Happy new Year

2015 the Chinese year of the Sheep  羊

Be careful with the fireworks, and all the best for 2015 !

Links

Thanks for the Birthday wishes. I just need to confess, it's not my actual B-day on the 25th of December though. It was my "Rezday" in Secondlife, almost a decade ago....  ( Huh, 10 years passed ? ).

Like stated in the last post, i moved some domains around and reconfigured some services. More will be added in the future, but for now the essential stuff i need to support Red Dragon users and groups has been setup, and is available 24/7.

Here's a shortlist of services that are currently live and available :

http://www.reddragonclub.nl/                 Main (Nothing here yet, just a temp landing page ).

http://teamspeak.reddragonclub.nl/        Teamspeak server 

http://stream.reddragonclub.nl:8000/      Shoutcast sever 

ftp://ftp.reddragonclub.nl/                      FTP server (Members only)

Other links are available on http://www.madfoxx.net/ which is the main domain linking to all these pages. That page is a work in progress, and is likely to change a lot in the next few weeks / months. For now it links to all "Red Dragon" pages & services, and has a live chatbox.  

Pretty soon all DNS forwarders pointing towards the Madfoxx.nl domain will become obsolete. If you use any of those old URL's you will end up at MadFoxx.net, which likely lists what you needed in the first place. '

Once OSG is back, i will likely start to build "Red Dragon Club XI". After not actively having ran events in the past 4 years, 2015 might be the year DJ Foxx returns to teach you what those speakers on your desk were used for again.  But those are just good intentions for 2015. 

For now, and on behalf of Red Dragon Nite Club and its members : 

"All the best for 2015 to you, and all those you love". 

Seasons Greetings

Since OSG is still down, i have taken the time to move all my domains to a different host. Various services for Red Dragon members will become available in 2015, like Mail, FTP, Teamspeak, Streaming media and some other stuff. These will become available on http://www.reddragonclub.nl  and some of it's subdomains. Also this Blog will change URL's, but it will remain available on it's current address as well.

Once upon a time

Once upon a time some guy got his hands on the opensource version of lindenlalalands SL engine. Together with some friends and like minded people who were intrigued by the software, they decided to start a grid. They named it TSgrid. It's purpose was to be a test grid for development on the engine, which was named Opensimulator,

More and more people showed interest in exploring this mysterious open source grid, and playing with the engine and its modules. So the group of friends chose to open their gridservers to all people interested. Free of charge, as after all, it was a test grid with a clear goal. Development of the opensimulator engine.

The volunteers worked hard to improve the engine and make it live up to the expectations of the users flocking into the grid. Secondlife limitations where shattered, and cutting edge technology was implemented before Lindenlab had a chance to so so. The TSgrid had grown to a massive userbase, each avatar calling TSgrid home for his/her own reasons. Some had homes, other had testlabs, people studied on how to run their own grid, script, or build their creations in TSgrid to later export them to commercial grids and own a buck. Even clubs and hosting providers started to notice the grid.

But the grid is still the TSgrid, started by some guy and his friends, with as purpose of testing and developing Opensimulator. Since the grid got real big, the costs to run it went up exponentially and with help of the donations of its users, and hard work of various volunteers it was kept running.

One day the grid went down... A plane had crashed into the datacenter where it was hosted, and both the TSgrid servers and all of its backups in the rack on the other wing of the datacenter were destroyed in the flames. The inferno left noting but piles of smoking ashes, not a single prim survived.
Obviously the users got very, very upset with the admin volunteers as they "should have had the backups outside the building". Some even furiously criticized the chosen location of a datacenter near a busy flight route....Idiots...All their precious prims and pixels, all gone. Stupid volunteers.
Nobody ever told them to make a backup for themselves, or that they were in a test grid. So they spammed their invaluable advice on how things should have been done in to the community's forums, and they left the TSgrid to rot, to go on with the rest of their digital lives and vent their superior opinion elsewhere. People welcomed them everywhere, and this time they were properly informed, so life was great once again !

The TSgrid volunteers however, never gave up on their beloved grid, and rebuilt it from scratch. The non commercial grid would rise once again. A lot of TSgrids users loved their grid, and went back to the testgrid they called home since many years.
Their world, their freedom still applied. No greed, no drama. And it was a much nicer place now all the people with their "relevant opinion" on how things should work in "their grid" decided to go elsewhere. Perhaps they even build their own grid. And all are welcome to go live there and tell them how they should run their grid and operate things. All others are welcome to come test life in the TSgrid. This chapter should explain how great it really is, and how awesome the people inhabiting and running it are, but that would be part of another story.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Advanced NPC's

NPC's are useful in the Metaverse for various tasks. Today there supported "out of the box" by open simulator, and for most users it's not a huge task to get one operational. When you want to make it do stuff, things become a lot harder and more tedious. Especially if you want it to do a lot of complex things. Or simple stuff like putting on the pants you just gave it.

I used to have a "Pikkubot" in secondlife, which was very nice and feature rich. Not free, but a very nice tool which i had a lot of fun with. I know its supports opensimulator, as i had it running sometime around 0.6.7. Realizing i have a lifetime license, (read, i was browsing some old bookmarks and "re-discovered it", i found there still operational, since 2007). i hooked it up to my region in metropolis, and find much of its library (560 commands!) still work nicely. It's loaded onto Red Dragon Club attached to a pandora chatbot (mind i still need to "train" it) so you can interact with her in chat or IM as well.

If you need an NPC with advanced "control", the ability to log, patrol, follow you around, run scripts & macro's, be a rent, camp, dance, and/or chat or greeter bot, and a lot more by simply sending it IM commands, or control it from a small GUI; you can play with it's trial version to see if its worth a license. You need to jump some hoops to get it working in Opensimulator, so i will post a small tutorial below the break later this week. If you would just like a "normal" unlicensed NPC you can check this URL or this one for more info.

Status OSgrid

The following exempt was captured from IRC  on October. 15th

< leTwitch> The news is, there really isn't much new to tell. Three different organizations spread geographically all over Texas are all struggling with a broken raid volume. We get two steps forward and one back; be patient. There really isn't a good way to give an eta on work like this; once we can certify that we have the volume back in a readable form, then we can start pinning down certain tasks and registering progress. Even then, ETA's will be just that *estimated* time to arrival.

< leTwitch>  The real showstopper at this juncture is that the data recovery folks can see the data, but when they ship it to the data-center and we get it hooked up to the server, we cant. So right now what’s happening is a straight up dump of the paths and directories to a big volume (single partition). The last thing that didn't work for us was a set of partition copies. The thing we’re doing now is the last trick up the sleeve of the engineer doing the data recovery; if this doesn't work, we’ll be left with nothing more to do than rebuild the server and start rebuilding from archives. My understanding is, we don't pay anything if they don't get our stuff back, so if that's how it winds up, we’ll be talking with them about getting back what we have already paid them.

< leTwitch> so if nothing else, the end of the waiting will soon come to pass.

< leTwitch> we’ll be moving forward one way or another.

< leTwitch> Heh, I guess that is news of a sort.

< leTwitch> o/

source : http://news.osgrid.org/ 

For those of you that don't understand the technical stuff, there working hard on getting OSGrids data fixed. 2 previous attempts to recover the  data have (partially) failed, and now there is a last try. If that fails, they will be left with no other options than to start restoring the grid from archives. But, it isn't over unless the data-recovery dudes give up... (And, would you walk away of $ 5000,- and your firms reputation easily ? I guess the data-recovery people think the same.) 

So keep fingers your fingers crossed, and be patient. OSG will not be back next weekend though. If you moved your stuff to metro for the time being, please read the topic below. 

If you want to keep up to speed with every update, check this forum topic maintained by Lani Global. Oh, and on forums, don't feed the trolls please....  

Grid Donations, help needed.

OSgrid spent most of its resources getting all data back after the grid crashed, so continued donations are really required to get & keep the grid back up on it's feet. You can hit the banner on the right column, to help out our favorite grid. Much appreciated.

Meanwhile me, and a lot of the OSgrid residents are sheltering in Metropolis grid. I already had my inventory there, but according to this topic on their news pages, there having a hard time coping with all the new data, and are severely lacking of funds to keep it operational. (Severe, as in less than  $ 100,- in active funds ).

Hence i opened paypal, and dropped €5,- in their donation box. I hope some of you OSG residents out there can spare €5,- bux to do the same. Metro has the courtesy to provide us with a safe haven now our favorite grid is down, the least we can do is help them cope with the costs of our "visit". Over 600 residents made an account there since OSG went down,  so if even half would make even a one time donation, they would be without headaches at least till OSG is back up.
You can donate for Metro by clicking here .

Camping in other grids

we are legion

As i started to miss my prims, i decided to upload the X build of Red Dragon to Metropolis Grid for the time being. I'm confident OSgrid will be back, but this will take days at least, more likely weeks. Bless the OAR functions, and a diskcrash teaching me to make regular backups.
For status updates on OSG you can either follow G+,  the OSgrids news page, twitter, Facebook, IRC or the good old OSG Forum.

A donation banner has been posted permanently in the right column of this Blog. Great initiative started by 3D Rock grid and with a banner kindly provided by Maria Korolov. (click if you want one for your webby / blog or region as well).  Much of the OSG residents are refugee in metropolis for now, and its great to see the opensim based grids stand united with the outage of OSG. At least now we don't have to miss out on the party's, and it's always nice to make new friends, and meet up with long "lost" ones.

If you want to party or visit other events in upcoming week(s) check the following links:
hyperica
metropolis
littlefield

When OSgrid is back up, I think it will be time for Red Dragon build XI. More on that later. The troubleshooting document for region setup has been updated, and can be found on the help page.

Grid Down

Normally i don't have a chance to write about OSGrid being down, as by the time i press publish all is mostly running again. However, there is a severe outage ( the raid of the asset server went FUBAR ) and this takes a huge chunk of time to fix. OSG has been down for several days now, and there is no ETA ( estimated time of Arrival ) for the fix. This is the longest OSG downtime i have ever experienced in the past 4 years, so i'm quite sure things have broken pretty badly. The best way for you to help fixing things can be found here . Not that it will make things go faster, but you now at least know whats missing in life if you cant login to your beloved home, and i assume most people will agree that the volunteers of OSgrid can use more coffee and pizza whilst fixing things in their free time....

Wrong pic

So no party at OSG  today, but luckily there are tons of other grids with activities. If you feel an urge to party as well, you can consider to try http://lostworld-os.com:8002/wifi/ which has a beach party and some other events today.

Probably more grids will host activities, so you don't need to feel lost without your pixels. Let's hope were welcome to partycrash at the other  grids in the metaverse.
As i rarely use hypergrid it will likely be a royal PITA to find my way around, but were going to at least give it a shot. After all, the show party must go on.

The last OSgrid update i saw on twitter this morning doesn't look very promising, as they are now trying to rent a Voodoo Man to get things operational again. (I assume the rebuild failed).
Update: We have recruited outside help to obtain an estimate for recovery time and cost, we will provide more info as soon as we get it.

whats happening

The metaverse is buzzing with activity lately, despite it being holiday season. OSgrid has welcomed its 100.000th user, and in 2 weeks the OSG7B events will take place.  A lot of nice display builds have arisen on the 3 VAR display regions. If you want to participate in the festivities held at Event Plaza by performing, DJ-ing, or providing other forms of entertainment, you can sign up in the OSG forums here. 

A new club called Greeklife opened it's doors, you can visit their display on OSG7BE region, or visit the club directly by finding HRA CLUB on OSgrids map. They run weekly events on Thursday evenings if i recall correctly. Your host Envoy Nikos from Greece, and the Dutch DJ Yoshi Noizumeka will entertain you. This means you can party in OSG at least 5 days a week, in different venue's now. And if you think, mehh these party's have 4 dead boring quiet AV's and a bot, you might try and visit some, and be surprised.

A while ago i posted the URL of Planatex Radio, this has been moved and is to be found in the player section of sunlight radio as of now. The OSgrid troubleshooting document has been moved to the "help"page. The downloads page needs some love, but since it's tedious work it will likely take a while.

The Opensimulator conference has extended it's deadline for proposals until today, so if you want to participate you heed to hurry and hit this URL. You can also still become a crowdfunder , sponsor or a volunteer. There still looking for greeters, moderators, stream and tech supports, etc.

A very interesting article i read is found on hypergrid buisiness  It was posted last week, about Fernando Olivira writing a tool to enable his users to backup OAR's straight into dropbox, which i think is a very nice feature to have.

In memoriam

A couple of weeks ago, sad news was posted in G+ about Cornflakes Woodcock, a very creative prim artist that had his home in OSgrid since 2010. He passed away almost a year ago. The news spread very slowly, as when people go "offline" for shorter or longer periods, there generally just shifting interests / grids etc. and often it's hard / impossible to keep track of all people and their alts & interests. (I really thought he just left to Metro).

Thirza Ember, editor from the Pingsfromtheafterlife blog has had various interviews with residents and friends of Cornflakes in OSgrid (including yours truly) and wrote the following beautiful article on her Blog :
Tribute to Cornflakes .

If you have had the privilege to meet him, you might want to go and check the article and all the great anecdotes and pictures she collected. (I promised to integrally repost the article here as well, but since it has all the pictures, i decided to just post this article pointing towards it).

Cornflakes has left us with his inspiring builds, and some "hidden messages" in his builds. Much of his works have been saved, and there are various tributes and even a complete "Cornflakes Museum" was erected. You can find all details in the article mentioned above. On a personal note, I would like to share the most important "lesson"  Cornflakes left me (this was back in 2011 already, but nevertheless ) :

Regions Updated to VAR "compatible"

When i tried to teleport from the Red Dragon Club to the OSG7B regions last night, i received this message : "Destination is a variable-sized region, and source is an old simulator. Consider upgrading.". So i immediately shutdown all regions, and upgraded all servers  to the latest build. Not that the regions weren't doing fine, but our visitors should be free to leave to whatever place they like, also if that region is a VAR.

OSGrid only made mention of  this fix / change on it's G+ page,  so you might have missed it, but the message is pretty self explanatory. If you want to be able to teleport in and out of VAR regions, you have to be on a region running their latest build. Alternatively you can make a hop in-between on either one of the plaza's or another normal size region running the latest build (software version). This is probably to prevent you from running into other problems due to code changes between the builds.

If you just joined OSgrid in the last few weeks, and just have your first build on your regions, now is an excellent time to create a backup OAR (it's a full export of your region / terrain / objects / settings), and upgrade to the latest build. It's not a requirement, but does prevent you and your visitors to "failing" teleports, as you can assume much more people will run VAR regions in the near future.

Opensimulator conference 2014

" AvaCon and the Overte Foundation are pleased to announce the second annual OpenSimulator Community Conference 2014, to take place virtually on the OpenSimulator Conference Center grid on November 8-9, 2014.  The OpenSimulator Community Conference is an annual conference that focuses on the developer and user community creating the OpenSimulator software. Organized as a joint production by AvaCon and the Overte Foundation, the virtual conference features two days of presentations, workshops, keynote sessions, and social events across diverse sectors of the OpenSimulator user base. " Source

If you missed last years conference, i truly recommend you to visit this year, and if you like / have an interest in Opensim based worlds, this is a party you simply don't want to miss out on. Apart from "seminars" on various very interesting subjects, you will find great freebies, see awesome builds on the display regions, and meet interesting people of a various grids. 

Since I was impressed by last years conference, great organisation, with very interesting sessions on a variety of subjects, "Red Dragon Nite Club" decided to become a community sponsor. So this year we will attend the conference, and be represented with a small booth focused on representing our club in OSgrid. 

As in the end, one has to relax and socialize after scripting and hurling prims on his private simulator all day.   

We are "inworld" for the nice & interesting new people we meet, to create without limits, to have fun, enjoy party's, with DJ's and music and to learn, and share our knowledge and experiences. Our only goal is to simply enjoy virtual life, build a bit, and share good times. OSgrid has a vibrant community of "users" next to all the developers, content creators and people chasing a particular goal. So also if you are not a coder, scripted, developer or builder, still feel free to pop by and visit. Be amazed and inspired. 

Some handy links : 

If you are interested in becoming a community sponsor as well, find the proper link to register here :

http://conference.opensimulator.org/2014/sponsors/crowdfunder-campaign/ 

If you want to run an event on your own grid / region, right after the conference, try this :

http://conference.opensimulator.org/2014/socials/social-event-sign-up/ 

Road trip trough OSG

Just another weekend teleporting around the map in OSgrid makes you stumble into beautiful worlds. (getting tips from friends does as well). Feel free to drop me an LM if you find / built a little gem on the map. Check some pictures of my travels below, a couple of the cool ones you can slip into (click for large) :

Steam

Danger Island

   

Mystic Forest

Cuteulala Park

Steam has tons of zeppelins and airships, and is an industrial region with loads of ground to explore. Check the machines, the shops, and don't forget to visit the docks. The Danger Island is a gloomy harbor carved out of rocks in the sea, with great sailing ships and a shipyard. It's a VAR that also is home to the beautiful Mystical Forest, where the fairy's linger. You can space out on a giant mushroom here.... And if your done with that ride, visit Cute's Park. It's is OSG's coaster park. With working roller coasters and waterslides. Need I say more ?  It's never boring flying into other worlds. 

OSG7B OSgrid turns 7

OSgrid turns 7 this year, and as usual they have a couple of regions prepared for displays of it's inhabitants. The events are held on 26th and 27th of July. Red Dragon participated last minute in the past OSG6B edition, so this year we decided to be the first to put a small display build there. Sneak preview picca.

Since it was only announced last week, there is no schedule for events as yet, but this will likely take shape in the next weeks. The fastest way to obtain a plot is to get in touch with one of the admins. Currently the west region has a few spots left, on east there is still plenty of room.  I expect a topic to emerge on OSG forums about events soon, and will post the schedule here as soon as i obtain it. So come have your cake and eat it, at OSG7B. You can find the regions to the left and right of event plaza on the map.

The troubleshooting document in my previous post was well received, and has been edited and corrected on certain points. its at rev 1.3 now and work on it will continue overtime.

Troubleshooting your Region setup

Yet another troubleshooting guide for OSgrid. Mind this is not a setup guide. It more or less lists errors and common mistakes that occur during the region creation process, making people having a hard time getting their regions operating. It doesn't explain how to setup, it explains what possibly went wrong, and what you can try to fix it. Since i'm not some technical documentation writer, apologies in advance for my non-native english interpretations of your language and OSG's inner workings :).

The document tries to address the most common issue,  people seeing their region on the map (meaning your pc was able to upload a maptile to the grid, nothing more) but they cannot teleport to their region. They followed the setup guide, all looks jolly.... but it doesn't work. Than what ? Wade through 5 years of forum posts and google ?

Try this document. No guarantees, but it might have a pointer. You can find the document here on my Google Drive (word document) This is just a first revision, I hope to make it a useful, less chaotic and more elaborate document which can be used when stuck, so feel free to add / edit / correct where applicable. There is a NC version available in OSG for those interested. By the time this is a decent document, i will post it to forums etc. (see the Help button in the menu ?)

One last tip for region owners that "were running fine for years and now they have issues" OSG uses a lot more resources than when on pre- 0.7.6 builds, and if you expand content and update occasionally you might be hitting system limits somewhere. In any case wipe & manually configure your ini's on a latest version  if you keep running stuck.

If the above helped you out, and you're eternally grateful, or want to give back, you can do so here. Thanks on behalf of everyone in the grid.

This week travel sweetspot is Luna Parc of the French community. Check the Planatex Radio region, or just listen to their beats on this page. Find a picture of their regions below, might want to go check the regions from upclose for yourself.

Regions updated

All red dragon regions have been updated to the latest and greatest build. We also pushed over the old V8 builds to the hosted server, so you don't drop in oblivion unless its weekend when you TP there. So as of today all 18 regions will be online 24/7. The main travel center at Red Dragon Club was updated with the newest places to explore, the others will be updated soon. All regions are voice enabled so you can yap with your friends when exploring the huge underground shops stores and galleries. If you love the music on these regions, find a web player here. The downloads section had some broken links removed, and some new added. Also the About Us page got an update, so you can find Red Dragon in "other worlds" as well.

If for some reason you rather use teamspeak than vivox, or need a more secure and encrypted channel to talk on, you can hit our Red Dragon Teamspeak channels on :

RDNC.MadFoxx.nl
9997  password: Reddragon

Please do not disturb the players in other RD channels. The public OSG channel can be used at will, the private channels are encrypted. Passwords are found in their descriptions. Red Dragon also exists as a kinship (LOTRO)  and Tank division (WOT), hence the teamspeak channel. On the Steam communities were found here. So if  not building, we "Game on".

VAR regions

There is a lot of testing and experimenting with VAR regions (scalable, and not a "megaregion"). You can read up on the VAR wiki page on how to create one, find tips on migrating your existing regions etc. If you want to visit / check one, try popping by Event plaza, or Jurrasic park regions. VAR is a work in progress, so expect minor glitches that can impact anyone.  Like, don't be surprised if you can read chat conversations in neighbouring sims all over sudden, or if on a var, terraforming is a bit chunkier than usual. Performance wise, on the loadtest i attended VAR runs like a charm. Bugs are being squashed at each new update. Red Dragon will remain on single regions for the time being. as i don't want to load 150K+ prims on a VAR just yet.

According to hypergridbusiness who vigorously collect stats on as much grids as they can, the top 40 of opensim based grids dropped by a 5000 regions, due to some housekeeping and spring cleanup. People come people go, but overall OSgrid seems to become more active again, more events are hosted, more clubs and DJ's are active, and a steady flow of new people is setting up and building their new regions.

Dev's are figuring out ways to get around the issues with NAT loopback, as apparently in the US & UK the ISP's love to hand out "poor mans" routers that don't support it, or have it disabled in their firmwares. (in general, and i think globally ISP's don't like you to run servers on home connections).
My advice is to buy & run a decent router if you plan to host a server. And although, it really sucks not being able to run your own region without "buying stuff first", it's well worth it, and generally not "unaffordable". A list of supported routers is found here. Mind there are much more supported, than unsupported routers, and you can find them from € 15  / $ 18 and up already, depending on your further requirements. Also make sure to properly troubleshoot your connection, before running to the store. In 95% of the "problems" i've seen in the past 4 years it's misconfigurations and not NAT loopback causing problems.
.

More party news

Saturday the 15th of March Red Dragon Club X presents "The House of Beats" Dance party. Grab your rave-sticks and come party. DJ Foxx Bode will run the stream, and teach you what that subwoofer below your desk was meant for again. Your host will be SnakeDance Moonwing. The party starts at around 10.00 grid time, until 13.00 max. (Thats 19.00 to 22.00 if you are in europe). Sunday morning will have a chill-out session with more mainstream music. 

Enough about the weekends for this post, you can also party Today ! The "Blue Wave" club on Pyramid region, runs events every wednesday, at 7.00 UTC. The region houses a large pyramid, with a big pool inside. And you party under water ! Your host here is Samira Samtanko. 

I'm awaiting the opening dates for Club Quantum and Club Holland, and most of the events listed here are also present on LBSA plaza's infoboard. Another simple way to find these clubs even if you forgot the name, is hopping by wright plaza and visit the Travel office. It's kept up to date with the latest and greatest. 

Notes after troubleshooting some installs in last 2 months after the break.

Clubbing

Red Dragon kicked off again at today, and had a nice opening, with DJ Foxx, Host Snakedance, and an average of 10 visitors. Like expected, the Club X region, carrying half the prims and scripts compared to the main club, performed excellent. No lag, no crashes, all went smooth, and we had a nice party. We ran a 3 hour set, and afterwards we popped to "Prim club" with all visitors, and continued to dance on tunes by DJ LadyJo.

The event  at Prim Club is currently still playing, and at 17.00 PST another party will be occurring at Sunburst region. Meaning you can party all weekend in OSG, listen to a variety of tunes, and visit live events. All travel offices have been updated with some new regions to explore, so in weekends, no need to be bored.  For more events check the boards at LBSA plaza region in OSgrid.

Possibly a short OSG loadtest for scalable regions will be announced later tonight, taking place on Event plaza. Also keep posted for next weeks events listing, as "Red Dragon On Tour" will start its travels through the grid. We will stop posting G+ invites, but publish here and in the plaza's if and when events take place.

Red Dragon Re-Opening

Despite my enthusiastic plans to open this weekend, Red Dragon will re-open next weekend, and start Bi-weekly dance party's. The first one will be held at Red Dragon "Club X" region, on saturday the 1st of March, which will be the "formal" Re-opening of  Red Dragon.

I was actually planning to open this weekend, but after going through all logs of the loadtest, there are some things i want to address first. Also this weekend is packed with events already, and as stated in the previous post, i don't feel the need to compete / interfere with any other events. (I'd rather visit those).

Tonight there is a party in Posh "Prims Club" at 1 PM grid time, with DJ Ladyjo Martin, and at 5 PM Ladyjo is throwing in another set at "The Sunburst". Every sunday there is a live event at the Maritime, details on that will likely be posted on OSgrid's Forums , so really no need to be bored this weekend. 

Apart for the Red Dragon club firing up, i have another plan, but need some help of OSgrid's current DJ's and club owners. I would really like to start "Red Dragon On Tour" .

The tour should become a series of event i have been planning for a little while. In that tour, i want to visit a different club each 2 weeks, spin a (themed) set of 1 hour maximum, after which the "resident DJ" takes over.  I have discussed it with some club owners and DJ's already, and most seem to like the plan, so were going to try and make it happen. For now, i have 4 places willing to participate, so if you own a club, are a DJ or just would like to throw a party, and you like the idea, get in touch. The "finale" of this tour will hopefully take place on Event Plaza, after months of paryt-ing in all the clubs OSG has.

Apart from the events, i think it's a nice way to find a structured way to liven up OSG with events, keep drama far away by excluding conflicting interests, as well as being able to "serve" all time zones. In the end, we ARE the "community", so might just as well make it great to be here. Also clubs have the best tools to do community building, and i think that if we get off our islands and collaborate more, we could have more fun than we do, next to making OSG more appealing to "fresh blood". 

Since i'm around for some years, people often ask me why i didnt ever run events in my huge builds. The answer is simple, my machine didn't have the power to do so. And with only 3 clubs organising "regular" events, the tour was also not really an option. Now  i have all the abilities, and there are more clubs popping up and getting alive, there are no excuses to not to go for it. Time only will prove if there is sufficient animo, but doesn't hurt to try. 

If you need more power, want to be online 24/7 or just want to unload your DSL line, read along carefully. My regions are now hosted by Kris Terrien, and so could yours. You can find more information on specs and pricing on his blog at http://blog.qlittlefeather.com/  You can both rent complete servers, or just regions, at very, very affordable pricing. The server holds my regions without any performance issues, and there are over 80.000 prims on the 9 regions it hosts, so you really get Bang for your bucks. 

Loadtest Completed

After making a terrible mess of the starting time of the Red Dragon Loadtest ( I "assumed" i knew what time dev meeting started, and calculated from GMT time there, mixed that with PST timezone, took the root of UTC, multiplied it by 21% am GMT-5...... and ended up 5 hours off ). We did have a successful test though. The new server is clearly not impressed with any load it was given, which is great. It has got more than enough RAM CPU and bandwidth to cope with any amount of visitors attending a party in OSG simultaneously, listening to 128 KB/s audio. Opensim did catch an exception and crash after about 2,5 hours, with around 20 avatars on the sim, and had 1 report of someone not being able to normally TP in.

To all people that came by (also those that found an empty club earlier) apologies for the timezone mess, and the crash at the end, but thank you all for helping out and visiting. Much appreciated.

I plan to organise a party this weekend already, but first have to puzzle a bit ( learn about timezones and such), and make sure not to interfere with other events. This as i feel we need more activities on OSG, not competing ones IMO. Also i have some stuff to fix ( thanks for all the feedback )  like a decent danceball, some more config tweaks, event poster for LBSA plaza, fix the welcome LM, find pole dancers etc. So it was a good & productive test run.

So partying will start soon. Updates on this Blog will hence follow more rapidly, so feel free to subscribe if you'd like to keep posted.  I will make an additional topic in the OSG forums to update events for people that don't like Blogs, or just never heard of us.

After 3 years of building, were going to put some more beats into the grid. Hope you come visit and have fun. More tomorrow....

Red Dragon Moves to hosted server

With the build expanding, and people requesting to party, a roadshow appeared to be the only option available (read previous topic). So in 1 week i got offered to DJ at Club Quantum and at D&J club. As if that wasn't sufficient, i got an awesome offer by the owner of the new club Yiffi (Kris Terrien) to have my Red Dragon regions hosted on a "spare" server. And what a spare !! a Xeon with 32 GB RAM 2 TB disks in raid and a 200 M/bit synchronous connection. As you can imagine, the migration was swift;  so as of today Red Dragon will be online 24/7, and with all the performance it needs. This also calls for a load test, and if that goes well, a party. I will build Kris a statue at the entrance later... \0/

Faq:

Huh party, at a 45.000 prim region ?  
Yes. thats the idea, if it underperforms for any reason, the test will move to the adjacent Club X sim with half the prims. Mind the region can still put some strain on viewer and GFX, depending on your settings and hardware, especially at 1st login.

So does this mean you're not doing the "Red Dragon Roadshow" ?.  
Why not?  More party's....  this grid can't have too much fun. Updates will follow.

So when is that Loadtest scheduled?        
Tuesday 18 februari Red Dragon Nite Club Region. Also some soundchecks will be performed. Your attendance is greatly appreciated. The exact time will be issued via a Google+ invite.

So if the server holds well, Red Dragon will organise a party soon ?
Yes, in the next weekend. DJ Foxx, and possibly a guest DJ will spin some sets, more details will follow.

For now i have to finetune the configs, enable voice, configure shoutcast etc.etc. but feel free to visit and check out the regions.
Red Dragon Nite Club. The saga continues.....

New clubs in OSgrid

Next sunday, Club Yiffi will open it's doors. Haven't seen it yet, so can't post much about it, apart from it being ran by Kris Terrien. I will post more details when they become available. At Federation Bay regions the new club Quantum is actively recruiting DJ's to start a series of events in 2014. If you're interested in running a set or organise an event there, you can contact Sherrifdawn Summers for details.

Red Dragon has planted prim 45.000 on it's main region so it's "full". Can still move around with 4 AV's so it's good enough to explore a bit, not suitable for big events though. The regions simply do not have enough upstream bandwidth for 15+ avatars, this much prims and scripts, and a decent shoutcast stream, and also the RAM would deplete if i tried. I will first continue building on the Red Dragon X region now, before testing if maxprims=100.000 also works. I still have some floors to fill, and also some free shopping space is still available for those interested.

As more and more people request me to run events, i will probably launch a party somewhere soon. Likely will be a "Red Dragon Roadshow" on a region that has sufficient bandwidth,  but more on that later. On the website the club list on the right side was updated, if you want your club to be listed there, or know of a club that should be mentioned in that list let us know.

Things to do in 2014

Events :
Pretty much every friday there's a nice party on Close encounters, every wednesday a party at the blue pyramid club, and on sundays the Maritime club often has live performances. Special events held on Event plaza are announced at LBSA plaza on OSgrid.

Tools:
There is a nice set of GUI (Graphical User Interface) tools developed by Dene Sparta, which can help you perform various tasks on your Opensim console at a click of your mouse. Find the installer(s) and instructions on http://admin-sim.net/ . Looks handy, so I need to play with it sometime soon.

Reminders:
For windows users returning to the OSgrid after being away, current OSG versions need .NET framework 4
(Typically you can see what is installed under C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework).
Also if you come from a pre 0.76 release, you will need to rewrite / adjust to the new opensim.ini files.
Voice for your region can be still be requested by form at http://support.vivox.com/opensim/

Plans: 

• Tutorials & howto's on: Installing opensim,  Troubleshooting & maintaining your installation, Configuring & testing your network etc. in 1 page. Not the normal "quick start forum post" but an elaborate guide, including a FAQ, error messages, and their solutions. 
• Event listings & region showcases
• Updates, news and links to fresh goodies
• hitting 45000 prims on the main club build and try to host an event 
• Getting mesh related info in the links section
• clean & organise the downloads

Some of that plans will take a while, but all of the above is on the agenda for 2014, we will see next year where the plans brought us.