’m also hopeful that future protocol work (such as the Linden Lab led VWRAP and other efforts) will make creator identity preservation easier.

Please note that none of what I’ve said addresses the issue of Digital Rights Management.  It’s trivial for anybody to change the saved creator information.  But I think that preserving creator information by default would be a good step forward.

All this is very experimental stuff that has largely just come out of my own head.  I hope to develop it further but I’m not sure how much time I’m going to get in the short term.  So I would love to hear comments, alternative solutions or code patches for this area of OpenSim.