Introduction

This page is a work-in-progress

Integrating OpenSimulator regions with external sources of data can be done in a number of ways.

Techniques

Shared media/media on a prim

Media on a prim (MOAP), also called Shared Media by Linden Lab, allows you to display and interact with any webpage on the surface of an object with version 2 and later Linden Lab viewers and third party viewers such as Firestorm and Kokua. See this page for more details.

Integration through Linden Scripting Language (LSL) scripts

LSL provides a number of mechanisms for objects in a region to send (e.g. llHTTPRequest()) and receive data (e.g. llRequestURL() and then the http_request event) from external servers via HTTP. Please see the linked webpages for more details on using these and associated commands.

Integration through region modules

OpenSimulator provides a IRegionModule mechanism by which C# code can directly affect the objects in a region and can interface with any external system. Interfacing with internal OpenSimulator code is unfortunately something of a black art, though the core distribution itself contains a large number of region modules and test code which can give examples of how to do this.

Region modules can also send and receive information from scripts via the OSSL_Script_Library/ModSendCommand mechanism. In a future OpenSimulator release (0.7.4), region modules will also be able to make custom scripting functions available to scripts without having to manually patch and rebuild OpenSimulator via the OSSL_Script_Library/ModInvoke mechanism.