Category Archives: OpenSIM

OpenSim Terrain Tutorial via Blender – Part 1

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Updates: Includes minor updates for use with Blender 2.63.

Blender 2.5 has a new import feature that can be used for making terrain in Blender. Most terrain tutorials are about getting terrain into Blender and little if anything about getting it out. Those that are about exporting terrain are mostly for Blender 2.49. There are enough changes between 2.49 and 2.59 that it is hard to figure how to accomplish 2.49 tasks in 2.59. This article is about importing terrain to Blender and exporting for use in Second Life and OpenSim. Part 1 is about getting terrain into Blender and Part 2 about getting terrain out.

Terrain Imported from OpenSim

I’ll be working with Blender 2.59 and OpenSim 0.7.2 Dev. The height maps can be used in either SL or OpenSim.

Terrain Vertices Count

First I need to know what I’ll need to export for use in OpenSim. Plus I have a terrain in OpenSim (OSGrid) which I’ve worked on for some time that I want to get into Blender and start from there. So, I need to import and export terrain to and from Blender.

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Second Life Game Scripts

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Every so often some interesting things appear in the Second Life Wiki. This weekend Second Life resident Allen Kerensky created new pages in the Wiki for an RPG gaming system. They are about the Myriad RPG System, which was designed, written and illustrated by Ashok Desai Myriad. The system is published under the Creative Commons License (Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales).

The pages include the scripts and explain how to use the scripts provided. The FAQ reveal the game system is incomplete. They also say the scripts have been tested in Second Life and OpenSim. There is a book authored by Myriad that explains even more.

This looks like a good example of how to start writing a gaming system. The list of the individual scripts includes ranged weapons and melee weapons. If you are interested in creating weapons, armor, other parts of gaming systems, or a full system this could be a good starting place.

See: User:Allen Kerensky/Myriad Lite Preview 3

You can contact Allen Kerensky in both SL and OSGrid. Read the FAQ’s first.

OpenSim News Week 32

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The best sources of news for OpenSim are the OSGrid Site, OSGrid Blog, Twitter, JustinCC’s blog, the OSGrid 11:00 AM PT Tuesday, Meeting in Wright Plaza, and Hypergrid Business. I have regions in OSGrid, so I tend to pay attention. But, it is harder to keep up on OpenSim news and most of the news is rather geeky. The result is I find less interesting news to report. But, I came across a few things this week.

Devokan Tao Linking Hub in OSGrid

OpenSim Programmers

There is a firewall in place between programmers writing code for viewers and servers. It is a licensing thing. Work is in progress to remove that wall. While it remains programmers must wait six months before changing sides. They either write viewer or server code but not both. That slows down development.

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Second Life and OpenSim Stats

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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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OpenSim Development

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Today the Open Simulator group announced the formation of Overte Foundation, a 501c(3) entity that allows tax free donations from the USA. The foundation will hold the rights to the code that makes up the simulator, the server side of many virtual worlds. It appears the main purpose is to clean up licensing issues and head off future problems. But, what does this do for the OpenSim user? To understand we need to know a bit about the Open Simulator Project and what is changing.

One change is a uniform license is being created for those contributing code to the project labeled; Contributor’s License Agreement (CLA). Quoting the Foundation, “Under this agreement, each OpenSimulator developer, including the core developers, will continue to retain copyright over their code but will also grant an explicit copyright license over their contributions to the Overte Foundation.”

The current licensing is BSD, which does not require an author to state they have all necessary rights to contribute code to the Open Simulator Project. The CLA changes that. Nor does BSD grant a right to distribute the code to an explicit entity. The new licensing will deal with that too.

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OpenSim and LIBOMV

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In OpenSim grids it is common to need to move things we have built from grid to grid. LIBOMV ( libopenmetaverse ) is a new tool for doing just that. It is a DOS Command Line (text commands and no in-world view) type program. So, you may want to look at Astra Viewer for a viewer tool for importing and exporting between grids (OpenSim Astra Viewer Review).

While Astra uses a HPA (Hierarchical Prim Archive) file type for exporting and importing, LIBOMV uses XML.

Chapter and Metaverse has a short tutorial on installing and using the tool. See: Moving Objects between Opensims. It is not as simple to use as Astra’s export/import tool.

I have yet to try the tool LIBOMV. Let me if it works for you.

 

 

 

OpenSim Astra Viewer Review

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Astra Viewer

Astra Viewer

The main developer of Astra Viewer is Siana Gearz. (See comments for a correction) Posting in SLUniverse’s forum Siana wrote:

Oh and never mind my fork of Astra, forget it, it’s for private OpenSim/AuroraSim installation only, It’s a special purpose version of Imprudence.

Siana was writing in a thread about the Singularity Viewer to answer someone question about Astra. If you have questions about Astra, contact Siana.

So, Astra is not a Second Life Viewer or at least not intended for use on the SL Grids.

For OpenSim Use

If you are playing or working on OpenSim then download a copy of Astra. Astra Viewer Download (broken) Update: Astra Viewer Download (from Google 11/2011) which eventually leads to a Singularity Viewer download.

USE: Astra Viewer Download (1.6.0.2) – See: Astra Viewer 1.6.0.2 Download Review

The web site is mostly empty. Update: 11/2011 the site is gone.

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OSGrid Update Week 7

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Some time Tuesday we should get a new version of the server software. Several things have been fixed. One big one is; throttling, the ability to evenly split up bandwidth usage. That prevents a visitor with a fast Internet connection and high viewer settings from taking a disproportionate amount of the available bandwidth, which lags other visitors. A common problem for home based regions.

One must update their INI files to use throttling. The actual lines that need to be in the opensim.ini file can be found here.

There has been a teleport problem causing crashes. Tuesday’s release should correct that problem. This has been an annoyance for some time. I look forward to having my teleport units working again.

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