http://www.metaverseink.com/blog Just another WordPress weblog Sun, 01 Aug 2010 23:32:56 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en It took a long time, but OpenSim 0.7 is finally here! It's quite difficult to explain the value of refactorings and of  re-conceptualizations of the software, which is what happened to OpenSimulator between 0.6.x and 0.7. Those things tend to be intangible at first ("WTF? This does the same thing! ... http://www.metaverseink.com/blog/?p=37 A recent thread about financial contributions to the OpenSimulator project touched on issues that we don't talk about that often in the opensim-dev mailing list: organizational, institutional and financial aspects of the project. These aspects are all different, but they usually go hand-in-hand. I thought I'd share my thoughts on ... http://www.metaverseink.com/blog/?p=35 Yesterday, Stefan wrote down his thoughts on Linden Lab's troubles. I loved that post, he's right on. Let me add to that by stating the importance of the work that many of the laid off Lindens did, and the role of OpenSimulator from here on, at the technological level and ... http://www.metaverseink.com/blog/?p=33 The news came yesterday after lunch: major layoffs at Linden Lab, as much as 30% of their employees. Lindens who had been there from early on, respected engineers, all laid off. All of those who had, at some point, been involved in the idea of virtual world interoperability -- gone. ... http://www.metaverseink.com/blog/?p=32 As OpenSim becomes more stable, many people are looking into developing new businesses on top of it. That is great! An ecosystem of businesses is exactly what we want to happen, if OpenSim is to fulfill its potential. However, let me add a word of caution in the form of ... http://www.metaverseink.com/blog/?p=30 The OpenSim Library has been a neglected part of OpenSim since I can remember. Apart from a few animations and example scripts, there hasn't been anything interesting there. Even though it was possible to add things to it, the process was so cumbersome and error-prone that no one cared to ... http://www.metaverseink.com/blog/?p=29 OpenSim now supports the concept of megaregions -- several regions stitched together without borders. I love megaregions. For the kinds of applications that I am involved with, megaregions are a must -- try sending traffic over a region border! (horrible). The diva distro comes with a megaregion. However, megaregions have a ... http://www.metaverseink.com/blog/?p=28 Today, while we were doing load tests in Wright Plaza, I was also doing another kind of load test on my standalone. This one relates to server-side bots. I was able to have a 3x3 megaregion with ~2,000 prims, 200 bots and my client connected to it! My client was quite ... http://www.metaverseink.com/blog/?p=27 Goggle has announced its 3D Building maker for Google Earth. It looks really nice and simple. I think Google is getting that most people aren't expert 3D modelers, and as such, simple tools that produce simple models will go a long way in modeling the entire planet. Google's intention is great ... http://www.metaverseink.com/blog/?p=26 We hit a milestone today in OpenSim. We piled up 52 avatars in OSGrid's Wright Plaza sim, under 600M of RAM, and after an uptime of 10 hours. It eventually crashed, probably due to a lurking ultra-conservative lock somewhere in code. But hey! -- this is fantastic news for OpenSim-based ... http://www.metaverseink.com/blog/?p=25