 Welcome to the 2020 Open Simulator Community Conference. I'm Joyce Bettencourt, the Vice President of Avocon, the nonprofit that helps run this. And you may, of course, you know me as my avatar here, Rhiannon Chatnouar, and probably in other virtual worlds. This is our eighth year, and we're delighted to open up the conference with the Open Simulator core dev group again and spotlight them. So it's our eighth conference year, about 13 years of Open Simulator and the many developers that have been working on this open source, multi-platform, multi-user 3D application software that is running this conference grid and many other Open Simulator grids. And of course, yes, the hundreds of public grids and the many private virtual grids that we don't even, that we don't see. I'll put a link into chat in a second about the stats for the active grids. In this video, well, we have a video and I'll actually add that here, too, to the chat. We put together a video as we usually do of the core contributions, like the dev that's happened in Open Simulator over the years, and here's the URL for that. And you can definitely see the work that's been put in this year, and then also you can look back at prior years, too, we keep them up on our YouTube page. And today, well, today we're going to have Lear Lobo as the co-chair of OSCC with me, who's going to be moderating this panel. And I guess I can turn it over to you, Lear, to introduce folks, and then we can kind of go from there. Thank you, Joyce. Thank you, Joyce. And hello, everyone. We were so delighted to see you this year and we're so delighted to be a community and to be together. Well, I have the privilege of introducing Melanie Meland. As an Open Simulator core developer, Melanie has been one of the most active contributors to the virtual world software and, in particular, for Open Simulator. As her avatar, Melanie Meland, she is a long-time, second-life resident and gained much experience in using virtual worlds. Yubit Yubaroff is currently a lead core developer for Open Simulator, and he's been working on the project since 2012. He was instrumental in coding and implementing into the Open Simulator code base many of the updates that were part of the Open Simulator 0.9 update and developing the upcoming releases. Krista Lopez, as Divacanto, is a professor within the Department of Informatics, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California Irving. She is an IEEE fellow and, of course, well known for her contributions to Open Simulator and to the HyperGrid. Robert Adams has been an Open Simulator core developer for many years. His Open Simulator work includes the BulletSim physics engine, the DSG distributed scene graph, simulator experience, and many performance improvements. Outside Open Simulator, he has been a computer developer and researcher for 40 years. He has a current interest in distributed simulation and robotics. And then we have Kevin Kozens, who is Andrew Helichanks. Kevin has been coding for open source projects since 1992, including being a member of the Open Simulator core developer team since March of 2014 and created or maintained several add-on modules, including the Open Sim Search, the Open Sim Profile, and the Open Sim Mute List, the modules that are used within the Open Simulator project. You can find him reporting bugs, bug triaging, and updating the Open Simulator project. Well, thank you to our core developers. Let's begin the session. So let's see. What is, how is everyone doing today? What is new with each of you? I think I'll start, who would like to begin first? Is there, would anyone like to talk about what you're currently working on? Let's see, Krista. Good morning, everybody. It's absolutely a thrill to be back here on OSEC for the, what's like the seventh time, eighth time. This, oh, this is the eighth annual, right? It's unbelievable. And especially this year, that so many other conferences out there are going into some form of virtual environment. This one continues to be the one that I think is my favorite of everything. I mean, there's a, there's a really nice feeling to be in a 3D virtual world and not just on Zoom. So it's, it's a pleasure to be here. I, this, this past year, I, unfortunately, I didn't, because of many things happening, including having to deal with COVID in the family and lots of other things, I wasn't, I didn't have as much time as I would to contribute to, to the code base of Open Sim. So my, my contributions this year were mainly to make sure that I'm, I'm paying the bills to get the, continue to have the, the, you know, the Open Simulator hosting up and running and updating the Diva distribution every so often, but I have been following from, you know, from here being closely following what is going on in Open Sim. And of course, I think that Ubit should go next to, to see, because he's the real main contributor for the past couple of years. Thank you, Krista. And to the point you just made with 178 contributors and over 496,000 lines of code, we are so appreciative of everyone's contribution past and present. Ubit, what's, how it's happening with you? Hello, everyone. Glad to see you all again. Well, I've been working, adding in new bugs and things like that to our future release 092, that is a bit overdue, because I keep adding changes and not giving enough time to check if it is a good release candidate. Basically that, okay. Oh, that's wonderful. And thank you. And Kevin, how are you doing? I'm just doing fine. Thanks and good morning, everyone. Been busy year for me. I do some work and embedded systems and work I'm doing for a particular client's been keeping me really busy and situation that helping the person out with and so I haven't been as active with Open Sim as I would have liked this year, although I have been just recently made a few small little minor changes to the modules I maintain. And I also have started a while back and Open Simulator events module, which would be a module to allow people to make notes of events in grids that they were interested in attending and that it would be able to remind them of when those events are coming up. That's a work that started, but unfortunately, I haven't had time to get back to finish working on that and say I work from home. So I've been safe in all this craziness that's been going on, hoping that I'll have a bit more time this coming year to get back to a bit more Open Sim work. I think that's funny. Yeah, that's great. You have to realize we are so appreciative. I can't imagine what life would have been like this past year if we didn't have worlds like this to come together as a community. To not just socialize and heal, but also to share and to dream of a better future. So I want each of you to realize that it's not so much what you've done this year as what a profound impact you've had on our lives. And I just wanted to thank you for it. Melanie, you know, many of your contributions have shaped our behavior today, and we're so thankful for your guidance. How are you doing in this time of COVID? Well, since I've always worked remotely, I'm pretty familiar with working remotely even during COVID. Nothing much has changed for me. I did lose my job, had to find another one, which I did in the middle of lockdown. I've not done a lot on Open Simulator in terms of code commits. I think there were like maybe four or five commits on three days in this year. But I've been doing a lot of work behind the scenes for always great as well as to create an environment where Open Simulator can be deployed in Kubernetes containers. So that is something that is going to come down the pipeline. Once I get it worked out how to do it, how to have everybody be able to do it quickly and easily. But I believe Kubernetes Container and Orchestration of the future also for Open Sim. Oh, thank you. You know, we were so inspired. What was it? Two years ago or maybe three now, when you were talking about the opportunities of bridging with other software engines such as the Unreal Engine. And you made us dream of so many different opportunities. There's been quite a bit of work throughout the community in thinking about these bridging opportunities. Well, let's see. So Robert Adams, Mr. Blue, we saw you dancing up a storm yesterday. And how are you doing? Well, I came by to dance to support the community. Like other people, I've been working on other projects, other virtual world projects. There are with this virtual work remotely thing happening, the world has become hip deep in virtual world projects. And and, you know, Open Simulator continues to be an example to all the other ones. And I'm here to support the community. Hey, that's great. You know, yesterday we held the educator meetup and they were talking about doctors and I had to laugh because remember last year you had inspired several of them to to take off and try try some of your techniques that you were recommending. So you bit. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, go ahead. Tell us about that. Well, I mean, last year I did present at the OFCC, the a dockerized version of an Open Simulator region. And the code is still out there on GitHub. That's right. And that's it was wonderful to hear that the educational committee and community had picked up your ideas and were, of course, using them. So you bit, you were telling me about the environment, enhancements of features. And I'm not as familiar with it. I was wondering if you could describe, I know you're running it on OSGrid, aren't you? Yes, OSGrid is using the latest version of the Open Sim and so several other grids. For example, Open SimFist was running also with the latest version supporting the new environment features. Basically, that is a feature that the viewers are introducing that allows more options to define the environment of a region. For example, we will be able to define the environment for each parcel and also for different altitude levels and also just a few improvements to the wind light system. New features, the moon now can be set independently from the sun and things like that. OK. It's something that you can see already in several grids using several viewers like Experimental Firestorm, etc. Does it does it take any additional performance or server server load to run that? On that, the server is just to provide the storage and provide that of the information, all the load and all the work is done with your site as most of the things. And yes, it had some impact on the framerate that you were able to to achieve, but I think it's working OK. Oh, that's great. So the latest version of Firestorm for Open Sim would be able to see and use these features? Yes, I think Firestorm is about to release a new version pretty soon that will support that feature. There are also other views that I can speak much about them because I'm not having that contact with their teams except the day turn. But I think at the moment, they turn will not have this feature. It has other improvements, not this one. OK, you know, that reminds me, you were talking to me about Vivox and I didn't know if you wanted to share anything with the community about some potential changes that may be coming down the road. Well, I'm not sure about the future on Vivox support. As you know, Vivox had a policy to provide free accounts for Open Sim news. I cannot tell how will that go. Also, when I asked them for some support to improve our our codes to support it, I got no answer at all. They just said to keep using what we have. And now we the change that now that Vivox is a completely incorporated into Unity as just another product of Unity. I'm not sure about the future and we may need to find another solution for voice. OK, thank you. And I remember last year we were we were talking about the upcoming early Bakes on Mesh support. How is that going? I'm sorry, I was distracted. Can you? Oh, that's OK. The bake on Mesh. I know there was quite a bit of attention about that. Is that is that a feature that everyone's enjoying? See, I get a little isolated. I'm I'm off teaching university classes. Yeah, well, they come at was introduced in the last version. This equation is already supporting it from our side. There was no need to make those change on on on our code. Send you, for example, for the new version of Firestorm, we'll support improve the resolution on the on the Bakes that are used for also for Bakes on Mesh. I think the problem is just a problem of the content creation. Typical problem on OpenSim is to have creators making new things. So for us to to use there is the for avatar, there is that roof and roof. I think that's the name open source avatar project that does support Bakes on Mesh. And possibly there are some other creators creating avatars for us with with those features. OK, thank you. And I was looking over the list of what we were talking about last year as far as new OSSL functions, the Y engine as experimental option. How is that going? Well, the zero nine two will have improved some improvements to I engine, including the options to extend the language a little bit with some features like a switch case, try and catch. Just optional, because if you use those on a script, only that version of I engine will be able to to run it. There are so many things. Of course, we keep extending our own extensions to LSL, the OSL extensions, and we I did have a few more functions. We'll see that on the release notes when they come out. OK. And yeah, I'm the wiki page that lists the available OSSL functions. We're trying to keep that up to date as as there are, you know, as changes are made in terms of new functions being that are being added. That page is being kept up to date. And the new features are usually flagged so that, you know, people want to keep up to date with what's happening with the OSL support. They can look at that wiki page. Wonderful. Thank you. And I want to thank all of our core developers. We have a short system session this morning, but we will have a VIP session over lunch later with the with the core dev team. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org slash schedule. Following this session, the next session will begin at 7 30 a.m. and it is entitled, We Are Going to America. We encourage you to visit the OSCC 20 poster expo in the OSCC expo three region to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the hypergrid tour resources in OSCC expo two region, along with our sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC expo regions. Thank you again to the core dev team and to you, the audience, our community. Let's have a great conference.