Category Archives: OpenSIM

Rigged Mesh Tutorial Sans AvaStar

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I don’t see many tutorials about rigging mesh for OpenSim. But, Hypergrid Business has a new one. See: Quick mesh rigging how-to. Of course the procedure will work for Second Life too. But, this is for ‘rigged’ mesh only, not fitted mesh.

-. InnocEnce .-

-. InnocEnce .- by Perhaps Twine, on Flickr

While they use the Machinimatrix base avatar, you do not need AvaStar. However, not having AvaStar means using the parts of the model included for working with fitted mesh is awkward and not at all intuitive.

I haven’t played in OpenSim since OSGrid crashed. So, I am not sure whether or not we can use fitted mesh in OpenSim. So, this tutorial is more than adequate for most of those making clothes in OpenSim.

Statistics: Second Life, OpenSim, World of Warcraft

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Hypergrid Business keeps many of us up to date on happenings in the OpenSim side of virtual worlds. They currently have an article up on expansion and contraction in the OpenSim worlds: Regions, grids hit new record highs.

Garden Party

Garden Party by Gorba McMahon, on Flickr

It is a good headline. In the first paragraph Maria, author, points out that active users on public grids fell by 909 to 30,000. So, even though I consider Maria a bit of a fan-girl for OpenSim, I consider her reporting accurate enough to give us the good and bad news.  Continue reading →

Linden Dollars and OpenSim

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Hypergrid Business has an article up on Linden Lab restricting use of the Linden dollar in other virtual worlds, OpenSim. See: Linden Labs halts use of Linden Dollars in other virtual worlds.

Money II

Money II by Jozef Purdes, on Flickr

I doubt this is a competitive thing. L$ incurs a legal liability for the Lab. They have to be able to show the government where those dollars are going. This is a measure of the government trying to control currency and thereby control crime.

If your into philosophy and have read the Federalist Papers, then the fallacy of trying to control crime this way is probably apparent. But, it gives the government more control and feeds the bureaucratic and politicians addiction to power.

Whatever the reason, the reality is L$ are now going to be restricted to Second Life. Expect to see their current use in various places disappearing.

IAR Exports – OpenSim

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If you play in OpenSim worlds you have probably heard of IAR exports. If you built a region in OpenSim, then you probably use IAR exports to backup your work. I do… did. I haven’t started my OSGrid regions for some time.

0496 - Condensation/OpenSim

Condensation/OpenSim by Zonja Capalini, on Flickr

IAR is an Inventory ARchive file. Very handy thing to have. If your grid closes, having an IAR copy of your work that you can take to another grid can mean not having to redo your work.

Hypergrid Business has an article on the recent debate that erupted over the safety of this export/import feature of OpenSim. Safe in the sense of is it safe or subject to abuse? Abuse, like copyboting theft. It is subject to abuse, but that isn’t as bad as it sounds.

I think Maria Korolov does a good job of putting things in perspective. See: How dangerous are IAR exports?

OSGrid Going with FSAssets

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Hypergrid Business has an article up about how OSGrid has left RAID MySQL behind to go with FSAssets, a high availability system of data storage.

my inner light

my inner light by j o r.d a n, on Flickr

It is all kind of geeky. If you are into that stuff, see HB’s article: Avination helps save OSgrid, donates cluster storage solution.

For the none geek, RAID and FSAssets are different ways of preparing for hardware failure and safely storing data. RAID stands for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive/Independent Drives. The idea is if you have two hard drives with the second being a copy of the first, you’ll still have a good copy if one drive dies. It gets way more complicated as speed is another facet of RAID. But, two drives being safer than one is the base idea.  Continue reading →

OSGrid Up 2015-09

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Over on Hypergrid Business Maria Korolov is reporting: OSgrid is back.

New Firestorm Region in OSGrid

New Firestorm Region in OSGrid

February 24, 2015 @ 6:45 PM the OSGrid folks tweeted the re-opening of the grid. Plus the blog has an announcement: OSGrid Online.

Yay! While this doesn’t mean OSGrid is completely up or stable, it is open to logins. They warn that there may be outages as servers are tweaked. But, they feel the grid should mostly be up and open and no more major problems.

For those that run their own regions, new server software is available for download. Also, there are some instructions in the OSGrid blog for getting existing regions back up. See the announcement link above.

As you might imagine, there is likely to be a rush of people logging in. This may place heavy load on the system and slow things down.

OSGrid Assets Recovered

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Yesterday a new post appeared on OSGrid News: osgrid update for 2015-02-16.

New Firestorm Region in OSGrid

Firestorm Region in OSGrid

The assets have been recovered and loaded into the asset servers. Now the network configuration is being setup to put the servers online. There is no ETA for completion of this work.

There are discussions ongoing about how the OSGrid will be restructured. They say no drastic changes. But, there is some plan to modernize some aspects of the grid, whatever that means.

The next update for users is planned to be 2/22 or 23.

OSGrid Needs Help

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You may have heard that OSGrid had a hard disk crash. They use a RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) system to improve reliability and speed. But, the system crashed and could not be recovered as they thought would be possible.

They have been exploring recovery via professional data recovery services. It appears they will be able to recover all data. It is unclear to me exactly what the cost is, but US$2,600 is close. That uses up a little more than half the funds available to OSGrid.

If you use OSGrid, it is definitely time to kick in with a little extra support. Make donations here: OSGrid Donations. A thousand people need to contribute $26 to cover the drive failure. Continue reading →