OSG Metaversity (second class meeting)

The second class for C# programming was help on OSGrid today at Teravus Plaza at 2100UTC. Ten people were there *and* use was made of Justin’s “Graffiti Board”, a white board script he kindly placed in the OpenSim library for all to use.

Most students were there an hour before the class started to discuss programming, *and* I heard some even asking about additional homework on the #osgrid-college IRC channel on FreeNode earlier. The enthusiasm is joyful, to say the least.

I hope that we can strive to use “Teravus Plaza” for various meetings around this time of the day everyday, both classes, question answer hours and other learning and sharing activities as the community using OpenSim continues to grow.

Since we are concentrating on using the SecondLife Official client, currently 1.21.6 and the Hippo also, this is a good time and place for us to get reliability and stress data for the use of a major plaza to help the OpenSim development along.

Charles Krinke
OpenSim Core Developer
Director of OSGrid

Vehicles in OpenSim

There are three types of vehicles in OpenSim. These three are:

Type 1: Non-physical vehicles moved with llSetPos().
Type 2: Physical vehicles moved with llSetForce().
Type 3: Physics vehicles moved with llSetVehicleType().

There has been significant success with Type 1, modest success with Type 2 and Type 3 is incompletely implemented at this point.

Type 1:
One can find an example of a Type 1 vehicle in the form of a tour bus and a taxi on the region ‘Port Edward’ on OSGrid. The tourbus runs a fixed route around the streets of the town and the taxi accepts commands to move around the town.

Type 2:
A couple of folks have reported success with motor cycles and boats.

Type 3:
The 10 or so llSetVehicle* functions are incompletely implemented. That is, they are missing the last connection to ODE. It turns out that ODE is a little different then Havoc in its definitions of joints and motors and this is waiting for a “zealot” to help move it forward.

In chatting with folks about Type 1 and Type 2, our current issue seems to be crossing a region with either type of vehicle. Either we loose the reference of the prim or script from the scene, we loose the physical state, or both.

It seems to me that setting up a number of copies of a simple script and run a fixed route vehicle at a region boundary while monitoring the consoles of the “from” region and the “to” region to create and add notes to Mantis is one of our best ways forward to figure this out. At this point, I would like to recommend a few folks on the various grids using OpenSim test this notion and help us get vehicles to where they can reliably cross a sim boundary and keep their state.

Charles Krinke
OpenSim Core Developer
Director of OSGrid

OSG Metaversity

The OSG College idea has now morphed into the “OSG Metaversity” on OSGrid.

Today, I attended the first meeting of a new C# programming class on “Teravus Plaza” in the small ampitheater. Normally, I am one of the most conservative members of OpenSim, but to see a teacher, SnowDrop Short gather 12 students together, form teams of three, exchange e-mails, assign a little independent study is so exhilarating that I needed to describe it tonight.

This class, partly organized by BlueWall Slade and others represents the instantiation of a dream I have had for two years now. That is, the use of OpenSim to teach others in a virtual environment useful lessons to help them grow and understand.

The class will be meeting regularly each Tuesday at 2000UTC, right after “Office Hour” on Wright Plaza. There is room for more students next week and I see C# as an extremely interesting skill to acquire. After all, we support C# scripts in OpenSim as well as LSL scripts. I see this as useful to those that might wish to create region modules also.

In fact, the admins in OSGrid discussed this after the course and we feel that we would like to dedicate the suffix “Campus” to any educational group or institute that would like to support learning on OSGrid.

This is an exciting thing to see happen, and it has the side benefit of demonstrating and perhaps stressing the sim with students on a regular basis as we work to increase the number of simultaneous avatars in a region.

Charles Krinke
OpenSim Core Developer
Director of OSGrid

OpenSim Weekly News – week ending Saturday Nov 8th, 2008

We released OpenSim version 0.6.0 yesterday. It is SVN r7176. A Zip and binary are on the OSGrid web site amongst other places at http://osgrid.org. Click Instructions->Downloads to get to the download, or download from opensimulator.org from svn as usual.

We have now gotten to where we have about 60% of the features an average user would expect and the pace is still continuing at high speed. In addition, the forge (http://forge.opensimulator.org) has spawned 30 related projects including a search project that implements the beginnings of in-world search for grids.

We still need to implement the last 40 or so LSL functions and are now down to some vehicle physics issues that need attention.

OSGrid has finished the week with 6700 users, 750 regions and 1700 logins/day.

Charles Krinke, Irvine CA, Core Developer and Director of OSGrid