May18

Understanding Parcel Rezzing Permissions

on May 18th, 2012 at 9:43 pm
Posted In: InWorldz, Second Life

Reports of Trouble

Recently, I have heard reports of InWorldz residents complaining that permissions seem to have become broken, or that objects that used to work no longer do.  In addition to the dance ball rezzer products people buy “no longer working”, prefab home rezzers, furniture with MLP engines that rez balls, and other products can’t seem to rez the items they need to function.

Here’s an example.  I received this message:

Hi ya Jim, do you have any idea what this error message means? My alt gets it when she tries to rez one of my products from its rezzer.  Everything is set to Mod/Copy, permissions look good:

(product): Unable to create requested object. Object ‘(thing to rez)‘ lacks create object permission or parcel full.

What Has Changed

First, let me point out here that the permissions system in InWorldz is functioning properly and also that it is behaving exactly the same as Second Life™ in this regard.

In previous releases however, this was not the case.  InWorldz did not properly check the permissions of objects rezzed by scripted objects.  Now it does.

Also, with the latest release, there is a full implementation of parcel-based, region-wide prim limits.  Thus the “or” in the error message above.  There are two cases for failing to rez a prim from an object within a given parcel now: either the owner doesn’t have enough available prims in that region, or the object doing the rezzing does lacks the require permissions.

Here’s How To Fix It

The prim limit case is obvious enough, and can be checked by looking at About Land to see how many are available.

The more complicated case is rezzing permissions.  The error, in this form, comes from an object: (product) in the example above.  It’s trying to rez an object from its Contents, named (thing to rez) in the example above.

If that is being refused, something is not quite set correctly. Either:

- the land isn’t set to allow everyone to rez, or

- it’s set to allow object creation by group members, but the rezzer isn’t set to the correct group, or

- it’s not set to allow group object creation at all.

It’s actually pretty simple: to rez objects, you have to be the owner of the land (which in the case of group-deeded land would be a group-deeded object), or the object must be set to the correct group to match the land with object creation enabled for group members, or enabled for everyone. So:

  1. Check About Land, looking particularly on the Options tab at the two “Create Objects:” checkboxes.  It’s “normal” to have the first one unchecked (disabled for All Residents) and the second one checked (enabled, for group use).
  2. Then if you want to enable group members to create objects, make sure that the land parcel has a group assigned (see the first tab on About Land).
  3. Then make sure that the rezzer object has its group set to that group.

If you don’t enable object creation for either everyone or group members, then only the owner can rez objects. And that also means that if you have deeded the parcel to a group, then only group-deeded objects can rez other objects.  (Because then the object’s owner (the group) is the same as the land (the group).)

Note that “normally” you do NOT have to deed objects to the group to allow them to rez other objects.  You just need to set a land group, and enable rezzing for group members, then set the rezzer to that group.  You only need the extra step of deeding the object if you have disabled object create for group members.

 Comment 
May03

Unbelievable New Mobile Phone – Everything in One Place

on May 3rd, 2012 at 6:11 pm
Posted In: Fun, Real Life, Technology

Check out this amazing phone. You won’t believe it.  If you haven’t seen the Pomegranate Phone yet, you better check this out.

http://www.pomegranatephone.com/

As I type this, I’m sitting in my new home in Nova Scotia, Canada, after being away for 28 years. It feels great to be home.

The Pomegranate Phone has solid ties to Nova Scotia, so it makes me proud to see what they’ve done on this web site.  It’s a deep site with lots of content, videos, interviews, etc.

After the intro, there’s a list of features on the right. Check them out!

Tranq will like the coffee-related features. Yes. And everyone will love the projection capabilities.

When you’ve seen enough, check out the Release Date link at the top for more info.

From there, be sure to check out the Surfer Girls link, an example of the content depth of this site. There’s a manager from Cisco in California on that video too.  ;)

o..O

1 Comment
Feb29

Understanding Scripted Region Crossings

on February 29th, 2012 at 1:50 am
Posted In: Controversy, Grids, InWorldz, Linden Lab, Second Life, Technology, Trends, Virtual Worlds

Over on Inara Pey’s blog posting on region crossings by vehicles, Pussycat Catnip added a comment that asked the question:

Are there really Open Sims that -lack- this ability?  I’d just assumed this was as standard as the ability to rez-in your own avatar… (ie: logging in).

I started to post a reply there, but after seeing the length, I did not want to hijack that blog posting in any way. So here is my answer here:

No, to the best of my knowledge, all OpenSim grids have lacked this ability until now, unless you include InWorldz.  It’s a very significant thing, and was in also a big accomplishment by Linden Lab when they provided this for MONO scripts in Second Life.  But it’s not really anything to do with physics, or vehicles.  It’s about transitioning a running script (in anything) from one region to another.  The explanation is a bit long; my apologies.

The Script Continuation Problem

When SL went with the .NET/MONO runtime environment, they forego the ability to control scripts very closely, since the runtime environment was developed by a third party.  But during a region hand-off, they need complete control.  They need to be able to stop scripts running in one virtual runtime, transmit them to another region, and load them in an object on that region, and not restart the scripts, but rather continue them from where they left off. So it’s just not a matter of re-rezzing a new copy of the same thing on another region; it must restore a copy of that object with the scripts running in the same context as they were when the object hit the region border.  All the active data, the current state of the script’s execution contents, must be restore and continued from where it left off.  For example, before this, in OpenSim, scripts were restarted (from their beginning, losing their current context) after a TP or region crossing.  InWorldz achieved this continuation of scripts with the introduction of the Phlox script engine last summer, but it was not possible in OpenSim until now.

Linden Lab’s Solution

When Linden Lab implemented this before any of the alternative grids, there was no ability to get this execution context from the third-party runtime environment (MONO). So Linden Lab developers effectively had to become MONO developers, and provide significant hacks, er, I mean extensions, to the MONO project.  Which then effectively meant they were running their own variant of MONO.  (I’m not aware of how extensive or localized the changes were from the standard tree.)  It was a lot of hard work, but they eventually provided the hooks in MONO that they needed to pause running code (MONO scripts compile to native code), and to serialize the data into a stream that could them be fed to the next region, deserialized, and reapplied to a copy of the object on the other region.  That was a lot of work and I’m sure when they started, they probably weren’t really sure to what degree their success would be.

InWorldz’ Solution

When InWorldz chose to attack this problem about a year ago, they chose a completely different path. They chose to create their own Phlox Script Engine runtime environment as a virtual machine, providing whatever hooks were needed as an inherent part of the design of that virtual machine.  Then compile LSL (or any language desired) into the intermediate p-code that their own virtual machine understood.  Not only does this keep control of the runtime environment for scripts within the InWorldz development project, but it allows much easier extensions in the future, much MUCH better processor consumption and memory management, and complete control of scripts.

One of the planned side-effects of this Phlox design is direct control of hand-offs between regions.  These can be done *so* efficiently that some naysayers actually complain that videos of crossings (here and here) must have been doctored, or faked in some way.  It’s that good.  Vehicles are just one example of script crossings. Physics really doesn’t play into this much.  If you can walk across regions, you’ve performed complex crossings of physical objects.  The tricky part is having the scripts continue where they left off, uninterrupted, and this includes vehicle scripts (and a lot more).

Avination and OpenSim Milestone

This is why I give credit to Avination for their recent success in the major work item of script state persistence across region crossings.  The vehicle part of it isn’t really the big deal here.  Having true continuation of active scripts on the other side is a Big Deal.  This is also a key part of why I found the “first” claim by Avination to be so outrageous; InWorldz has had vehicle crossings since the Phlox runtime environment came online last summer.  Even in terms of physical vehicle crossings, InWorldz has had ODE physics (same as other OpenSim grids) since before InWorldz was founded.  However due to its ability to cause region crashes, it has been disabled for about a year (out of InWorldz’ 3 year history).  If InWorldz simply turned physical objects back on, physical vehicle crossings would have been possible since the introduction of Phlox; the hard part, and the part Avination just completed, was the persistence of the scripts across the crossings, and that was fully functional and available grid-wide in InWorldz last summer.

However, since the Linden Lab proprietary implementation, another third party developer has provided an implementation of continuations in MONO, which has been available since MONO 2.6.  This provides the context save/restore needed, and Avination has successfully applied that to the OpenSim runtime. That’s great news for MONO-based script engines in OpenSim.

Thinking Ahead

In the long run, I see moving away from MONO as the best (and perhaps the only) way to tame processor and memory use and provide complete control of the runtime environment. Phlox will provide that total control, which means more features. Things like much easier support for new languages, an LSL debugger that can be built-in to the viewers to allow single-stepping through LSL code and examination of variables at each stage, easier control over scripts CPU and memory usage, and many other secondary benefits, such as no need to try to limit script cost artificially and blame script authors for hurting sim performance.

But the bottom line here is that continuing a script in a new region, running on a completely different machine (IP address) is a Big Deal.  Physical objects, a vehicles, not so much, but persisting those scripts, hell yes.  It’s a major accomplishment, and now OpenSim has it too.

14 Comments
Feb06

Beefcake Time

on February 6th, 2012 at 11:03 pm
Posted In: Fun, InWorldz, Second Life

And now for something completely different.

Over on the JuicyBomb blog came the blog challenge called “12 Days of Lingerie“.  Now that sounds like like something I’d be interested in reading.  But you would normally think this leaves me off the hook, since I’m not really a lingerie-wearing kinda guy.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with that; it’s just not me.  Just sayin’.)

So here I am, minding my own business, when Mera decides to blog that I am perv-camming her lingerie. Anybody who knows me knows that I would never do this.  And further supporting my case is that I am supposedly doing this while I am busy DJing… so clearly that can’t possibly be true.  Besides, I wouldn’t have the faintest idea that she had a happy face on her panties. Not a clue.

And suddenly she’s calling it the “undies” challenge for bloggers.  Me not knowing what is going on, and always willing to take a naughty challenge, I blindly accept the challenge, but realize… I don’t have any undies.  Oh oh.

So now what is a shy, innocent, conservative guy like me to do?  Aha! I came up with a solution for this at an earlier event in InWorldz.  I can use the same solution.

Clearly I’m not going to post pics of me and my “commando” undies. So…  I came up with another solution:

I made “CENSORED” boxes, both for male and female avatars. I’ll put them out in my freebie shop as soon as I get a chance.  But in the meantime, now you have a preview of the male version.  And of my commando form. ;)

So there.  I hope Mera and the others agree that I met the blog challenge!

16 Comments
Oct26

Truth In Government, Part 2: Citizen Uprisings

on October 26th, 2011 at 1:30 pm
Posted In: Business, Controversy, Occupy, Politics, Privacy, Real Life, Trends

Last December (2010), in an article related to the WikiLeaks controversy, I wrote the following.  Only 10 months later,  it is even more evident:

There is no question in my mind that not only is it important for the truth to be readily available, but also that it is imperative that the truth must be made available, in a free society where the government exists to represent the best interests of the people.

It is the collective attitude of those posting to the many blogs with articles and comments that gives me optimism in the future, when all around I see armies of powerful people attempting to corrupt that future.

The Internet has shifted some of that power back into the hands of the people; if it has enabled enough power, we will see those who try to hide the truth slowly but surely replaced by those who believe that truth keeps everyone clean.

On the other hand, if that shift of power does not adequately move to the people, and there is no confidence in The Official Truth, we will see a new revolution, of some kind. I don’t know who will prevail, but either things will change, or it will get very messy.

I’d like to officially welcome to the Occupy movement to this process.  Now at least I know what form that revolution will take.  And it’s getting messy.

You can read my complete original article here.

And in a related story: the US Government has introduced a bill to require Internet service providers “to block access to certain websites, very much contrary to US official positions on censorship and internet freedom, and almost certainly in violation of the First Amendment.”

And in a yet another related story: Justice Department Wants To Be Able To Lie In Response To Freedom Of Information Requests

And those who speak out against this nightmare are dealt with harshly.  The government crackdowns against the people in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria and Yemen have come to North America.

Imagine a nation where a war veteran trying to defend peaceful protesters is shot in the head with a “non-lethal” weapon, which fractures his skull and puts him in critical condition in a hospital. Now imagine that a row of police just stand by after he is injured, not helping him.  Now imagine that other citizens rush to his aid, and in response to that, the police use a flashbang to try to disperse those coming to his aid.  It sounds like Syria or Yemen, but it is Oakland, California.

Occupy Oakland: Iraq war veteran in critical condition after police clashes

I know it all sounds far-fetched but that is only because we are so innocent in our beliefs that the government will take care of us.  It can’t get any more real than this.


3 Comments