Kitely, the leading OpenSim grid, has announced a significant upgrade to its virtual world hosting service, implementing an improved version of OpenSim 0.9.2.2. This update comes on the heels of a recent system-wide upgrade that doubled world performance.
Announced earlier this week, the new version of OpenSim includes hundreds of proprietary stability and performance improvements the company has made over the years. One of the most notable improvements is faster world startup times, which will improve the user experience across the grid and improve compatibility with scripts imported from Second Life.
The most important feature in OpenSim 0.9.2.2 is the transition from XEngine to YEngine for the scripting system. This change brings both benefits and challenges.
“YEngine is designed to more closely follow the LSL script syntax,” Oren Hurwitz, Kitely co-founder and VP of R&D, said in the announcement. “This makes it easier to port scripts designed for Second Life to OpenSim.” However, he cautioned that the change could break some scripts that were working in XEngine, requiring users to fix, replace, or remove affected scripts from their Kitely worlds.
When switching to YEngine, all scripts were reset to their initial state.
“This is because the format of the state file that OpenSim uses to store script state has changed, and YEngine can’t use the state file created by XEngine,” Hurvitz said. As a result, users who have scripts that need to be reconfigured after being rezzed will need to reconfigure their scripts.
It’s important to note that switching to the new scripting engine will require the system to recompile all scripts for each world. According to Hurvitz, “This will happen the first time you enter each world after today’s update. That means each world will take longer than usual to start up when you first enter the world after this update.”
However, Hurwitz said this is just a one-time delay, and future world entries will come out sooner since the scripts are already being compiled.
This latest upgrade follows Kitely’s recent system-wide improvements that have doubled its global performance, demonstrating the company’s continued commitment to improving its services without increasing user costs.
Kitely, released to the public in March 2011, is one of the longest-running and most innovative OpenSim grids. Featuring a unique on-demand region system and the popular Kitely Market, this grid plays a key role in the virtual world ecosystem.
For more information about the script changes and how they might affect your world, Kitely recommends checking out YEngine’s OpenSimulator wiki entry.