OpenSim users pledge $2,000 to improve vehicles

Update: More supporters pledged funds to the effort, bringing the total to $2,000.

Members of the OpenSim Virtual Google Plus community have pledged $1,550 to improve vehicle scripting by fixing bugs with the way llLookAt and llMoveTo commands are implemented in OpenSim.

“Today I’m making a personal pledge of $200 — and I might donate more if the the pledges come in — to launch the campaign to raise a bounty,” wrote group owner Talla Adam in a post last week.

Community member Shin Ingen was the first to step up with a matching pledge.

“Put me in for $200,” he wrote. “I have been waiting for those two functions for a while now.”

Community member Fred Beckhusen followed up with a $500 pledge, bringing the current total to $900.

Other contributors include Virtual Outworlding editor Selby Evans with $500,  Avi-Labs grid founder Alex Pomposelli with $100, and XMIR grid founder Geir Nøklebye with $50.

Meanwhile, until these bugs are fixed, Beckhusen has a tutorial for how to work around the llLookAt bug with his own face_target function.

Fred Beckhusen's flying bee. (Image courtesy Fred Beckhusen.)
Fred Beckhusen’s flying bee. (Image courtesy Fred Beckhusen.)

Bounties have worked in OpenSim before. In 2011, for example, NPC functionality came to OpenSim via a bounty.

Another successful crowdfunding effort was Qarl’s parametric deformer project, which raised more than $5,000 from users in Second Life and OpenSim, but benefited primarily OpenSim since Second Life chose not to adopt the code.

Maria Korolov