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 .