Friday tekkies reading: opensim 0.4 released!

Bringing in the yesterday's news is always so easy! Just look at another site, grab the information and write it. Well, at least I never not copypaste and always cite the sources :)

So, this time, from your favourite supplier of the BSD-licensed news, OpenSim, here are the big news:

OpenSim 0.4 released

Grab it here: http://dist.opensimulator.org/.

Some of my personal and "unofficial" comments / opinions.

Stuff that works:

* standalone mode with one or more regions

Does work :) currently running Ruth with one region - multiple regions consume some more memory; although I might try to enable a second region just for the fun of it - we will need to test the ODE physics on the "bleeding edge".

* basic physics (no object collisions)

works like a charm. If you feel that your av's movements are "jerky" in vertical - well, the height map has 1m precision, I think it is still smoother than if you had to do it IRL :)

* persistence of users, prims, assets, and inventory via sqlite

Yay, Sean! this is the stuff that is tested every night on my Ruth/Zion sim - which automatically upgrades itself every night. Obviously, this process involves the restart.

* basic building, custom texture uploads

Same thing - does work, the proof of this feature working you can again see on Ruth/Zion (assuming the previous one does work all right :)

* avatar editing

This one actually deserves a bit of comment. Till the latest time, the editing of shape/skin/etc. was "not working" unless you create a new shape/skin and wear it - then you can edit the avatar.
Keep this in mind.

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(putting on a secret-important face and whispering: totally unofficial - go and check out the latest ODE physics code changes in the nightly build of opensim and tell your opinions. (or simply fool around on ruth opensim server and see if you can crash it :) - and write here if you have any feedback)

Friday non-tekkie reading

No, I did not go dead. Just an injection of RL for my owner. :)

Meantime, Vint mentions an interesting article by Benjamin Duranske about certain types of individuals that exist within the SL environment.

Entertaining.

Much more than the soap operas of the opponent, which I stopped reading a while ago - there are some thoughts in there, but SNR is below the audible threshold.

Opensim: "sandbox" vs "grid mode" => "standalone" vs "distributed"

This week is going to be RL-busy, so besides the auto-upgrading sim for testing the latest release, I won't contribute too much.

However, with the "official" release 0.4 approaching,
I wanted to write about a common misunderstanding when it comes to talking about "standalone" or "sandbox" mode vs. "grid mode" - which should really be now called "distributed" mode.

misconception#1: You can have only one 256x256 sim in standalone mode.

No, technically you can have as many as you want, assuming you have enough memory. I tested with 5x5, but it runs quite a bit slow. ODE physics may have issues (or so I heard) with multiregion setup - but you *can* run many regions within the same opensim in standalone mode. How to do it ?
Very simple. You will need to create the new files in the bin/Regions directory, one file per each new region. Things to watch out for: ensure the database names there, the port numbers, and coordinates are unique - otherwise you will get an unfriendly barf when trying to launch the opensim :) I've made once a multiregion helper script in ruby to automate the creation of the region XML files.

misconception#2: To allow anyone else besides me to connect, I need to run in grid mode.

No, as soon as your IP is reachable from the your friends' computers, and the necessary ports are open, and you create the accounts for them ("create user Firstname Lastname password 1000 1000") - they can connect without any problem.

indeed using anything other than "test" for the password puts you in a very awkward situation of needing to know your friends' password to create the account (and there's no means to change it at the moment - which, I agree, is altogether a bad-ass thing from the "puristic security" perspective). However, as we do not trade gold of anything at this time in opensims, I would not consider this to be a showstopper.

Zion/Ruth autoupdates/autobuilds

Those of you who heard me saying "hm strange some permission problem" - well, it was a self-inflicted pain... I messed up the build scripts - so the nightly build was deleting the whole tree of the currently running Zion/Ruth, and then it was happening there :) No wonders it did not work too well.

Today I have discovered and fixed this stupid mistake, moreover, now there will be daily data backups (even though I said that the whole things are subject to sudden disappearing - those sudden disappearings are highly annoying :)

Along with that, I've slightly tweaked the schedule for the nightly builds.

So it looks as follows:

06:00 CET (21:00 SLT)
"hot" data backup
there is no downtime,
but there is a chance
of inconsistency

06:30 CET (21:30 SLT):
"nightly build" kickoff
the build gets placed onto
http://ruth.petitbe.be/build

07:00 CET (22:00 SLT):
Zion/Ruth gets updated to
the latest nightly build
and restarted.


The last step happens only if the nightly build
was successful, and consists of:

- stopping the OpenSim.exe
- making the data backup (which should be ok since the server is stopped)
- making a full tar archive of the current running server
- fixing the locations to substitute the newly built tree
- performing a data restore
- setting the flag to start the server

It does take some 5-6 minutes to complete all of this - so around the 7am CET there will be a daily "outage" on the Zion.


I use the user "opensim" exclusively for running the opensim, so in case it is useful for anyone,
I've published the scripts that I quickly hacked up, so you might use them yourself as well, they are here.

Little bit about each script:

make-opensim: perform the build and publish it (leave the build dir behind!)

opensim-data-backup: make a data backup from the opensim instance

opensim-upgrade: perform the upgrade cycle - requires the build tree be present! (make-opensim run)

opensim-run-in-cycle: use this command to run the opensim in screen/vnc/etc.

Crash party...

We had a very nice crash party on Ruth/Zion. Shortly before it started, I noticed there were some physics errors swinging across the screen:

ODE Message 2: vector has zero size in dNormalize4() File odemath.cpp Line 129


so since we wanted to test the capacity, the crash party proper, was without the physics.

Nonetheless, we had a very nice attendance, peaking, I believe, at 20 avatars packed in a very small space. It did feel pretty crowded.

Some things noticed:

1) the clients tended to disconnect every now and then by the server. This is something I attribute to current packet code not being too efficient - we queue up too many packets, the "ping" from the server gets delayed too much, and the server kills the client. I expect that when we improve the packet sending code, it should take care of itself.

2) while trying to type "show users", I got a funny crash due to an exception in the system routine, which I have now addressed (r1927).

3) There were tracebacks printed when adding the users after the extended period of time with many avatars - sdague should have fixed them as well.

Other than that - we had a pretty fun time, and the 20 avatars in 1 hour have created quite a bunch of fun things - which made the landscape of Zion/Ruth much more lovely than the emptiness it had before...

p.s. Vint had made a cool machinima of the event, and Nebadon has made a second machinima - which you can see inworld on Ruth. Find it :)

p.p.s. Correction: you can *not* see the second machinima inworld - as the land media settings do not survive the restart of the sim, I rather had to come up with another solution - the screen, when clicked, will tell you the URL to view the machinima at... This is kinda quirky, but making the media URLs persistent is bit more than a quick patch, so it will have to stay as it is for now.

Opensim compile troubleshooting page for debian/ubuntu

Some time ago I blogged about compiling opensim on Ubuntu/Debian

Click170 has put up a great Debian/Ubuntu troubleshooting page on the wiki at:

http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Troubleshooting

An excellent resource for those users who are not lucky enough to just say "emerge mono nant" =) (*sticks the tongue in the cheek*)

OpenSim crash hour party this saturday! :)

Zion/Ruth is back, with the latest revision AND the physics running (which means you can walk on prims!) - unfortunately in this process I've had to convert it into the single-region setup for the time being. The objects got lost due to the fact that now *everything* in opensim is stored in sqlite databases - woot! (which means hopefully I should be able to preserve the content going forward).

Now, to the important news:

This saturday, at 10am PDT (a.k.a. SLT), which is 7pm CET, we plan to make a "crash hour" on OpenSim - to see how many avatars will be able to connect at the same time.

The logins are either as usual - Testa User..Testz User, or you can drop a comment here and I will create your own very personal login on Zion/Ruth, where the event is going to take place. All the passwords will be "test", for simplicity reasons.

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Amongst the current news - the minimap should be fully functional now, with green dots appearing and disappearing. Thanks to MW for the hint about the child agents, which were responsible for the duplicate dots.

Little green men on minimap: step 1

I've committed the initial code to show the green dots on the minimap - so starting from r1874, you might to some extent enjoy the minimap functionality.

Note, that if you move to the neighbouring region or logoff, the minimap does not update (yet).

This is because at this moment I do not trigger the update on these events - I will fix that in the nearest days.

Avatars facing east: partially fixed

I am very happy to be honored with the commit access for the opensim (thanks guys!), and my first contribution was a relatively small bugfix for the avatar rotation problem - even though it is partial.

Now the rotation of the avatars is correctly shown, however the updates happen only when the avatar is walking - this required minimal code changes, and for fixing it for "in-place" rotation, I'd need some more discussion. But hey - you are no longer forced to face east, so it is a good first step, I think :)

Along with that went a small safety patch for the CLI - there were multiple occasions where the exception in the CLI (relatively harmless on its own), caused the entire sim to shutdown. Now it only prints the error message.

More megaprims fun on opensim

As an experiment, legolover tried building the earth-sized megaprim. The experiment showed that the center of the earth is empty. :)

Here are some smaller megaprims for your amusement:

plane 65535x65535x0.1:



huge cube (the stone inside it is not a stone, it is the whole 256x256 island :):



big hemisphere, holding the sim region inside it: