Release Notes

General

THESE ARE DRAFT RELEASE NOTES. THEY DO NOT APPLY TO ANY ACTUAL RELEASE.

Welcome to OpenSimulator 0.8, an open-source multi-user 3D virtual environment and metaverse server platform.

As ever, OpenSimulator is a highly complex piece of software. Various usage scenarios (standalone, grid, hypergrid, etc.) in combination with different dependencies (e.g. different versions of mono on Linux/Mac) can sometimes produce unexpected or unstable behaviour.

If you are upgrading from a previous verson of OpenSimulator, then we strongly recommend that you start off with the default configuration files and port over any changes you made to your older version of OpenSimulator.

As this is a wiki page, please feel free to update it with more information about migration or other issues as and when these come to light.

You can download this release of OpenSimulator from http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Download

Known issues

• Arbitrary key:value storage for regions has not yet been implemented for SQLite or MSSQL. This is necessary for temporary attachments settings to be persisted. This functionality is considered experimental.
• Regression in RLV functionality where objects given via the llGiveInventoryFolder() function with a folder name with the format #RLV/~gift are still placed in the #RLV folder but now with the name still as "#RLV/~gift" rather than just "~gift". This is being addressed in http://opensimulator.org/mantis/view.php?id=6311. Any help from viewer developers on this would be much appreciated.
• No form of prim equivalence is implemented for meshes.
• Loading scripts from the library section of inventory does not work properly.

Requirements

OpenSimulator requires:

• .NET Framework 4 when running under Windows.
• At least Mono 2.8 when running under Mono (Linux or Mac). However, we recommend using at least Mono 2.10 as Mono 2.8.x has been reported as less stable in some situations when running OpenSimulator. Mono 3 has also been reported as working well with OpenSimulator.

Backwards Compatibility Notices

• This release includes database migrations but these should be backward compatible with OpenSimulator 0.7.6/0.7.6.1 (i.e. one could rollback to the previous version of OpenSimulator if necessary without also rolling back the database). However, this is not a guarantee - please always backup your data before migrating from earlier OpenSimulator versions.

Changes with possible compatibility issues

General Server

OpenSimulator now requires .NET 4. For more details please see above.

Physics

As of this release, the default physics engine plugin becomes BulletSim rather than OpenDynamicsEngine. The BulletSim plugin is significantly better than the OpenDynamicsEngine one, both in terms of performance and in turns of support for physical objects and vehicles.

However, physics engines are very complex beasts and the behaviour between BulletSim and OpenDynamicsEngine will be somewhat different. If you want to use OpenDynamicsEngine instead, then please make sure this is selected in the physics paramter of the [Startup] section of your OpenSim.ini.

Hypergrid

In this release, Hypergrid teleports can now be made over 16383 regions in X or Y directions rather than the previous maximum of 4095. All the most recent third-party viewer releases (Kokua, Firestorm, Singularity) will accomodate this. However, older releases of those viewers will crash if such a teleport is attempted. If you still want to retrict teleport distance from your OpenSimulator installation, then please set max_distance in the [EntityTransfer] section of OpenSim.ini.

Other Changes

General Server

• Unofficial support for PostgreSQL added to the persistence layer.

General Simulator

Configuration

Services

Hypergrid

• Hypergrid users are now allowed into regions where a group they belong to has permission to enter.
• Much reduced issues where avatars are reported as "Unknown User" when travelling.

Objects

• Support added for particle ribbon, glow and blend.

Mesh/Sculpt

Avatars

• Attachment point and positioning is preserved when an object preivously attached is rezzed into the scene.

Teleport

Physics

Sound

Voice

Region/Estates/Parcels

Map

Instant Messaging

Friends/Profiles

Archiving

NPC

Inventory

Groups

Monitoring

Test

Scripting

• Many LSL events will now generate syntax errors at compile time if given the wrong number of parameters. This has not yet been applied to all events.

Acknowledgements

Many, many thanks to all the developers, testers and community members who contributed to this release and who help out with OpenSimulator generally. Your hard work makes this all possible.