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This is a glossary of software technical reference terms commonly found in descriptions of how OpenSimulator works from invocation, initialization, main loop and various services.

Definitions of OpenSimulator technical terms

Caps

An abbreviation that is short for Capabilities. Caps refers to the capabilities that a particular grid region provides to viewers such as voice or multimedia. For more, see CAPS.

LLSD

Acronym for Linden Lab Structured Data. A standard for encoding data for use with LLUDP communications between the simulator and the viewer. For details on standard, see Lab Structure Data.

LLUDP

Acronym for Linden Lab UDP. The designation is commonly used in the OpenSimulator community for the Linden Lab Second Life Binary UDP Protocol used for communication between virtual world simulators and viewers. For details on the protocol itself, see the Second Life Open Source Protocol documentation. For more on the OpenSimulator implementation of the protocol, see LLUDP ClientStatck.

Megaregion

An experimental and now deprecated type of region that could exceed the usual 256x256 meter size limit by combining multiple standard regions. Megaregions were deprecated in OpenSimulator v0.8.2 and support for them was removed in OpenSimulator v0.9.0. For more, see Megaregions.

OGS1

Acronym for OpenSimulator Grid Services version 1. A collection of grid services software used through OpenSimulator version 0.6 to provide UGAIM services to grid clients. OGS1 relied heavily on a Microsoft .NET technology called Remoting. Developers decided to move away from relying on .NET specific methods in order to make the software more portable and to increase performance. OGS2 was proposed and experimented with, but never adopted. In place of OGS1, OpenSimulator 0.7 and later adopted ROBUST as a replacement technology. For more, see OGS1 Diagram

OGS2

Acronym for OpenSimulator Grid Services version 2. An experimental improvement to OGS1. The code was written and tested but never adopted in a release version of OpenSimulator. Instead, ROBUST was developed to replace OGS1.

Region

A 256 x 256 meter area that has an X/Y position in a grid and a regionhandle calculated from the position. A region can also be defined as an IP endpoint that the Viewer can use to establish a client connection. The unique ID of a region is a UUID. This means that a region can change position, and because of that position change, the regionhandle will be recalculated. The regionhandle will uniquely identify a position in a grid. A region contains a number of sub components such as Scene and Client/Viewer circuits. See also Varregion and MegaRegion for comparison. Note: in some cases, region may refer to the regions database table which stores data related to a simulator's regions. For more on the DB usage, see Regions_(database_table).

Regionhandle

A regionhandle is a 64-bit number that stores the X/Y location of a place in a grid. The high order 32-bits are the X position, and the bottom 32-bits are the Y position. A region handle can be calculated as follows: ((X * 256 + x_offset) << 32) + (Y * 256 + y_offset). X and Y are the grid location of a region. X_offset and y_offset are the x and y location of a place within a region so their values will be in the range of 0 to 255 (inclusive).

ROBUST

Acronym for Redesigned OpenSimulator Basic Universal Server Technology. A modular replacement for OGS1 to provide grid services including UGAIM as well as allowing third party modules to replace standard grid services or implement new ones. Adoption of ROBUST began with OpenSimulator v0.6.6 and incrementally replaced additional OGS1 services until OpenSimulator v0.7 when ROBUST provided all services and OGS1 was completely removed. For more, see ROBUST

Scene

A scene is part of a region, currently there is a one to one relationship, i.e. one region has one scene. A scene contains all the 3d objects, called Entities, entities can either be ScenePresences or SceneObjectGroups. A ScenePresence can be represented by an avatar, if it is a root scene presence. SceneObjectGroups consists of a number of SceneObjectParts.

Avatar/ScenePresence

Each viewer is represented by one or more avatars. The Root avatar or ScenePresence functions as a kind of cursor, into the grid. Where the region will keep the viewer updated on the state of the simulation, taking place in the scene. Besides the root presence, a number of child presences will exist in the neighboring regions, enabling the viewer to know what is going on in the neighboring regions.

Session

Each connection between a viewer and a region, regardless if the avatar is the root or a child, is a session.

Simulator

Frequently abbreviated as Sim. Refers to an instance of the OpenSimulator server that hosts one or more Regions.

UGAIM

Acronym for the common grid services: User, Grid, Asset, Inventory, and Messages. Originally, the order of the letters in the acronym was related to the order in which the services needed to be started in early versions of OpenSimulator. Other combinations and orders may appear in the OpenSimulator documentation, code comments, and mailing list archive, for example: UGAI, UGRM, URM, UGAIS etc. It's often necessary to research the context to determine specifically what additional letters refer to but the general idea is the list of grid services.

Varregion

A special type of region that can exceed the usual 256x256 meter size limit. The viewer in use must support the Varregion feature. Varregions may be sized in increments of 256 meters up to a maximum of 8192. For more, see Varregion.

Viewer

A client application that connects to OpenSimulator and displays a view of the simulation to a user. There are many viewers but most are forks of the original open-sourced SL viewer. For more, see Connecting.

• OpenSim.cs (OpenSim.cs )
• OpenSim_SwInit (Initialization from Main() )
• OpenSim_SwMainLoopl (After initialization, a main loop waits for connections or commands)
• OpenSim_SwRegionHandshake (How a client connects to the simulator)
• OpenSim_UserService (How the user server works)
• OpenSim_InterRegionCommunications (How the sim communicates with other sims)
• OpenSim_GridService (How the grid server works)
• OpenSim_AssetService (How the asset server works)
• OpenSim_SimService (How the simulator operates after a connection is made)
• Sim_Throttles (How the simulator handles throttling of packets)

See Also

• Support pages
• Getting Started
• How to use OpenSimulator Archives (OAR)