Sunday, August 22, 2010

OpenSim resources

This is intended as an updatable list of OpenSim resources.  I shall be posting to the blog about my experience of working on an OpenSim grid, but in the meantime, I am going to collect information useful for Open sim on this blogpost.

Articles
OpenSim business roadmap - some inaccuracies but a useful general article.

How-to information
Video about installing an OpenSim hypergrid on your computer.  Other parts linked from that first part.
Opensim tutorials
Easy User guide
Linux/Ubuntu set up of OpenSim grid.

Reference information
Wikipedia article about OpenSim.
A useful list of all the server commands for OpenSim.
OpenSim and Unity working together at Rezzable

Fan sites
Koinup fan site.
Justin Clark-Casey's developer blog
Metaverse Ink

Miscellaneous
Difficult to know how to categorise Adam Frisby's site (he's also known as Adam Zaius in SL).  It's a combination of reference, fan site and how to and very much worth reading.

Let me know if you have suggestions or any of the links go dead! Ping Caliandris Pendragon in SL, or contact me via my blog.

3 comments:

  1. Very nice, Caliandris. We really need a curated page of OpenSim resources since there's a lot of information out there but it's all scattered about!

    If you ever want to wikify this information, please feel free to add a page to the opensimulator.org wiki.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Fee --

    What inaccuracies did you see in my "business roadmap" piece?

    Meanwhile, there are other resources on the Hypergrid Business site, and the Hyperica site.

    At Hyperica -- http://www.hyperica.com -- we've got the hypergrid addresses of around 300 different destinations. Another hypergrid resource is http://www.thehypergates.com

    We also have instructions on there for how to hypergrid: http://www.hyperica.com/how-to-travel/

    At Hypergrid Business, we track monthly statistics about the top public grids: http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/statistics/

    We're also assembling a resources page here:
    http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/category/resources/

    Right now, we've got a sample content creator agreement up, and a list of scripting resources.

    -- Maria Korolov
    Editor, Hypergrid Business

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi there!
    I'm sorry, I should have been more explicit than I was: there are only a few things in the article - which was excellent - and they are only minor things or I would never have put it on the list of things I was recommending. It seemed a bit petty to go listing specific small things, but as you asked me...:

    Although it is true that you are only able to export those things from SL for which one is listed as creator, it is possible - with the co-operation of the creator - to get those things exported from SL. Textures don't export, but if you own the original texture, that is easily overcome.

    Back ups of full regions aren't possible in SL, but servers can be rolled back if there is any disaster, which is the equivalent of having a back up.

    You said that people can't use their real names in SL, but that isn't absolutely true, as it has always been possible to pay for specific names. Companies who want a particular surname to apply to their employees can also pay for a custom last name. The arrangements over whether an employee can take their avatar or not are really up to the individual company... some accounts are dependent upon continuing membership of an in-world group or company, (as in the case of OpenSim grids) and some on continuing to pay a membership fee.

    Second Life voice is anything but wonderful for a significant number of users. In my own case I have it disabled nearly all the time, and I use skype or skype conference in preference to the in-world voice when a voice conference is necessary because of the terrible lag which I experience if I use the in-world voice.

    Web-on-a-prim is a great innovation, and we have developed products which rely upon it, but it isn't quite true to say that you can lay out multiple web pages and expect it to be usable, even as it is working in SL at the moment. Like anything in SL, it is dependent on a number of different things... how many people there are about, how many prims and what types of prim you are using, the connection you're on. It can work beautifully but it can also be dodgy - and the more pages you are running, the dodgier.

    Although you warn people against buying knock-offs in OpenSim, I am interested to know how it is possible to "check the provenance" of items which you are buying. In my experience in dealing with people distributing knocked-off items in SL, it is often very difficult to prove, and SL has a working (well, more or less) perms system. I understand that people setting up and selling whole OpenSim regions will find that all items on the sim will convert to show them as creations of the owner of the sim... it is hard to know how one can check the provenance of an item which is showing the owner as creator even when they are not the creator. I think this is one of the things which is curtailing development of OpenSim, the lack of a proper protocol for permissions, and the lack of proper interoperability between grids and between Second Life and the OpenSim grids out there. Creators are concerned that porting their creations to OpenSim will lead to a free-for-all.

    Finally, it is debatable whether 3D operating systems are doable or desirable or necessary. But that's just an opinion, not an inaccuracy!

    ReplyDelete

Comments on this blog are now post-moderated. Please comment in English, because I will delete comments I cannot read or understand.