opensimulator just released version 0.7 and it seems to have several very good fixes. i am not sure what half of them mean, but the core developers have been doing a lot of work. our fave coder (cuz someone is crushing on jcc) predicted that we may see version 1.0 of OpenSim this year. i guess that would be the first beta version? it is still considered alpha software. as OpenSim continues to improve, more and more virtual options will come online as well as providing a better experience

in this version, they consolidated some tables meaning less complexity and fewer tables to call on and they did a lot of work on hypergridding

being able to hypergrid is both a good and bad thing. remember when Linden Lab and IBM made the first hypergrid teleport three years ago?

it was considered huge news and promised a more open virtual world experience. but LL never went anywhere with it – partly for piracy reasons and partly for money (imo)

hypergridding, to me, is kind of like surfing the web. you can hop around to different grids with your one avatar. that opens up a great number of sims and grids out there, from grids on people’s own machines to grids in OSGrid (see a list of HG grids). Alec mentioned a very interesting concept about Google and other web search engines indexing virtual world places. that would be a huge change and add traffic to Second Life as well as other grids. how great would it be to hit Google or Yahoo and search “virtual world Aeron chair” and get results showing what worlds they were in and so on? click the link and go there via hypergrid just like hitting a SLURL

but hypergridding also opened up security issues. if you were to hypergrid to Enclave Harbour, 216.75.6.85:9002, i could copy your inventory. lol, that is super theoretical because i have absolutely no clue where to even start that nor do i have any interest in collecting other people’s stuff – i have enough junk of my own! =D

but that is a legitimate concern for creators

in the 0.7 release of OpenSim, they have addressed this in a very smart way. when you arrive on another grid, rather than downloading your entire inventory, a suitcase is created in your inventory as a folder. the welcoming sim can now only see into that folder, plus see anything you are wearing. your inventory is no longer exposed, unless you open it and search for something

they also fixed a vulnerability that had allowed for people to spoof your avatar (ener clones wreaking havoc all over the place) =p

lots of little bugs were fixed and all in all, this looks like a significant update

thank you OpenSim developers! =)