Gloebits proposes money module for OpenSim viewers

Mobius Grid has implemented Gloebits grid-wide. (Serra Royale.)

Gloebit has built, tested and proposed to Firestorm viewer team, a patch that, if implemented, will bring multi-currency support in OpenSim and eliminate the need for Gloebit users to do complicated coding and configuration for their grids and regions to support various money modules.

With the current viewer implementation, the currency symbol is configured to work with the global settings of the grid that a user first logs in and does not update even when the same user teleports or hypergrids to a different region using a different currency service. The patch will remove that confusion by making sure that the symbol updates to the currency symbol of the currency module supported in the new grid.

Christopher Colosi

“This is a big step forward in getting the money module to handle all commerce activity and truly making it so that you install and configure the Gloebit Money Module and everything just works,” Gloebit CEO Christopher Colosi told Hypergrid Business.

That means if a user teleports from a region with one currency to a region that uses a different currency, the currency symbol in the top right-hand of the viewer window will be automatically updated.

“With the Gloebit Money Module enabled, this will set the symbol to ‘G$,'” he said.-

The patch is now available for download for importing and as a reference to any viewer development teams who want to develop a similar module.

ZanGrid Hypershopping I and II regions are Gloebits enabled. (Image courtesy ZanGrid.)

The helper-uri will also update automatically to that of the new grid if the patch is implemented in the viewer when a user teleports or hypergrids to a different grid supporting a different currency module supported in the previous grid.

This means that the buy-currency, insufficient-funds, and buy-land flows will work without breaking and without asking the user to manually update the grid info in their viewer and without the currency.php file, landtool.php file or an xml-rpc server set up.

“I haven’t double checked this, but it might allow a foreign hypergrid visitor to buy land in a foreign grid,” he said.

For instance, if the Gloebit Money Module is enabled in the region that the user newly teleports or hypergrids to, the helper-uri will point at the sim running this region which will allow the Gloebit Money Module to handle these calls directly.

Gloebit, which is currently in use on more than a dozen grids, is inviting the OpenSim community to get onto Firestorm’s jira and vote up the idea.

The Gloebit team has not yet enabled purchasing of Gloebits directly in the viewers, but the update will allow them to set helpful messaging for a user either directing them to link or authorize Gloebit, or to buy Gloebits.

“Once we feel most users have updated to viewers with this functionality, we may remove the messaging we currently send to users each session letting them know how to auth/link or buy Gloebits, as we’ll be able to supply that messaging when they need it during the purchase flow,” he said.

Gloebit has been supplying the currency service for grids and regions but that required manually supplying of the currency service parameters to the viewer when the user enters a Gloebits enabled region, which was complicated and involving on the user side.

The update will also eliminate the need for users to learn the process of configuring the module, which takes time. It will also eliminate break of buy-currency, buy-land, and insufficient-funds flows breaks that are experienced.

Implementation of the patch in Firestorm will be great news for Gloebit because the viewer has the highest users at 53 percent followed by Singularity at 26 percent and 7 percent for Alchemy according to a post. Gloebit hopes that the Firestorm development team reviews, imports and tests the code, and include it in their next viewer update.

“I have no idea how much time they spend on that or if they ever modify code,” he said.

Singularity and Alchemy viewers have confirmed they will implement the module although they will need to do some changes on the patch code because the viewers’ codes are different from Firestorm code.

But there are tens of viewers out there who would also need to do the changes. For those viewers that have not diverged from Firestorm in terms of their code can just import the module as well without doing any changes to the patch code.

“If they have (diverged), they might need to resolve merge conflicts or they might need to just use this as a reference and redo the work for their system,” he said. “Even though they may have coding to do, I’ve done the most challenging piece, which is to understand the existing system and determine how and where to change it.”

The team will keep improving the module as time goes and as problems are discovered. For instance, the currency symbol works well with all buy-currency floaters that have dynamic string but they might be adding some changes if any buy-currency floaters with static string are found.

“As those are discovered, we may need to add a few lines of code to force those to update as well,” said Colosi.

Currently, it allows grid owners and event hosts to sell tickets to an event in OpenSim using a built-in parcel access interface.