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.
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