Maria mentioned in the recent designing worlds debate (again) how great it would be to have some sort of marketplace on the web, that will deliver your purchases instantly to your inventory in whatever grid you purchased them for. And I agree on the greatness part, it’s just that there are two problems I have with this approach.

1. Scale

“It doesn’t scale” is the latest black and for the most part, it only fits partially, even if the one using that term know what it means. But the one thing that needs to be considered is the way OpenSim works, and right now there is no interface that wil allow a remote loading of assets into the database for a normal user, other than an inworld import, and there are no sights of this changing anytime soon. This means that, if I wanted to offer inworld delivery on a grid, I first need to have ALL the items I want to deliver in the database of said grid. While this works great for Second Life, where all the grid uses the same database, and thus my items only need to be there once to be available all over, we have a different situation on OpenSim, where there’s at least a dozen major grids, hundreds of minor grids, and again hundreds – possibly thousands – of self hosted grids/standalones running from home. Offering delivery to all, or even the majority of these, would require to upload the creations to each grid individually. While this probably could be automated with bots, I’d still have to register an account for every grid, talk to the grid providers about my system and what I intend to do, and run and maintain all these bots. Mind you, this is not just a one time activity, but every time something new comes out it needs to be uploaded to all destinations.¹

So this is a lot of work and effort; too much if it was just for a single creator, no matter how large their catalogue might be, and too much maintenance for a community of creators who come out with new things very rapidly and thus the assets need to be synchronized constantly across all the grids.

2.  Reliability

OpenSim is alpha software. OpenSim is alpha software. OpenSim is ALPHA software. I can’t say this enough, because apparently nobody else is saying it. This means that it’s unreliable, it breaks – sometimes even intentionally -, features may become incompatible from one version to another, and in all cases you get to keep both pieces. The only grid that tells its users right up front about this is OSGrid. Every other OpenSim grid I have seen keeps quiet about this fact, and instead acts as if they’re just like Second Life, only cheaper. The grid operators I talked to about this usually say that it’s “common knowledge” that OpenSim is alpha, but frankly, it’s not. None of your bloody users will go to opensimulator.org and read all about a server software they never intend to run (because hey, that’s why they joined your grid – to NOT have to worry about the technical side). So really, the reason nobody is honest to their user is because they’re afraid it’s bad for their business.

Thus, we end up with people  expecting OpenSim to be reliable, stable, even better than SL, while on the other hand there are frequent asset losses, sometimes gridwide, like recently in Craft or Avination, where the latest backup is anywhere from 3 days to 3 months away, but mostly simply a corrupted database file which results in a texture not showing, or an object not rezzing. This happens all the time, anywhere, even on my own private standalone, where nobody but me and El are using the database and everything is hosted on our own server. Building a business, any business, on this kind of unreliability, will eventually lead to unhappy customers, because when someone buys something from me – clothes, animations, objects, you name it – and at some point their acquisition stops working, won’t rez anymore or lost a texture, they will come to ME first, and while it’s obviously not my fault as a creator that the asset gets lost, there’s really only one way to deal with that professionally, if you want to keep the customer, and that is to reimburse them for their purchase or re-send the article.

So, from a creators perspective: Even if your inworld delivery system works, your deliveries might still not make it or get lost at some point in the future due to circumstances that are not your fault, nor can you do anything about them, but it will still be you who needs to deal with the user who lost your creation.²

3. Alternatives

So right now, for me, the only viable alternative is transferring the neccessary files via the web and letting users upload them themselves. That way, the user has a backup of the creation already on their harddrive, which can simply be imported again, should any inventory be lost. Also, it works across all grids and standalones, independently of version, and without doing a lot of maintenance.

Of course it’s inconvenient, especially when it comes to clothes where you have to import several attachments, attach them correctly, maybe even script them, and save them into an outfit, and I’d be the first to cheer if OpenSim, or any viewer, would reliably export outfits and nested inventory items. Yes, Inventory Archives do that already, but the only way to import them is to have access to the console, which rules out all of the casual users of any grid. A great way to deal with this would be some kind of interface that would allow the upload of an IAR via the viewer for every user. Sadly, none of this is anywhere in sight.

So right now, and in the forseeable future, I’ll stick to the inconvenient, but reliable, way of transferring creations via the web. That doesn’t mean I don’t keep a look out for alternatives, but there are many things to be considered before choosing a different way, some of which I have outlined above. Until the metaverse becomes more convenient, let’s enjoy what we already have. It ain’t all that bad.

1. On a side note, this approach will give every grid provider a full perm copy of all my creations up front, which makes a “shop” pretty ridiculous on a home-hosted grid where the provider is at the same time the only customer. But also, if there’s anything to be learned from Legend City Online, then it’s that you shouldn’t trust every grid provider; they’re possibly much more “dangerous” to your business than any “copybot” ever could be.
2. Having lost inventory – in fact, ALL my inventory in SL, I know how much this sucks, but really, the suckage is much greater if it’s 100′s of users losing inventory every day, and you’re on the receiving end of that.

Source: Victorian Lady

Please see the tutorial on how to import this creation.

This build was made by the Cobbler’s Trading Company of OSGrid, and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You can find it (and many of their other creations) on Wright Plaza on OSGrid. Also, there’s an amazing amount of textures available as well to customize this built the way you like.

Links from the class:

• LibOpenMetaverse: http://lib.openmetaverse.org/wiki/Download
• Backing up with LibOMV: http://rock-vacirca.blogspot.com/2011/03/moving-objects-between-opensims.html
• Imprudence Viewer: http://blog.kokuaviewer.org/
• Previous versions of Imprudence: http://wiki.kokuaviewer.org/wiki/Imprudence:Downloads
• OSAvatars: http://osavatars.com/
• Rexxed: http://www.rexxed.com/
• Jon Brouchoud’s website: http://jonbrouchoud.com/
• TGIB: http://tgib.co.uk/
• TAOS (TGIB forum): http://taos.name/
• Hypergrid Adventurers Club: http://becunningandfulloftricks.com/hypergrid-adventurers-club/

Source: Ankh

Please see the tutorial on how to import this creation and the speedbuild tutorial on how to make it.

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Source: The Umbrella Club

This build uses megaprims and can’t be imported properly to Second Life. Please see the tutorial on how to import this creation.

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Source: Hat

Please see the tutorial on how to import this creation and the speedbuild tutorial on how to make it.

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[EDIT 15th March 2011: Uploaded the second part again, since the audio stream got out of sync at the first try.]

Source: Sunglasses Black Aimee

Please see the tutorial on how to import this creation and the speedbuild tutorial on how to make them.

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Source: Sunglasses Orange Retro

Please see the tutorial on how to import this creation and the speedbuild tutorial on how to make them.

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Source: Sunglasses Black

Please see the tutorial on how to import this creation and the speedbuild tutorial on how to make them.

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