Introduction

Under construction. Please add terms if necessary.

This glossary intends to cover various terms used in OpenSimulator. It may also cover concepts in the code though it may be better to put these in a separate document.

A

• Agent - A user's presence in a simulator. May be a root agent or a child agent. Each agent is established by a separate connection from the viewer to the simulator in question.

B

C

• Child agent - A user's presence in a simulator which does not have an accompanying avatar. Child agents are used to receive information about objects and avatars in neighbouring regions so that a user can see them. Therefore, when a root agent is in a region, the viewer also establishes child agents in neighbouring regions. Therefore, there may be 0 or many child agents. See agent for more general details on agents.
• Client - In OpenSimulator these are commonly called viewers.

D

E

F

G

• Grid - Usually one or more regions connected to Robust services.

H

• HyperGrid - System that allows teleports between grids in the metaverse.

I

J

K

L

• LL - Short for LindenLabs, creators of SecondLife and some of the protocols used in OpenSim.

M

• Megaregion - An experimental OpenSimulator facilities which merges several ordinary continguous regions into a single large region such that region boundaries are some multiple of 256m, such as 512m x 512m. This facility is so-named since it is compatible with ordinary Second Life viewers, though only with some hacks (such as a double teleport if one tries to teleport into a megaregion anywhere other than the 'root' 256m x 256m area). Considered experimental.
• Metaverse - Not the Facebook kind; Collection of all grids and virtual worlds using roughly the same protocol and design ideas.
• Module - OpenSimulator internal structure is designed to be modular, with various parts adopting a similar structure in the code to provide functionality as a module. This concept can be used to further extend the functionality with third-party modules, which can even integrate and talk to existing modules.

N

O

P

Q

R

• Region - A simulated 3D area in OpenSimulator. Typically 256m x 256m as this is the only area currently supported by the vast majority of Second Life viewers. Larger areas are achieved by placing regions next to each other, possibly spread across several different OpenSimulator instances. An alternative is to create a megaregion.
• Root agent - The user's primary presence. Only one root agent can be present for a given session. A root agent has an avatar in the scene which represents the user. See agent for more general details on agents.
• Robust - Serverside services wrapper that provides essential services to simulators and regions.

S

• Session - A continuous period of communication between a viewer and one or many OpenSimulator instances, from login to logout.
• Simulator - An instance of OpenSimulator that runs one or more regions.

T

• Teleport - Movement of a user from one location to another that isn't due to avatar movement (e.g. walking forward). Teleport can be within the same region, between different regions on the same simulator and between different regions hosted on different simulators.

U

V

• Viewer - A user program to interact with OpenSimulator instances. Commonly, will be dominated by a 3D graphical display of the environment with an avatar at the central focal point, though exceptions such as text-only viewers also exist.

W

X

Y

Z