 technical issue here. So good morning again for those of you who don't know me. My name is Chris Collins and I'm the president of Avocon, the non-profit organization that is co-producing this event with the Overt Foundation. I also manage the Center for Simulations and Virtual Environment Research at the University of Cincinnati. And this year I had the privilege and pleasure of chairing the planning of this conference. And I think I can speak for the entire conference team when I say that we're really, really excited to see everybody here today. If you've ever organized a large event then you know how much work goes into the planning and coordinating and cat herding. But then of course with an event like this you have to factor in all of the technology challenges and truly it's a small miracle and a testament to the wonderful talents of the open simulator developers that you guys are sitting here in these virtual chairs today and hopefully watching live on the web stream. Before I get into some of the sort of housekeeping notes and the dos and don'ts and information about the conference I just wanted to take a minute and think about how much has happened since we were all here together last year at the first conference. How many of you in the audience were at the conference last year? I see lots of folks. That's good. Good to see you back again. And for those of you who are here for the first time we're really glad to have you. If you think back to where we were about a year ago when we were first planning the OpenSim conference, if you wanted to hyper grid jump to a destination grid that was too far away, you had to worry about figuring out coordinates and making all kinds of hops in the middle. Can you imagine that we all did that? We really had to plan out our hyper grid trips. And these days you don't have to worry about that at all. And before the first conference, while the OpenSim software certainly become a lot more stable, when we first started talking about planning an event like this we felt like we were really pushing the envelope. We weren't sure if the platform was ready. And not to give poor Justin a hard time, but if you know Justin Clark Casey, one of the developers, he's a pretty conservative fellow when it comes to taking risks. And last year I think he thought we were a little crazy to try to bring 200 people into the grid. But we did it and it went really, really well. So the changes from last year to this year, it's kind of amazing how far we've come and all of the great work that the developers have done to bring this platform to where it is today. And it's not just OpenSimulator itself that's been really exciting this year. Last year technology like the Oculus and platforms like high fidelity, those things were really just getting started. And for those of us who kind of lived through the second life hype cycle, the boom and the bust, I think many of us were worried last year that maybe the Rift would sort of be a flash in the pan that maybe there was just a lot of hype. And for those of us who did have that experience of sort of riding that supernova of second life all the way past the fun explosion part into the fading part, I think we're all glad to see that the developer kit too is really amazing. And if you haven't tried it yet, you should. So that's been a big change this year. And of course, high fidelity at this point last summer, I don't even think they'd invited anyone in yet for alpha testing. You know, when I remember first reading about high fidelity, and suddenly I found myself on Wikipedia reading more about voxelock trees than I ever wanted to know. And now they have opened up the alphas and there are people in there testing. And we're really excited to have Philip here for the afternoon keynote today. So make sure you don't miss that. And he'll be talking about his thoughts on the future of the metaverse and where he sees things going. And you know, between last year and this year, the Rift obviously was the Facebook purchase. That was pretty shocking. I was pretty shocked about that. But whatever your thoughts are about Facebook, I feel like they did our whole industry a really big favor by putting the words virtual reality and the metaverse back in the spotlight. You know, for the past few years, before the Rift came on the scene, when the virtual world's boom was sort of fading, it felt like that the mobile apps really sucked all the air out of the room. And all the, you know, interest and discussion was about mobile development, which was great. There have been lots of good things that have come out of that. But thanks to the Rift and Facebook's acquisition, I think the wheel has turned a bit. And I'm really excited to see that virtual reality and virtual worlds are back in the discussion. And it's really fun to see the word metaverse, you know, in a headline in the New York Times. I'm glad that people are thinking and talking about that. So compared to where we were last year at the first in some conference and where we are this year, I think we're here at a really, really exciting time. And I'm really glad to see we have an exciting schedule. All of the speakers and presentations really are talking about the future of this technology. And I think it's going to be a great conference. So with that having said, you know, here we are this year later, and we've really pushed poor Justin. Last year, we had him quaking a little bit at 250 users this year. We have almost 500 registrations. And in fact, I haven't checked Eventbrite for just a few minutes here. We may even have tipped over the 500 registration mark just since I started talking. So it's really exciting to see that there are that many people interested in being here today. And, you know, the OpenSim developers have continued to really drive this platform forward. You know, with every new release, I feel like OpenSim is more stable. There are more features. The viewer developers are adding more features. Var regions were a big addition to OpenSim this year. Groups are now in the core. Lots of changes that have made all of our virtual lives better. And, you know, without a doubt, I think all of this wouldn't be possible without them. And it's really great to see that it not only allows us to have a conference like this, but all of the other things that it enables. I mean, I'm just amazed when I, you know, review the proposals for the sessions, you know, that are going to be presented at the conference today. It's crazy all the great things people are doing with OpenSim. We have schools using it, city planners, you know, folks using this to model transportation systems of the future. We have the most creative artists, musicians, actors, they're putting on shows and art openings in open simulator worlds. It's just, it's fabulous. And I think, you know, part of what makes this key and part of what makes it possible is that this OpenSim software is open source. It's free. It's, you can download it and run it wherever you are. Anyone's able to contribute to it. And I feel like that's, that's, you know, when we talk about the future of the metaverse, and when I'm explaining this technology to people who don't know what OpenSim is, or they're not familiar with, with virtual worlds, you know, I still use that analogy of Apache in the worldwide web. Because to me, you know, I think part of the reason why the web was so successful, and I remember the early days of the web, you know, I think the fact that Apache, you know, anybody could run a web server if they could figure it out. And if they wanted to do it, they could. And OpenSim is the same way. Anybody who wants to run an OpenSim world can. It takes a little practice. And you have to do some learning if you haven't done it before. But anyone can run it. And I think that commitment to open source is what holds the promise for OpenSimulator being a good platform for the metaverse of the future. And I think we're here at such an exciting time to be at the beginning stages of that. You know, looking out in the audience, I see lots of really familiar faces. And I know that some of us have been involved in this space now for like a decade. It's hard for me to imagine, at least for myself, I've been really immersed in virtual worlds, you know, for going on 10 or 11 years now. And sometimes it's hard to, you know, it's easy to forget that we're still in the very early days. Just recently, there was an Internet2 conference in Indianapolis a week or so ago. And Josh Carpenter at Mozilla, who's sort of heading up some of their metaverse focused efforts, was talking about how he felt like the metaverse had its kitty hawk moment this summer with the release of the Oculus Rift dev kit too. And I had to object a little bit and say that I definitely think that virtual reality had a nice kitty hawk moment this summer. The dev kit too is so awesome. I mean, it really made such great improvements over the first version. And I think that that really did spark the virtual reality movement again. But virtual reality and the metaverse, you know, those aren't the same things in my mind. Anyway, the metaverse to me is that concept of connected worlds, of being able to take myself, my avatar, and all my stuff, all the things that I have with me and that make up my virtual self and to travel between worlds and to participate in all of the crazy, great, wonderful experiences and environments that other people create. And that metaverse connection, we've already had our kitty hawk moment. Our kitty hawk moment was the day that the hypergrid came into being. And the first people made the first teleports from an open sim world to an open sim world. Being via the hypergrid is proving that the metaverse is possible. And everybody who's been to the shopping center region already because you needed better hair and visited one of those portals, you know, you're proving that the metaverse is possible. So thank you. I want to say thank you to, you know, all of you here who are pioneers. And for everybody who's persevered through the tough times when it has not been cool to be a VR geek, you know, sometimes that's rough. But I'm really glad that there are so many of us who are committed to this vision of open metaverse. And I especially want to thank all the grid owners who have the patience to keep the servers running, the developers who are continuing to push this platform forward. And I would be very remiss if I also would like to thank all of the people who are making this conference possible so that we can even be here. They might be running off and helping others. But, you know, it's really funny. I keep getting IMs this morning saying, what a great job I've done this year. And I just keep laughing because these guys did all the hard work. You know, something like this does not happen without a really wonderful team. So, you know, Nebedon and KeyGruin and all of the builders, you know, they did a really fantastic job iterating on last year's conference venue. They optimized a lot of things with mesh so that you guys would have a better in-world experience. And I think they did a phenomenal job. So thank you to the building team. Justin and all the developers week after week, load test after load test, you know, these guys just keep working, keep fixing all the bugs and, you know, the performance on these regions. You know, frankly, I am amazed that we can pack as many avatars on here as we do. And the simulator never crashes. It's really amazing. We also have fantastic track leaders, Maria Korolov, Steven Zutfly, Dan Banner, Cynthia Colloyne, and Justin leading up the dev panel. Thank you to our track leaders for bringing together just a fabulous group of speakers. The worst part of this conference for me today is that I can't decide where I want to be. There's so many good sessions I can't figure out which one to go to. So I'm going to try to go to them all. That probably won't work, but I'll try. We also have the other great thing about this. We also have an amazing team of greeters and moderators. Sheena, whatever is our volunteer coordinator slash key cat herder today. And when we put out the call and asked for volunteers and moderators this year, we had over 80 responses. When we say this is a community conference, we're not kidding. It's really a community event, which is what makes it so fun. So thanks to all of our greeters and moderators who will be around the grid today. You can recognize them with their blue OCC shirts. If you have questions or need help, they'll be there to help you. And last but not least on the staff side, our streaming team are probably going to be the most hardworking folks here today because they are streaming every single session for every single part of the whole conference and they won't be able to talk to you on voice because they have to be muted for the stream. But when this is over, thank them because they're doing a fabulous job. If you can hear me in world right now, it's thanks to our streamers. So that's great. And you know, that's all of our conference team. So thank you everyone for a wonderful job. But I also have to thank our crowd funders and sponsors. And when I say crowd funders, I just have to say, wow, last year when we did this for the first time, we really weren't sure how much things would cost and what it would be like. So this year when we asked people to chip in, we asked if you can, if you can help chip in a few bucks to help offset the cost of the event, we were shocked at the response that we got. If you look around the room, a third of the people attending the conference, so about a third of all the people who registered is a crowd funder. And that level of generosity is truly humbling and amazing. So thank you to our crowd funders and to our sponsors who helped foot the really big costs of the conference. UC Irvine's Institute for Virtual Environments and Computer Games is our gold sponsor this year. Thank you for all of their support. We definitely couldn't do the conference without that. Virtual Outworlding is our silver sponsor. And Selby's always been so supportive of Avocon's work, not just this conference, but all of the things that Avocon does to build the metaverse. So thank you, Selby. And then our NICL sponsors and DETRA and designing digitally, both organizations that do some of the most amazing work happening in virtual worlds. So make sure that you get a chance to go visit the expo regions today and visit their booths. And if you see them there, say thank you, because really they supporting this event at the level that they do is what allows us all to be here. So those are my thank yous. Thank you for your patience and letting me do that. I really can't say again what a wonderful team we have. There are a few housekeeping notes and reminders that I just want to mention to everybody so that we're sure that we have a great experience today. So before we get started, we do have almost 500 registrations. And depending how performance goes, we may be able to convert some streaming tickets into in-world tickets. We're going to see how things play out here in the first couple of sessions and see how stable the grid is. If you have a streaming ticket and you're watching on the stream, keep an eye on your email if we are able to bring some more folks in world. We'll send you an email with a username and password that you can use. Now for those of you who are in-world, hopefully there won't be any bleeding on the bleeding edge today. But in the event that we have technical problems or if the grid crashes or regions go down, don't panic. Be calm. It'll all be okay. We're going to be tweeting on the conference Twitter account. So that's twitter.com slash open sim cc. If you can tweet with the hashtag OSCC, we'll be keeping an eye on that. And that's where we will communicate if we have trouble with the grid and let you know when it's safe to log back in. So if the grid goes down or the region you're in goes down, you know, don't panic. Just wait a few minutes. Watch the Twitter stream and we'll let you know when it's when it's safe to log back in. If you don't do Twitter, I see somebody in chat says I don't have Twitter. We have our Twitter stream also embedded on the front page or any of the inside pages, sorry, of our conference website. So if you open up the conference program, for example, you can see the Twitter stream right there on the sidebar. So you don't have to have a Twitter account to get the communication. We also are recommending for our inworld attendees. If you haven't already done it, please go to your viewer and edit the preferences. Make sure you turn on prim and parcel media and set them to automatically play. We have lots of speakers who are planning to use media on a prim in their presentations and that's going to work lots more smoothly for you if you have it set to automatically play. So go on into your preferences right now, edit preferences, audio and video and then check all the boxes to automatically play prim and parcel media. Make your life a lot easier. And then finally, we do ask in the presentation spaces, please sit as soon as you teleport in. The second you see the chairs res right click and sit on a chair. We don't know how things go, but in general, if everybody's sitting, we expect simulator performance will be much better and we'll be able to get more people in. So in all the other regions, you can feel free to walk around, but at least in the presentation sessions, we ask you to sit as soon as you can. So that's it for the sort of tips and tricks there. The conference program today, if you haven't already done it, go to our conference website. It's conference.opensimulator.org. The program link, it's an online interactive program. It has lots of neat features. I just wanted to quickly go over the schedule today to make sure everybody's sort of on the same page. So after I'm done talking here, we're going to have the keynote developer panel and that will go until 8 30 Pacific Standard Time. So make sure your time zones are good. We'll have a short 30 minute break to give everybody a chance to get a cup of coffee, have breakfast maybe before the next session start. The breakout sessions will begin at 9 a.m. If you open up your conference map here in world, you'll see that the track regions are just south of where we are and they're color coded by track. So that should make it easy for you to figure out where you need to go. That first breakout session will be 45 minutes. There's a 15 minute break in between and then the next breakout session will start. When the second breakouts are over, we do have a meal break at 11 a.m. Pacific. So you can get up and take lunch. We do encourage you to visit the Storywheel exhibit in Education 2 Region. It's a very fun little exhibit. And then for those crowd funders who were at the crowd funder, I believe it was the exclusive access level and above, you should see that you're in a group called OSCC VIP. We're going to have a Q&A session in the Staff Zone Region for the VIP club and that will include a Q&A with our developer panel keynote speakers as well as with Philip Rosdale. So that's at 11. And then of course, Philip's keynote is at noon Pacific time and that will run until 1 o'clock. And then again, we have a half an hour break and then the afternoon keynote sessions. So that's basically the schedule for today. Don't forget that there is a social event this evening at 8 o'clock Pacific time. I believe Little Field Grid is hosting a dance party. So post conference if you want to go hang out, chat. Little Field Grid is hosting an event this evening. So I think that wraps up pretty much my notes. If you're on the organizing committee, you guys can go ahead and have a seat in the audience. Thanks for coming up on stage. And I think at this point, we are about ready to begin our developer panel. So give us just one second. We'll have just a moment here and we'll be right back. Okay, and we're back. We are back today for the keynote Open Simulator Developer Panel. Up on stage here today, we have some of the core developers of the Open Simulator project who are here to talk with us about a whole variety of issues related to the OpenSim platform. I think this is going to be a great session. With us today, we have Michael Turconi. He's a core developer of the OpenSim project and a board member on the Overt Foundation, which of course governs the Open Simulator Project license contributions. Justin Clark Casey, who's the president of the Overt Foundation and one of the key developers on the project. James Hughes, better known as Blue Wall, who also works with the OpenSim development team. Orrin Hervitz, who's the co-founder and vice president of research and development of Kitely and a new member of the developer team. Krista Lopez, professor in the School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine and the center of the hypergrid. And Melanie Mellon, who is the founder of Avination and also serves as an OpenSim core developer. Welcome to our OpenSim dev panel. And Krista, I will turn it over to you. Thank you, Chris. Good morning, everybody. So this is very exciting for me to be here in the conference this year, because last year we did it sort of as an experiment to see if it would work. I was last year, I was very involved in the organization. This year I actually stepped back and just let Chris run the conference. And it's been great to come back now just for the past week when I kind of had to figure out what exactly was supposed to be talking and look through the program and see the whole thing just looked so amazing. So thank you very much to Chris and the organizing team. They did an amazing job this year. So I want to say just a few words about where I see OpenSim later going. I think we are sort of at the crossroads right now. And my slide says cutting ties and I mean it. So you probably know that sort of one of the core design constraints that we've been having for the past, you know, in the project for all these years is that we wanted to stay compatible with Second Life. And the reason for that constraint was very simple, that we did the server side. We did not have resources to do the viewer project. The viewer project is another massive amount of work and kudos to the viewer developers. So we were very conservative about leveraging on all the work that other people were doing on the viewer side. And it was I think a very good decision because it allowed us to proceed with kind of experimenting with new things on the server, just focusing on that piece of the infrastructure and try to, you know, basically hack and take the clients to places that they probably shouldn't go and while sort of exploring what we could do on the server side. I think now we are at the crossroads that it's perhaps time for us to revisit this constraint for a number of reasons. So the first reason is that we have, I think we have done pretty much all that can be done on the server in terms of experimentation, things like the hypergrade and content and all that stuff. There's still things to do, but I think we've explored enough of that space. We have always run against the constraint of not being able to change the protocol and not change the server and that made us do some strange things. So I think now is perhaps the time to cut the ties also because Lindenlab is now dedicating a lot of their effort into another version of a virtual world that I'm sure it's going to be very exciting, but it's not going to be second life. So I have a feeling that now is perhaps starting to be the time that we revisit very strict constraints that we had about not changing the protocol and not changing the viewer. I find that very exciting. For one thing, for some of the projects that I do, it's really important that the viewer has to be changed and the user interface of the viewer needs to be changed for some of the applications that I'm involved with. And being able to change the viewer to behave more like a web browser is something that I am particularly interested. And some of you have maybe seen my tweet a couple of days ago about this project that I'm working on called Onlook, which is a singularity based viewer that pushes on the boundaries of what can be done in terms of programmable user interface. So that's sort of what I want to say. Maybe it's time to cut the ties and that's the tone of my contributions here in the conference this year. I'll be talking some more on the IPaGrid later today. And having said that, I will pass it to then my next fellow developer, Oren. Thank you, Krista. And hello, everyone. I've got many slides. I do have three things I'd like to talk about today. The first one is about OpenSim and the Metaverse. Now regarding what is the Metaverse, I know that Fili Pro's there from High Fidelity is going to do a keynote later called What is the Metaverse? But since I didn't get a peek at his slides, I'm going to use my own definition, which is that the Metaverse are virtual environments that are independent but linked together. That means that they can operate even if there's no central authority that says that they can operate. So obviously OpenSim via the Hypergrid is a kind of Metaverse because anyone can put up a grid and they don't have to coordinate with anyone else. And High Fidelity is also something that looks very much like a Metaverse because their philosophy appears to be similar to the philosophy of OpenSim, meaning that they're going to allow different virtual worlds to exist without requiring coordination with the central authority. Now, I know that right now in OpenSim we call ourselves the Metaverse, but I don't think we can really call ourselves the Metaverse if we only work with a single technology. That would be like calling a baseball championship the World Series but not inviting other countries. So I think that moving forward, one of the things we need to think about is how to interoperate with other systems and that's going to be important. Also regarding another thought regarding the Metaverse is that although the Metaverse is defined as independent grids or independent virtual worlds, I would really like to see some shared services. Now, certainly they should be optional. You don't have to sign into them, but I think that shared services provide a much better experience than single grid services. So for example, identity where you can find the location of an avatar in a search engine that truly works across all the regions and obviously a shared marketplace, which is something that us and Clycley are working on. All of these things are important if the Metaverse is going to be able to compete with the single technology virtual worlds that don't have to worry about working with other technologies. The second thing I'd like to talk about is everybody's favorite feature, the web viewer, which obviously everybody wants a web viewer, but we aren't quite there yet. And about that also there's going to be a panel later where Tony Alatalo from RealExtend is going to talk about virtual worlds on a browser. One thing I'd like to mention regarding the web viewer and the Metaverse is that a true Metaverse is going to pretty much require a web viewer, because if for example you're moving from an open-scene virtual world into a high-fidelity virtual world, you can't ask the user to download and you client every time they move between such worlds. But if they're using a web viewer, then it is possible for them to switch technologies pretty much seamlessly, except maybe for a download. So in addition to the obvious benefits of a web viewer, which is that people can get into your world much more easily, it also allows a true Metaverse with different technologies that aren't necessarily completely compatible. So how do we get to a web viewer? Right now we don't have one that's fully usable in open-scene. There's something called Pixie Viewer, but it's still not generally available. I don't know if it will be. Tipo Dian has a service for converting open-scene worlds, but it's not real-time, so I don't think we can rely on that. So we kind of have to roll our sleeves and do it ourselves. What are our options? We can try to adapt the web viewer that we'll extend have. Tony Alatalo even said that someone who decides to do that might be able to receive a grant from the EU to do that project, or we can try to do it on our own. I think that one good possibility, for example, is to do a web viewer that's based on Play Canvas, which is a nice open-scene source framework for graphical web applications. So something could be done that starts on Play Canvas, and then we could add specific libraries that we need, even in C++, by compiling them with M-scripten. To those who don't know, M-scripten is a project that compiles C++ libraries and even complete applications into JavaScript, and that's already used, for example, by Unity, by InView, and even Play Canvas compiled the entire bullet physics library into JavaScript using M-scripten. So that's definitely something that's viable. Now what's the problem? The problem is that doing this, doing any sort of web viewer takes a lot of work and a lot of time, and I know that the current developers, at least those of us sitting here on the stage, we don't have the time. My to-do list, for example, it's not actually a list, it's like 20 pages, and I know that other developers are also very busy. So the question is how do we get more developers into OpenSim, and how do we get developers to work on really big projects? That's the third thing I'd like to talk about, and I have some ideas, and I'd like to hear what some of my fellow panelists think about this. One idea is simply to project it into the universe, meaning let's explicitly say what are the top things that OpenSim needs, and for example, put a page on the Wiki, and I think that that would be effective in getting people to say, hey, I can do this, this is something people are looking for, I'd like to work on that. Another thing is perhaps we can actively recruit developers. I don't know if that's something that's done in the open-source world, but maybe we can go and hang out in some CDIRC charts or something and say, hey, you're a 3D developer, would you like to do something that lots of people really want, and maybe that's a way that we can get more developers. Also evangelizing OpenSim in general, I mean, actively evangelizing it could help us get both users and developers, and maybe that's something that the Green Owners Association is going to be interested in doing. I know that they also have a panel later today. And another idea is Google have a project called Summer of Code. In Summer of Code, every summer they basically pay a bunch of bright young people to work on various open-source projects. Maybe we can do something like that. Now that requires a mentor from the existing developers, but it's still something that could get us to great things. We should look into that, I think. My final thought about how to get more developers is to make it easier for people who maybe aren't thinking exactly the same as us to still be part of us. What I mean is, right now, many add-ons and third-party services are shunted off into part of the internet where you can barely find them. Like, for example, something called OpenSim Forge, if anyone's heard of that. And I'd like to maybe put something on the wiki, maybe even in our own in our own git that links to these projects to say, yes, we want you. We like you. We'd like people to see you and to try you. And maybe you'll also get into the core OpenSim. And not just if you are not part of the core OpenSim, then, you know, find your own website, put up a blog spot or something. And that will allow us to do big projects like the WebViewer that I mentioned previously and that everyone would like to see. And maybe something else, a big project that I would like to see is a JavaScript scripting language for OpenSim. Because, obviously, LSL is going to be to die eventually. Even Second Life aren't going to continue with it. And we can try to come with our own language. Or maybe we can base it on some existing JavaScript scripting language, such as the one in high-fidelity, or maybe the one that Unity is using. I don't know. And that's a big project, but something that we also need, I think. Another possible big project, if we get developers that have time to integrate is to integrate the avatar technology from high-fidelity into OpenSim. Because high-fidelity has very lifelike avatars with expressions and movements. And if we integrate that into OpenSim, I think that would be something great. And I've mentioned previously, so using Unscripten, we could integrate this technology even into a WebViewer, I think. So that's it. I tried to keep it brief. I'm not sure I succeeded, but those are my thoughts on OpenSim right now. And who's after me? Thank you, Aran. So I think we go next to Blue Wall. Blue Wall, can you unmute your mic? Okay. So maybe we can just come back while Blue Wall having technical problems. We can just jump to Justin, and then we'll try Blue Wall again. Justin, are you ready? Sure. Yep. Can you hear me? Good? Yes, we can hear you. Okay, great. So I'm going to get the luxury of getting my retaliation in first, I think. I think we are at an interesting point. I think it certainly has been the fact that virtual worlds have been pretty unpopular and really still are. I mean, compared to gaming, they're incredibly niche area. There's a much lower level of development. I mean, we didn't get anywhere near as much, you know, not even a fraction of the kind of attention that gaming does, and there's various kinds of problems. But at the same time, I think what is enormously interesting about this area is the fact that we have community. I think community is enormously powerful. I think the fact that we're here today during this conference and kind of all talking to each other, that is, there is something, I mean, I don't think works the same way in the gaming world, right? Games are kind of their own projects, they're their own experiences, whereas this is kind of like an ongoing continuous experience. It's more like, that's why another reason I think it's more like the web than it is, like, you know, a particular kind of game is kind of an ongoing thing. So I think even of those problems, I think the fact that we have community is enormously powerful. I think it's one of the most interesting and probably the critical interesting thing about OpenSim is that people can make connections across systems. But at the same time, I mean, I work with this stuff day in, day out. I've done an enormous amount on the server and everybody always says to me and I kind of get the point that I'm kind of like the Cassandra. I'm the most pessimistic person. I see and meet the problems a lot and I can see the problems and, you know, I always think in terms of the problems perhaps. But I think it is critical to remain compatible with the existing system. I don't think we want to be changing the protocol in such a way that suddenly there's a whole mass of viewers that can't use OpenSim anymore, because that would be, I think, a real danger to the ecosystem. I think suddenly you'll get people who can't use stuff anymore. We're getting these confusing these protocols and we and often they're not documents and often they're experimental. What I much and it's kind of critical for me really. I mean, I've done the reason I've been able to do so much work is because I do make a living strange as it is off OpenSim either usually in consulting with commercial companies or education institutions. And for me, somebody like me to continue, for instance, it's critical that the system continues to work and that we don't get disruption in such a way that we can't kind of use existing software. So for me, I mean, don't get me wrong. I mean, incredibly, I'm really in favour of actually evolving the system. And I think this is going to be one of the big challenges ahead as as Krista said with and then Owen said with Second Life kind of winding down there kind of Second Life One support is kind of like the opportunities, I think, open up to do something different. But I much more in favour of effectively extending existing protocols. If one wants, for instance, the kind of new web interface on the viewer, I think that's a great idea. And I think it's very much needed to be able to kind of like to be able to change things more much more dynamically. But at the same time, I think that can be done by extending existing protocols and doing it kind of in the sideband. I don't think you need to change the core protocols for that. I'm not against changing core protocols, but I think at the same time one needs to be very cautious about doing it. And to kind of address Owen's points, I think it is I think growing the community is critical. I mean, we are I'm amazed we get where we are, but we do not have a huge number of developers doing this. And I think getting more coordination, getting more communication between everybody is is one of the really important things. I think this things like this conference, of course, help enormously with that. At the same time, I think one has to be realistic about it. One has to grow politically. I think it'd be great to go to other communities and to kind of get them and to get their interest. I think there are things one can do. I think the problem we have is that we're incredibly unsexy technology. I mean, you go to the website and you look at all the excitement surrounding XYZ, new web framework, and I kind of think you go and hack and use it. It's kind of stuff all the time. And there is, of course, residual interest about the metaverse and about this stuff. But I think to a certain extent, maybe I'm contradicting myself. I think we do come from the second life perspective and the second life niche. And of course, amongst a lot of people, that's enormously unsexy, both because of the kind of the continuing legacy of that in terms of the kind of community. I shouldn't say it like that. I mean, the kind of content maybe one gets there and the kind of awkwardness and complexity of the systems and the fact that a lot of stuff is niche. As Owen mentioned, lending scripting language is kind of like an incredibly niche thing. And people nowadays want to do stuff like JavaScript and that kind of thing very understandably. They want these modern frameworks. So, you know, I think there's definitely a case for evolution, but I think one also has to be cautious about this. And I think that's the challenge. Can we evolve the ecosystem and bring people along? Because I think that's the critical thing about this. I think the community and the ecosystem is what makes this so powerful and actually have an existing network and add things onto that network, like the web being able to add kind of new things on without completely disrupting what was there already. And that's a huge challenge and that is arguably more complicated than I think it's critical to bring everything along with us. So that's kind of my perspective on this. So thank you very much. Okay, Blue Wall, did you figure the microphone? No, sorry, it's me. Okay. So, okay, let's jump ahead in the next panel, at least, and then we'll try Blue Wall again. Melanie? Yes, I'm here. Thank you. Hello. Okay. We can hear you. Very well. Thanks. So now I'm up before I was ready, but I've got what I wanted to say is that I'm very excited to see that OpenSim and the entire metaverse is moving into what I consider the next stage of its development. And yes, this is really the age of the viewer. It's been a limiting factor for so many years, but as my prior colleagues here mentioned, the SLV1 support is waning, and I believe this is the time for a number of projects that have been due to be done for a long time, and everybody has not started on for wanting to keep compatibility with Second Life. I believe that restriction is going on now. Now, Krista has the Onlook viewer, which is a great thing, and I've got to extend the warm thanks to the viewer team. That's the singularity team out there, guys, for doing this. And at this time, I would like to announce that we also are working on a viewer-based modification, which we hope to release around the new year, start the new year. We're breaking away from the Second Life avatar. So you'll be seeing lots of changes regarding appearance options. And I've got to disagree about trying to stay compatible with all the existing software. This is an evolving system. This is an exciting time with the Cusp of a new age, where we can break away, yes, and do our own thing and make the metaverse what I always thought it would become. Yes, and that's another thing that was said that I have been speaking about five years past, which is central identities. These are things that I do now. And yes, I'm very excited to see them happening. So, Blue Wall, we're going to try you one more time. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Okay, great. Okay, I wanted to say a few things. I don't fancy myself as much of a speaker, so I have written down a few things, and I've made a few notes as we've gone along, but I remember logging in to the Second Life OGP Beta Grid, and then jumping via Hyper Grid into Ryte Plaza to amaze all the Lendon's present at the OpenSim office hour meeting. And I remember a lot of excitement built around the OGP project, but that was a huge missed opportunity for Second Life. And by coming up with the Hyper Grid, that was a great save by Krista. It's great technology, and I'm glad that it happened because we've been able to move forward. And like Oren was talking about the 2D list, I've got a 2D encyclopedia myself and so things are kind of limited. It's what we can do or how fast we can accomplish them, but I think we're moving in the right direction. And so I wanted to tell a little story about innovation and technology in the last century and see if history might be able to guide us a little bit as we move forward. Walker Stewart was the brother of my great grandfather, and he lived in a rural area just a few miles from where I am today. Now it was an agrarian economy. Most of the families in the area were subsistence farmers, and they lived off what they were able to produce on their farms, and they had very little cash left over for discretionary spending. But Walker operated several businesses in the area, and he was an enterprising man in a time of technological change. He and a neighbor constructed a radio transceiver, and they connected it to transmission lines, which they strung across the community. And while the families in the area could not really afford their own radio set, many were happy to rent a speaker and tap onto the network that became known there as the Great Vine. In 1902, Southern Bale installed a switchboard at the post office in the railroad town of Liberty, about seven miles to the southeast of Walker's store. And it was said that sometime after then, he maintained a line from the switchboard to service three telephones in the community. The technology was similar to that of the Great Vine, but the telephone network gave each user the ability to reach outside of their community and allow conversations with others at a distance. Now nearly a century later, I'm sure that not many of us rent speakers to connect to a Great Vine-like network, but we all know about and use telephones and devices connected to the telephone network. Obviously, there was some value to the customers who listened to the radio broadcast of music and news on the Great Vine, but when they were able to go to Walker Stewart's store and use the telephone to contact family members in distant cities, they wanted one in their home. Now, I'm hoping it's not too far of a stretch to make a comparison here between the technology of that bygone era. And the way we deploy Open Simulator today, the Great Vine was a system that served the community. And even if its users had been able to send outgoing message, they would have been very limited in the contacts they would be able to reach. And also they had to be content to listen to the programming that was being broadcast on the Great Vine. Now, we've been happy to configure our Open Simulator as private stand-alongs and grids to serve our individual communities and provide value to our members. But much like the introduction of the telephone, HyperGrid technology has allowed us to reach out to places beyond our borders and extend the value of our individual Open Sim installations. When we deploy our Open Simulator with HyperGrid support, it's much like putting a 3D face on the worldwide web. This is a very important milestone in shared 3D virtual space technology, and we need to make sure that we continue to develop its capabilities. We have accomplished a great deal and much of the implementation is very solid. Some parts need work in the area of reliability and still other areas need to be fleshed out to provide that smooth, transparent experience to the user. I'm sure we will face some challenges along the way, but as usual we will overcome them. And I'm happy to be one of the members of the Open Simulator core developer team and part of the Open Sim community. It will be interesting to watch the future unfold and see how we extend the technologies that we depend on today and the ways that people will find to put these new capabilities to work for them and others. And with a little bit of luck, maybe our descendants will be telling stories of our innovations and exploits around their campfires many years from today. Thank you all for being here today and thanks for using Open Simulator. I hope you enjoy the conference and are able to take it all in, and I hope you see you around the net real soon. Thanks. Thank you, Blue Wall. Thank you for the inspirational speech. Okay, so now we have one final panelist that's Nebedon, also known as Michael. Do you want to say a few words, Nebedon? Sure. Hello, everybody. Thanks for coming today. And that was a really great story, Blue Wall, and great analogy. Now I kind of wish I went before you, a little hard to follow up with that great story. But yeah, I'm kind of here as a developer, but I think you all know that I'm not so much of a programmer. I'm kind of on the other side of the coin to everybody here on the panel as well. I'm here mostly as a representative of the community more than the development team. My responsibilities for the project primarily are testing the software, breaking the software, coordinating with people who are reporting bugs and try to relay that information in a logical manner through the development team. And I'm also very heavily into the content creation side of things. So my role has primarily been to try to bring understanding to the development team to how these processes should work correctly compared to things like Second Life that we've been so heavily trying to, I guess, mirror to this point. And that's really mostly what I do here. A lot of this here I've been spending working here on this grid for the Open Simulator Community Conference. And we've had a really great team here with the builders with Kee Groen and Jack and Joe and as Waldo and Son and so many great people here this year, Ayn. We really had a really good team. And we spent a lot of time trying to optimize things and make things run well. And I've worked very close here with Justin to make sure that we could reduce as many bugs and make things work as well as we could with hyper grid and logins. This year, in the past 311, 312 days of this year so far, I think we've done almost 1,000 patches. I think it was 972 patches to be exact up until this point. And yes, I don't sleep much. I work very hard on this. I'm also involved in several other projects. I work for Incitra. I'm working very closely with the Air Force Research Lab with Chris Collins-Fleep here. We also work with the Moses grid and many other projects, and I have my own grid. I keep very busy and pretty much I'm full-time 100% dedicated to the open simulator project. As many of the people up on stage with me are today, most of us primarily have our focus squarely on open simulator. And I hope everyone appreciates the amount of time we do put in. It is very long days and long hours and lots of discussions. We don't have a whole lot more to say. I'm just very impressed with everybody here on the stage. It's been really great working with all of you. I am very excited to keep working into the future for hopefully some time with everyone here. And I hope everyone here is enjoying the conference and really has a good time this weekend. I know I will. I'm already having a great time. Thanks everybody. Thank you. Okay, so I think we had all our introductory little notes. I think I would like to pass this back to Chris-Fleep, to kind of moderate any questions. We open now for questions, so please shoot the questions. I guess Chris will give the orders about which channel to use. So, well, we have lots and lots of questions. If you have questions for the panel, if you are in world, please I am me, Fleep Tuk, send me an I am. And I'll let you know as soon as I see your question. If you are watching on the web, please send your questions to atopensimcc or use the hashtag OSCC. And I'll be keeping an eye out for those as well. So, for the panel, we already have a whole host of questions. So, I'll let you guys decide who's taking what questions. The first question is from Cyber Serenity Vella. For those of us who are working on the borders of simulations and games, the physics engine is a big problem. Thoughts? Oh, man, that would be a question for Mr. Blue. Mr. Blue, unfortunately, by the way, I should say Mr. Blue could not be here because he had some already family plans. And Mick Bauman, who was also supposed to be here, he had last minute family problems too, so he couldn't be here. Justine, you're saying something. Yeah, I was just going to say something in general in that. I think we recognize and as you said, Mr. Blue has done all the work on, pretty much all the work on the new Buddhism integration. And that has helped, I think, enormously in some physics areas. It's much more, I know there are people out there who disagree, and I don't mind that. But from what I've seen, it is much more efficient than ODE. But physics engines are super complicated things to integrate. I mean, they're kind of like, you know, they're whole projects on their own. And every, you know, they're integrated into games, but it's all, I mean, from my, I've done this deeply, but from my perspective, it's all kind of hand integration, so it has to be tuned. And of course, Second Life has a very particular kind of physics approach, I believe, to vehicles and that kind of thing. So, you know, it does not behave identically to Second Life. And in some ways, ODE is superior, I would say, certainly in some things. So, I think there's a lot more to do. And all will be done. And I really do hope so. But I don't know, I think it might depend on the exact kind of simulation you want. And I think, to a certain extent, you are hampered by the fact that everything is happening on the central server. And then that is kind of a constraint, right? You're not doing a lot of physics simulation locally, and you have to go through the physics loop on the server. So, once I think there's definitely more that can be done, I think it's tough to do. So, we'll get done, but it's not easy stuff to do at all. And it would have been great to hear Mr. Blue's perspective, but I know he's been looking at that. And I think I'm sure he will do more work on it. Or even if he doesn't, somebody else will eventually come along and be able to do more work. It's an open source project. So, we will get there, but it's not easy stuff. Yeah. Vegas lawn has also contributed heavily to the physics engine as well. So, don't forget about him. Any other comments on the physics before we move to the next question? Okay, if not, next question comes from Annabelle Fanshawe, who says, is there a strong desire among the developers to continue with bullet some physics engine or perhaps something else? So, related. So, I'm only saying because I've done a very little bit of physics work, but only a very tiny fraction. I mean, what else is there? BulletSim is pretty much the premier open source bullet physics engine, I would say. There are a couple of others, but BulletSim is by far the most advanced. Actually, I shouldn't say it like that. For my somewhat naive outside of perspective, I mean, that's my impression from what I've read and I've done in the code. I've looked at. So, I think it has to be BulletSim. You certainly couldn't go right, you own physics engine. That's like a huge project in itself. You want to use something that exists. So, I think I would say I'd be pretty sure we're going to continue with BulletSim. If it changes, then I'm sure you can integrate ODE changes, but every time you upgrade the physics engine, you have to really go and do a whole lot of, well, ideally, you're going to do a whole lot of testing to make sure you haven't broken stuff. This is not simple stuff to integrate. So, I would say I would be pretty sure we're going to continue with BulletSim in that vein. Well, I think one of the big key differences between ODE and BulletSim, too, is that ODE is, it's very tried and true, but it's been around maybe 10 or 12 years now, but there has not been much change in development and getting patches into ODE is not the easiest process. Whereas on the other side with BulletSim, there's a huge development process team. There's lots of contributors and volunteers and testers and it's widely used in the industry and there are many video games, not just on the PC, but in Xbox and possibly other platforms. I know there's a lot of script ports of it and things like that that are working with WebGL. So, there's a lot of experience that comes along with BulletSim and I think it's one of the reasons that it's a much better choice than ODE. I'd like to say one thing about the BulletSim and ODE. In our grid, we allow users to choose which physics engine to use and even now our default is still ODE. The reason is that even though BulletSim works great in many cases, there are some cases that may be extreme. I'm not sure where it uses a very high CPU. We don't have such extreme bad cases in ODE. I wrote about this on Mantis somewhere, but anyway, it's a sort of a caveat. If BulletSim works for you well, then great. It really is an amazing piece of technology. But you need to be careful that you don't get into one of those situations where it might fail you. So, just watch out. I think that's where, basically, you have to start surfing those bugs, I guess. That's where it's not mature. I think we took the decision to make BulletSim to default in 0.8 because you've got to do it at some point and it's kind of a chicken and egg. You've got to get it there to actually get this kind of testing because you're starting to explore corner cases or maybe slightly less obscure things and actually get the experience. But ODE is not going away. ODE is very much still an option in OpenSim and it's not going to be removed anytime soon. So, people can always use that. If somebody comes along and does great ODE work, then we will absolutely accept that. It's an open source project. It's like what do the developers have time for? What's maybe what's the funding or what's their interest? People have not been doing a huge amount of work on ODE. I mean, that's what it boils down to. So, that's how it is at the moment. But ODE is still going to remain there. And just to answer Gavin in the chat quickly, yeah, BulletSim, I think, I've seen that Mac, unfortunately, does not get as much support. I think because a lot of us actually use Mac, that's the issue. I think that can be said for probably a lot of things of OpenSim that we don't just don't have a whole lot of Mac community involved in terms of the viewer, in terms of the simulators, and especially in terms of physics. It's just not a lot of people out there testing it. Okay, so let me move on to the next question, which is sort of taking us away from the physics question. When you guys are considering changes to the OpenSim software, how important is backwards compatibility as you move forward? I can take a stab at that. I think backwards compatibility with respect to OpenSim has always been a concern. I mean, we've tried to support things that had been in past releases for and kind of carry that for a while. So we're always, I mean, we're always, I mean, many of us, most of us, I would say here in the panel, we are developers, but we also have, we are also users. So we also feel the pain when things break. So backwards compatibility is important. There's one caveat there is that I think a lot of people get accustomed to some of the bugs in OpenSimulator and try to do workarounds to adapt to these bugs. And then at some point, we fix the bugs and break their workarounds. In those cases, we tend to not tread lightly sometimes. Yeah, and I think that's an interesting point. It's like, well, I don't have this working stuff, but it doesn't conform. I mean, this is the, so I know I banged on about backward compatibility, but I'm not, I definitely want to move forward as well. I'm not saying that, you know, we have to be backward compatible forever. I'm just, you know me, I tend to be fairly cautious and conservative in these things. But I think it's the case that it's been kind of easy thing we've been able to do right now is basically just huge to the second life system effectively. If something is broken, we can say, well, what is it doing in the next period? What is it doing? And that's what it should be. And that's what we will fix to have it do. And that's nice because you don't have to have some huge debate or huge design process to decide what to do. And I think that's the challenge we start to encounter more moving forward is we want to do things which aren't in second life and in Linda lab. It's like, well, how do we decide what the design is? How do we cooperate with each other to actually get there? How do we, how do we come up with document documented stuff, you know, saying how this works? And I have my own thoughts on that. I don't want to talk too long, but I think that's the big challenge we face. And I don't know how that's going to work out yet. Well, that's what, that's what's going to happen going forward, but backward compatibility is about the backward. And yes, I can say that we have always had a strategy to try and keep configuration compatibility. If we had to break that, we would announce that if we fixed the bug and we knew of workarounds, we would announce that as well. And otherwise we try to make the work around stay alive if at all possible. So we are actually not so much, I would not, I would not even call it backward compatibility focused on continuity. I think that's a good answer. Continuity is a good way to prioritize, I think. So I have a couple of questions that are all kind of in the same direction. I'll take the one from Eldavar as sort of an example of these types of questions I'm seeing. Eldavar says, I'm thinking about setting up a project to make open simulator usable for elderly people to participate in a social life even when they can't leave their home physically anymore. But among many things that would require a viewer that is much more simple to operate and even might be operated on a TV screen at home. Are you aware of any projects, maybe even niche projects that are going in that direction? And related questions are about web web viewers for easier access and less cluttered UI. How does the OpenSim Dev Panel feel about viewer development and what are your thoughts in that direction? Well, I'll jump in because so that was by the tone of my opening remarks. I am very much interested in simplifying the viewer. So I have been working within Citra, this urban planning company, and we have, you know, our users are not expert users. They don't turn up gamers. They don't know anything about virtual worlds. They can barely navigate themselves into something like ketchup. So we have to assume that they don't know. They cannot handle the complexity of the viewer when it comes. So we are very much in need of a viewer that is absolutely dead simple to use. And that's why I started working now on this onlook viewer to kind of push the boundaries of what can we do with simplifying the viewer. But it's not, but in doing that, what I really want is not just simplify the viewer in using my own preferences of what I think it's simple, but in simplifying so that it can be programmed server side. So the people who run open seem to open seem world are the ones who are better positioned to decide what's the interface that their users should see on the viewer. And so that that should be programmable on the server side. And that's where I want, that's what I want to do with onlook is that we can define many elements of the viewer's interface on the server side, and it can be modified depending on the viewer, depending on the user. And it's all programmable, dynamic, people change regions, they can potentially get a different interface. And this allows us to, for us at least for in-sitter allows us to produce viewers that are absolutely dead simple, that uncluttered and complicated. And I think lots of people are going to be needing that for that particular application for elderly or schools or, you know, making this accessible to people who are not experts in 3D environments. I'm also very much in favor of a simplified viewer. And just to give you an idea of how simplified viewers can be, if you've seen how InView works, for example, you can't even walk to any arbitrary point there. You can only sort of lean or sit or stand in specific predefined points, which I also, of course, find heresy, but it's definitely easier, and it may be something that's useful. And Krista, I don't know if that's something that the only viewer would be able to do, maybe something else would be required, but it's definitely something that I would look at, that I would be interested in. Yes, that's definitely so. I mean, the whole thing is to make the interaction, not just the GUI, but the whole user experience, make it programmable server side. So even parts of the control, like whether there is an avatar or not, for example, which is something that was important for the users of Incitra, we want the users to actually not see themselves as avatars. We just want them to look into the world. And so that is configurable server side. And all the other things that we can eventually imagine that people might want to do, we should just basically reify that server side. Very interesting. Today's heretics are actually tomorrow's innovators. And yes, of course, we need to break with existing concepts to do these things that we want to do. Like, for instance, the TV screen is not something I really considered. Now, of course, these elderly people may not have a TV that has an HDMI input. And I don't know who can cater for that on the hardware end, but on the software end, this is definitely possible to do just with that very same on LookView. It's sort of in the same sort of thought. I think I hear Justin typing. Somebody's typing. Oh, that may be me. Sorry. Yep, it is. That's okay. So sort of in a related question, someone asked and I lost the person's name, but in talking about compatibility and breaking compatibility, they asked the question, isn't keeping compatibility with Second Life, though, a good opportunity to move Second Life residents and their content into OpenSim, particularly a Second Life residents? Well, as the question says, grow increasingly frustrated with the compatibility break, Linden Lab has announced with SL version two. Are Second Life residents going to get stranded? My guess is that Linden Lab are going to find some way to migrate content or at least make it easy because they're not going to want to start on day zero with like a marketplace that has no items. I think that would be crazy. And still, the fact of the transition to SL2 might be an opportunity for OpenSim, but you know, I've been in the business of trying to lure Second Life users into OpenSim for several years now, and it's really hard. So I'm not sure if maintaining SL compatibility is that important because, you know, we're not going to get a million users, say, traipsing over to OpenSim. You need to keep in mind that there's operators who want to maintain Second Life compatibility. So I believe there's always going to be some kind of grid out there that will maintain it. That's not like we're talking about stripping that completely from OpenSimulator. It will remain open and configurable and people can configure how it suits their needs. And I believe there's probably always going to be grids out there that want to mimic Second Life, you know, exactly. I think it's an evolving thing again. I think we're very much in this stage of exploration as to what these things are for and how you do it socially. I think that it's not going to be some enormous thing where a huge number of Second Life users suddenly migrate over to OpenSim. And it's like, who has that as the aim? I don't think any of us really have that as the aim per se. I mean, maybe we'd like to see it. From what I hear, we're interested in actually being able to do more interesting things in this platform and see where we can take the existing system. Well, I guess from my perspective and adapt it, I'm very much in favor of a strategy of being able to add things and provide other things as... I mean, they're not going to be around forever, but other things having continuing to work, there's not going to be any of us are talking about some hard break where we're suddenly going to remove old stuff just for the sake of it and just to stop it working. I think you want to do that after time because otherwise you end up trying to maintain this stuff forever. And that's a big cost as well. But I don't think any of us are going to go and move that. I think it's a case of evolution. And other people may well disagree with me here. Evolution both on the technical side and on the social side and what people are trying to use this. And the platform is driven by what people want to do. It's an open source stuff. People either do it because they're interested in them or maybe they're being funded. But they're doing it not to... I think a lot of people out there assume that we want to take over in the lab for a second life. And I really don't think that's true. I think it's becoming very much its own thing. And I think that's critical that this is its own thing and not just some effectively some pale imitation of what was there. And I think we're seeing that doing these steps to try and go beyond where we are. So I think OpenSim becomes very much what people wanted to do. It's kind of driven by the community. There's not some central company wanting to do a certain thing. We all have to try and find a way to cooperate to do what we want to... to see the goals we want to achieve achieved. And that's where we need to have these discussions and have these talks in cooperative shadow. And we come to compromises which are sometimes messy and sometimes difficult. But that's the power of what we have here and what we try to do going forward. So I've kind of forgotten the original point. I really should shut up. Sorry. So it's just true. I just want to make a remark. When I talk about sort of cutting ties, that doesn't necessarily mean making incompatible breaks, you know, that break like content. And so I don't mean anything like that at all. In fact, I think there are many good things about the second life system that that should be preserved that that will continue to support even if we support new things. So whatever, you know, content in particular, I think, you know, for my projects, we have invested a lot in content that is that works for this platform. And we have no desire or plans to let go of it whatsoever. So that's going to happen. When I talk about breaking ties, I really talk about additional things that can be done, can be added to the protocol that enable the nodes of operation. So it's not removing what's already there. It's adding more options and taking the system into a direction that is not possible if we just want to restrict ourselves into the second life model. So don't worry, at least as far as I'm concerned, I'm not thinking into breaking in a major breaking changes that would make the content, for example, not being usable, things like that. That's what I'm talking about. Well, I don't think any one of us are on the other hand, and it looks like second life is going to break compatibility with second life. So I don't know where that's going to go. Rumor has it there aren't going to be any prims in SL2. Right. But as far as we are concerned, I don't like there's no way that we could, you know, would go and break prims, for example. I mean, there's way too much content invested in that, at least for me. So we will continue to support that kind of content. Okay. Switching gears a little bit here. We've got another question. Cassius Falta asks, are you guys doing anything in particular to support the Control Alt Studio viewer or stereoscopic 3D? And I got another question. What are your thoughts on the Oculus Rift and how that will impact Open Simulator? So kind of related questions. So I can say that we, I mean, kindly bought one of the development keys for Oculus, and we are extremely interested in this, and we are, this as we mentioned before, but we are very thankful for the existence of Oculus Rift, which has suddenly made the virtual reality cool again, and we get front-page coverage on the virtual reality, not Open Sim yet. And we're definitely looking into that. Specifically, I, for one, haven't done anything server-side to support Oculus Rift, but we bought it with that intention, yes. So just to say, I had a very brief, I did swap a few emails with David Rowe, who was the guy behind the viewer, and we did briefly talk about, because he was interested, yes, in starting to be able to extend Open Sim to support the Rift better. And we kind of didn't get very far, I think we both had to go and do other things, but I mean, he is definitely interested, so hopefully there'll be more conversation along those lines. Any other thoughts from the panel about Rift or Rift viewers? No, I think they covered it, it's amazing. Okay, another question, and I don't know if you guys know information about this, but I got four or five questions about what is the future of OS Grid and does anyone know what's happening? For those who may not know the audience, OS Grid is one of the oldest Open Sim grids, and it's been down for a little while due to a hard disk failure. Any information about the future of OS Grid? Well, I'm pretty sure that question is pointed squarely at me, so I will definitely try to answer that. My involvement there has been limited by time at this point, and mostly working on many other grids. The good news is, is that either way the grid will be back, whether we can retrieve the content or not, there's definitely been in trouble getting the content. I can't say 100% sure where we stand with that today, but the future of OS Grid, it's not going anywhere, it's not going away, and one way or the other, it will be back. I don't have any kind of timeframe, I don't really have anything more to add to that other than, yes, it's not going to go away, and as soon as we know something more, we'll definitely put out some information to everybody about that. Great, thank you for that update. A question about VAR regions and physical SIM crossings. Will anything be done to improve physical SIM crossings, particularly for those who do sailing, or are you switching just to VAR regions, and are there any updates or issues with VAR regions that you guys are looking at? Well, physical SIM crossings is something that we have done some work on, and we've donated what we had except for a little bit of writing the vehicle parameters, that stuff's actually supposed to go to core. It's just been rather complicated to get our stuff to fit, so they were still working on that. It will come, however, on the part of bullet SIM, there will be some additional development required to make these parameters actually transferable. Actually, I have been working with a few core developers behind the scenes, and we've made some progress. Unfortunately, I can't give a timeline on that. Apart from that, VAR regions, of course, are a perfect way of doing this because they avoid the physical portion altogether. Even with the physics crossing code, as you can experience in Avination, we have it, there still is a bump. You will always have this holding, waiting, re-resing, moving on thing that you have in the second life, that you have in open SIM, that you have everywhere. VAR regions really are the way to go for the sailors. Can I say a few things? Just regarding VAR regions, so really this has come to light, because one of the debates we had about these keynotes themselves was to try and do this stuff in a VAR region or in four separate regions, as we have done. You'll notice that you can't cross regions here. We've disabled that because of basically to be able to control the load. Certainly, VAR regions are very interesting. There are a couple of points. Once you get to the bigger VAR regions, you've got to bear in mind that you're using a lot more memory, potentially in processing power. If you've got a five trial by five trial VAR region, for instance, that's four times the size of a normal region. That's four times the amount of terrain data you're sending down to the viewer. That's four times the potential. Well, you could pack a lot more objects in there, say, for the same amount of space. You're putting existing components under pressure, like the outbound and inbound UDP loops, which aren't designed to handle some of this stuff. They're not kind of evolved to handle that kind of load. I think VAR regions are an amazing idea. I think these kinds of problems can be improved, definitely, but there's still, I think, performance issues. It'd be interesting to see where they are. There's really not been a lot of testing done in that area, I don't think. I think regarding region crossing, I would definitely agree with Melanie. It's a kind of really complicated thing to do if you've got two separate physics loops running in different processes, let alone in different servers, potentially. That's a super difficult thing to do, and it may well be that it's just not possible to get a completely smooth transfer, but you know, this is an open source project. If people out there want to submit patches which kind of look at this stuff, then we'd be very interested to see them, because I think, you know, ultimately, if there are better solutions out there that can get out there, then we want to see them. I see that, but I would be somewhat pessimistic about being able to really get it super smooth, because it's just such a, you know, you're trying to do something really, really tough there, and whether it's even possible, I don't know. Yeah. I think it even goes beyond, I think, a lot of the pain right now. It's not so much how optimized it is, but it's still not as stable as it should be, especially like on things like corner crossings, and not even directly on the corner, but when you rapidly cross two borders in a quick manner, things get messy. So there's definitely room, a lot of room for improvement there, and we definitely want to improve that. But again, it's not so easy. Basically, there are the things you certainly can fix. I think the things that are difficult to fix are this fundamental handing off between physics. So, though, maybe there's some interesting ideas of being able to preload in advance, but you're kind of starting to talk really sophisticated code there, and it's like, well, you know, that's tough to do, and are you better off doing it for our region? It's an interesting question. Okay, another question. I'm a new developer that's interested in working on the OpenSim project, but looking at the Wiki, I really don't know where to start. Do you have any tips for new developers? Install an IRC client and get on our IRC channel. Yes, that's the best advice. We're always happy to answer questions about development, details, point people at the right bits of code. We cannot guide people through the entire code base. So if somebody, for instance, asks me about something, I would definitely tell them what file to look at. I may remember the method that's important for that, but then I just have to find out where the code is documentation, sorry to say, but that's endemic and open source and we are no different. I want to say something. I've said previously in my remarks that one of the things we can do to attract developers is to put up on the Wiki what we would like to do. Now I'd like to say something a bit heretical and say that people who actually want to do things, maybe they should also tell us what they want. What I mean is all of us developers are really busy, but maybe if someone would say I want to do eeks and someone would say, hey, eeks is a great idea. That's what I want to see happen. Then they'll take the time. They'll make the time to mentor and guide and help. I mean, hopefully we do, we do an IRC help people anyway, but that would give the ended incentive. So that's a possibility. Yeah, I agree with what's being said definitely. Another great resource is the mailing list because not all of us can be on the IRC channel all the time, but if somebody posts the mailing list, I always, you know, I make a special point. It might occasionally take a bit of a while because usually all of us are incredibly busy, but I make a special point to try and help anybody who asks a question on there and even write Wiki documentation. I've been doing a lot of that over the past years and just try and make it easier. But at the same time, OpenSim is a really complicated project to get into. I kind of liken it more like to a mini operating system than to a lot of other things. It's like, it's a super complicated thing. So so you really do need to be pretty. You know, it's not something you can do easily, but if somebody wants to do something, please do come and ask. I've been IRC, as people said, are on the mailing list and I think we'll do our best to kind of help you. You know, Justine, I'm going to have to a bit disagree with you there because I've compiled OpenSim and I've compiled, for example, the viewers. I gotta say, for someone who's new and doesn't know either of these projects, getting a viewer to build and run is, I think, 10 times harder than getting OpenSim to run. We're not actually that difficult to get into. No, please come. We are very easy to get into. The important bit is that if you're sort of expected that there will be sort of a to-do list or something on the week, your documentation chances are that that's not going to be there. So the good things that there's people, we are here. We are usually logged into the IRC. We are monitoring the mailing list. So basically try to contact us. That's the best way of doing it. Yes, we're almost always on IRC. Remember, it's called idling relay chat. That's right. One thing that OpenSim is very modular and a lot of our things are built on modules and you can look for a resource here. I made that a while back for people who are interested in making region modules and that's a whole lot of the stuff that OpenSim has implemented so that a user can go through and look. The pre-build XML file is very important. It has to be done right. So all those things are documented in that. So that's a pretty good thing to get to know how the modules are laid out. Okay, we only have a few minutes left. So my apologies to anyone who sent me a question that I didn't quite get to because I wanted to leave the last couple of minutes to ask the panel. In the next year, what are your top priorities for OpenSim? Where will we be at the conference next year? Should we do the same order? Sure. So on my side, what I want to focus on is on simplifying the viewer and making the viewer programmable. That's going to be my focus, my new focus. I have other things that I will focus on like fixing bugs on the iPod grid and stuff. But the newer focus for me is going to be giving alternate user experiences to the users of these environments. What I would like to see is I would like to see someone from a technology that isn't OpenSim being able to teleport here and be a viewer or a presenter. That's one thing. The other thing, Chris, and I know that's not what you meant, but it's something I'd like to see, is how about in OSCC 2015, we do it in something that's like a lake or a mountain or outer space? I think that I'd like to see us use virtual environments wildly, wild and creative ways. We're not restricted to sitting on gravity-laden couches, right? Indeed, that's true. There is quite a bit of that this year in some of the sub-track regions that the presenters have brought in themselves. It's not all reality-based creations. There is definitely some fantasy and really great stuff out there. Awesome. Reality is overrated. Okay. Gluwal. I hope we have a lot more hypergrid support next year and maybe more optimized physics and things like that we can talk about. The viewer, Chris, is working on. Hopefully we'll have some nice ideas how to use that with the server side configurations. That'll be interesting to work on. I think we'll have plenty of new things to talk about. I think we'll be moving forward maybe not at the pace everybody would like to see, but I think we'll be making progress. I think it'll be in the right direction. Justin. I think next year, for me, it's going to be, as it has been really for the last seven years, a lot of bug fixing. I have the curse that I like to see things work. I tend to end up doing a lot of that. I think it's critical to do that. We do need better stability. We do need things to work better. I'm actually very interested in improving aspects of the hypergrid in cooperation, but we'll let you discuss, Chris, what the best way forward is because I do see that as pretty critical to the whole thing. Other than that, I think to come off something I've been said, I think I'm very interested in trying to continue documenting how the protocols work. A lot of the protocols in our consumer add hot protocols that have kind of evolved from sometimes from kind of internal data formats, which are not very efficient, but are kind of what we have. Because of that, it's very much sometimes the documentation is only the code. And certainly in the area of data formats and protocols, I don't think that's enough. I think if you want interoperability of other systems, you can't say to them, hey, go and read OpenSim code, and that's how it works. I think you actually need documented stuff. And even if that's really scratchy, oh, this is a really broken crappy format, but hey, it works. It's like what we do. And here's what it should look like externally. And here's what you should try and conform to. I think that's the route to try and get better interoperability to actually try and do some of that stuff. And that's kind of like, I don't know, I actually quite like doing it. I'm kind of a bit of a masochist. I kind of like exploring systems and actually documenting how they work. Not all the time, but I do do that. So actually, I hope to be doing a bit more of that as well. But otherwise, really, some of my priorities are going to be what clients pay me to do and what people out there want, crowd sourcing stuff, people who are prepared to put up boundaries community. I'm very interested in doing what the community wants. But for me, it does come down to funding. I do this stuff very full time. I don't have another, well, I didn't do other jobs very often. So it's like, you know, what do I need to do to actually get money? So it's like, what do clients pay and what what are other people prepared to fund? So I'll be, I'm interested in exploring that further because I think there is interest out there in kind of funding changes, which are good for everybody, right? The pro bono stuff that one has to do as well as design a specific client work. Okay, Melanie. Well, what's what's been the thrust of our work actually has been to change the way the grids and viewers work together with the partnership with the viewer development team. This has been making big progress. And it's basically the same direction Chris does going. And she's going for simplification, we're going for extension, but it's going to mesh really well. And I think next time next year, this time, we'll see a massive improvement in the user experience. Never done. Mostly I'll just keep doing what I do best. I look for bugs, push open simulator beyond what everybody expects it to do and break things, break things. Yeah. Build really crazy, overly complex things. Never done the roof gold track. Yes, indeed. Well, I think that is a wonderful way to end this panel to say that I think we will all be continuing to push things perhaps not as much as as Neb does. But nevertheless, thank you to our panel really for all of the tremendous work that you do and for giving such great answers to all of the questions we've got that we got. Thank you to the audience for all the questions. And we are going to just checking the schedule here. So we are at a little bit over schedule right now. It's 8.34 in the viewer. So check that time. We're going to have a half an hour coffee break for everybody who needs to get up and stretch their legs or get something to drink. The next sessions begin at 9am Pacific time in the track region. So if you open up your map here in world, look for the track regions just south of the keynotes. And you can view the conference schedule online at conference.opensimulator.org. As a reminder to our web audience, please tweet your questions, comments, issues, or support requests to the atopensim.cc or sorry, Opensim CC account. I think that wraps it up for the panel. Thank you again to our developers. And we will see you guys after the break. Thanks, everyone.