Saturday, December 28, 2013

Happy new year

The end of 2013, a year with a lot of movement in all aspects. We re-gained what was lost, moved and upgraded, built new stuff, lost some friends, gained some friends, and another year has passed. Time flies when you're having Fun. Next year we will focus on new plans, new builds, new activities, and you can keep up to date by checking back here. On the blog some fresh links to nice goodies were added, and the downloads page is about to be cleaned and updated. On Red Dragon X build, a new club emerged above the apartments, but it's still a work in progres.  Also a new standalone was setup. Find it at http://simulator.madfoxx.net ( mind it's emprty, as it will be a 2014 project).

Last days of this years agenda :

    Cookie with no permissions
  • 29-12 OSG's 1st annual member meeting will be held at Bade plaza. Details can be found in the forum.
  • 31-12 a "countdown" party is held at LBSA plaza. DJ Dan will provide the tunes for your entertainment. (pst-time).
  • 1-1 *****- will be updated later -*****
Our "spend your money wisely" top value investment tips for 2014 can be found here and here. Keep posted by joining the community here.
Find your chinese horoscope prediction here and generate your own cool fortune cookies there.  Well, so far for 2013 hope to see you all again in 2014. Stay safe and have fun.

Happy new years wishes in your native language below the break. (If your language is not there, i'm sorry, i wasn't aware you had access to the internet there already... But happy new year to you as well).

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Merry Christmas


On behalf of the Red Dragon Nite Club, 
Merry Christmas and all the best for 2014.

Keep posted for dates & times of the OSG new years party.  





Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Something new

Not on the grids. Here on the Blog. A Youtube list. You get to pick your own random Christmas Song. Stuff from the 80's up to today. Mind i didn't make any of these.... Youtube approved all of them. Flames about farting elves can best directly be posted in the comments below the respective video(s).

Songs :
Smokinn Santahttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMOmr3FW8Zk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCWn7Sro9HY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJSBXt_VOOA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFUVTgTBP4U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xkCRbCe2rs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP4-7VQV42k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR07r0ZMFb8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KppZLfQLKxQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiP45unhy_E


If you like that last one, here's a URL you can use to make your own vid's. http://www.elfyourself.com
Nice if you want to surprise friends, colleagues or family on their public facebook timeline....

If you're tired of the annual Scrooge on TV, feel free to check any of the videos below:

Full movies : 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL46fAxWztA   Santa's slay
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wasPlLRQass     Santa who ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c95hc4ZNt1k    once upon a christmas movie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sopjvsoruiQ        twice upon a christmas movie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H828NrDJJSs   A mom for christmas

So far for all the christmas prep of this year. Seasons greetings will follow, hopefully along with an update on the christmas and new years events in OSgrid. Check the forums or the travel centre for to find the nicest christmas regions for now.

Friday, November 22, 2013

D&J 5th year anniversary

Friday 22-11 i attended the 5th anniversary of D&J's and celebrated with what is likely the oldest club in the metaverse. For the occasion we were not on the close encounter ( D&J Home region ) but you can visit the region by finding  "Feriae Quinquennial" on the map.

With 5 years of non stop party's every friday, (and trust me, i have done so for 3 years in SL. this takes dedication, devotion, and loads of it ) Dorothea and Jay are true "Pillars of Community". Respect, and a big thanks for all the fun & good times are in place here, and i assume i can safely post this is on behalf of a lot of OSG residents. Keep rocking, and hope to be at the 10 year celebration as well.


The party was great, and busy, I saw a lot of familiar names (couldn't recognise anyone, as all were dressed up in Roman outfits), and also talked to some people i hadn't seen in months. If you have some spare time, you should visit this region just to check out the build. It is detailed, and beautifully made.
A Video impression thingy of the party can be found HERE .

Friday, November 8, 2013

Software


In case you need more / different free tools that you can't find in the links section you might want to browse the list in our freshly updated "Downloads" page. (it's available under the button in the top Menu).

The downloads are not necessarily directly related to opensimulator or metaverses, but can still be very useful, as they link directly to download pages from their creator rather than vague download or torrent sites. Like our links section below the posts, the download page will be frequently updated with fresh goodies, so expect it to grow over time.To avoid making the list too long, check Ninite first, for basic needs.

Some of the software you will already know or even have installed, others might be very useful, but might have gone unnoticed. It's a handy reference list if you need something specific quickly, not having to click around search results and you avoid being bombarded with adds and laggy download managers, toolbars and other crap. Mind it's just a list of software, which may or  may not work for your specific quest.

In any case, hope it's useful to you Enjoy !

Sunday, November 3, 2013

OneHundred

100 what ? Posts on this Blog. This is the 100th post in Red Dragon Club's Blog.Wohoo !!
In the past 3 years we gathered a lot of information on OSgrid, and the various tools you can use to enhance the daily virtual life, and create content for the metaverse. With 21K views, the blog remains an underground place you have to stumble about. Do not underestimate the content on this page though. Many questions i ran into in my 8 year metaverse travels have their solutions hidden in the posts and links here. 

The next logical upgrade to this Blog should be a gallery, and direct downloads, but since a lot of things can be already found in the link pages, and it being a lot of work to categorise and index them, i don't have a lot of incentive to start building pages for it. So the blog will be maintained and updated monthly as it has been in the past years. 

At Red Dragon Regions about 80 teleporters have been placed on strategic places, so you can teleport around to places on the regions you would else likely miss, due to the builds being so huge. Since i'm slowly running against the boundaries of what this machine can handle, the V8 builds are up less often. ( if all 18 regions are up, there is too little RAM left to decently run a viewer and browser).

I have had some requests to start hosting party's again, but before i can, i will have to build a new island, with a smaller club and less prims. The main region has simply got too many prims for people to be able to party hard. It will lag your pants off if you start running animations with 10+ people i recon.  This will however not stop me from building until at least 45K prims there. Just because I can.

I hope you enjoy this Blog. If it is to any use to you, feel free to subscribe. If you don't feel like subscribing, you can also choose to add me to your G+ circles or follow Red_dragon_club on twitter. It will update you when i release any brain farts on this blog.  So much for this yadayada topic, i'm going to pop into OSG to find at what time the Primwords game starts today.

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Halloween part II

If you missed out on the OSG halloween party, you still have a chance to exhibit your most spooky outfit at upcoming D&J's Halloween themed friday party.

The region is Close Encounter, and  Doro & Jay will be your host and DJ. Mind that for the occasion you will need to be costumed. People that walk in with their "regular" avatars will have their souls eaten, and have to stay and cleanup the prims and do the dishes when the party has ended...  Well, maybe not, but the request is to wear a custom avatar for the occasion, and contribute to the atmosphere of the party. Mind the time displayed is GMT.

Unfortunately all pictures I shot at the OSG party are saved in inventory ( have to export,  open TGA, convert to JPG, normalise, resize etc. before i can upload, not going to happen anytime soon ) and the video i shot has an IM window open, so hopefully others have shot some footage. I'll dig through OSG gallery and G+  for them later and update this topic with links if i find any.

At Red Dragon Club X region a new furniture store & art gallery opened, by RedVerse Waspe. If you look for custom prim furniture or abstract art, you might want to pop by and visit here. All his work is available full perm and free to copy. You can find it in the main building, 3rd floor, right wing. Teleporters will be placed at the entrance to the building somewhere after the regions are updated with the latest release of OSG.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Halloween Dance 2013 in OSgrid

The annual halloween party OSgrid throws was just announced on OSg forums Halloween Dance for 2013!!
Region : All Hallows Plaza
Date  : Saturday the 26th of october
Time: 19:30 UTC - 7:30pm GMT - 12:30 pm PDT


Any people that would like to perform as a guest DJ can reply on the forum topic or contact Dan Banner inworld for the schedule. Last years party was a big success, pictures of it can be found at  OSG's Halloween Gallery . There is still plenty of time left to gather your spooky outfit and free time in your tight building schedules as this is one of those party's  you don't want to miss. LBSA plaza already transformed to a spooky graveyard like gloomy place. We will put up some halloween stuff only on Red Dragon club X region. (too much cleaning afterwards if we put it everywhere)  Happy hunting the grid for all the cool Halloween treats, and hope to see all you zombies at the party !

If you want to party Tonight (13-10-2013) :
Sunday night live in The Maritime Club in Virtual Belfast on OSGrid at 2pm PST 10pm GMT we feature Trulie Ellen live from her Nashville studio playing her all original country-punk / folk-noir ballads followed by DJ Stiofain X

Join in at :
hg.osgrid.org:80:Maritime%20Club%20Belfast/16/105/33
hop within osgrid
hop://login.osgrid.org/Maritime%20Club%20Belfast/15/101/30

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Version 0.8

All  Red Dragon Regions have been updated to version 0.8.0 of Opensimulator. If you are still running your regions on a 0.7.x build, my advice is to upgrade immediately. We have setup all ini files from scratch as we were running a pretty dated configuration. The performance increase is noticeable. All servers and regions are tested and working fine. This week we will test some of the opensim.ini options, like the ability to see 3 regions further rather than 1. I don't know if and how this will work, because of the 34K prims on a single region, but we will find out soon enough.

All Red Dragon Regions have also been moved to a new domain, simulator.madfoxx.net
This as my 10 year old Madfoxx.kicks-ass.net DynDNS account caught an error ( Dyn changed a security certificate which my firewall didn't trust, so it terminated the connection). Since the account was grandfathered from Dyns "free" service, it expired as i "forgot" to login and reactivate it within a month. The client in my firewall normally did this automatically and i didn't notice it going down due to the certificate issue
Anyways, no more free DNS, just a FQDN from now on. Also we moved some regions to their own simulator, to offload the Red Dragon Nite Club and Red Dragon Club X regions, and re-mapped all the port assignments.

I''m also working on a shiny new linux box, and hope to get a Diva standalone running on that machine, which can be on 24/7. Likely it will launch somewhere next year. On that server, we will possibly offer some space for Residents to live on. If you are interested in a plot, feel free to contact Foxx Bode inworld.

As i was browsing through my popular search terms in here, i find people looking for private parts on OSgrid. Good one, as you don't get these at the welcome center.....  The freebie HQ on wright plaza has a ton of  free stuff and shops, but due to its G rating, no private parts are allowed there. So for the cool scripted goodies, you will really need to make some friends and ask around. If you look for private parts in OSgrid, a good place to start is by asking around at LBSA plaza. ( and yes, people WILL have an opinion on that ). But no worries, don't feel ashame. we all came here as Ruth, so we know your feeling. Even if you never use it, you still pack one.

 -- Update :( I asked around at LBSA ) : some very helpful people notified me that you can find PG rated items and the appropriate attachments at  Susukino Region ( find it on map). Mind these are Adult regions etc.
NB: * ( Also, you can quit sending me your private parts, i'm good.....Really....Stop it.... unless you built it yourself and its some awesome scripted mesh one, of which i need to own a copy, else please no more....)* .

Saturday, September 28, 2013

Updated Red Dragon Club

All Red Dragon regions have been updated to 0.7.6.dev.53de6d9 build of OSG. All is up and running very stable & smoothly so far. The picture on the left is the beginning of the bowling thingy i started building in this topic. Its located on the 1st floor in the back of Red Dragon Nite Club Region.

As you might have already noticed, I slightly modified the layout of this page. You will possibly see more changes occur in the future. For now I have changed the width of the page and added a top menu, which will (eventually) lead you to new content.
Also i removed some elements from the frontpage and placed those on separate pages, like IRC, the (very nice) Hexxagon game, and the chatbot. I added an extra column to the links section, so it appears less massive, and you can find all the goodies faster. The tag cloud will take you to random pages on my blog. Furthermore some clubs and links were added, and dead / inactive Blogs were removed. Checked 2170 web pages, found 25 broken links. Meaning most the goodies are still where they belong. Go grab some.


Friday, September 27, 2013

Bugfix new release and Crazy Diamond club

As you might have read on twitter, OSG forums or Hypergridbusiness the 4096 bug that's been there since forever has been fixed. A developer from Singularity named "Latif Khalifa" fixed it. Test results of various OSG residents confirm. Another limitation squashed. Hurray for Latif. No more teleport problems.

Since the Opensim conference it appears things work more smoothly between various party's involved with opensimulator, and hopefully it will bring more good things. I read in some chatlogs there are people working on the scalable regions again, so who knows what the future will bring. A little downtime last week seems to have improved the performance of the asset server. stats  Also new version of OSgrid Simulator was released, you can grab it here . If you really like OSgrid you should use this link.
Guitarsim

Whilst hopping around the map looking for hidden gems, my eye got caught by a guitar on the map. I popped over and found a club, called The Crazy Diamond Club. Nice rock music there, but since there was no party, i took the liberty to sit down and write this magnificent piece of Blog.


Likes the rock music hereIf you want to visit this region yourself, find "SoundChaser" on the OSgrid map. You land at 500 mtr in the club, have to pop down if you want to see the Guitar. Can't wait to party here someday.





Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Pic's of the shop and voting system

As you likely have read in the previous topic, Red Dragon has a small shop located at Wright plaza. If inworld, you can read this very Blog by enabling media. You can enjoy the tunes from Pulse Radio as well.


If you visit the Red Dragon Nite Club region, and like the build, you can now vote for the region again. We reinstated the tool from Oliveira on the region. Other regions using this voting system inworld are listed on his website here. Some have comments, pictures and/or video available.

You can obtain this voting system for you own regions, by searching the map for Sandbox Oliveira 48 in OSgrid. Be sure to check the surrounding regions for other nice goodies, has some nice builds and shops,and these regions tend to be "always online". Also when in need for Land, you can contact Fernando Oliveira inworld or though his webpage.

Also a lot of newly released initiatives found their way to my mailbox this week, such as Kitely's marketplace (Click here) , for people looking to sell/ buy virtual creations,  and unity's Extreme Reality SDK which promises to turn your webpage into a 3Dworld. So many cool things to explore, and so little time.....

Monday, September 16, 2013

NPC's & Bowling

After watching a couple of the breakout session vids of last weekends great Opensim Conference, it is back to building as usual. Since Red Dragon has a lot of space, I figured to start working on an indoor bowling alley. (thanks for the idea Mss. Moonwing). With Bullet physics being enabled in the next build of Opensimulator  (it's currently implemented, but not activated in opensim.INI ) we might even try to make it a working.one. If i can find a script guru that is willing to script it, that is.

I have also logged into Second Life for a couple of minutes, to re-enable my PikkuBot. I have had it running in OSG version 0.6.8 and am going to try to get it alive again on the current 0.7.x build. If i get it working again (recall it was simple, but very hard to find), i will post here how to get it working, if only for future reference.

Pikkubot is an extremely light weight text based Bot control program, that can be hooked up to ALICE AI (pandora chat bot), and do all kinds of useful things, like chat, host, dance, play games, follow you around. invite people to group etc, and this all completely independant of the OSG server hosting the red dragon regions. (It will be sort of a client based NPC).  Licensing of this bot can only be acquired through Secondlife, but you can get a free trial for a week.

Furthermore i played around with the radegast client, which is also a lightweight client, but still 10 times heavier than pikkubot (around 40 MB vs 320 MB of  RAM). I was impressed by its features, like voice and audio support, and the ease of having a minimal 3d viewer ad map access ( Pikku is txt only, at least it was the last time i used it ).

I know opensim has a built in working NPC script, but there is already plenty of documentation on that in OSG's forums ( And cool video's on youtube ).  These are however script created, and for as far as i know, can't get off the region there created on.


Sunday, September 8, 2013

Opensim conference


If you regularly visit any or multiple grids,  i recommend you to visit the Opensim Conference  (click link for more details) which is held this weekend. There will be a variety of speakers and events, and the display regions that have been put up are just amazing. Very nice builds, and a great representation of what the various grids in the metaverse have to offer. Definitely worth a visit. The Expo regions are open to all public.

I believe all the sessions with speakers & keynotes are full.  Some free tickets are atill available at this link : https://opensimulator.eventbrite.com , and all will be streamed live on Ustream as it is happening  There are really interesting topics being discussed You can check back what already happened yesterday by going HERE and view the recorded streams. URL's to the live streams can be found after the page break.

I think this conference is already a huge success, only looking at the tremendous effort it must have been to set things up, and to get all these people from allover the world to collaborate and work together to create this event.  The regions & webpages look great, the expositions are awesome. Livestreams work like a charm, and all well is documented for us that were asleep, so we don't miss out. For some reason, it feels like it is a big step forward, all these worlds uniting in this conference.

To the organisation, the various speakers at the Opening Keynote and all the grid owners, Chapeau, you have made this an impressive event, and thank you for making our virtual lives possible. This event will be an annually recurring one, but the grid (which is specifically built for this event ) will disappear after a few months, so make sure to pop by whilst you have the chance.  On map : cc.opensimulator.org:8002

This conference was one of the best and most informative event i ever visited in the metaverse. I recon i'll be busy a few more days watching all the recorded streams with the sessions i missed. But since all i attended was awesome, i need to see the rest as well.
Pictures of the event can be found on the Google+ event  page HERE. mind to add yours if you made any.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

GreenHouse & Region Update.

ohh this is empty
 Having way too much space on my hands, i figured to build another clubby build. Since the chosen colour was Green, i slightly modified the surroundings, and made a dance floor surrounded by an an in house jungle. You can find the GreenHouse on the Red Dragon Club X build, by walking in the front door, and keep going straight ahead, past the shops.

Located directly above the club is a Gallery displaying some pictures of the Red Dragon builds in progress. On the same floor, you will also find a small Photo studio, with some nice picture backgrounds, and a "Perfect Pillars" shop that offers a variety of pillars.

Nice, a Green HouseClubRed Dragon has updated all its regions to the 0.7.6.dev.23ca1f8 version which can be downloaded HERE. I don't know what changes have been made, but the regions run nice and smooth, and seem to perform better than the last version we had installed.
We also fixed an issue with regions being unavailable, giving a "Null" reply in console. This occurred when the system resumed from a "sleep" state. Regions appear up and running, but TP is impossible. Simply switching off the power management for the disks has most likely resolved this. And last but not least, for the fans, Linda Kelly's stuff can be found & downloaded again on the new website http://zadaroo.com/

Sunday, August 18, 2013

Red Dragon at Wright Plaza

As of last week, Red Dragon Nite Club has a small shop on Wright Plaza in OSGrid. When you drop in at the landing zone, you will see it on your right side. Were across "Sarah's Creations" and have M Spiritor and Rigid as our neighbours.  Audio on the plot is powered by Pulse Radio, and there are some nice freebies to fetch. If you allow the media to play, you will get served this Blog, so you can read up on the latest topic here. Upstairs is a mini dance floor and some lights, to get into the clubby groove.

Our version X regions are generally up every evening, the V8 build is only on in weekends. The pictures displayed on the shop will provide in landmarks to the varions Red Dragon islands. If TP fails, the regions are down. If i'm online, my regions generally are as wel. If not, feel free to send an IM.

Especially when new to OSGrid, wright plaza is a very good place to start your virtual explorations in this world. It has many shops with a diversity of  great free stuff, and landmarks to many great places. Also it is home to the biggest freebie store in OSG, the Freebie HQ, where you can also share your own creations with the residents of the grid. Looking for basic stuff for your AV ? skins clothing, eyes, homes, you will find all of it at Wright. Last but not least, wright is the location where the Town Hall meetings are held, and its where OSG's Travel Office has its home location. From there you can teleport to a range of region showcases in both OSgrid and the hypergrid.

Friday, August 9, 2013

I know this place...

It is situated in OSgrid. It is said to be a club.It's big. Possibly the biggest club in the metaverse. It has the following "features" for leisure and entertainment : A  hotel, 2 cinema's, various podia (classic, rock, dance, themed) some club areas, (about a dozen) a couple of pools & hot tubs, a restaurant, bars, beaches, a port with boats and a lighthouse ( in progress)  3 travel centers, various shops like : D&J furniture, Lalinda's, Perfect Pillars, Fluffy's Gestures, RDS design, and Jorinks Art Gallery. You can find some photo gallery's, 2 photo studio's, a club in a planet in a building below a pool. Furthermore there are about 9 very spacious apartments, a couple of homes, some small, some sim wide, it has tropical area's,  futuristic area's, mountains, seaside, some gardens & parks, various fountains and waterfalls, caves, hidden places  and more...

Shops and goodies are scattered over 18 regions, and its easy to get lost. Some areas are built underground, some over water, and almost every build has multiple floors. The largest buildings are over 200 mtr, and the regions combined carry well over 100.000 prims. The regions are filled with many items collected and built in OSgrid over the past years. Many of them are full perm.
Some of the area's are still empty, and many area's still need a lot of work, but the regions tend to have their own unique atmosphere, (playing with daylight, ar large view range and high GFX settings  are recommended when visiting.) .

What can be found in the shops ? DJ & club gear, dance balls, furniture, swords & blades, pillars, art, textures, gestures, buildings, trees, boats, airships, and various other things. We are still looking for people that want to put up a shop with their freebies at one of our locations. There is plenty of free space available. If you have boxes of things you like to share, equip them with an LM if you have your own place, and drop them at one of the mailboxes, or directly in the CEO's inventory. You will find them back at the markets on the regions. This can also be done if you want to have your sims displayed on our Wall of Fame, or in the travel centers.

You are welcome to visit in these regions every weekend. You can find them by opening your map and find the Red Dragon Nite Club. All regions are adjacent and named Red Dragon.

Monday, August 5, 2013

The Aftermath & party pictures

Yesterday, after a first attempt at the "Primwords" game (hurray, I was in the winning team) the closing event of OSG6B was held at OSG6B central. In case you missed these party's last weekend, you can still check the picca's. You can find these on the following links:

OSG forums album by Lani Global
OSG Forums by Key Gruin
Vid of OSG6b East by  MoritunaWatanabe

OSG's  Gallery's will also have pictures, but you will have to search people's albums. ( great place to check more awesome pictures of builds from past to present).


The party's I attended were well visited, and lively, so good fun. A whole lineup of DJ's playing a variety of music, and live performances completed this years event. I assume the exhibits will remain up for a while longer, but you don't want to wait weeks before fetching all the goodies and LM's. These sims eventually are removed.

The Red Dragon build has seen various new visitors, from the USA to Japan, and received nice feedback. So it's very likely we will be present again next year. We thank OSG and it's community for their mutual input, and making it possible to participate and visit this great event. Thanks ! It was fun.

Oh, and if you just stumbled over this Blog, go Here, create yourself a free account, download a viewer here, install it, select OSgrid from the login screen, and login with the account details you just filed. You can afterwards share in all the fun, and this Blog will make more sense to you....

Sunday, August 4, 2013

Travelcenter and OSG6B Closing Event


Red Dragon installed the travel centre on 2 locations, Red Dragon Nite Club, and Red Dragon Shops. From there, you can now travel trough to various places OSG and the hypergrid have to offer. You can update your own, or request placement of your LM and picture on the main center in Wright Plaza. 
We also erected a smal exhibit on OSG6B west, where you can read the Blog, check some pictures of the various Red Dragon Builds, and grab some goodies.

OSGrid 6th birthday closing event will be held 1pm gridtime /pst ( This is 22.00 CET for us europeans) at OSG6B Central.Dont miss out on the last party of OSG's 6th Birthday.

“The Maritime Club on the Road”  for osgrid 6th birthday bash is featuring the following line up :

1 pm DJ Jazzy Chatterbox - classic southern rock and blues
2 pm Joaquin Gustav – live Argentinian smooth jazz guitar
3 pm truelie ellen – all original folk noir / country punk live from Nashville
3.30 pm casias falta – originals and classic blues live from Detroit
4 pm truelie ellen
4.30 pm casias falta 
5 pm DJ Stiofain X - rare irish vinyl and eclectic rock

Feel free to join and meet up with the wonderful people in OSG, and enjoy the tunes.

Saturday, August 3, 2013

Happy Birthday OSG

OSB turned 6 years so the OSG6B party kicked of yesterday at D&J's close encounter region. There are 4 regions with exhibits and displays  of various OSG residents, and a central stage where party's will be held.
Freebies, region showcases, displays, sci-fi, smurfs, you will find plenty of wanna haves so make sure to pay the regions a visit. OSG6B north sourth east and west have the displays, events are on Central.

The scheduled events are listed on OSG's forums and stuff gets updated and added along the celebrations. So far you can read up on the activities below :

Friday  8/2 at 11:30 AM PST - D&J OSG6B Party @ Close Encounter

Avatar Repertory Theater presents two weekend performances on Region OSG6B West (the north lot). 
Saturday  8/3  2 PM PST - a radio drama, Ray Bradbury's Zero Hour @ OSG6B West
Saturday 8/3 3 PM PST - Opening word of OSG6B by Albertlr Landar, followed by a dance party
Saturday 8/3 11:30 AM to 12 noon PDT Osgrid viewer time, at Recreation Plaza. Speedbuild contest
Saturday 8/3 6 PM PST - Dance @ OSG6b Central

Sunday 8/4 at 1 PM PST - Live entertainment from The Maritime Club on the Road @ OSG6B Central
Sunday 8/4 at 2 PM PST - a staged reading of three works by Christopher Durang @ OSG6B West

There is also an Opensimulator Conference Loadtest this saturday, prior to the speedbuild contest. If you like to participate, visit the following link.

All Red Dragon regions will be online 24/7 during the OSG6B event, so you can come count the 100.000+ prims between the party's. On behalf of all members, Red Dragon Management wishes OSG and all it's residents a Happy Birthday, and we hope to visit many more of these. Party time !  

Monday, July 29, 2013

Grid down

Huh, The OSgrid is down. Only twitter mentions some downtime, but not what the reason is, nor how long it will take to get things back up and running. The message on twitter states :

ALERT : Grid is offline possibly for the next few days or maybe even longer, we are sorry about this inconvenience but it is unavoidable!

I assume / hope it will be back up before friday, as OSG6B is scheduled to start on that day.  I see some forum topics here and here  that could indicate something went FUBAR on the grid servers. Last outage was in august 2012  just after OSG5B. It was resolved within some hours back than.

I assume the admins will keep us posted when there is news to share. If it remains silent with updates here, you can always check OSG's Forum, Twitter, Newsfeed or scroll down to the bottom of this page, and join the IRC channels to try and get a hold of any admins. ( mind they might be to busy to chat when there trying to fix stuff ). Mind your sumilators will not start, or produce a gazzilion of errors if still "up". best shut them down, and wait for the heads up.

Update : Well that didn't take long. Looks like all is online again. Found this on Nebadons G+
UPDATE : Grid is back online we were able to do a quick band-aid to get things moving again, may be more outages later this week! Stay Tuned

Friday, July 12, 2013

OSG6B Town Hall Meeting

The OSG forums tell me that OSG's 6th birthday event will be held from 2nd to the 6th of August. Events and exhibitionspace can be requested / reserved by asking any of OSG's admins or in the OSG forum topic.
The OSG party's are generally well visited partys, with very nice exhibitions, cool new free stuff, and kick-ass events with various live DJ's / performers playing a variety of music. Last sunday there was a Town Hall meeting about the event, you can find the chat log here 

OSG management has also put out some updates in the forums regarding the meetings they have had. This is mainly about hypergrid and the metro Ban, and the legal status of the non profit organisation. The latest version of the simulator dates from the 6th of july, and can be downloaded here.  We didn't install it yet, so cant tell how it performs.Not much more news at Red Dragon, It will take aproxx. another 5 years to decorate all the huge space. Hopefully around OSG 1.0 :)

This weeks spotlight points to a very useful service in OSG, the Travel Office. It's located on Wright Plaza, maintained by Marcelia Beck and has many landmarkgivers to all the sweetspots in OSgrid, and even the hypergrid.  OSG forums have a topic on how you can upload your own Landmarks there, and the LMgivers also display if a region is up or not, so no more wasting time with teleports into oblivion either.

Newbie, or Die-Hard Metaverse Traveller, the Travel Office will get you to sims you should not miss.

Monday, June 3, 2013

the 100.000+ prim Beast

I retrieved the 9 center regions of the old RD V8 build. The rest was mainly terrian and sea anyways, so of less interest. It gave me back 48972 prims, which were once lost on a broken disk. Along with the 55443 prims that exist on club X islands & shops, Red Dragon regions now have over 104.041 prims online when all its regions are up. As  you can see it eats 90% of the machine's RAM, but this includes a viewer, browser, and bunch of other programs and services, so it isn't all that bad. These 6 simulators in the picca  hold a total of 18 regions, of which 4 are sea only, and 4 are low prim areas ( less than 5000 prims). I try to balance heavily loaded regions, with light or empty ones.
(FYI 5 backups exist of which 2 offsite, and 1 online. So even if my house gets nuked, my OAR's are safe now....).

All  FBI regions are renamed and placed  right above the V8 build for now, but they might be relocated a bit to keep space between Red Dragon and it's neighbours. RD builds are pretty huge compared to normal standards, and we don't want to spoil people's view. All regions have a name with Red Dragon in it now and are located next to eachother, so were easy to find. Feel free and come check out how we stacked all these prims into a huge build. Red Dragon Club. The 100.000+ prim Beast :).


Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Happy days

Almost a year ago, I had a barracuda 1TB disk that crashed, and took down 25 sims and all backups. As the disk was under warranty, I called in and was told a repair would be attempted, or the disk would get destroyed, and I would receive a refurb.
As I didn't care about the hardware, but did about my data, I asked for the pricing of data recovery. The amount per GB was shockingly high, so I decided to cancel my ticket, not willing to pay such amounts, but also not willing to risk loosing my data.

My father happens to have a set of the same barracuda disks in his machine. After 14 months of use, one failed with exaclty the same symptoms as my disk (spins up fine, but the machines bios can detect it anymore, not in USB case, or different machine under DOS or Linux either )  He calls in, and is told this is likely a firmware issue. So UPS comes to pick up his disk, and returns it working fine 3 days later....

So I decided to email Seagate support, explained the above, and ask if they can try the same trick. I didn't know if my warranty was still valid, ( this disk is in my desk drawer for allmost a year ) but they didn't make any issue about it, and I promptly got a UPS shipping label to send my disk  to their repair labs.
And happy joy, today I received my disk back working fine, with  all data !!
All my precious gigabytes of textures, MP3's, my sims, OAR's IAR's all in perfect shape. You can imagine me smiling I recon.

Now I should be upset that a firmware issue seriously gave me a royal headache and made me start from scratch, but I'm way too happy to have all my stuff back. So I wrote a nice email to the support people, with a big "thanks", and am now making backups. On USB, firewire, and in the cloud. Once done i'm going to try and figure how to migrate all the SQL data, upgrade it to 7.x standards, and how to get my "old" sims back alive, before i wil back it up again....
Anyways, luxury problems. For now Foxx has Happy days.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Clean the mean Machine

Last week my machine had a crash.Windows locked up, and i got a bluescreen at restart. No need to say this made me slightly uncomfortable, as last time it did such thing i lost a 1 TB HDD with 25 sims and all backups. Since the bluescreen just flashed ( no chance to read it ), safe mode wouldn't work, and resetting BIOS to default didn't help too much either, i figured to open up the casing and see how things were.

I opened the sidepanel, and found a dead cat... or something hairy dusty and filthy.
So i disconnected all, took all the drives RAM and cards out, and had fun for an hour with some swabs, an old toothbrush (very handy), a can of sprayduster and the vacuum cleaner. Geez the thing was Nasty.
After I reconnected all cabling and re-inserted the RAM and all cards, the bluescreen was no longer there. Good fix, although it took a while.

Anyways, my tip of the day to keep your simulators up and running : If you never opened your casing in the last 3-6  months, you might want to consider doing the same. With warmer weather coming, it's not a bad idea to cleanout your machine a bit. Mine is almost 17 degrees cooler, now the fans generate airflow rather than dustflow.

I know it's a dirty job, but it gets worse if you wait. Go give your machine some love, so it can keep serving you, and me, and all others in the metaverse.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Partners, Password resets & Purging sims

OSG has made some changes. As of valantines day, it's possible to "hook up" with your virtual lover. You can now partner by logging into the OSG website, choosing account / partner and specify the name of the lucky person that accompanies you in your virtual travels. If he / she accepts, you are officially registered as partners. The one benefit this has, is that you can let the partner know in a subtile way your through with em, by simply breaking your partnership.....

Also you get the option to change email adres and passwords. You might want to do this some day, as your already using yours for over 3,4,5 years now ?
Furthermore you can now Purge any region you own from the map. It crashed ? Lost the UUID to it ? or simply want to remove it from the map ? Now you can, by logging in to your account on the website.

New goodies like the stuff above you can find in the  weekly briefings in OSG forums. Last but not least there is a new realease of 0.7.6 you can download it here.  ( Keep in mind the INI changes from the last topic. If you crash and burn at boot, check your configurations ! ) .

Sunday, March 3, 2013

INI changes in new release of OSG

In  the next OSG release ( 0-7-6-dev-e70c71a ) there are some changes to the ini files. Read the OSgrid news page  for updates on what has changed.  Your current / old config will still work, but you want to keep track of these changes to not get stuck eventually, when upgrading your simulators. Also you miss out on the added functionality when you dont make these changes.

For questions, and help, you can vist IRC freenode #osgrid ( scroll down to the bottom of this page ) or ask any of the greeters / admins in one of the plaza's.

We upgraded our regions to the previous 7.6 as this just came out half an hour ago. Red Dragon Club is running in it's own instance now, which should improve performance. We expect to hit 30.000 prims this month, as were gradually working on details and eyecandy. If you visit, you want Ultra settings to make your GFX card work for it's money.

Every once and a while i get IM's / notecards telling me my sims are down. I am aware of it. If the Red Dragon regions are down, it's generally because of banthwidth requirements for other stuff. Red Dragon exists in many other games, as clan, kinship or group. Generally we only recruit dutch members, as most of the games we play have different servers for different regions of the world, and dutch people understand our gibberish on teamspeak a lot better. Check the pages below for more "Red Dragon" action.


Red Dragon Clan      World of Tanks
Red Dragon Kinship  Lord of the Rings  





Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Housekeeping & Party

After we upgrade to the latest OSG release  (planned for next weekend), it's about time to do some housekeeping work on the simulators. The club build now has over 28.000 prims, and since it is really nowhere near finished, it's time to put the region in it's own single instance. It's current 2 neighbours in the same simulator carry around 15.000 and 4000 prims now and it eats a heap of RAM. And although i don't expect it to cause problems, it's just handy to be able to shutdown all other regions, and so free up some GB of Ram when desirable. While at that, can just aswell make some fresh OAR's, and start cleaning out the old installs of 2012 and claim back some diskspace.

Tonight we attended a rock party at the Blue Wave club. Its found in the region "Pyramid", and is under water. I found myself between fancy dressed avatars, with various rock classics swinging the place, provided by samira's live stream. As you can see in the pic, there's a party here every wednesday. And we can't party too much, now can we, with all this hard labour ahead of us....  Feel you missed out ? If your quick you can still get there... Next opportunity is this friday, when you can find most party people at  the weekly D&J party with DJ(ay). Yao

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Opensimulator.me

Reading though my daily Google+ mail explosion, i stumbled over a post mentioning a new platform for Opensim users.  You can find it on this URL .

As i have been in the metaverse for a while, i popped in an account and am pleasantly surprised by all the features this platform offers. If you have never seen it, i recommend you to go and check it for yourself.

Ofcourse you will find many familiar  names you recognise from other groups / grids / platforms, but the nice thing is you can make your own group(s), albums, post video's, Blogs, save your bookmarks, and many more things, all in one and the same page. Your still here ?  More activity on "The Wire" 
Feel free to add me and say Hi, or join  the Red Dragon club group. :)

Monday, February 11, 2013

The future of OSgrid part II

After reading through the daily G+ Mail explosion, i found this link to a Blog with a title stating: Holy cow, is OSgrid Done ?   In response on the fuzz about shutting down Town hall meetings. Below is a (partial) quote i found in the Blog's comments, which i think is relevant and handy to conclude this topic with. For context you find the source in the link at the bottom.

""Here is the real story:
1. We have clarified longstanding policies and begun to enforce them uniformly. While there are plenty of good, wholesome use cases for both children and child avatars employed in VR, it is my opinion that OSgrid is simply not one of them. It’s too mature, too wild west, and we do not have the resources to certify that no children are present in some highly adult contexts. The official policy, however, is that no one under eighteen is allowed on OSgrid at any time. Child avatars are not allowed in the public areas controlled by OSgrid. Child avatars are allowed on private regions and lands. OSgrid staff will not attempt to investigate private regions unless a complaint of abuse has been made.
2. While the Administration Team has been restructured, it hasn’t lost any members. In fact, it regained an old and longstanding one: me :) We stand united on these actions, they are anything but unilateral. Our support staff is also increasing. Numerous volunteers are putting in many hours building, scripting, designing and teaching. Our residents are investing their time in OSgrid’s future.
3. The change in the Town Hall Meeting format, to one of suggestion/comment boxes is designed to provide a more balanced, accessible system of communications which gives every resident a chance to be heard. In the “live” Town Hall Meeting, I was barely able to be heard over then din and interruptions. If I can’t be heard, neither can the quietest person in the room. The people who are unable to attend the meetings will also have a chance to get their questions out under the new system. While some may have found the drama entertaining, it certainly didn’t encourage participation. I am hopeful that this new system will.
4. In spite of all of the talk of an exodus, our numbers are down consistently by about 30 avatars – which about accounts for the number who left in a huff – mind you, they weren’t even asked to leave, much less did they get thrown out; they just refused to accept any change and left. But those numbers are recovering rapidly, by about 30 new users per day, and various shifts in concurrency peaks associated with new accounts.
I’m relatively certain that some of those are the old users who left returning with re-rolled characters. As long as they don’t cause trouble, I don’t have concerns over that.
5. We are currently putting together a plan to nearly double the size of the asset server, adding some significant storage performance improvements in terms of hardware speed and software compression of asset blobs. These changes will put us on the road to the future, and should serve the grid well for years to come.
6. Donations took about an $80US/mo hit from this so called ‘exodus’ – this was rapidly replaced with significant numbers of new donations, and several that were cancelled and restarted at higher rates.
7. The legal status of OSgrid as an organization has been less than settled for literally years. That is about to change however, as we have a new organization specialist on board who has a career in the non-profit sector, and he says that we will be just fine; it just takes time to patch these things back together.TL;DR: OSgrid is in fine shape; better than ever; and that represents a trend that will continue for the foreseeable future.  ""


Source :  Click

Saturday, February 9, 2013

OSG changes, Standalone, Metropolis

Every once and a while changes occur. In life, work, relations, and also in the grids we live in. Most people don't like changes, they are good "as they are" and they value other things than progression, like for instance reliability, security, friendships or their community. As "progression" is not a guarantee for "satisfaction"
(example ?  V1 to V2 viewer in SL springs to mind), some people are opposed to anything.

Lately there is a lot of buzz regarding the new "owner" of OSgrid. Many of the "issues" i read are bound to personal issues with the individual, and since none of them concern me, I as a "regular" OSgrid resident could care less. I do see a lot of new things happening in OSG. Greeters in the plaza's, welcome area taken in use, better starter AV's, and a plan to get OSG registered properly & formally, with a board of representatives, a decent TOS etc.

From a user point of view, i say "better late than never". OSG could use some serious work on it's community-sense, and professionalise a bit. Too long it stayed a "test grid" without a forseeable "stable" version on which this grid can prosper. It's most important asset, the people in it, felt isolated and unheared  which has been expressed in numerous occasions. So i appreciate the choices and effort the new OSG management put in so far.

Unfortunately, every grid has it's rules. OSgrid did pretty well "without" but if you want to proffesionalise, you have little choice than setting a standard somewhere. And there is always people that don't like "the" cq "any" rules. You can discuss them, but cannot deny them. Someone will (have to) make a descision, and stick to it. One obey's the rules of the house he's in. This policy is pretty much globally accepted, so on a grid it's no different. If one cannot live with the rules that apply, too bad, cut losses, and go elsewhere is the only option.

All the fuzz and drama, and the "conspiracies" about OSG's future commercial plans, and who is appointed to assist / greet people and for what "deeper reason", are bit well, much for me.So far I get the same great free service here i enjoy since i left SL, and for my person, little has changed, apart from having missing some friends that left. This as they could not comply with the "new"  terms or just have a personal or moral issue now things start to take more serious shape. And since the new greeters cant help with everything, (and not everybody is willing to put up with "the establishment" for help), there will always be user interactions.
Too early to run away screaming for Foxx. (oh and my tip for the week : Read this Link  as in, been there, done it before, will likely have to do it again).

One thing i dislike is that OSG appearently killed HG connections to Metropolis. As a lot of european users left / moved / migrated / abandoned OSG to live in that grid that is not handy. I can't find why, but it is a sad development. It means i have to miss some close friends, and relog to be able to talk to them....

Hence i dropped 3 sims in Metropolis aswell, and since i'm testing a bit anyways, i have also setup a nice hypergrided standalone, which you can find here (for now) : Red Dragon Nite Club  ( if it gives a 404, im asleep, and so is my server ) . But whatever grid you are on, and regardless of who owns it,  you should always be able to visit a Red Dragon Nite club.

Friday, January 11, 2013

Last weeks Town Hall meeting - The future of OSG

The asset issues mentioned in the previous topic appear to have been resolved or mostly gone away. This might have been the aftermath of OSgrid having moved to a different server, which for the rest has been a smooth transition thanks to the tameless effort of the OSgrid admins. Gossip and rumours about the reason of this transition were debunked in last weeks OSG town hall meeting.

If you are a regular OSGrid visitor but never / rarely attend the town hall meetings, but you do care for this grid and it's community (like myself), i really suggest you read last weeks log. Find it HERE . Mind you will not find the usual tech talks. It's pretty much discussing the future of OSgrid.... 
It will also prepare you to be able to understand better if /when/why changes take place.
Note: No panic, the grid will not change or seize to exist tomorrow, but a lot is going on for the guys running & maintaining it.

OSG will likely soon call on it's community, and i'm pretty convinced the community is happy to pick up the call. There are very creative and intelligent people in "our" grid and we are with many. 
You can start helping here, but for what i understand other input is highly appreciated as well. The best place for suggestions is likely the OSG forums or for quick replies, try IRC



Sunday, January 6, 2013

Assets, Vids, Malware & Expo

Wohaa. I look at my blog and get a malware warning from chrome... I added new links and Blogs last week, and appearently one of those hosted a.... Bad Favicon. Anyways. Link is removed, this website has not served any malware, and it wasn't on long enough to generate havoc or get banned so no biggy.

I made a couple of test vid's with Bandicam software, and will probably upload some more later, testing Fraps & other screen recording software. The testvid's can be found in my G+ profile

I've spoken to quite some people inworld reporting asset server issues. Likely those issues will be discussed in next weeks "town hall" meeting. One good advice in advance, is when you upgrade your OSG server, manually edit and use the latest opensim.ini file. Past months / versions some changes have been added in, and if you run an old ini file, this could be a potential cause of problems.

If you live in the netherlands, you can visit an Expo of one of OSG's artists "Jorink Devin". The expo is in Apeldoorn, the netherlands.  You can find the details in the picture on the left hand here. For questions, contact Jorink Devin inworld, or visit his website :
Jorink Lijstenmakerij