Category: OpenSim

Tenth Annual OpenSim Grid Survey Now Available

Posted on by Daniel Voyager

Tenth Annual OpenSim Grid Survey Open 

Maria Korolov has opened up the Tenth Annual OpenSim Grid Survey where everyone can vote for their favourite OpenSim grid. The survey includes the top 15 most popular OpenSim grids from the latest monthly stats report. This helps “the community improve, and help give newcomers to OpenSim some ideas for places to explore!”.

It’s strongly recommended to vote once for the OpenSim grid that you spend the most time on during the week. If you have any feedback for any OpenSim grid then this is a great opportunity to put something down. The deadline for submissions is midnight (SLT) on Sunday 27th October 2019. The results will be published on Monday 28th October 2019.

Latest OpenSim News – October 2019

OpenSim Land Area Increased This Month – Link

  • Went up by 3, 300 regions this month
  • Largest growth recorded on OSgrid which gained more than 1, 500 regions
  • Total OpenSim land area this month was the equivalent of 81, 866 standard regions.
  • The public grids also reported a total of 394, 885 registered users and 35, 716 active users.

Sixth Annual Tangle Grid Halloween Expo (continues until 19th November) – Link

Tag Marketplace Gaining Fast On Kitely’s – Link

  • Tag Grid merchants added 4, 058 new item listings, while Kitely merchants added 2, 289. 
  • Kitely is still in the lead with a total of 32, 449 different items, compared to Tag’s 21, 566.

2019 OpenSim Conference Seeks Presenters – Link 

  • Visit the OSCC’s Call for Proposals page and fill out the form
  • This year’s conference will focus on visions of the future and the evolution of the platform.
  • It will take place on December 14 and 15 and will include presentations about creative, educational, technical, and experiential topics.
  • Each speaker session will be 20 minutes long.
  • The conference will also feature community-sponsored tours, an Expo, content give-aways and hypergrid exploration.

OSCC19 Conference Key Dates

  • November 3, 2019 – Proposals are due by 11:59 PM PST (Pacific Standard Time).
  • November 10, 2019 – Proposal acceptance emails and with conference information.
  • November 17, 2019 – Accepted speakers must register for the conference to create an entry in the conference schedule and the program.
  • November 23, 2019 – Speaker Orientation & Training sessions and Presenter Booth Setup to prepare speakers for the conference.
  • December 3, 2019 – Deadline for stage props and audio-visuals (beyond textures) for the conference program.
  • December 14-15, 2019 – OSCC19 Conference dates!

Firestorm 6.3.2.58052 Released

Posted on by Daniel Voyager

On 1st October the Firestorm team announced the Bakes on Mesh viewer (6.3.2.58052) release which is a major update and it’s important all users upgrade to it. Firestorm 6.3.2.58052 is now fully merged up to the 6.3.1 Linden code-base.

This new release includes rendering-related changes from Linden Lab, bug fixes, improvements and tweaks.

This build is not offered to OpenSim users for the moment. 

In my previous blog post I said we would provide an “as-is” download of this release for Opensim. However, I have been informed that this update will actually cause Opensim regions to crash upon login. Unfortunately, by the time we made the decision to reverse the split we were too far into our QA process to test or make changes & fixes. This is why the “as-is” was mentioned. Because of the severity of the issue (crashing regions is about as bad as it gets) and having no time to fix it, I am forced to go back on my word on this one.

We will continue to host Firestorm 6.0.2.56680 on our downloads page in the Opensim section until we are able to remedy the major issues. The SL version of this update will install separately, so you can use the 6.3.2 update for SL and continue to run 6.0.2 for Opensim.

Major updates from LL in this update include:

– Bakes on Mesh! See the primer from Inara, the announcement from Linden Lab, and the LL Knowledge Base.
– Love Me Render! See the post from Linden Lab on these rendering updates.
– Umeshu, a group of bug fixes, tweaks and improvements.
– Edit notecards from an external editor.
– Ability to duplicate group roles.

There are Firestorm goodies…

There are a few new FS-specific features in this release as well like ability to sit on objects from Area search, New Discord Rich Presence, Ghosted attachments now automatically fix themselves after tp, but as usual there are too many to list here.

Bakes On Mesh

BOM – Bakes On Mesh

Bakes on Mesh is a new feature to allow system avatar baked textures to be shown on mesh attachments.

Basic features

  • Any face of a mesh object can be textured using one of the server baked textures.
  • The corresponding region of the system avatar is hidden if an attached mesh is using a baked texture.
  • 5 new bake channels – leftarm, leftleg, aux1, aux2, aux3. You can use the new bake channels on the face of a mesh.
  • A universal wearable type.
  • New tattoos for universal wearable type –
    • HEAD_TATTOO, → baked to head
    • UPPER_TATTOO → baked to upper
    • LOWER_TATTOO, → baked to lower
    • SKIRT_TATTOO, → baked to skirt
    • HAIR_TATTOO, → baked to hair
    • EYES_TATTOO, → baked to eyes
    • LEFT_ARM_TATTOO, → baked to left arm
    • LEFT_LEG_TATTOO, → baked to left leg
    • AUX1_TATTOO, → baked to aux1
    • AUX2_TATTOO, → baked to aux2
    • AUX3_TATTOO, → baked to aux3

Benefits

  • Avoid the need for texture appliers → easier customization workflow.
  • Avoid the need for onion avatars → fewer meshes, fewer textures at display time.
  • Avoid the need to sell full-perm meshes. You can customize any mesh you have modify permissions for simply by setting the flags and equipping the appropriate wearables.

Avatar wearables are baked into eleven different textures (BAKE_HEAD, BAKE_UPPER, BAKE_LOWER, BAKE_EYES, BAKE_SKIRT, BAKE_HAIR, BAKE_LEFTARM, BAKE_LEFTLEG, BAKE_AUX1, BAKE_AUX2, BAKE_AUX3) by the baking service.
You can now apply these textures to your avatar’s object attachments’ diffuse texture slot.
Right-click on the attachment, click edit and from the edit face menu select textures.
Click the diffuse texture icon to open up the texture picker.
The texture picker has an extra radio button mode called ‘bake’ for selecting server bakes.
The ‘bake’ radio button mode has a dropdown for selecting BAKE_HEAD, BAKE_UPPER, BAKE_LOWER, BAKE_EYES, BAKE_SKIRT, BAKE_HAIR, BAKE_LEFTARM, BAKE_LEFTLEG, BAKE_AUX1, BAKE_AUX2, BAKE_AUX3 server bake textures.
When an attachment is using a baked texture, the corresponding base mesh region of the system avatar is hidden.

If a mesh face is set to show a baked texture but is not attached to an avatar, you will see a default baked texture.
If you are using an older viewer without bakes on mesh support, then faces set to show baked textures will also display as the default baked texture, and base mesh regions will not be hidden.

For more detailed documentation, please see:

The things I like from this release…

  • NEW Added Discord rich presence support
    This feature allows you to connect your SL account with your Discord account.
    Once connected, Discord will show your SL online status & session length, and optionally, your username and location in SL.
    For further details, see the Firestom Discord wiki page.
    Comm → Discord
    Liny Odell, Ansariel Hiller, Nicky Dasmijn
  • NEW Added the ability to edit notecards in an external editor
    For Firestorm, to set the external notecard editor, go to Preferences → Firestorm → Build 1 → External Editor → Browse to the program or application and select then press OK.
    When a notecard is open, you will see a new “Edit” button bottom left.
    Clicking the Edit button opens the Notecard in the external editor.
    Making changes in the external editor & then saving the file in the external editor will upload the changes into the notecard in Second Life.
    If no external editor is selected in Preferences, the viewer will try to use the external editor that you have set to open txt files.
    NOTE: There is a known bug with this feature that causes the order of embedded content to break – see BUG-227626 for details
    Maxim ProductEngine
  • NEW Added the ability to duplicate a group role
    The feature allows you to duplicate a group role so that the copied role has the same permissions and you can just give the copied role a different title.
    This feature was requested in BUG-226986
    Open the group profile → Members & Roles → Roles → Left click on a role to select it → Click the “Copy Role” button.
    AndreyK ProductEngine
  • NEW Increased the allowed sound clip length from 10s to 30s
    This adds support to the viewer to upload & play sound clips up to 30 seconds in length.
    Currently, sound uploads over 10 seconds are not possible, but will be soon when the server-side support is added by Linden Lab.
    Firestorm 6.3.2 is ready to support this feature as soon as the required server-side changes are made
    AndreyL ProductEngine
  • NEW Attachments now auto-refresh if they are ghosted on teleport
    Added timer for refreshing attachments if attachments were attempted to get killed after the actual teleport finished
    This feature should mostly solve the problem where attachments are invisible to observers after a teleport or region change
    It provides the same function as “Refresh Attachments” under Avatar → Avatar Health, but the refresh is triggered automatically when needed
    This feature is enabled by default
    Optionally, if the debug setting FSExperimentalLostAttachmentsFixReport is set to TRUE, Firestorm reports attachments that were attempted to get detached during a teleport or region crossing to nearby chat, followed by reporting “Refreshing attachments…” to nearby chat when the auto-refresh starts
    This should hopefully workaround FIRE-12004 and BUG-7761 until there is a server-side fix from Linden Lab.
    Ansariel Hiller

The full release notes can be read here.