OpenSIM

Astra Viewer 1.6.0.2 Download Review

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I haven’t kept up with the Astra Viewer nor do I know much about it. I did a review of the viewer in March of this year. (OpenSim Astra Viewer Review). I saw in my net reading that Astra Viewer has mesh render ability. Hmmmm. Maybe it is worth an update.

If you don’t know, the viewer is targeted at Aurora-Sim and OpenSim. It is said to work with Second Life too. I haven’t tried it in SL.

Astra Viewer
Yellow Arrow Points to Mesh Object

Finding It

A quick search of my blog reveals the download link, oops it’s broken. So, I back off the URL to the just the web site… Oh! It gone too. Dang. A Google search for the viewer download takes me into the Google Code repositories and shows a number of Astra Viewer download sites… ummm well… some of those are AstroViewer.

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Blender 2.5 Exporting Height Maps Tutorial – Part 2

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The previous part of this tutorial is OpenSim Terrain Tutorial via Blender – Part 1. The previous part is about getting terrain from Second Life and OpenSim into Blender. This part is about exporting  the terrain from Blender 2.59 as a height map image.

Height Maps via Blender Nodes

Terrain

By the time you start this tutorial you should have a completed terrain or at least have a test terrain to try.

Also, you should have a backup of your region. Loading the tutorial can mess up your region. So, a backup is a good idea. In OpenSim I make OAR file backups. (save oar [filename.oar] – save to OpenSim’s working folder. You can specify a path.)

Now is a good time to back up your Blender file too. It is a great idea to work in a copy of the file.

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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 … Read more

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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