Voice, better Maptiles and Music

We cant ignore the news about Vivox voice available for OSgrid and opensim. You can read all about it in this article from Hypergridbusiness . On OSgrid, you can goto a sim called 3Dvoiceplay, to test it for yourself. We did, and it works just fine. Also the IM voice works, at least as long as both users have (been) on a voice enabled sim. Imprudence cuts out at TP, other viewers like singularity, astra, and some others appearently "carry" the voicestream over to other sims at teleport. If ended, you can only enable it again if the sim is "voice enabled". As soon as we get an account at vivox, we hope to post a tutorial on how to get it on your sim.

If you look around the map, you mostly see green black and pink squares of the prims rezzed on it. Maptile old style. However, some sims have prims drawn on their map, like you see in SL. By default your OSG install can do this for you aswell, through activating the "warp3D image module". This is done by adding 1 line to the opensim.ini, find and see the snippet below and add the line in red:

    ;; Map tile options. You can choose to generate no map tiles at all,
    ;; generate normal maptiles, or nominate an uploaded texture to
    ;; be the map tile
    MapImageModule = "Warp3DImageModule"
    GenerateMaptiles = "true"

This can have some impact on the initial loading time the 1st time you boot a sim. (It has to draw all that prims on the map). Afterwards, you will have a great looking map and your sim will start up fast as usual. If desired you can tweak the maptile refresh timer to a bigger value so its not writing to map constantly.

Than a small note for people running winamp / shoutcast. Dnas2 requires you to buy a streaming license these days, so find a copy of 1.9.8 if you dont want to pay to send some tunes to your own parcel. Mind to configure Legacy mode for it to work.


Since this post still needed a nice picca, check these sims of PMgrid, which is a very nice region on hypergrid. The sims are named ROM.
Definetely worth a hypergrid trip, and a visit.

Migrating your Sim to MySQL

Ok, you followed the steps in the previous post to setup a sim, and all is up and running. If you don't plan to running more than 1 region, or have no urge to stuff 45000 prims on it, the SQL lite version OSG comes with will work & perform just fine. Apart from having better performance, running MySQL has a some other slight  advantages. Whenever you need to upgrade your OSG server software, you will have to make an OAR backup of your sim, and import that in the new installation.

With MySQL you have all your stuff stored in a database sever which runs seperate from OSG. This means that you only need to point the new installation to the database, and it will just load all, without you needing to import or export anything. Below the page break you will find a step by step instruction on how to install mySQL, and what to change in the gridcommon.ini file to point OSG towards the correct database.

As its still wise to make a backup OAR file every once and a while, you can read up on how to do that in the Wiki. Its well documented. Hence we will skip this part in the installation below. You DO want to read that wikipage. Many people that just follow shortcut guides and have no interest or clue of what their actually doing, will  run stuck in the long run. Don't let the technical terminology scare you. And mind there are no perfect guides. If you get the bigger picture, the small stuff will fall into place by itself. 

Running a region and urban legends

Since there is a massive flow of new users entering the OSgrid, here is a topic worth reading for you, especially if you are completely new, or want to run a region but your not able to for some reason. And some stuff that is worth remembering.

1. You likely come from another virtual world. Like secondlife. Osgrid is not Secondlife. Some major differences ? In Secondlife all costs loads of money. Osgrid is free and open source. OSgrid core is hosted in a datacenter on decent machines, maintained by Nebadon Izumi and a couple of admins. However the majority of its sims run on peoples home connections.
So if a sim is not up, or performs crappy, its possible you hit a 1000mhz celeron with 512 KB RAM on somebody's 256kb/ps wireless DSL line on the himalaya just as he's downloading sexy movies. Try again later, and mind it's not the grid, but the PC you landed on giving you the weird issues.
Also switching between viewers and grids a lot, can cause cache problems, avatars not properly loading, and other weird crap. Especially on multi layer supporting viewers. Explains why some people never have rezzing and imventory issues, and others do all the time.No machine / viewer combi is the same. However, the grid works fine for most people. (subtile hint). Cleaning cache, and using 1 viewer saves you headaches.

2. OSgrid runs on donations and is run by volunteers. Its a Test-grid, and has no working economy. Most stuff is free. Permissions are set by respective creators. Free doesnt mean no rules. You can imagine that a volunteer that likes tech stuff is not very fond of handling formal incoming DCMA requests (boring administrative paperwork) in his sparse free time. Abuse or misbehaviour of the grid or its residents and use of illegal viewers like copybots can result in you being banned. You will find this a rarity though, as OSgrid is filled with cool people :). And you can always run a standalone for "private" experiments. On the grid, behave, and you'll be fine.

3. Do not copy all you can see. Greed is a useless emotion in OSgrid. Since almost all is free anyways, its useless to carry all around, and also it makes exporting your inventory ( yes you can do that ) take ages.

4. Setting up a sim is not real hard, if you have a clue about networking and Pc's. Google, opensim wiki pages, this Blog, OSgrid forums, they get you a loooong way. However whatever you do, do NOT go into a plaza asking "everybody" for help. Better to ask a single person in IM, than to all in chat. Unless you are  prepared for 1000 well meant advices that get you nowhere but lost in a scala of possible issues (that you might never even run into to begin with).
An idiot proof step by step guide with preparations can be found below the page break. OSgrid is pretty stable and thus there is no reason why it shouldn't work for you. It hasn't got absurd requirements, but the more CPU power, RAM and bandwith you feed it, the better it will work.

5. The urban legend :  Generally if your SIM appears on the map, but you cant get to it, somethings misconfigured. Typically the upstream router needs a port assignment, an IP in the regions.ini file is invalid, or a firewall is in the way. On very rare occasions people have a router in which NAT loopback is disabled, for instance when an ISP doesn't allow servers to run at the users homes. (95% of all modern routers just support this function, and its on by default). Even if you would run into this, you can relatively simply install a loopback adapter in windows to fix it. (although i'd advise a different router / ISP in such case ).

This topic will be edited a few times until i get all i want to write in decently.

Club Azul opening next week

We know from reliable sources in the grid that Club Azul will launch somewhere next week. Find it at 137,121,305 on Coral Sailing1 sim for a sneak peek.

We will publish more info once we get updated on exact dates and times.