Second Life and OpenSim Stats

I like impartial numbers. Their meaning is not always clear. But, they allow us to form our opinion on some unbiased information. It is up to us to be intellectually honest and consider all sides of our opinions. We hopefully get a rational perspective and keep our opinions within a real context. Is OpenSim replacing Second Life? Is Second Life doomed or about grow or just stagnate?

OpenSim

Yesterday, the 15th, Hypergrid Business published the article titled: OpenSim grids break records for regions; users. Sounds awesome. Of course it is a headline and I expect some hype. They published the following graph in the article to show the data they considered.

OpenSim Region Count - From Hypergrid Business - Enlarge

The total number of regions in all the grids is 16,959. This is about half the number of regions as Second Life, which is roughly 32,000. OSGrid is the largest single grid with 6,671. ScienceSim is next with 1,810. The stair-stepped saw tooth is from periodic data clean up. People add regions and eventually let them die. Every so often the grid owners clean up the data and registrations. The steps should be getting smaller as clean ups are becoming automated and more frequent.

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Mesh and OpenSim

Myst-Uru Guild Hall

Mesh is Changing

The Lindens have reasons to change how mesh is handled in Second Life. The changes are format changes to the mesh data set. The reason given is performance and compatibility issues with the existing SL software.

For those of us that are not up on C# or C++ and object oriented data that doesn’t tell us much. Suffice to say mesh is sort of changing from a round peg to a square peg. That means all the holes for mesh have to change too. The place in the asset database where mesh information is stored must change. How the physics engine deals with mesh has to change. The inventory handlers, the build/edit dialog, render pipeline, and other parts of the viewer handling mesh must change.

This week the movers and shakers in OpenSim have been looking at how this change will affect OpenSim. Justincc has a post up on what is known now. His post is probably the most authoritative words on the subject for OpenSim. See: Warning: Don’t rely on meshes uploaded to OpenSim (just yet)

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OSGrid Update

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OSGrid Meeting in Wright Plaza

OSGrid is one of the larger Open Simulator (OpenSim) virtual worlds. The grid is funded by donations. Several friends and I have simulators connected to OSGrid. Just as SL is updating so too is OSGrid and OpenSim. On Tuesdays the developers have an in-world meeting at 11:00 AM PST in Wright Plaza to talk about recent developments. This is my summary of things I found interesting.  Continue reading

Imprudence to Kokua Clarification

It is not surprising many are interested in the coming Kokua Viewer and somewhat confused. Whether it be this or that and did you mean… So the Imprudence peeps have put up a new blog post. It is a very well written set of FAQ answers.

See: FAQs about Kokua

Even more clarification…

11/10 – It seems the Imprudence team got ahead of things. The Aurora Simulator is not going to change name, in spite of that being announced. So, it will be the Kokua Viewer and the Aurora Simulator. See Imprudence statement.

Also, while people are setting up Aurora Simulators and they previously did work on OSGrid recent changes on the OSGrid seems to have downed the Aurora sim’s connected to OSGrid. No one seems sure of what happened. But Artemis Tesla and I could not find any operational Aurora sims today, not that we know where they are all located or have any inside information. Our best authority said,”[02:59 PM]  Simpy Merryman: all aurora regions are offline including the mega and trolls – due to the fact that Aurora is currently not working with the latest core upgrade….

Imprudence Viewer Morphs into KoKua Viewer

The End of Imprudence Viewer

Today the Imprudence peeps announced that they are moving to the next stage of their viewer and naming it the KoKua Project. Kokua is a Hawaiian word meaning mutual assistance or helping out. Those formerly known as the Imprudence peeps got the KoKua name from Hamlet Au, the editor of New World Notes blog.

Version 1.4 of Imprudence Viewer will be the last. For now it is being developed in parallel with Kokua. The 1.4 version is planned for release late November or early December. Then all development will shift to the KoKua Viewer.  Continue reading

Mesh to OSGrid – Viewer Changes

How to Get Mesh Uploaded to OSGrid

OSGrid Mesh

Mesh OSGrid

OSGrid is supporting mesh now. All one has to do is figure out how to get a mesh uploaded. Most of the viewers do not have the feature. Only the SLV2 Mesh Project viewer has the feature. So, one needs to point that viewer to the OSGrid and give it a try.

Updated 2010-11-24

Getting Started

First thing we need is a copy of the Mesh Project Viewer. You can down load it from the Second Life Support Download page*. You’ll find it under Project viewers. Get it installed and try it out. You may see some pretty kewl meshes in ADITI (the preview or beta grid).

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OSGrid 0.7 Update Available

Today the download for upgrading to OSGrid version 0.7 is up as are the instructions and a warning NOT to go online with the upgrade. Wait until the server change over is complete Sunday. The upgrade will NOT connect until then. Attempting to connect with the upgrade will cause problems. Wait.

Instructions are here: Upgrade procedure for upgrading your simulators to OpenSimulator v0.7 on OSgrid

The download link is there.

There are settings in the new INI files for Meshes, LightShare, and I found one for Media On A Prim.

There is a handy feature to turn off avatar face lights, which the developers consider silly. Hmmmph!