This Week in OpenSim Dev – week ending Saturday 30th August 2008

Hello everybody. This is a short summary of OpenSim development for the past week up until the end of last Saturday, as culled from our source code repository logs.  After any general news there are two sections.  The first section – “Features and bug fixes”, contains prominent new functionality and bug fixes visible to users of OpenSim.   The numbers in brackets in this section are the final svn revision numbers in which the work was completed for this week. This is right at the cutting edge so there is no guarantee that this functionality is stable.

The second section contains information about the infrastructure changes happening within the project.  This is going to be a little more impressionistic than the features/bug fixes list, but hopefully it will give a picture of how OpenSim is evolving from week to week.

This week in OpenSim ( r5959 – r6070 )

Features & bug fixes

• Melanie implemented persistence of texture animation, object sale, looped sound and script access pin settings (r5967).
• Salazhar contributed a patch that implements llGetNumberOfSides() (r5973).
• Homer Horwitz contributed a patch that fixes user profile updating (r5968).
• Teravus integrated and improved an adaption of Zha Ewry’s Open Grid Protocol (OGP) patch for OpenSim as a region module.  This can be turned on by setting ogp_enabled = true in OpenSim.ini.  See the Second Life wiki on how this can be used with Linden Lab’s OGP Beta program (r6032).
• Melanie added a ScriptDelayFactor setting for LSL in OpenSim.ini.  This allows LSL scripting delays to be reduced or eliminated (by setting the scaling factor to 0) if desired (r5977).
• Teravus fixed a bug on standalone where you wouldn’t be allowed to login if your home region was down, even if your destination region was different.  At this moment, the same bug still exists in grid mode (r5989).
• Francis contributed patches which fixed a latent inventory retrieval bug reveals by other recent improvements (r6046).
• simsim contributed a patch that allows sitting avatars to teleport – basically by forcing them to stand up before the teleport commences (r5996).
• Melanie added a ScriptDistanceLimitFactor to OpenSim.ini which allows modification of LSL‘s arbitrary object movement limit (such as in llSetPos()) (r6015).
• Melanie fixed a bug where the physics representations of child prims were not removed when a link set was deleted (r6014).
• Salazhar contributed a patch that improves the behaviour of llDetectedLink() (r6023).
• Dahlia worked on improvements to the prim mesher which should result in more accurate meshes, lower memory consumption and fewer lockups (r6047).
• Dr Schofield added XMLRPC admin support for loading OpenSim region archives (r6034).
• Homer Horwitz contributed a patch that should help with the problem of ‘ghost’ avatars.  There are various types of ghosts – some are simply passive images that remain even if the avatar that they belong to is not logged in.  Other appear in sims, wave their arms about and merrily type away, though the avatar that they belong to is actually leading an independent existence in another region (r6051).
• Adam Frisby added an experimental asset server that stores assets as files in a directory rather than as blobs in a database.  Currently, this will only work in standalone mode (r6053).
• Adam Frisby changed the MySQL code such that user and grid requests can now run on multiple connections (rather than being funnelled through one connection as before).  This change should be considered experimental and may be unstable for a short period (which, of course, is true for any change to the trunk code) (r6065).
• I fixed a bug where OpenSim region archiving was not saving asset information for landmarks, and would promptly fail when a load was attempted for the asset (r6066).

Infrastructure

• Sean Dague spent time cleaning up old database code cruft.
• Melanie worked on genericizing some XEngine script engine code to make the facilities available to any scripting engine.