 So good morning, everyone. Hopefully you can hear me. And welcome to the 2023 Open Simulator Community Conference. I'm Joyce Bettencourt, co-founder of the nonprofit Avocon, or as many of you know me by my avatar name here on stage, Rhianna Chattanoor. This is our 11th year, which is pretty amazing. And we're delighted to open up with our Open Simulator core developer Spotlight. And we are, Open Simulator itself is celebrating 17 years, which is also another amazing number. And the first commit was on January 31st, 2007. And the many developers working on the open source multi-platform, multi-user, 3D application server software that is running this conference grid and behind the scenes of hundreds of public and many, many, many more private virtual grid environments. And so we're very thankful for Open Simulator. I will put into chat a video. We created basically a visualization of the development of Open Simulator in the past year. And I'll put it into the local chat here. And then you guys will be able to see that. It's three minutes long. You can watch it afterwards. But it shows just the impact and all the work that is put into it. In the last year alone, we've reported, or the report that you'll see in that is up to 180 contributors who throughout Open Simulator's development past and present, who've created over 4,997,000, sorry, 854 lines of code through the years, through those 17 years. So the equivalent of over 134 years of human effort. So that's pretty amazing a thing to think of. And we are more than thankful, of course, for the core developers who allow many of us as users and grid owners to be able to kind of have these spaces. So with that, I will turn it over to one quick thing. Of course, I wanted to also thank all the sponsors who you'll see up on the posters, other logos. And also thank, of course, the core developers, but also thank all the presenters who'll be here over this course of this weekend and the many volunteers and organizers that have worked with us to make this all happen. So thank you as well. And you'll be kind of hearing through myself and Lear, who is also the co-chair of the conference with me. And with that, I will turn it over to Cynthia Colloyne or Lear Lobo, as she is on the stage. So thank you. Hey, thank you, Rihanna. And hello, everyone. Welcome to R-O-S-C-C. I want to wish you all a great conference and to let you know how thankful we are to our core developers. I'm up here with some of the most wonderful people in the world, and I'd like to introduce them. Krista Lopez is a professor within the Department of Informatics, Donald Brenn School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, and a core open simulator developer. Krista developed the HyperGrid protocol, which allows users of one open simulator grid to travel to another grid server with their identity, avatar appearance, and inventory remaining persistent. Mellie Milan is a open simulator core developer, and Melanie has been an active contributor to the virtual world software in general and open simulator in particular. She has been involved in a number of virtual world projects, including creating with a team of up to 12 developers. Her own spin on the open simulator software, which powered the Avination grid. Much of the grid's code, when shared back to the core code, was the base for many of the new open simulator 0.9 update features. Yubit Umarov, open simulator core developer. Yubit is currently a lead core developer for Open Simulator, and he has been working on the project since 2012. He was instrumental in coding and implementing in the open simulator code base many of the updates that were part of Open Simulator 0.9 through 0.922 and works on resolving issues and developing the upcoming releases. Kevin Kozens, Andrew Heller-Shanks, is an open simulator core developer. Kevin has been a member of the open simulator core development team since March of 2014, and he created or maintains several add-on modules, including the OpenSim Search and OpenSim Profile Modules, which are useful within the Open Simulator project. Please check out the website found at theconference.opensimulator.org for more info, speaker bios, details of the sessions, and the full schedule of events. That's at conference.opensimulator.org slash schedule. The conference is being livestreamed and recorded, so if you have questions or comments during this session, please share them in world in the text chat or local chat, or send tweets to atopensimcc with the hashtag pound O-S-C-C-23. Welcome, everyone. Let's begin the session. Let's open with the wonderful developer work from our core devs and code enthusiasts who work hard to track down bugs and examine potential features. If you have a question in the audience, please post it in the text chat. I have it up as we speak. So let's see, why don't we start with where everyone is today and what you're working on? What are your current interests? Who would like to begin? Krista? Sure. Good morning, everybody. It's great to be here. You know, that time of year again, I have been relatively out of the loop for the past year. There's a lot of other things that got higher priority in my life, and particularly this past quarter, I have been out of California and also on the sabbatical, so really out of the loop. I have contributed much to OpenSimulator other than paying the bills every month for the server hosting costs, which I must say it's a pleasure to be able to continue to support the community in that way. Well, that's important, and we're thankful for it. So you're on sabbatical. Well, that's fun, wonderful. That's a great time to recharge. Yeah, well, yes, maybe. So, yeah, I'm here. I'm looking forward to hear what everything, what everyone is working on and the new developments. I mean, there was a big hype of the metaverse the past couple of years or so, with meta getting into some sort of metaverse that nobody really knows what that was. I think the hype now is over, or at least overshadowed by the next type of AI. But, you know, we're here. It's been 11 years since we started this conference series, and we're still here, which is pretty amazing. We're all 11 years older, but thank God our avatars did not get any one day old. So that's great. That's right, that's right. Well, you know, speaking of this, and we appreciate your support. Let's face it, without the server and everything that you do, it's an easy place to host our content. And that reminds me, Melanie, you know, this year we were so thankful for your support, and I thought, why don't you tell us what you're working on now? Well, not much open sim actually. Mostly my involvement with open sim at this time is always great. Keeping the asset service alive and improving. I've just yesterday spoken to Dan, who has said that this is the most stable asset service that OSCrypt has had in, like, ever. So that's one thing, and then I still have, from the back burner, the little project for creating a new server voice that can deal with things other than Revox. I would need help with that project though. It's not something I can tackle alone because I have to work for a living and that doesn't leave me enough time for a large-scale, multi-platform scope project. Well, thank you, and thank you for bringing up voice because, of course, at the core dev meetings, we've been talking about it and other options and we always need new information, new ideas, and that's one of the areas that we're thankful for when you come to conference and you energize us with a lot of different ways of thinking about these problems and how to solve them. So, Ubit, what are you working on these days? Hello, everyone. Nice to be here. Glad to see you all. Well, I'm in the OpenSim area. I'm working, trying to make possible that we meet here again next year, keeping OpenSim up to date and running. Hello. Did you hear me? Oh, I did hear you. I'm medium between those, so you don't hear me. You know, I don't think people have any idea how hard all of you work. You're so modest and I don't just mean what you do this year, but I mean all of this infrastructure that makes our world possible, right? And why don't you tell us, I know you've been working really hard behind the scenes. There have been commits this year. What have those commits been about? And, Andrew, I'm going to get to you in just one moment. So, did you want to mention one of the commits? Well, a lot of them are still about to move into support.net 6.0, because as you know, Microsoft decided to stop the support of .net framework for and Mono and moved on into .net 5. That is actually now .net 8, but from that we are still targeting .net 6.0, because it's a nice platform better that fix some uses that .net 6.0, and the .net 5.0 add for us. So, still in the migration, that sadly means that we lost some things, namely support for the 32-bit CPUs, Intel and AMD class of CPUs. Well, they were still nice, but okay, everyone is dropping support for them and .net, of course, .net 6.0 does not support them, so that was a loss. We need to use modern CPUs. And another one is that it lost several components that made us lose something like, for example, our main script engine that was extension. Good luck that we had replaced it already by or we had engine already in condition to take over. Well, but that was one of the losses. And also now people need to install the new .net runtime, even in Windows, while in the .net framework 4.0 it was already installed. Now, at the last it is working and we take benefit of the improvement code and the improved performance of that .net 6.0 and .net in overall does provide us. And about the new features, well, we are currently trying to see what that thing called physical running materials are about and as we see it in the Firestorm version 7. And so far it is working. Of course, that's still, I think Firestorm is still in early implementation of that, so we'll see what's going, but so far it's working and maybe the main feature, beautiful shining feature of our next release, open theme 9.38.0. Okay. Hey, that's exciting. Okay. Well, let's get back to that for just a moment. Let me introduce Andrew and Andrew. What are you currently working on? Good morning, everyone. And yeah, I say 11 years and wow, we're just three years away from two decades on open simulator development to say it. It's amazing how time has flown. I realize how long I've been kind of involved in one way or another with the project. One of my sort of day jobs I get, I'm involved with embedded systems work. I do work on electronics and computers, so I'm doing some work for a company, just a number of miles west of me and they deal with this dedicated computer system that is involved in monitoring and controlling in CNC machines, like basically machines that make stuff in various manufacturing plants. One of the side projects lately has been working on a small little computer system, kind of because I have an interest in vintage computing. One of the best 8-bit microprocessors is basically a 6809 processor and so I built myself a little board with that processor that fits into an Altoids tin and I'm currently implementing a fourth-like language for it and I've got it running. I'm just currently in the stages of debugging. I mostly run Linux and one of the issues I had, of course, is that when it comes to C-Sharp, I usually use a program called mono-develop to help me to be able to browse and make changes to C-Sharp-based code and of course that project was dropped. It's being replaced by .develop but I haven't been able to get .develop compiled and not been running but just recently I did manage to get some other packages where I went, I think more to Microsoft to install some stuff and that somehow wound up giving me back mono-develop so I'm back being able to work with the codebase and other C-Sharp projects again now. Hey, thanks. Well, that sounds fascinating. So speaking of command control, communications, things like that, you know, Melanie's point earlier about voice, we had a message come in and here's the question and I'll let one of you tackle where we should go with this one. What do you think we need to work on to find a solution for voice and world? What would you like to see possible? Well, I can tell you what I have been up to with that. Maybe kick-start the conversation. Wonderful. Found that the combination of Mumble murmur is one of the best suited ones because it has a spatial audio implementation. I have a low latency audio engine that I have written in pure C-Sharp which actually implements the bits of protocol that are needed for spatial voice in murmur because the original open source C-Sharp library that they have on their page doesn't implement that portion. It also doesn't implement channels properly so I've added all these things and it basically would need to be hooked into the interfaces for SL voice but that's something I have not had the time to research and also the code still needs a lot of cleanup. Well, that's wonderful though because we've had a lot of conversation about it but we weren't sure quite how to get started so that's great to know. So a low latency C-Sharp engine is this for a particular project or is this something you have passion for that you're developing on your own? Oh, I have a history of taking part in the Jack Audio Connection Kit project back in the days which is a low latency engine in C++ that is written for use by musicians on their digital audio workstations so I took the concepts from that but not the code and rewrote it in C-Sharp using a number of ready-made components of course and based it on the open source C-Sharp client for murmur and that has actually been tested with quite a few users and has eventually after fixing a few bugs passed these tests and it would be at a point where it could be taken over and developed further I don't have the time to do it by myself. Noah, we appreciate that though that sounds wonderful. So if anyone's interested in voice or can they reach out to you over IRC or how might they get in touch? Well, yes, always on the IRC you have to mention me by name then it will go ping and I'll see it when I see it. That's great. Because I'm like so far off most of these people's time zone that it would be difficult to actually catch me awake. Oh, I understand. I understand. Well, we only have a minute longer and so before we move on please realize we are going to have another session with our core devs and the crowd funders and speakers over the lunch break so we'll have a VIP session to discuss this some more. If anyone has questions or comments for our core developers please direct them directly to them. Ubit, so you mentioned 0.9.3 and you said that has PBR in it did I understand you correctly? Yes, at the moment it is working almost everything is working with the latest Firestorm Alpha version there are of course a few problems even that Firestorm is still not finished it's still in early development it's called in my mouth for a reason not even better. And on our side we still have some things to do like actually I think it's already propagated into hours but for example our map does not do about them so still some work to do but for now it looks great, you've seen it. I have, I have, I'm just acting like I haven't. There's been a lot of hard work behind that getting and for those of you who are new to PBR just so you know it's the ability to see shiny and metal and reflections and just all kinds of cool content well I want to thank our core development team for all your hard work we're excited to have you with us and kicking off our conference and you're right the hype with the metaverse Krista it's still there but you're right AI is on the rise and of course it's the conversation this year isn't it so thank you to our core developers for their support past and present and for OpenSimulator 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. in this keynote region and it's entitled OpenSim on a Bigger Scale we encourage you to visit the OSCC23 Poster Expo in the OSCC Expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and to explore the HyperGrid resources in OSCC Expo 2 region along with the sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC Expo regions thank you again to our core development team and thank you to our audience it's a community conference welcome