Open Sim Development Week Ending November 15, 2008

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 ( r7203 – r7317 )

General news

• OpenSim 0.6 (r7176) was officially released.  Downloads can be found on the Opensimulator website.  As well as binary packages there is a Windows installer and a Debian package available.
• This week, Teravus discovered that we were enabling non LSL script compilers (C#, Visual Basic, Javascript) by default.  These languages can currently only be enabled if you trust all script writers, since they have access to system functions (unlike LSL).  I highly recommend that you go through your OpenSim.ini file and make sure that you have only
  allowedCompilers = lslset in both the [ScriptEngine.DotNetEngine] and [XEngine] sections.
  
• If you are following trunk, then regions regions older than r7306 will not be able to connect to grid services of r7306 or newer until the region server is updated to this later revision.
  

Features & bug fixes

• idb contributed a patch that improves avatar height calculation.  This was then further improved by Melanie.  Hopefully, this will mean that avatars will now tend to stand on the ground again, rather than sometimes being ankle deep in it (r7286).
• Melanie fixed an issue where unnecessary object updates were being sent for attachments that an avatar was wearing.  This should reduce network traffic somewhat (r7219).
• Melanie made a change to prevent animation overrides from crashing a sim if the user logs out before the ao script stops (r7221).
• Christopher Yeoh contributed a patch tha prevents sim freezes from occuring if many objects call llDie() at the same time under the XEngine scripting engine (r7223).
• Melanie fixed a regression where avatars would have trouble crossing region boundaries because they had a local id in a range that they didn’t expect (r7239).
• Teravus implemented the ability to download and upload .raw terrains from the Second Life client estate tools (r7297).
• Melanie added a ClampPrimSize option to OpenSim.ini.  If this option is on for a region, then any prim that crosses in that exceeds the region’s maximum prim size settings is automatically shrunk (r7260).
• Justincc implemented a very basic system for preventing out of date regions from connecting to a grid service.  Under this system a developer increments an interface version number (unrelated to the OpenSim version number) if they have made an imcompatible change.  Only regions with the same interface number as the grid service are allowed to connect (r7252).
• Melanie made a fix to prevent pieces from other people’s HUDs from displaying at the center of ever user’s HUD (r7257).
• Teravus updated OpenSim.ini.example settings and OpenSim’s defaults to prevent C#, Visual Basic and Javascript scripts from compiling by default.  This is because these scripts are able to get access to system functions such as System.IO.File at the moment.  LSL scripts do not suffer from this issue (r7262).
• jusntincc made a change that stops a significant lock being held for a large part of the agent crossing sequence.  This may reduce the short freezes that happen for existing clients when somebody logs in, teleports in or crosses into the region (r7266).
• idb contributed a patch that if OpenSim receives a shutdown command, objects yet to be persisted are actually persisted before OpenSim exits (r7274).
• Alan Webb contributed a patch that may resolve a lost clothing issue on region servers containing more than one region (r7284).
• Christopher Yeoh contributed a patch that allows llAllowInventoryDrop() to work properly with the permissions module enabled (r7302).
• Melanie fixed an issue where attachments that had been dropped would still get removed when the avatar logged out (r7298).
• Melanie added support for group permissions in user inventory.  This revision of OpenSim will not be able to interact with servers running older versions (though, of course, all data should migrate smoothly).  StrawberryFride also contributed a patch to support this in the MSSQL database as well as MySQL and SQLite (r7306).
• idb contributed a patch that means that objects that change quite often are not persisted to the database after every single change, though they are guaranteed to still be persisted at regular intervals.  There are some user configurable values to control this in OpenSim.ini, though the defaults should be fine (r7315).
• Following on from idb’s last patch, physical objects are now persisted to the database (before they were never saved) (r7315).
• Homer fixed llSetRot() behaviour to better match Second Life behaviour (r7316).

Infrastructure

• Adam changed the AssetCache to persist fetched assets temporarily by using the GlynnTucker.Cache.  This will somewhat reduce the load on an asset server if OpenSim is running in grid mode.
• Melanie continued writing infrastructure code for region crossing scripts.
• Sean continued work on database layer oriented unit tests.
• justincc continued work on unit test infrastructure for scene testing.  arthursv also contribute a scene test.
• Melanie started to revamp the inventory transfer module.
• justincc started on permissions options to prevent non-administrators/gods from creating, copying or editing scripts (though all users can still run them).  This is to allow applications using OpenSim to control the type of scripts that can be run.
• Melanie continued work on infrastructure code for a more complete implementation of Second Life groups for OpenSim.

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