(Deutsche Version)

I’m running OpenSim on a Mac Pro dual quad Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz machine with 8 GB of RAM. That’s a lot more than is neccessary to run it, though, depending on your needs. Actually, everything – your setup, your hardware requirements, the database you use, the extensions, assets, whatever – depends on what you need OpenSim for. I am a ‘casual user’, I guess. I like to have it running on my own computer to play with it, to be able to build without getting distracted, to experiment and try out stuff and all without having to pay a lot of money. I don’t need to have my regions accessible all the time, and even though it is possible to visit them when they’re up, only few people do. I don’t provide accounts for users and don’t promote my ‘place’ as a cool thing to go, it’s private.

However, I like to visit other places. I just don’t want to create a separate account on all of them just to go there (with all the chores of re-creating my appearance and neccessary inventory assets on each and every single grid I like to visit). Thus, my sim is hypergrid enabled. This allows me to teleport from there to other hypergrid enabled places, taking my appearance and inventory with me without needing to create an account. That’s my personal approach: Have a private place (which can be visited occasionally via hypergrid, if it’s running and someone knows the right URL to go to) and being able to hypergrid from there to other places for exploration, meetings, chat, shopping, and such.

Setting OpenSim up is not an easy task, and is certainly nothing for people without technical understanding; however, it’s also not impossible, given enough determination and the willingness to learn and try and tinker with settings. Myself, I have no knowledge of coding, or even scripting, and have little understanding on how OpenSim actually works. I’m just a tiny step beyond being able to install and run programs, as I can operate the console to some extent and know a little about how databases work.

To install OpenSim, you might not only need the OpenSim software itself, but several other softwares it depends on. Which those are, again, depends on your machine more than anything else. In my case, I needed to install Mono as a runtime environment (.NET for Windows). I’m not sure if Python is a requirement too, as I had that already installed for blender. Additionally, I installed MySql, since the diva distro, which I use, requires it.

I found it easiest to use the Diva Distro for my OpenSim installation. It’s a preconfigured installation of OpenSim which is already set up to enable hypergrid, run a megaregion of 4 regions and uses a Mysql database. It can be downloaded from the OpenSim main page or the downloads section. The distro comes with installation instructions as txt files in the main folder which should explain everything about how to set it up. If you’re behind a firewall or router, you need to enable port forwarding for each of your regions. Every region needs a unique port for it, and a tcp and udp forwarding. It’s next to impossible to explain how it works, as it’s different for every router model. Basically, you want to look for a submenu that’s got something to do with ‘ports’, ‘forwarding’ or ‘opening’ or such. You will probably have to configure each port individually. Be sure that you can chose tcp and udp; if you can’t chose that, try changing the type of forwarding to ‘other application’ or something similar.

If you want to change settings of your OpenSim installation, you need to edit certain .ini files inside the bin folder of your OpenSim installation; just open them with a text editor and make sure they’re saved unformatted. Most settings are configured in the opensim.ini, however, Diva set her distro so that the folder “config-include” contains the .ini files you should be looking for in the first place. The most common configuration options can be found there in MyWorld.ini; the DivaPreferences.ini holds some more options but should not be changed by unexperienced users, and not without having made a backup beforehand. (Actually, backups are essential, and here’s where the Mac OSX comes in handy. I keep Time Machine running at all times, which conveniently backs up my database and OpenSim installation every hour, along with all the rest of my harddisk.) It is extremely useful to have a graphical database browser for easy access to your database. I’m using Sequel Pro which works like a charm; Windows users might need a different solution. Sooner or later you’ll want or have to edit the database directly, if only to remove a script that keeps crashing OpenSim every time you start it up.

You can add more regions in the RegionConfig.ini inside the Regions subfolder. Actually, you don’t even need to configure them in the RegionConfig.ini; any .ini file inside the Regions folder that contains the neccessary region data will work, even several of them. I split my regions into three different .ini files; I made two clusters of 9 regions each, and 3 more regions called Backup 1 to 3 for trying out .oar files or moving things from one cluster to another. Except for an individual port, every region needs to have a coordinate on the map that’s not occupied by another region. For hypergrid, it’s useful to have the regions close to X – 10000, Y – 10000, because of a teleport limit of 4096 regions. That means, you can’t teleport to a region that is further than 4096 regions away (in map coordinates) from the region you are currently on. This limit applies in hypergrid as well, and since most grids center around 10000, 10000 it is useful to have your own center there in order to reach their regions. However, this is of course no standard, so there are grids that center around other coordinates, like 1000, 1000 for example. Therefor, I found it useful to have at least one region as some kind of ‘elevator’ that can be moved freely around the map to get a better starting point when trying to hypergrid to regions with far coordinates. I’m using my Backup regions for that. The trick is to move one to 7500, 7500 for example, when you want to hypergrid to a region that’s coordinated at 5000, 5000, so you can teleport to your movable region first (which is less than 4096 regions away from your center) and then teleport to your hypergrid destination.

There are several ways to teleport to a hypergrid destination, one of them is to create a link to the destination as region on your map. That’s useful for places which you visit frequently – think of them as hypergrid “bookmarks”. I set them up in a file called hglinks.xml as being described in Method 2 of “Linking Regions” in the Hypergrid Installation Instructions. Additionally, to have them start up every time I start OpenSim, I put the command link-region hglinks.xml into the startup_commands.txt. That’s basically all the settings I used for my OpenSim installation.