 Well, let's open with the new release and then move into our discussion of the future. Ubit, for Open Simulator 0.9.2, please tell us about this new release. Hello everyone, glad to see you all. Last Sunday we finally released our new version, the 0.9.2.0, and it has a lot of changes almost two years of little incremental improvements. I think the main feature we can highlight on this version is the support for the new region's environment that is required for new viewers. That changes our region's look. For example, the moon can now move in an independent way relative to the sun. Well, a lot of changes that you can see in our release notes in this link. That's about it. Well, thank you for all your hard work. I mean, you make it sound so easy, and yet I recall you working on those fixes and improvements, so we appreciate it. And it's running now on OS Grid, isn't it? Yes, OS Grid is always running, or at least its main regions is always on our development. Code, in fact, it's already in version 0.9.2.1, development branch, OK? I already had the little change to the code, thought that it was already a bit out of date, OK? Well, that's what's so great about this, is it's constantly in an improvement cycle and with new releases planned. So, Melanie, you know, there's been a lot of hype about the metaverse here lately. We, you know, almost every company seems to be coming out with a metaverse product or trying to position themselves to take some of the action. And I was wondering if you had some thoughts about, you know, what are the opportunities and new capabilities that you see rising from the interest in the metaverse? I see definitely that there's development going on that we may be able to leverage, especially in terms of finally maybe breaking away from the second life viewer and using one of the viewers for one of the other projects for ourselves as well. Of course, the metaverse has become very much interesting for many different interests, business interests, because of the pandemic, because it's a way to combat loneliness and get people together without spreading anything evil. So, that is where I see a chance for open simulator to position ourselves as the grid software of choice for companies who are too small to develop their own. And I believe we should potentially even more actively contact companies from which we hear that they're looking to have a metaverse, but we know they're not actually metaverse developers. At the moment, though, I'm not really contributing to the code base of open simulator because I'm actually actively working on OS grand, the grid itself, with a yet again, a new asset system, because it always keeps reaching the boundaries, so to speak. And every few years, it just needs to be renewed. So, this is something that's also going to benefit larger virtual worlds as companies potentially decide to use open simulator. Oh, that's wonderful. I mean, let's face it, we need our worlds working as well as our software, so we appreciate your support. So, Krista, what do we need for the future? I mean, whether you want to think about the metaverse or you want to think about your original goals when you contributed to the software for strengthening meetings, for increasing socialization, and for making it easier to do this worldwide, what do you see coming in the future? I learned, so, yeah, this whole sudden attention to the metaverse was kind of an interesting, surprising twist recently. I don't really know what to think about it. It seems like there's a lot of venture capitalists right now with a lot of money, very interested in technology that they know nothing about, which can be an interesting opportunity for people who have been working in this space for many years, as Melanie said. So, I mean, and people have been discovering open simulator that much I can tell you. And, you know, yesterday I was asked by a journalist whether what I thought about the metaverse and whether open simulator might be the technology for it, and, you know, my answer was that whatever companies are trying to create the metaverse in proprietary platforms is just not going to be it for sure. I mean, we've been having closed worlds in gaming, for example, for a very long time, and that's not the metaverse. Those are interesting environments, but it's definitely not the metaverse. And so if people are serious about creating a metaverse, then they need to be serious about creating some sort of interoperability protocol for letting people, you know, visit these different virtual environments, and that's where the hypergrid comes in, I guess, or something like the hypergrid. So, either the hypergrid or something like it will, I think, be an essential key ingredient. Of course, this also connects with things like blockchain, which, honestly, I don't really understand, and it seems really weird, but maybe I don't know enough about it. But, you know, it seems like an interesting approach to protect assets, but without really protection, just sort of as a, you know, as an honor basis, like I paid some money for that thing. Therefore, please don't copy it or something like that. Maybe one of you can explain to me better how that thing is supposed to work technically. But in terms of applications, I am still as excited as I was 10 years ago, that actually during the pandemic, I have been using OpenSim quite a bit, including in one of my courses. It's a course of introduction to computers, and I developed a bunch of simulations of computing machines and the internet and stuff like that. And so, I have students, groups of 150 students on a grid similar to this one here, OSCC, that they do all their projects in this virtual environment. And that has been working pretty well, actually. And so, yeah, I'm quite excited about the future. I don't know exactly what it is, but there's some excitement ahead. Oh, that's wonderful. And like you, I've been doing the same on a Lobo grid for education. So, Kevin, speaking of this notion of an open world, now the question is, is how would we fund future development so we can encourage more growth, whether it's an OpenSimiter or whatever OpenSimiter evolves into? Have you thought about decentralized, autonomous organization styles or other kinds of funding models? That's not really an area that I've been thinking too much about, say, I haven't really been involved at all in any kind of financial... Oh, sure. ...relating to the project. And by the way... What about the future? Yeah, go ahead and talk about the future. Then, where you see OpenSimiter going? Well, definitely seeing it seems to be used more and more on the educational side. I'm working with a few people on another grid and they're presenting on Sunday. I know that they're looking at the educational field, including things like learning of languages, for example. So that's definitely, I think, an area that's going to be being used more often. And by the way, the U-Bit kind of glossed over some of the changes in 092.0. One of the other big changes I think you didn't mention is that we now also have a new scripting engine called Y-Engine that makes a lot of improvements in script performance. I think a number of people will be interested in checking that out. Oh, that's great. So that's part of the multiple scripting engines that we now have in the software. So what about OSSL functions? Are there any new ones there? Yeah, we've had, there's been a few that have been added recently. The best place to do that, we have a list if you go into the opensimulator.org website. I don't have the link at the moment handy, but we actually have a page where it lists all of the OSL functions that are supported. And yeah, okay, thanks, U-Bit. That's the link to the page. And the new functions will get flagged so that people can spot the stuff that's been recently added. Thank you, I appreciate that. So U-Bit, what would you like to see possible for the future of opensimulator? What do you need? First, I need to find the mute button. I think I found it. Oh, well, that's hard to say. There are still basic things that we need to improve a lot because things that we are supposed to be doing, we are still not doing all that well as you easily see that goes from bad performance, a waste of CPU, waste of bandwidth, waste of things that need a revision on all the protocols we still use and the kind of code use. Then there is a big challenge that is the evolution of the software we depend on like the .NET framework that is changing in an incompatible way. The move to .NET 5 and now .NET 6 will cause us big problems to update our code. If you actually decide to do that, that the way the things are moving, we will be forced to do it because it seems that the mono, that is the platform we use to run opensim on Linux and other platforms seems to be dead and without any support anymore. So we have some challenges and we will need a lot of, mainly the support of everyone. I think the support of people is the most important thing we can hope to have. Thank you. And before you mute, one other thought, because you just reminded me, I know you've been working with the voice system and the collaboration with Vivex, which for now is remaining, but do you have any concerns about that for the future? Yeah, I still see no solution. We have the project, the big news we are having is about the Echo Voice project that people is going to talk about it today, Liz and the AMA group. That's the most news we have on that area. We still have the free switch model that kind of works, but does not satisfy. But also my main concern about this is that the requirement that this will bring in terms of high performance voice servers. Some grids already have problems in the providing high performance servers for OpenSim alone. And now they will be facing the need to have also high performance servers for voice. That means very low latency, machines, et cetera. Vivex was a very good solution because it completely fix all that infrastructure problems. So actually that's what my most concern is, is how will small grids provide and have that infrastructure and how to set up that infrastructure? Okay. For the moment, I'm a bit pessimist about the voice support in the future. Well, I haven't even thought about it when I was asked to speak earlier, but I do have a solution. I've just recently dug out the source code again after the times that I needed to hold on to it, have elapsed and have taken a look at it. And it does look like it's not really that much work to make it work for OpenSim as a replacement for SL Voice. It's low latency. It is high throughput. It is 3D and supports the channel naming scheme similar to Vivex's. So it should be relatively easy to use existing driver code to drive that backend in place of the Vivex one. So there's more to come. Thank you, Melanie. That's great news. We appreciate it. So on that note, I wanna thank the core developers for their support, for past and present for OpenSimator. It's our favorite open-source world and we just love being in here. And I've been thankful. I can't imagine life without it. So as a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at HTTPSconference.OpenSimulator.org slash schedule. Following this session, the next session will begin at 7.30 a.m. in this keynote region. And it is entitled Teaching Sustainability in an OS Virtual World. Now we encourage you to visit the OSCC 21 poster Expo in the OSCC Expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and to explore the hyper red resources in OSCC Expo 2 region, along with our sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC Expo regions. Thank you again to our speakers and to you, the audience.