The road to Open Simulator is a rocky, long and winded one, verily. Probably most, if not all people interested in OpenSim have started with Second Life and then heard about it and, for whatever reason, wanted to give it a try. This post (or rather, series of posts) wants to describe my personal approach to OpenSim and therefor aims not to be a comprehensive guide to anything OpenSim-related. My approach is unique, and might or might not work for you, depending on your own needs, technical ability and personal engagement.
The first thing you need to understand, before getting into anything technical about OpenSim, is the mindset. There’s a lot of confusion on words and concepts, so I’ll go off on a tangent here a little:
First, OpenSim is not a ‘place’. It is not even a ‘service’, as Linden Labs likes to call Second Life. Rather, it is a software project, which aims at producing an open sourced server software for running a second-life alike environment. Therefor, keep in mind that you’re talking about a lot of places, when you’re talking about “going to Opensim”.1 However, OpenSim also goes beyond what Second Life does or can provide and incorporates several new technologies that are unknown to Second Life users: Hypergrid, megaregions, Realxtend, Lightshare, Meshmerizer, etc. The list goes on. The basic rule is: Everything can, nothing must. To avoid confusion and frustration, though, let’s clear up a few words before we start:
Open Simulator, as already mentioned, is the name of the software project, as well as the software itself, that’s neccessary to run an SL-environment on your own machine. The project is open sourced and anyone can contribute.
An Avatar is a virtual representation of a computer being logged into an OpenSimulator installation. Avatars do not neccessarily need to be operated by a human user. To distinguish “real” avatars from computer operated ones, the latter are usually called Bots. A user can have several avatars, as they can usually create as many accounts as they want on an OpenSim installation.
Viewers are the software neccessary to log into an OpenSim installation and experience it with your avatar. There is a great number of viewers publicly available, and they are usually open sourced and free. Personally, I am using the Imprudence viewer for almost all tasks.
In-world means anything happening ‘inside’ an OpenSim installation when logged in, experienced through a viewer.
A Simulator, or sim for short, is one instance of Open Simulator running on a machine. Open Simulator can be configured to run in different modes, thus the sims vary greatly. For example: A standard diva distro standalone with 4 regions is a sim, as well as a grid such as 3rd Rock Grid, running hundreds of regions and hosting thousands of users. A sim is not the same as a region, or a grid!
A grid is an OpenSim installation that handles assets separate from regions. Running OpenSim in grid mode enables others to connect their regions to someone elses grid.
A standalone is an OpenSim installation that handles assets and regions simultaneously. Standalones are easier to maintain than grids, and are usually sufficient for a personal installation of OpenSim.
A region is one square of virtual land, covering an area of 256×256 meters. A sim can (and usually does) run several regions. Megaregions are an expansion on the standard region. They are ‘constructed’ out of standard regions, their size therefor is always a magnitude of 256×256 meters. The advantage of megaregions over regular regions is, you don’t experience the usual lag when crossing from one region to another. There are some drawbacks, as megaregions technology is still in development.
A parcel is a fraction of a region (created with the land edit tool). Parcels can have individual settings within a region regarding media, access, security and such.
Assets are virtual things. Actually, they are the sum of virtual things on a given simulator. Assets can be textures, prims, objects, animations, sounds, gestures, wearables, and basically anything users can hold in their inventories.
Prims are the building bricks anything inside the world is constructed of. They can be created and edited in-world with the tools built into the viewer (with the exception of sculpties).
Sculpted prims, or sculpties for short, are a special kind of prim that uses a graphic file (called the sculpt map) as reference to how it is supposed to look. The thought behind this is that every pixel in a graphics file does store at least three informations, which are the numbers for the red, green and blue channel, which mix to the desired colour. These numbers, taken individually, are interpreted as the vectors on the X, Y and Z axis of the sculptie. Creating sculpties requires the use of a 3D-modelling software. (I’m using blender for them.) They are imported into OpenSim by uploading the sculpt map and applying it to a prim.
A teleport is a jump from one place within a sim to another.
Hypergrid is a technology that enables users to teleport between separate sims, be they standalones or grids. A hypergrid teleport requires the user not to have an account on the destination sim they’re hypergridding to, and enables them to take their assets with them.
- Much like americans talk about “going to Europe” when they mean they’re going on vacation to Cornwall. [↩]
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