 Okay, right, hello everyone, and welcome to the 1.30pm session in developer and open source track. As a reminder to track in rather than web audience, you can do the full conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org and tweet your questions or comments to openapp.opensim.cc with the hashtag OSCC4T. So at this hour, we are happy to introduce the two of the relevant pandas I'm waiting by myself, justing to start taking. Our pandas leaders today are Jessica Lee, who is the founder and project manager of the Phoenix Firestorm Project Incorporated, a non-profit company with over 80 support staff and developers working under it. The project is responsible for developing the very popular Phoenix and Firestorm viewers used in Second Life and other virtual worlds. So I'm probably not doing this in order, I just recognise. So now it's obviously Jessica in the middle there. The left of Jessica is Angela Fionn's stage, it's Nikki Perriam, who is retired from the United States Army and ABB. Building the Kokura Viewer is his major hobby. Nikki believes that building the Kokura Viewer is a good way to exercise, but then it's not a terrible surgery. Nikki lives in a rural area, but in the USA. Arkansas, of course. And to divide on the couch there, we have Niu Fears, who is a long-time singularity developer. Niu Fears, and I'm probably not saying that right either, it's probably fire, it's not fear, sorry. Stepped in fairly late on, so I'm very happy to have her. And hopefully, late on, you'll also be joined by Sydney Biscuits, who I think is having some connectivity problems right now. But she's worked on quite a few viewers for a long time, including the Phoenix Firestorm, and currently, companies are working on various other virtual world projects. Her goal is to see the Metaverse thriving on its own and burdened by corporate ownership. Unfortunately, I do want to say this, we worked due to have the TV here today, but as many of you may have seen, the TV hasn't been very well as it is blocked about at the moment, and unfortunately you can't join us, but I'm sure you'll all join me in hoping that he feels better soon. So, welcome, everyone. And I don't think, unfortunately, Sydney has been able to rejoin us yet. So, we're going to start. So, the format of this is basically, I've had a set of pre-prepared questions about various view-related topics, and of course, heavily related to open sims, as you would imagine in this kind of thing. And I'm basically going to work for another panelist to talk about them in turn as they see fit for as long as, well, not obviously as long as they like, because it'll take the whole time, but at whatever length they think is appropriate or as short as they like. And then after that, as we get through the questions, I'm going to open up for questions from the audience. So, let's just get going here. So, the first thing, really, obviously I have a few questions there, but I would like to give everybody an opportunity to state a bit about the standards of Aussie. I'd like to miss something out or something like that. So, I'm just going to ask, in order here, from Nikki on the left here, could you introduce yourself, or if you feel like I've done it already, don't worry about it. Maybe tell us a bit about the current state of your view of projects. So, Nikki. Okay. So, the thing that we've most recently done is split off the OpenSim view completely as a new branch for the second line. That was done due to some limitations that I was running into. I'm trying to keep the AISP3 inventory and pipeline current with all of the OpenSim grids. And those viewers who would work on some OpenSim grids and not others, and I haven't been able to resolve that. So, I've made a decision to go ahead and split off as a separate branch and use the second line, 3-7-8 as the base for that branch and still going to build forward from there. So, Firestorm, we're kind of in a similar boat as Nikki is with Kikua. We're in the process of merging Limit Labs AISP3, which will more or less make out legacy baking. But we're going to handle it, we're probably going to handle it a different way. I think what we're going to do is merge in AISP3 and then reintegrate legacy baking after that. So, we're in the process of, we're in a release cycle right now for our next release. It will not have AISP3. After that, though, we'll be handling that merge and then dealing with things from there. We have some challenges so I can talk about more in-depth as we go through this in that regard. But I'll pass it over to Liru. Okay. So, I'm a little bit sick. So, excuse my horse voice. So, I work on both Singularity Viewer and Alchemy Viewer, which is a new project. It's a V3, which, like Kikua and Firestorm, it is using the new interface. There's not much to say for the OpenSim site yet, but we are planning to develop a whole suite so that OpenSim connectivity can be easily ported to many viewers, no matter what platform they're using. As for the Singularity site, well, everything is doing pretty well. We don't have to worry about the merges with upstream we pick what we need and basically that's it. So, yeah, I guess that's it since Singularity is not here and the team is out. Just moving on to kind of like question one here. So, actually, this, I think, relates about what you've just been talking about with things like baked-out avatars. But the first question I wanted to kind of ask you is that, is OpenSim related to becoming harder or easier to support? And in that context, what needs to be improved to have OpenSim related to support work with your viewers better? So, Nicky, if you would care to start. Yes, I think it is getting harder to support, but I don't think it's all going to open down to just develop what we're going to do. The projects as a mature and way-put-in, the more it's harder to campaign and put in new stuff. And I don't know what to do to improve that particular situation. You can't get your stuff. You've got to move forward with all of it. I'll move this on over to Jessica. Yeah, I have some kind of unique challenges. I mean, obviously, the coding challenges, especially as the internet progresses forward. And then there's also, I'm faced with human resources challenges. And I've been finding, despite that we've made a lot of efforts in the last two years to make Firestormers compatible with OpenSim as we can, we've sort of been in many ways slighted by OpenSim administrators, I guess. And I mean, one of the things that motivates developers is having your product used, knowing that people are using your product, seeing that it's being promoted. And we found that places like OS Grid, for example, Firestormers down at the bottom of the page, barely above 1.223 viewers that don't even support MASH. And even this conference, for example, at no point anywhere was Firestorms suggested to be used. It was singularity. And that's fine. But the problem with that is it becomes a challenge for me then to motivate my developers to do OpenSim work because they sort of feel like they've been, you know, snubbed. So I've got two challenges. One is obviously we've got the coding challenges, but we've also got the challenges of just trying to find developers who are willing to keep Firestorm compatible. So we're merging this AIS-3 into Firestorm, which needs to be done. But then I'm faced with, you know, how am I going to get, like I see, baking back into Firestorm and who am I going to get to do it? You know, we had a sender doing a lot of the work for OpenSim for a while. And now I'm at a point where I don't have any developers left who really even have an interest in OpenSim, mainly because of, you know, its impressions that we seem to get. So, you know, we have to keep moving forward. I'm going to keep doing what I can to keep things going. I have to give a shout-out to Littlefield. They have been fantastic and instrumental, and really that's the motivation we have right now is to keep things going for Littlefield and the EDUs, the Edge Educational Systems. We have a lot of Grids that you use Firestorm for educational, and obviously we support them 100%. But yeah, that's our challenges right now. Okay, so I know there's probably quite a lot of comment on that, but maybe if I can go to Leru and let us speak about this question as she wants first. And then we actually have a very short disruption because the core quality is degraded. But Leru, if you could just go on. Sorry, not go on, if you could just talk about this if you want to set a question. Well, there's not much to say. I mean, I've been working with the people in IRC on OpenSim Dev, and I've found it really easy to support. There's new things or all the things that need to be supported or just mentioned. And so it's been pretty easy. I mean, what needed to improve last year was communication and that's really improved. Hey, I actually just wanted to come back to just this point, just that I think it's a good point to talk about that. So maybe we'll actually talk about it at the end of just this. Okay, I think it's just okay with that. Yeah. I think that maybe you can push, I think. I might not go on for this too long, I think. Maybe it's party communication because I think that it's a good point to talk about this. I think that's any better. Okay, so. I think it would be useful to just maybe explore a little bit further that has to do with issues of fire while operating in a firefighter room in particular. I think, I mean, from my perspective, I think that a lot of people in the community can do some of the things. Maybe there's a little question because I've just seen quite a few people in the audience here who have put very much fossil users. And I've been keen on it, so maybe there's a better communication for that, I think. Maybe this is any of my personal favorite which may or may not be correct this time. Maybe it's a bit of a project culture that might or might not understand everything that Firestone comes when the champ's second wife says that my culture of across the world is to talk in maybe involved groups and talking about things involved. Whereas I've been seen in particular for the most constant need and source culture of having people in IRC channels and talking in IRC. And I've never been able to do it. Maybe I'll go far enough I've never been able to locate any kind of active IRC channel and a few of us actually use it. We used to get all of us through you can contact me at any time through my email that's going to be at Hello. Okay. Does everybody hear me better now? Am I actually involved yet? All right. I'm going to rewind back to the start of what I was saying just to address Jessica's point directly about kind of the open sim strategy that I think and I don't want to speak for other people out there because I do have a certain view I'm very much head down in the server code and it doesn't always give me the best perspective but I think as you've seen from the chat there are quite a few Firestone users out there and my feeling and I know you had a response to this was that maybe there was to a certain extent a cultural thing whereas Firestone very much comes out of second life and having communication second life within I should say in the world whereas open sim is more the classic open source project of people very much communicating in IRC channels and many less and I've been interested in the past enjoying seeing an IRC channel for Firestone but I haven't been able to find one maybe I didn't look hard enough or I didn't find one that was at all active so my theory was that maybe there's a cultural thing and I know you had some points to address that Jessica. Yeah so our contact has always been basically through our emails or through in world or even through Skype I think my Skype is pretty much well known to everybody we don't use an IRC we have an IRC channel but we generally don't use it and we're sort of faced with a bit of a unique problem in having too many users you know 350,000 people on Firestone roughly just in second life I have no idea how many in open sim and with having an IRC channel we're just flooded and end up not having any time to do anything else whereas at least people contact me through email I can kind of structure that and for those of you it's at jessica.lion at phoenixfewer.com or admin at phoenixfewer.com I don't remember any of our contacts can be found from our website I have a contacts page that lists every single person on the team and communication is absolutely a big problem I think with between Firestorm and OpenSim we have communications with Littlefield all the time I talk to Walter regularly and he keeps me posted on what's working and what isn't working and I have in the past made efforts to contact other other grids and grids to email me as well but it's never been very good and I don't know that having an IRC channel is going to change that nobody reaches out to us is really what it is right right well maybe we can come back for a discussion at the end but let me go on to the second question first of all so my second question here was really about hyper grid and the distributed metaverse so it is that do you think that the distributed metaverse is feasible and or desirable you may not think it's a good idea and if you do think it's it's a desirable thing what challenges do you think need to be overcome I guess primarily I'm asking on the viewers side but also you know maybe the system as a whole so I don't know if I should be going to the same all the time but Nicky I'm going to pick on you first again do you have any response or thoughts about that question yes I think that it's desirable to have a distributed metaverse but the practicality of having so many different viewpoints into the different worlds or the way they operate is a challenge it's getting to the point where it's almost have to tailor the viewer to the region I'm sorry to the word or the grid that you're going in I don't have anything else to add okay just to identify you do you have any thoughts on that Nicky I think it's absolutely necessary to move forward but there's also as Nicky said there's so many different channels on how to get into virtual worlds and having listened to the previous discussion prior to Philip was you know a web-based client I think that's a fantastic idea but there are a lot of challenges that need to get past that as well like being able to build in world and having just even fundamentally advanced things like building inventory and various things I think a web-based viewer is really the way to go but again are you going to end up with a whole bunch of different versions of a web-based client yeah I think standards such as they are you need to make a standard and also I think OpenSim admins have to collectively come together and agree on a path in one direction I've heard at the OpenSim developer panel you guys all seem to have different ideas of which way you want to go I think OpenSim is going to need to find a way to agree on where they're going to go collectively especially at this time when things in Second Life are up in the air we don't know what's going to happen with SL1 right good point and Lira what thoughts do you want to have about this topic I don't really have any thoughts that haven't been expressed already I mean I think that it's feasible and it's desirable but I feel like what we have right now is pretty good as is except for I feel that Hypergrid could be a little bit better like there was progress on it like two years ago it's just been stagnant for a while okay so moving on to the third question here so I guess maybe your most desired feature would be some kind of agreement as to what it's going to be yeah absolutely but I mean if I if I just present this question to Nikki first do you have any particular feature that could be pretty much anything maybe something to make your life as a viewer I think maybe you've already addressed that or maybe some other kind of feature you think could be very interesting important in virtual worlds I don't have a specific feature I think my point is and I agree just some sort of standards committee or standardization where a core open sound is going to present this particular thing and we're going to stick with it you guys can get a roadmap okay um Salira do you do you agree with Jessica and Nikki or do you have any other thoughts yeah it kind of goes back to what we were talking about last year they need to be like an organization of viewer developers and open sim developers working together and then a really separation yeah I so correct me if I'm wrong because I'm really not so involved in this stuff but I think there was a kind of talk about trying to get common things like a viewer mailing list in the past for over years but I didn't really seem to work out didn't seem to work now right I mean I don't know what the answer is it's obviously it's challenging it's also you know we're at a time right now when open source developers really need to pull together now more than ever I think and come to an agreement but it's also a very difficult time to motivate open source developers just with the way things are changing you know four or five years ago virtual worlds was really exciting and not to say it's not still exciting but it's you know the honeymoon is sort of worn off on people and and there's other emerging emerging technologies that are pulling people's interest away from virtual worlds I think so motivating developers is becoming a tougher more challenging problem right and I guess again it comes baby but it's this communication divide a lot of communication does go on in the IRC and I think maybe even more soon kind of raping some channels nowadays because you know that's kind of maybe not neutral ground it's the wrong world but it's a place where it's easier to get viewer developers to go right it's my feeling but of course you know that's not going to work for firestorm so you're right I do agree is it's very wobbly in terms of motivation and what people want to do and how I don't know how do we pull together it's that's a difficult question certainly but I appreciate what you're saying about the need for for things to be pretty not to vary too much not to be wildly different but to actually you know standard maybe a strong well I don't know but to actually have some kind of uniformity so I'm going to move on to my last question here really just touches on what you said again a bit earlier because I think it's always a question on people's quite often on people's minds is that do you think that a web-based viewer is important and and or feasible of course is it actually possible this time in terms of either performance or the amount of work one would have to do so I'm just going to continue as I was I'm afraid just for this last question say Nicky what would you say to that is is a web viewer feasible or possible I'm not qualified to even answer that question because I had it done on a web base that would work myself you can tell us what you would have to give a good answer okay and Jessica I think you pretty much would be I can tell you what I think I think that it may be the solution I mean let's face it I actually said this to a friend of mine earlier today you know the viewer is kind of like a rotary phone now in its comparison to a smartphone viewer is getting old and plunky and I think we can all agree it's a big mess of spaghetti code and a web-based client might be the answer but we always get requests from people can't you make a basic version of Firestorm with just this feature, this feature and that feature and yeah we could do that but the next person is going to want another set of features and the person after that is going to want another set of features and so what is useful to me as a viewer is going to be different from what's useful to you or anybody else so if somebody does do a web-based viewer which won't be us because like Nikki said we don't have that expertise in that area my devs are C++ devs and a web-based viewer would not be C++ so there's a lot of challenges that need to be faced and I can't help but think we're reaching into a crunch time somebody needs to be doing something but I don't know, motivation all that stuff and finally Liru would you think about web-based reviewers? do I think they're important? not so much actually I think that a lot can be accomplished whether or not you use a web interface or just regular application we have already phone applications there's Lumia and there's viewers for computers so we don't really need them, are they feasible? yeah they're feasible but I don't think they're needed because what we can do even though the viewer code is getting old we can totally rewrite it if we need to make it customizable if we need to we can do basically anything with the current code that we could do with a web viewer perhaps some more because there's just a lot more that you can do with the computer itself working in C++ then you can do in the confines of the browser so I feel like it's not so much important but it would be kind of nice but it's not it's not an absolute solution okay so before we really go into the audience Q&A I just want to ask you is there anything that you're particularly like to say to this audience or to the people here about what about any really topic I guess connected to the viewer is there any point you'd like to make or any closing remarks before we go into Q&A Nikki Jessica I have a lot of respect for OpenSim and in fact I sometimes go up against some of my own developers you know I think that it's in my opinion that if if Second Life were to fail OpenSim would be the fallback and it worries me some that like we've got you know these viewer difficulties and compatibility problems that's not so much my concern my concern is that is there an OpenSim grid capable and ready to take on an exodus of users should Second Life go south and I worry that maybe there isn't and so my concern is I hope that OpenSim administrators can you know put together a roadmap prepared because when the time comes if the time comes everybody's going to have to be kind of on the same book and on the same page in the same book to support you know a lot of people leaving Second Life I'm not convinced the new platform that LinenLab is working on is going to be what we consider to be Second Life and it may not be suitable for you know a good even half of the population of Second Life so you know if that Second Life as we know it bellies up becomes not profitable or for whatever reason OpenSim is the next closest thing and I think that's where people are going to come so basically my message I'm saying is guys and by guys I mean all of you OpenSim administrators and developers you know we as users may really need you guys to come together in a very quick way and I hope you guys are prepared to do that or at least thinking about how you're going to get the infrastructure in place to be able to take on you know a very big load of people very quickly I do have one thing to add and that's the disaster that they deal with that was just red in it was a very popular idea it was very regular for testing because it's a front edge of what OpenSim was doing but I have a recovery plan just seems inexcusable yeah let me just finally ask Leroy do you have anything any kind of closing remarks you would like to give I don't have any closing remarks no okay well thank you already very much for kind of your questions now I would like to take questions from the audience now I saw one earlier and I've got to scroll back a little bit through I know we had some technical difficulties earlier unfortunately it looks like Sinin has not been able to make it back I'm sure she's having some probably I mentioned some network issues so really I'm taking this question from Matt but I think you've already answered it in that where did the panellists see the future of SL1.0 going will you continue to support and develop it at all or do you see a short term holding pattern support followed by the plug being pulled I can only speculate I'd be willing to speculate sure I think and I don't think any of us really know but I think that Second Life 2.0 as we'll call it there is no real name for it just yet is probably going to be more social media in a virtual world than what SL is and since they're planning on supporting other platforms it might be less graphical I don't know what it's hard to say but as far as SL1 as we know it I would from a business point of view I would suspect that as Eby Linden has said they want to make the new platform so good that people will want to leave Second Life and go to the new platform and they will obviously once that's been released they'll be marketing the new platform there'll be advertisements for it and all these things and there'll be less information about Second Life 1.0 as we call it and through attrition I do believe LindenLab will keep SL1 going as long as it's profitable but I think through attrition and not being marketed by LindenLab gradually things may go down and it'll get to the point where it's no longer profitable in which case from a business point of view it would only make sense for LindenLab to shut it down and try to transition people to the new platform and I hope that if that happens it would be a slow process but so I just think OpenSim should feel some pressure OpenSim administrators should have some pressure on their shoulders to be prepared for if that time comes OK I'm just going to swap to a question to ask where in that I'm sorry I'm so sorry did you have any kind of points you would like to have made about that question I kind of forgot the question sorry just to repeat is that it's about 1.0 question was is where do you see the 3.0 1.6 are we going do you think that I would want you to support and develop it at all or do you see the assurance term following by plug being pulled and if it is will the OpenSim or OpenSim or are they more likely to pull their own plugs well as I've seen so far it was a whole bunch had supposedly moved on to the new platform but we keep seeing them come back and work on second life so I don't think the new platform is going to be pulling away too many people and it's just going to be more of the same maybe some people try out the new platform but since there's not going to be the same content I don't think people are going to move to be as willing to move okay and Nicky do you have any opinion on this topic yes I have an opinion second life is the second life year the pace of corrections and output has been very high in my opinion is it going to get all the list of topics and as soon as the good things are going in to the present second life it's going to be a test around what that does okay interesting so just to come on to we're kind of coming up to time here but just a quick question from water is and really I think this is particularly for you so we'll go through this fairly quickly Jessica is that and I think we've already talked about this is what can we do to assist Firestorm in continuing compatibility with open simulators is it going to take say donations maybe monetary to Firestorm or is it really maybe you've said conversations with good owners and maybe the dev team you know would it be helpful and I don't know how these things can be difficult to organize and really this is the point at which we have these conversations but would it be helpful to kind of have some way of having a conversation about this yeah I think you know this AISV3 thing and losing legacy baking is going to be one challenge but it's in a big challenge but it's I think it's sort of sits on its own and I'll we'll manage we'll get I'll get around it I'll find a developer who will you know merge in legacy baking back in it's possible that I might have to go with the bounty and offer bounty that code back in again it's you know I just have a problem with motivating my own developers right now because they sort of feel outed and slighted in some ways and I can understand that and communication obviously is really important and you know I noticed that Nevenon said that he won't do business through email the email is just a starter you know once we I get your email and we'll have a short reply I'll get you hooked up in Skype with me and we can sit and chat and talk all we need and I'm more than happy to come into the grids as well as I often do I think communication it's it really we need to see communications I need my developers to see that they're appreciated Singularity devs know that they've got a lot of support here in Opensim whereas my devs you know we rarely ever hear from Opensim folks and so yeah that's a really good point I mean it really does sound like yeah as you say knowing that there really are people in Opensim who we support it and you know really like to see Firestorm continuous so maybe we can work towards that as you say if email is the first Skype tends to be more of a common ground I have to say a lot of communication Skype isn't ideal for me because I much prefer seeing stuff in IRC where it's completely public and people can see whatever is happening oh yeah I'm good with that the problem with IRC that I found is that you don't have a history that you can go back and see it so if I'm away you know what I'm going to miss things right so yeah just to, so yeah we're coming up to time I'm going to take a final question and I'm going to go to the deputy here because again this relates to the poll and how can we better support the viewers or get a better kind of better get a better development there so his question is how does a good programmer get started in viewer work what are the best starting points he says he doesn't see many overall dev docs and has he simply missed them so maybe again if I can start with Nikki on that question how does a good programmer get started in viewer development work I'm thinking like Wiki for building on BS 21 is very detailed and good and that can get you started if that's not your preferred language then the Linux Wiki is not quite as good but the curve to get into building in Linux is in my opinion easier if you want to start building it I'm not going to unpack the off-limit because I sure need some help just to repeat what Nikki said if anybody wants to start working or building I think you're saying Nikki right is to contact you and just go from there and I guess not anyone is competing with developers or anything but I mean Jessica do you have a comment on that on how does viewer development get started how can they help we have a Wiki page just pulling it up here and my devs have gone through great painstaking effort to make a very comprehensive guide on how to compile Firestorm and in fact actually it's more about setting up your build environment which you know that's the hardest thing like getting your computer set up to do a compile compiling the viewer is incredibly complicated once you're set up with that and you've successfully compiled and by the way that guide works the same for the linear viewer I believe as well as I think pretty much any viewer for that matter and basically if you want to be a dev for the Firestorm team what we ask is take a look on Jira we've got a lot of bugs we've got a lot of feature requests we've got a lot of a lot of things pick something that interests you compile Firestorm resolve that Jira is submitted to us as a contribution and basically this is how we recruit anybody on the team and it goes the same with our support team and you know once we see that because if I had a dime for every person that's come and said that they are a developer and they can do things but in the end they don't even know how to compile anything so we sort of need to see examples of your work and so when I say contribute code I mean give us a few examples of your work compiled against Firestorm that we can take and introduce into our repository and it becomes a point where it doesn't make sense for us to not recruit you as a developer on the team and we are always looking for developers always okay and Liru how can somebody best get started in the development or maybe in general or Singularity in particular well for Singularity in particular I generally recommend that you join the IRC channel on FreeNode it's Singularity viewer one word no underscores and basically if you arrive there you ask for help or I'll probably say hi anyway because I say hi to people who I haven't seen before or I just don't remember seeing them and I'll find out what you want what you need to do and I've been around the viewer source a while and a lot of other people in the channel are there to help too even if I haven't been around and there's we also since just linked her pages I'll link mine we've got those three pages which have been written based on building the viewer I wrote the first two written by Latif who couldn't be here today so basically just asking for help and sitting in the channel and just looking at it and if you need any help if you want to do something we can work with you we can figure it out and we can get things done but you can basically do anything that's it we've run out of time here so thanks very much to all our panelists there's still a lot to think about there in terms of viewer development hopefully we can get some improvements on that front I know it's difficult but there's quite a few of us now so hopefully we can all work together and get something going there so again thank you very much please give our panelists a round of applause