If you haven’t popped your head over onto OSGrid in a while, you might want to take another look. We’ve made some reasonably big improvements in recent weeks; above pictured is part of the new LBSA Plaza (welcome area); but the real improvements have been in our website.

I mentioned previously the development of Elgg integration on OSGrid – we put that into production just over a month ago, and have since spent quite some time refining the integration. Initially when we deployed, there were a couple of deficiencies in features over the old website – we’ve quickly gone past there, and the new website integrates a whole bunch of shiny new features.

Many of these features are or will be linked to popular places inworld – such as the website event calendar being visible on billboards inworld (using PHP+GD+osSetDynamicTextureURL). We’re working on doing some of the reverse too (such as each region getting it’s own “Page” automatically — similar to how each avatar has it’s own profile page.)

OSGrid itself has grown pretty dramatically in this period too – it grew on almost every metric by a full 25% in the last 4 weeks. Regions, users, active users – all shot up. Infact, using the stats on the OpenSimulator.org grid list (skipping grids with missing data) – OSGrid now represents between 48 and 56% of OpenSimulator grid users; it’s by far the largest and busiest OpenSim grid. OSGrid currently has about 2,100 active regions (by comparison, the Second Life mainland is approximately 5,000 regions)

Some of the other improvements we’ve added was a new achievements system (pictured above), which we will be expanding to encourage exploration and participation in OSGrid events. We’ll be rewarding people with ‘achievements’ for various things such as participating in official (and some unofficial) events, exploring, building and more.

Which brings me to OSGrid itself – it’s nearly turning 2. On the 22nd of this month, we’re going to be celebrating our second birthday. We’re still sorting out what exactly the celebrations will be – but you can find them on OSGrid’s Event Calendar closer to the 22nd.

So if you haven’t already – come register an avatar and take a peek.

[Apologies to readers for the lack of updates in the last 3 weeks - I've been buried in work, I'll be posting June's commits wrapup in the next few days -Adam]

Somewhere in the deep dark recesses of my backup server, is a little directory called ‘AWSERVER’, last modified circa 1999. Inside that directory is my world database and the content path associated with my old ActiveWorlds regions. With a little (or maybe a lot) of work, I could probably re-load it today and log in.Yet, if I tried to revisit some of my full-sim creations in Second Life from 2004, I’d have a lot of trouble trying – I’d need to recover what I could from my inventory and do painstaking rebuilding work, if it was possible at all.

This is the problem with SL – the moment something is deleted, or a region is shut down – it’s almost always gone forever. If you wanted to revisit a earlier incarnation of Nexus Prime, or parts of SL’s ancient history – you are out of luck, as there’s a very solid chance those places are simply irrecoverable and lost to the sands of time. As digital data, there should be no good reason for this – disk space is cheap, and sims are small.

The classic case of this is the Bedazzle sims, among them were Gravity Space Station, Chinatown and UnrealSL – but none of them lasted more than between a few weeks or a few months. I’m digressing here slightly; but there are major projects I have been involved in SL that I would love to be able to still access that are gone forever (earlier versions of Aleph, the Atlas Underwater Complex, etc).

The problem isn’t so much that SL doesn’t store ancient rollbacks but that it is simply not possible to save a copy of one; even if you are the rights owner and want to back up your own work. Second Inventory can help here, but it too has flaws – it doesn’t have any kind of mass restore functionality; and it can only save inventory – there’s no chance to save the layout within a region, only the individual contents of it.

It is somewhat sad to see regions shut down by their owners for affordability reasons; knowing full well that the content cannot be ever easily restored later – I personally hate to see it when this happens, because something creative is lost forever.

OpenSim on the other hand, has some real advantages here – I have complete copies of a lot of my builds on OpenSim in varying stages of construction, courtesy of the Region Archive functionality. Every major construction project I have done on any of the grids is sitting somewhere on one of my hard disks as a .tar.gz file containing everything needed to reload it in later. In OpenSim, nothing is ever incapable of being saved – at all times you can dump a copy of the region to a disk, then reload it later somewhere else.

As a creator it’s fairly liberating – and convenient. I can work on a sim locally, export it, then import it into the production environment, and vice versa, take a production environment for local tweaks, edit it, then bring it back again.

Backing up Aleph

I have for a few months been testing an internal tool which allows you to export a OpenSim Archive from a Second Life Region – it was originally developed to export a clients region (their IP); but ended up being handy to preserve some of our workshops and builds from deletion when we closed the sims or rebuilt them. Today, I rewrote it – the previous version was based on the old libomv PrimWorkshop viewer, the new version is now based on the Simian Periscope (Periscope is a kind of multi-user version of GridProxy).

Before anyone asks, the modifications aren’t public – unfortunately for every legitimate user for a tool like this, there’s ten asshats prepared to use it as copybot deluxe, so the source is going to stay private (although I might release a binary version containing creator and permission checks similar to Second Inventory – we’ll see what my schedule looks like in the next few weeks).

This new version is overall a bit more reliable – a number of small bugs and niggles got fixed along the way – but the key factor is it’s now not a 2 hour effort to run, a region can be grabbed with 95%+ accuracy in minutes. You can see here, my personal workshop region ‘Aleph’ in Second Life – it’s a fairly old sim, but it’s gone through a ton of revisions in it’s history. The current revision is a sort of moonbase cross sandbox, complete with orbital lasers.

Aleph Null

Below you can see the same region and contents, but in my personal standalone OpenSim region. This one is located on my personal desktop – but with the same OAR file, I could just as easily reload it on any region running any version of OpenSim since OAR support was added. If I wanted to bring Aleph to OSGrid, it would take only as long as it took to copy and load the file on a region connected to OSGrid.

127.0.0.1:9000

There are limitations, the tool doesn’t copy any form of ‘deep inspection’ – so scripts, etc do not get saved. It’s theoretically possible however to back these up if you are the object owner, something I will be looking at in the future. Estate settings and a few other features aren’t in the v1 OAR format, so those also need to be recreated – but could be something we look at adding in future. It’s also worth noting that it will only backup content with a creator tag in a specified list; while that limit could be removed, it provides an easy way of assuring that you are backing up only content you have rights to.

The Wayback Grid

One of the projects I would like to see would be some kind of opt-in mechanism to subscribe to an automatic backup service similar to Archive.org for the web – the goal of which would be preservation of content in the long run. When someone drops their region, it would be nice to be able to restore it later on if they buy another region, or move to one of the open grids.

Ultimately, this could be taken to an extreme where you can dial back a grid in time, and see it as it was in a previous point in time – however the biggest limitations here are dealing with content prosciption. Most SL content is licensed with one or more restrictions – ethically ‘no copy’ is probably a blocker to performing backups, likewise ‘no transfer’ makes some implications about bringing something out of SL. To do this effectively, you need massive ‘opt-in’ by content creators to approve their content going outside.

The easiest starting point is instead probably to provide some kind of service for creators to voluntarily backup their sims (say, in the case of a creator shutting down their region – but wanting to preserve it). Perhaps there are options here to look at providing some kind of transfer service for people moving regions from say SL to OSGrid [providing they own the copyright]. If anyone is interested in that kind of service, let me know – this might be useful for folks contemplating migrating over to OpenSim/OSGrid and have all their own content.

With May coming to a close, I would like to start the first of a monthly feature – some explanations of what’s going on under the surface of OpenSim. But wait, you may ask; doesn’t Justin already provide excellent weekly reports on what’s been committed? Of course – where this differs is in the level of detail, particularly on infrastructure projects. Justin does a weekly feature which means he only has time and space to report on features in bullet form. Where I plan to differentiate with these posts is in the details – not only what has been committed, but also where it is going.

There has been a lot of progress this month – starting at revision 9358 there have been several major areas of focus.

Networking: LLUDP Improvements

We now support the Multiple Object Update packet format for Linden UDP clients (most notably Second Life & realXtend), this builds on work that Mikko of realXtend provided late in April that did the same for Avatar Updates. The work done by Melanie reduces the total number of packets that need to be tracked by packing multiple updates into each packet – resulting in a significantly lower workload for our packeting code. The Avatar packet aggregation with 100 Avatars in the region results in a massive 71% reduction in the number of packets transmitted, and a 29% drop in CPU requirements, according to tests done by Intel for ScienceSim. Object aggregation produces similar results (although hasn’t been measured precisely.)

Packet Pooling – the next major improvement is in ‘packet pooling’ – one of the drawbacks to managed languages is very little control over optimising garbage collection. OpenSim handles potentially thousands of packets each second, in our previous packet system for each of these packets, we created several classes representing the internal data structures. (eg, Byte[] Packet becomes MyPacketObject) – while the processing is fairly quick, creating these packets results in the Garbage Collector handling tens of thousands of tiny unused classes at each collection. On .NET this runs so-so, but on Mono it runs atrociously.

Packet Pooling solves this problem by recycling classes – rather than leaving a dead class to be garbage collected, we stuff new data into it and re-use the class instance. We previously did this work back in 2007 with the help of 3Di developers, however it was at the time proven unworkable due to problems with old data persisting into new data blocks. Melanie managed to solve this issue, and nearly two years later we have it re-enabled. Early pooling code did not show much promise past 40 avatars (although up to that point was fairly dramatically better) – however more profiling done by intel managed to locate the problem as being due to a finite sized pool – a patch fixed this problem and the overall improvement was a further 40% reduction in CPU requirements for 100 avatars (total reduction for this and aggregation is a whopping 57% reduction in CPU requirements for a busy sim).

Overall, the OpenSim networking code has been improved very significantly (especially with April’s texture resend fixes), and I would appreciate seeing more testing with large userbases – the Wright Plaza weekly meetings have been running better than they have for a long time, but only represent a peak of 35 concurrent users.

Some early bugs did present themselves with this networking code – most notably running into several MTU limits for international users (apparently most international trunk lines will simply drop rather than fragment big UDP packets), myself, Nebadon and Melanie managed to identify and fix this problem.

I introduced, then disabled support for NAT Loopback – this allows you to emulate a loop-back compatible router for those hosting from home and unable to get a public internet IP. This is currently commented out due to issues with compatibility in Grid Mode (however Standalone mode can be made to work effectively) – further improvements will be in the realm of adding UPnP support allowing you to host a region from home reliably. Finally I also introduced the capability to use IP and DNS based bans (including wildcards), Dr Scofield improved this with some stability checks.

Groups Support

mcortez has been working on adding a fully functional implementation of groups into OpenSim this month – previously located as part of the flotsam project, the groups implementation has hit core. Early revisions ran into a problem with a permissions exploit and group deeding (allowing anonymous users to group deed a parcel), however these have been fixed and it is ready for further testing. My initial feedback is that it looks good – things such as group chat are behaving well and responsively, although it is not yet fully functionally complete yet (particularly around the area of group permissions).

New Region Modules Framework

I’m not entirely sure if this was introduced this month – however a large amount of work was done porting from IRegionModule to the new ISharedRegionModule interface[s]. This new version is syntactically nearly identical, however has better support for removing regions at runtime, and also utilizes the Mono.Addins framework, which will be essential as we begin to add PECL/CPAN-style module repositories to OpenSim (although exactly when this happens is an unknown). The older region module format is going to remain working for quite some time yet – however if you are feeling adventurous you can investigate the new format and look at porting modules across.

New Services Framework

As part of a general improvement of OpenSim code quality, Diva and Melanie improved the services framework this month, deleting the old OGS1 ‘UGAIM’ in favor of a new ‘OpenSim.Services’ binary – this also means that the Grid mode and Standalone mode now share all the major infrastructure internally (Standalone runs the grid services in ‘private’ now) – this reduces code complexity and makes it easier for us to add and adjust the services framework.

This framework has also made it easier to edit and adjust module points for Grid Services, meaning it is now possible to write Grid Service plugins – such as asset caches, external login systems, etc. Diva has been utilizing these to improve the functionality and quality of the Hypergrid technology. A new cache was implemented using GlynnTucker cache – after it was discovered the previous asset cache did not infact, cache anything, early testing indicates this one works.

Finally, Arthur implemented some improvements to the User Service framework which prevents people from seeing the ‘You are already logged in’ message’ in grid mode.

Remote Control, Administration and Web Integration

BlueWall introduced and improved his JSON Stats plugin system for OpenSim which allows remote monitoring via AJAX applications of a region. Melanie introduced a ‘remote console’ system that utilizes REST, and I introduced some basic capacity for Grid Owners to be able to send grid-wide announcements for maintainence purposes. Dr Scofield improved the XMLRPC-based Remote Admin module to handle additional formats. All of these will no doubt go towards improving administrator remote tools and web interfaces.

Inventory Archives

Justin continued work on Inventory Archives – these allow you to save a copy of your entire OpenSim inventory to a file on disk, which you can then restore on any other compatible OpenSimulator instance. For those who work on multiple seperate OpenSim instances (such as a personal grid, public grid, etc) being able to synchronise your inventory between the two is a big help. IAR archives are still highly experimental and should not be relied on yet for any production purposes.

Justin also added the ability to store creator IDs as a URL rather than a UUID – this allows you to reference foreign grid avatars as a creator.

Prim Meshing

Dahlia continued work on the internal ‘Prim Mesher’ used for physics. Improving sculpty physics shells to be more accurate and support properties such as Mirror, improving the overall meshing performance and adding the capability to disk-cache converted meshes for faster startups.

XML Serialisation Formats and Region Archives

Sean and Justin made several improvements to our XML Serialisation support including adding unit tests to the serialisers. This will improve overall reliability and support for OAR files as we move forward (preventing OARs from becoming version-incompatible with each other.), OARs were also improved with support for a wider variety of .tar formats courtesy of Dr Scofield. Finally, OARs were renamed from .tar.gz to .oar as the default filename.

Scripting

I improved MRM scripting, both the Engine and the API. The engine has been improved to support real-time loading of external binaries, including debugger support. This when compiled with the MRM Loader project (located on the forge) allows you to write (and debug!) MRM scripts from within Visual Studio (very cool.), MRMs were also improved with additional security checks, fixing of certain properties (such as Avatar.Position), events (World.OnNewUser) and introduction of an Audio API (World.Audio and IObject.Sound).

LSL was improved with support for the LSL Webserver API going into production on the Second Life(tm) Beta Grid. Also implemented was llAttachToAvatar, llDetachFromAvatar and a host of other improvements.

IRC Clientstack

As mentioned earlier, OpenSim now has a ClientView which supports a primitive text-only IRC protocol support. This allows you to connect to a region for chat facilities using only an IRC client – this may be an advantage over the previous IRC Bridge module where IRC users were not represented inworld with an avatar.

Final Words

If I missed anything – let me know, Justin’s notes are likely to be slightly more comprehensive on smaller non-architectural changes.

OpenSim is now a semi-RFC1459 compliant IRCd. IRC clients are treated as full members of the virtual world, gaining a presence with a horrible default avatar, as the screenshots below picture. Each IRC client has an implementation of IClient* which means we could in theory insert text descriptions of the world and any events in. (Although in practice it’s unlikely to be useful for anything beyond basic text & IM messaging with an IRC client).

The advantage of this over the IRC Bridge module is that each presence is visible in both environments (users show up in the ‘who’ list on IRC, and have an avatar ‘in world’), and we will be able to handle a number of events more directly and appropriately – such as private messaging or group discussions. The IRCd framework I have written is extremely basic and probably not 100% to spec – if anyone with IRCd experience wants to get into the code and fix it up, please do.

In the mean time, enjoy. You can enable this by using the [IRCd] Enabled=true option in OpenSim.ini and connecting on port 6666.

Fig 1. XChat

Figure 2. Hippo Viewer

Every morning as part of my ‘get started’ routine, I check most of the OpenSim websites, plus technorati and google searches for OpenSim news. I like to keep informed as to what is being developed, and who is putting OpenSim into production. The problem is it takes a good 15-30 minutes to trawl everywhere.

RSS is the obvious solution – unfortunately every single RSS reader for Windows seems to be stuck with an identical UI – a UI based on Outlook’s terrible RSS reader, which I happen to think makes every attempt at making casual reading as disinteresting as possible. In short, they all suck.

I have a iMac on my desk for testing – and on there I have installed Times. Times is an attempt to make a virtual newspaper built from RSS content – for the most part it works pretty well, but has a few really big drawbacks – it requires OSX (which I rarely boot into for normal use), it’s also uses way too much eye candy – viewing a single post gets half of the text area obscured with a silly ‘bent page’ effect.

Microsoft apparently made a similar application called Codename: Max – unfortunately it was discontinued somewhere after WinXP SP2, and is no longer installable on any system (trust me, I tried). So for the last few weeks I’ve given up and just keep searching manually – until this morning when I decided I’d built my own.

Wordpress has some pretty nifty ‘magazine’ themes, which do automatic translation of blog content into a newspaper-style viewing. Combining this with WP-o-Matic which turns RSS feeds into posts automatically; I have a pretty cool setup going. It took about 3 hours to install and customise (I ended up adapting the ‘Magazine-Basic’ theme with the TTF Titles plugin and stripping out a lot of the navigation) – and then I inserted all the feeds from Planet OpenSim, Technorati, etc.

Overall it works pretty well – I have it configured to load all the OpenSim news, and it shows up in a nice chronological listing (screenshot above is scrolled back about 30 pages into late January). The layout is fairly consistent and easy to look at and being Wordpress & PHP, pretty easy to customise further.

This weekend, I have been experimenting with replacing OpenSimWI with open source social networking software – Elgg. For those who haven’t used or seen Elgg before, it is very similar to things like Facebook – user profiles, groups, etc.

The key with what we are aiming to do however, is eliminate the duplicated data. That is, if you have a group “inworld”, the exact same data should be used on the website. Join a group on the website – it should show up in world. The way we have done this has been to rewrite the Elgg database layer so that it reads and writes from the same databases the OpenSim Grid Servers do.

The result is you can participate in the grid, without needing to be logged in. Grab an RSS feed of your group notices or send someone an offline IM from the OSGrid website.

Custom Profile Pages (Editing)

A Sample Profile

Friends List (Detail)

Group Listings (Popularity Tab)

Group View

When?

There is no deadline for when this will be launched, but we’re hoping to do so within the month.

If you have taken a look at the OpenSimulator mailing lists or IRC channels in the last 24 hours, you will have found a link towards a new ‘feature tracker‘. It works kind of like Mantis for bug tracking, but it is optimized for quick and simple feature request posting. I should however make some notes on how this works.

First, this is not a roadmap. Putting a feature up and getting a high number of votes won’t get it implemented – however a developer looking at the idea and saying ‘Hrrm, I could do this’ will. High votes and high views will make it more likely that a developer looks at your idea (and may influence priorities), but it is not binding.

Second, this replaces mantis for feature requests – our mantis install has traditionally been the place feature requests go, but a lot of developers havent wanted them there since it is officially a bug tracker only. This tracker seperates the two out and recognizes features needing different tools.

It’s a work in progress and fairly experimental (I wrote the whole thing from scratch in an afternoon), but go take a look and post your OpenSim suggestions.

It’s time for some more pretty pictures to help answer a debate between myself and fellow OSGrid admin Nebadon. The core question is essentially; “Have the users who joined us since the LL OpenSpace price change, stuck around?”. The methodology we are using is based on last login times – it’s the only bit of data we store relating to how active users are, that we can query in a reasonable period of time.

The three questions we will ask of the database are; “How many unique users logged in in the last day? week? month?” – of the 10,958 who have at least one recorded login in the last 6 months since we added the field, 468 logged in today, 1,142 this week and 2,822 this month. The next question to ask is – how does this break down across by signup date? The following highly compressed chart shows the information for the number of logins in the last 24 hrs, 7 days and 30 days from each signup group. (A signup group is all the users who signed up in a certain calendar week).

Fig 1. Logins versus Signups

You can still pretty distinctly see the point at which Linden announced OpenSpace price changes (Y2008W41), but it doesn’t quite explain if these users are sticking around more, less or the same as users who signed up beforehand. We’re expecting some kind of drop-off since a lot of users were just experimenting with alternatives – and we’re not really focusing on being a SL clone (unlike some of the other grids). So, the next chart shows the above data – but divided by the total number of signups in that week.

Fig 2. Signups versus Logins Proportionally

I clipped off some of the earlier data since it was giving erroneous values, but what is interesting here is that older users have a fairly incredible retention – >30% of users who signed up in 2007 / early 2008 are still around and logging in. Newer users have dropped off – but there’s still a pretty high proportion who stayed – both myself and nebadon believe these might be region operators – early users were all region operators, and region operators probably have a pretty good retention.

So let’s take a look at some more data – the following is logins from the last 30 days – how many are region owners (cross referenced against signup date)

Fig 3. Region Owner versus Logins

Now this is a little incomplete, since it wont measure things like estate managers – it only shows people who are the registered region owner by the Master Avatar parameter. There is a trend for people with older accounts who still login regularly to be more likely to own a region – but it’s not absolute.  Looking at this data you might be mistaken for thinking that newer users are less likely to own a region – but charting the data % of region owners by signup date you get a different picture.

Fig 4. Proportion of Region Owners

In conclusion – the data seems to indicate mixed results to the original question; users who signed up looking for an SL alternative are more likely to have left than users who joined beforehand – but trends seem to be indicating the core underlying growth is still pretty strong; and a healthy percentage of the people who did sign up in that period have stuck around – overall growth of active users increased by between 200 and 600 percent after that jump.

There is also a trend that the more active users are region owners – of the people who logged in in the last 24 hours (versus 30 days for Fig 3), closer to 50% were region operators. This doesnt strike me as too suprising given that OSGrid’s real strengths are in the ability to connect in regions free of charge – more active users are more likely to b involved in that aspect of the grid.

For other grid operators who are interested in calculating the same numbers I have above for comparison, on the next page are the horribly complex SQL queries I have been utilizing to generate this data. They should work with any OpenSim-standard MySQL installation. Click here to see them.