From OSGrid to the Main Grid

In my adventures on OpenSIM (as Instant Blue on OSgrid), I have found it hard to come accross anything to change parcel radio stations. There are also other problems in what you see may not be legal. (Someone may have imported something that they shouldn’t have, and shared it with the grid). To work around the problem, I made my own little boombox script that lets me change stations according to my mood. I have found it to be very handy.

On the main grid, I started having that desire to switch stations again with the simple interface of my boombox, but I didn’t have anything close at hand in my inventory. I went ahead and pulled my boombox script from the OSgrid and created the boombox on the mainland.

This brings up some interesting thoughts, as people are often complaining about stolen content making it’s way to the OpenSIM grids. Although this is a script that I wrote myself, I am a bit concerned about the protection of content on the OpenSIM grids. Some of them have permissions enforced to prevent you from modifying, copying and looking at objects. However, the administrators of the grid may be able to work their own magic to bypass the permissions that content creators have setup. The same could be said about the Lab’s capabilities as well, but there is a stronger sense of trust with the lab along with legal actions that can be taken.

If I create something on an OpenSIM grid, is my content protected? Do I retain the IP rights? Are there security holes that I should be worrried about?

I’m sure there are more questions about this, but I’m about to turn in for the night.

posted by Dedric Mauriac on Applewood using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Supporting alternative grids

One of the things that I’ve been trying to keep up with in my infrastructure is to support OpenSIM. I keep forgetting about it because my OpenSIM does not yet fully supported HTTP methods. Because of this, I don’t have a proper test environment to work with and it keeps getting overlooked. Tonight I was able to fix the code for my trial licensing service to support other grids. In addition, I was able to get it to deny requests from the preview grid as well.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Applewood using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Upgrading OpenSIM Database

I’ll be upgrading the back end database to regions that I host on OS Grid. You may experience much downtime today. The Microsoft SQL Database is being upgraded from 2005 to 2008. Regions affected are:

• Anubis
• Balaton
• Bidstrup
• Brianreavis
• Chao
• Donasharma
• Farnham
• Gluck
• Isamu
• Jiangxi
• Kuwabara
• Lucafini
• Modena
• Rezzed.TV
• Rhadamanthus
• Sano
• Sapphire
• Schoof
• Vladimirfock
• von Lude
• Your Name Here

This will assist in development efforts to optimize queries against the back end database.

Update: The process is taking a little longer. This is a development machine so there are additional programs needed for the upgrade, and incompatibilities with existing programs. On top of that, this is a 64 bit environment and needs a little more care. Prerequisites to install are Microsoft Web Platform, Windows Installer 4.5, Windows PowerShell, Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack Preparation Tool, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, and Windows Updates are increasing the number of reboots and outages.

Troubleshooting: The infamous Config.msi problem is poking its head into the upgrade process. I’ve tried lots of suggestions from the Internet.

• removing the “read only” permission on the folder, but it immediately becomes read-only again.
• Granted the “Everyone” user full access to the folder
• delete the folder
• rename the folder
• create the folder
• reregister the windows installer (“msiexec /unreg” and “msiexec /regserver”)
• Play movies during the installation process to slow down the processor. (can this get any weirder?)
• Uninstall Remote Debugger
• Uninstall SQL 2005, Install SQL 2008
• Reinstall Visual Studio.net 2008
• Restart after fail, try again immediately.
• Uninstall Office 2007

Completed: OpenSIM is now running on a different computer. My development machine resulted in a complete uninstallation of both SQL Server Express, and Visual Studio.Net 2008. Installation of SQL Server Express 2008 failed a few times until I installed it with the minimum number of components. VS.Net 2008 is still in the process of being installed. With the OpenSIM on a separate box, this should take out a lot of stability concerns as the box is not used for daily work. It’s simply a computer to test services on. In addition, it is running Windows XP 32 bit, and the wireless card that it uses sits rite next to the wireless router – much better speeds then my own computer as there are not any walls to go through/around.

Copy Objects Between Grids

I just created a video demonstrating a little project I have been working on to export my content from the Second Life main grid onto my OpenSIM server over on OS Grid.

This is not copy bot. There are not any software programs used. The process is done using a few LSL scripts. You need to own the objects with modify permissions in order for this to work.

Prims are rezzed on OpenSIM and linked up to form a single object. Textures, Scripts, and inventory do not transfer during the process. Some of the default client textures are already available, so they will show up as if they had transferred without a problem.

I’ll be posting more details about it later over on my OSGrid page: Import/Export Between Grids by Instant Blue.

Using OpenSIM to demonstrate SL

Previously I’ve shot small movies of myself walking around regions to help demonstrate the capabilities of second life in a few meetings. The problem is, Second Life can’t operate behidn a firewall, so I make due with what I’ve got. I’ve tried out OpenSIM a few times in the past, but it was often unstable or didn’t have enough features for a good presentation. Lately, that has all changed. I’ve got a sim up and running on a laptop, ready to go – even without interenet access. I even setup a local website to demonstrate the capabilities of sending data back and forth. Ah, this is feeling great. I can’t wait for my next demonstration.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Nigorigawa using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Gridnaut Linden Bear

Well, it’s official. I’ve been able to log in with the Open Grid public beta client and teleport to other sims hosted by people with OpenSIM. I was able to visit Whump Lindens sim and got a special code to use back on the main grid to grab a gridnaut bear. I’m still having difficulty getting connected to my own sim through Linden Lab. I have ports open, firewalls down, static ip and configuration files correct as per instructions. Hopefully I’ll figure out what is going on. At this point, I’m asking friends to try and log-in, hoping it’s just an internal network issue.
posted by Dedric Mauriac on Ambleside using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

The path to Open Source

Second Life Library

Known as libSecondLife and libSL (Library for Second Life), this code was written as a light-weight client by a team of people who were not part of Linden Labs. It was perhaps the first introduction of the Open Source initiative to the Second Life Suite of tools and services. After officially stating that they were excited about libSL at SLCC 2006, the Lindens shortly announced afterwards that they would be making the official client open-source. The Second Life library today is used primarily as an API for programmers to perform various tasks on the grid such as unit testing, group management, land management, artificial intelligence, NPCs, experimental project, and light weight viewers (SLeek, AjaxLife). An added benefit to this project is that anyone who does not want to understand the internal workings of the API to add features can submit bounties so that other programmers will implement features for them.

Second Life Client 

Linden Labs has released the source code to its Second Life client (viewer) in the past. We have already seen the benefits of this as people have been submitting patches and optimizing code through the issue tracker (JIRA). Rouge viewers have started popping up (Nicholaz Edition) that have their own tweaks including patches that were not approved through the official issue tracker.

Second Life Sim

The Lindens are currently working on releasing the source code to their simulator.  There is potential talk of allowing people to host their own simulators outside of Second Life, and allow them to connect to the main grid. This can provide new hosting opportunities on the internet. Rather than paying Linden Labs for a sim (Currently 295 US$/month), you can pay a hosting provider at their own rate. Lower rates may be possible if they can charge by processing power or bandwidth instead for places like residential sims that don’t host big events or get a lot of traffic.

OpenSim

Just like libSL, OpenSim is also being developed outside of Linden Labs. It is a combination of four services (User, Grid, Asset, Simulator) to be able to host a full grid without the need to connect to Linden Labs grid. This may be the full realized dream of Linden Labs. The benefits here are large for the end-user as well as for businesses, educators, architects, filmmakers, and even parents.

Professional entities are not happy about some of the culture available in Second Life. These are aspects such as gambling, pornography, and conduct. Another issue includes the firewall. In order to connect to the main grid, beurocratic paperwork has to be put through with both benefits and risks. Being able to fully host the Second Life platform behind a firewall gives the added benefit of developing work that has a non disclosure agreement (NDA) tied to it.

Filmmakers may also find the OpenSim platform beneficial.  Imagine a large production set on a region spread across 50 simulators without having to pay for them. Frame rates are also vast. The current framerate on my initial trials was averaging out at 150 FPS when standing still, and would only go down to 60 FPS when spinning my camera around on a sim with 18,990 prims on it. For people creating machinima in virtual worlds, the frame rate is very important. It is hard for me to constantly maintain above 24 FPS on Linden Labs main grid while making machinima.

Parents can relax with running their own OpenSim. Rather then being restricted to the TOS on Linden Labs beta, teen, and main grid, both parent and child can work together on the same grid. Even children who are under 13 can join in on the fun. Imagine taking your child who loves to play video games and teaching them how to make things in a game? There are also many parents who will not let there children on the teen grid, just because they know of the culture that they would be exposing their child to. With OpenSim, parents have control over that culture.

OpenSim is still not perfect.  In fact, many features are missing or are currently in development. As I found my self adding objects to my private sim, the speed at which objects were added was hindered over time. It took over an hour to make 18,890 prims. The only physics in-world are those that let your avatar walk across land (and it’s jagged at best). At this past Second Life Community Convention (SLCC), the developers stated that it will be some time (six months?) before it is feature complete.

Prims are saved in a MySQL database. You can also export and import them with an XML file. Combined with libSL, this gives you the ability to build a sim out on your own computer at home and then have everything render itself on the main grid once you purchase your sim. The added benefit here is privacy before going public, and the ability to wait on a sim purchase before you are done with your build. There is also the benefit of replicating sims on the fly if you are hosting an event in-world and need multiple sims that look exactly the same (Like the NBC Christmas Lighting in November 2006 across 19 sims).

Currently, there are a few grids that you can connect to with your viewer (or your sim).  You don’t need to have OpenSim installed if you only want to connect to them with your Second Life Viewer. Public grids include OSGrid and DeepGrid. There are also a few stand-alone sims that you can connect to to play around such as CannonBall, Ruth(Zion), and CyberSpacia.

Build your sim off-world

One thing that interested me this weekend was OpenSim. The software lets you have your own private simulator without being on the Second Life grids.  There are even existing grids (deepgrid, osgrid) you can connect your own sims up to. I was able to download the binaries and run it. I ran into some problems though that may be related to vista, or simply being an older build from the repository. There was talk that you could build something in OpenSim, and then export it as an XML file.  In turn, you would then be able to use the file with LibSL and build a sim in a very short amount of time.  I love the idea of replicating a sim and also having the privacy to test things off-world. The speed at which things ran looked rather impressive as well in the demonstration.