Confessions of a Part-Time Mermaid: May 2009

The past few days, I've been experimenting with OpenSimulator, the open-source sim server that is compatable with the SL client. I hadn't paid much attention to it, thinking that I would need a dedicated server machine, but found out that you can host the server on the same machine as your client (of course, having a fast computer with lots of memory helps). Of course, having the server on a dedicated machine would have advantages.

Installing and configuring OpenSim isn't for the fainthearted technophobe, but there are some good tutorials on setting it up.

OpenSim comes with SQLite for database storage, but I decided to install MySQL which is better able to handle larger number of assets without a lot of lag. Here again, there is a tutorial for installing it and integrating it with OpenSim.

With a bit of head-banging and googling, I was finally able to bring up the server. So I made a copy of the shortcut for the SL client, and added command line options specifying the local OpenSim server IP address and port: "C:\Program Files\SecondLife\SecondLife.exe" -loginuri http://127.0.0.1:9000/ -loginpage http://127.0.0.1:9000/?method=login. I clicked on the shortcut, and found myself standing on a small round island in the middle of the default sim.

When you arrive in OpenSim, you are in the "T" pose, which is a bit annoying. However, as soon as you move, the walk animation kicks in and everything is OK from that point. Assuming that the noobie "duck walk" is OK.

After doing some random terrain building, I decided to experiment further and created a second sim on the server, next to the first one. This worked just fine, especially once I found out that the coordinates are sim-oriented (i.e. (1000,1001) is the sim next to (1000,1000) instead of (1000,1256) like I first assumed). So now I had two whole sims to play with.

I don't know how many sims I can support on my long-suffering Compaq without it melting its CPU down into a puddle of silicon, but two should be enough for my personal empire for the time being.

One of the big problems with OpenSim at the current time is that there isn't much in their library in terms of objects, textures, animations, and the like. You basically have to build everything up from scratch, and about all you can get out of SL is copies of modifiable scripts (by copy/paste into a text document on your computer and then in the opposite direction into a new script in OS), and textures for which you have full perms. I cloned Mare by going into Appearance and writing down all of the slider numbers, then applying them to my new avatar in the OpenSim world. This was a bit tedious, and I don't look right without my prim hair :-(

The contents of a sim can be exported to what is called an OAR file. Googling around, I found a very limited number of these available, some with trees and buildings in them. I was able to load these into one of my sims and get copies of the trees for my own inventory. Confusingly, OAR files normally have the extension .tar.gz, which indicates that they are actually Unix-style compressed files; this extension convention will probably be changed in the future. Caution: loading an OAR file wipes the previous contents of the sim, so be sure to save it into an OAR file of your own before importing another one if you want to save it!

If you don't mind spending 29 € (US$25 or so), there is a utility/modified client called Second Inventory which allows you to download items out of your inventory (only the ones for which you have full permissions) to your hard drive, and then upload them into OS. I don't have that yet, because I'm just experimenting right now and am too ~~cheap~~ frugal to spend any money on this.

If you get lonely or don't want to handle the care and feeding of hosting your own server, there are several public OpenSim grids on the Internet to explore -- here's a list. If you have your server on a machine that is visible to the rest of the Net, you can add your sims to one of the grids and "go public". I haven't explored any of them myself yet, but I will before too much longer.

OpenSimulator is still considered alpha software, which means that it's a work in progress, and I've run into several bugs and gotchas already; but nothing that is a real show-stopper in terms of playing around with it. I plan on reporting any problems I find, if they already haven't been reported: things have been and should go on improving rapidly.

There is a feeling of power in having your own private virtual world!