justincc's opensim blog

GridHop: The Yellow Pages of the Hypergrid

justincc — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:45:25 +0000

So, I was Googling for something else today and stumbled across a very interesting site called GridHop.net. It looks like my good friend and long time OpenSim supporter Tx Oh has put together a web based directory of Hypergrid accessible regions which people can submit their own regions to.

(For those of you who don’t know, the Hypergrid is an experimental OpenSim architecture that allows people to travel from one OpenSim grid to another without losing their avatar identity or appearance).

So in the picture I’m on Wright Plaza in OSGrid (minus my hair for some reason – OpenSim ain’t perfect and I have the GridHop website open in the built-in browser. In column 1 you can choose the grid you want to go to and in column 2 a specific region. There are even descriptions and pictures of the destination regions

Here I have Venice Italy in Cyberlandia selected (an Italian grid hosted completely separately from OSGrid). Since Venice is in a foreign grid, I need to click the Hypergrid Jump link in order to pop up a landmark dialog.

And when I click teleport, I’m transported to Venice in Cyberlandia! You can see this from the @osgrid.org:8002 under my name.

Now, this stuff certainly isn’t perfect – for some reason sometimes for extended periods my teleports to Venice were completely refused. And Cyberlandia was the only grid I could get to from OSGrid (though admittedly I might have succeeded if I’d kept trying some of the other grids). The Hypergrid architecture itself is experimental and imperfect (though watch out for Hypergrid 2 one day

But all the same I find it extremely impressive. Though you could grid hop before gridhop.net, having a directory of destinations to browse through makes travelling so much more accessible. Well done Tx Oh!

This Week in OpenSim Dev – week ending Saturday 27th June 2009

justincc — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 21:42:26 +0000

Hello everybody. This is a short summary of OpenSim development for the past week up until the end of Saturday. The numbers in brackets after bug and feature points are the SVN revision numbers in which the work appears.

The changes described here appear only in OpenSim’s cutting edge Subversion ‘trunk’. Please do not attempt to use code taken directly from ‘trunk’ 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 0.6.5 (branched at r9561).

This week in OpenSim ( r9889 – r9950 )

General news

None this week

Features & bug fixes

Melanie made group deeding of objects correctly apply their next owner permissions (r9893).
Melanie corrected the behaviour of llGetOwner() for group deeded objects (r9893).
Melanie fixed a bug so that groups with more than 70 members can be viewed without crashing the client connection (r9917).
Dr Scofield fixed “collection out of sync” errors occuring in the Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) physics plugin when under heavy load (r9923).
Alan Webb contributed a fix that moves texture send processing out of the main client packet processing loop and into its own cycle. This should improve texture display (r9924).
Dr Scofield streamlined the Linden UDP packet processing logic to make it more efficient (r9938).
Melanie changed the default region file format from XML to an INI file, though existing XML files are still readable (r9946).

Infrastructure

Melanie worked on a new user service connector infrastructure.

OSGrid Becoming Self Sustaining?

justincc — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:44:05 +0000

As I mentioned in a previous post, in the spirit of posting more often I’m now going to post any interesting short snippets of information that I come accross. We’ll see how long I can keep this up

Anyway, in the OpenSim Office Hours meeting on OSGrid today I heard something rather interesting. Apparently, OSGrid now has enough money in donations (1818 US Dollars), to keep the central asset service running for a year. The asset service is by far the most resource intensive OpenSim grid service (all the people with region connected to OSGrid rely on it store their textures, sounds, etc.). As OSGrid is a charitable organization they’re happy to make their financial details public (though I don’t know if this information is posted elsewhere yet).

One can argue that this isn’t true sustainability since the volunteers who work on it aren’t paid (afaik). But it’s interesting all the same – maybe it’s possible for a 3D virtual world based on open source software to be supported purely by donations rather than a fixed subscription.

This Week in OpenSim Dev – week ending Saturday 20th June 2009

justincc — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 01:35:52 +0000

This week in OpenSim ( r9860 – r9888 )

General news

None this week

Features & bug fixes

Snoopy and thomax contributed a patch, further worked on by Melanie, that allows deeding of objects (r9867).
StrawberrryFride contributed a patch that should stop the Linden Lab Second Life 1.23 viewer from crashing the user service on login (r9878).
Christopher Yeoh contributed a patch that should set the touch positions during touch_end scripting events (r9883).

Infrastructure

diva worked on the new service connectors infrastructure

This Week in OpenSim Dev – week ending Saturday 13th June 2009

justincc — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 17:49:42 +0000

This week in OpenSim ( r9801 – r9859 )

General news

None this week

Features & bug fixes

mikem made a change so that LSL loops with no assignment section are allowed, e.g. for (; i < 10; i++) { … } (r9806).
Alan Webb contributed a patch to allow better control of the persistence of dynamic textures and better locking on update to avoid update race conditions (r9816).
Snoopy contributed a patch that implements group based object permissions. I’m not sure how complete this is (r9817).
Alan Webb contributed a patch that stops all ODE collision exceptions from propogating in the code. This may increase the maximum number of avatars in a region with ODE physics before crashing (r9827).
Bluewall contributed a patch that fixes errors when creating a user using OpenSim’s SQLite database plugin (r9838).
I temporary fixed a problem where saved OAR files would fail to load. This problem may only occur for machines configured for certain locales (r9859).

Infrastructure

mcortez contributed more patches the implement the alternative Flotsam asset cache.
diva worked on the new inventory service connectors infrastructure, which mirrors that of the recent asset service connectors.
Dr Scofield made some miscellaneous remote admin plugin improvements.

Appearance on TWiT’s FLOSS Weekly Podcast

justincc — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:31:30 +0000

For anybody who doesn’t know yet, Leo Laporte, Randal Schwartz and Jono Bacon from TWiT.TV were kind enough to have me on their FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) Podcast number 72 this week. The subject was, of course, OpenSim and it was a lot of fun to talk about it with them. There was a lot to squeeze in so apologies for not being able to mention everything that’s going on!

Also, apologies for not having written anything much apart from OpenSim development summaries here recently. As usual, there’s a tremendous amount going on in my life and unfortunately blogging got squeezed out for a while. But I hope to return to it soon, probably with shorter and easier to read posts

This Week in OpenSim Dev – week ending Saturday 6th June 2009

justincc — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:12:29 +0000

This week in OpenSim ( r9741 – r9801 )

General news

None this week

Features & bug fixes

StrawberryFride contributed a patch that fixes editing of estate settings and use of god mode when OpenSim is using the MSSQL database plugin (r9745).
I fixed some bugs in OpenSim ARchive (OAR) saving, including one instance where the save would never complete if particular assets were missing. However, it’s quite possible that some issue remain which only reveal themselves under the right conditions (r9753).
Melanie fixed a bug where unlinking of prims would not persist under some conditions (r9760).
aduffy70 contributed a patch that improves llGround(), llGroundSlope() and llGroundNormal() (r9796).
Alan Webb and Chris Yeoh contributed patches that improve dynamic texture generation (for instance, when text is dynamically rendered to a texture) (r9772).

Infrastructure

Adam continued to work on Mini Region Module (MRM) functionality.
MW continued to work on the avatar creation module
Both Imaze Rhiano and mcortez contributed patches the implement alternative asset caches.

This Week in OpenSim Dev – week ending Saturday 30th May 2009

justincc — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 01:36:41 +0000

This week in OpenSim ( r9652 – r9740 )

General news

OpenSim 0.6.5 (branched at r9561) was released.

Features & bug fixes

Melanie implement group permissions for object return (r9658).
Melanie improved script reset handling for HTTP LSL functions (r9681).
Chris Yeoh contributed a patch to implement llPassTouches() (r9701).
MW added an avatar creation/clone module. This allows a new avatar to be set up with a clone of an existing avatar’s inventory, current clothing and attachments. See this revision’s commit notes for more details (r9738).

Infrastructure

I continued work on Inventory ARchives (IARs).
Dahlia started working on experimental sculpt map caching.
Adam continued to work on Mini Region Module (MRM) functionality.

This Week in OpenSim Dev – week ending Saturday 23rd May 2009

justincc — Sun, 24 May 2009 22:31:02 +0000

This week in OpenSim ( r9572 – r9651 )

General news

None this week.

Features & bug fixes

StrawberryFride contributed a patch that adds region maturity rating persistence when using the MSSQL database plugin (r9578).
Alan Webb and Dr Scofield contributed code to avoid occasional mono 2.4 errors when compiling scripts. Thanks also to Mic Bowman for his investigation into this problem (r9585).
Dahlia improved sculpties and Level Of Detail (LOD) vertex accuracy. She also fixed torus mesh edge joining (r9601).

Infrastructure

Melanie and Diva continued work on a new services framework.
Adam added experimental NAT translation support to login. This aims to make OpenSim accessible when it is hosted behind a router using port forwarding but where that router doesn’t support loopback.

This Week in OpenSim Dev – week ending Saturday 16th May 2009

justincc — Sun, 17 May 2009 22:38:37 +0000

This week in OpenSim ( r9475 – r9571 )

General news

Diva switched the asset service to a new OpenSim service architecture. This is a big change so inevitably some things will be temporarily broken for a period. As usual we advise people not to update from SVN trunk unless they’re prepared to deal with these issues.
Adam introduced an experimental suggestion system for OpenSim features. Definitely worth a look!

Features & bug fixes

Adam implemented an experimental IP/DNS based ban facility (r9496).
Patnad contributed a patch that implements the new region maturity rating seen in version 1.23 of Linden Lab’s Second Life viewer (r9503).
Melanie implemented llDetachFromAvatar() and llAttachToAvatar() (r9533).
Melanie implemented llRequestURL(), llRequestSecureURL(), llReleaseURL() (r9535).
Melanie implemented the LSL http server in OpenSim (r9543).
I changed the OpenSim ARchive (OAR) saving code so that it should use much less memory while saving. This may resolve problems in saving OARs of large regions (r9558).
Dahlia made some sculpted prim geometry accuracy and meshing speed improvements (r9561).

Infrastructure

Melanie and Diva continued work on a new services framework.
Melanie added permission mechanisms for gorup deeding land.