Table of Contents
I'm a novelist and have an interest in space science and physics. I've been a programmer for more than 40 years and I like reviewing new and up-and-coming authors. I have become a committed member of the OpenSimulator community.
Please consider registering (see top of page) to help support this site. Your personal data isn't shared with anyone, but it makes me feel good.
OS GridStats
I wanted to produce grid statistics for my grid, not because I expect high numbers of visitors (quite the opposite in fact), but because the virtual land in my grid does exist, the visitor counts are quite real, and I wanted to include these stats in the overall opensimulator grid and hypergrid statistics data.
OS Partnership
Partnership is easier (and cheaper) in OpenSimulator than it is in Second Life. So is dissolving partnerships. A partnership is where two avatars declare a partnership with another (partnership in the sense of marriage and its civil counterparts). When two avatars are partnered, their profiles are updated to state who their partner is.
There is no gain from a partnership, except to say 'I am not single'. Your partner gains no rights over your account or property. It's just for show.
Prim Inventory Transfer
These are the OpenSimulator scripts used in the demonstration video prim inventory transfer for transferring inventory from one object to another, and allowing transferred scripts to be set to a running state.
Making Videos
I made my first OpenSimulator video recently using OBS, to explain how my scripts for cross-region, cross-grid object communications was both powerful and very simple to use. Since then, I've been making test videos trying to improve the output.
First off, I had to get rid of the hum that accompanied whichever microphone I used, or which ports they were plugged into. I realised in the end that it was an electrical shielding failure. My computer is a brick, so although a powerful computer, everything is packed into a small box. Any analog audio circuit is going to suffer in these conditions.
IRCBridgeModule Networking
Opensimulator has a module called IRCBridgeModule. I won't go through how to configure this module, which comes by default with OpenSimulator, I'm just going to talk about networking using the module. To setup the module, just peruse the wiki page: Opensimulator IRCBridgeModule. See also the Gotchas below for a very specific configuration setting.
The first thing you have to know about the module, is that communications using this bridge are grid agnostic - that is, it doesn't know (or care) about the grid it is on. An object on one grid can talk to an object on another grid. You have to be able to control both regions in order to configure the simulators properly, but it's possible. I have regions on OSGrid, a private grid of my own with (currently) ten regions on it, and a standalone server supporting two regions: objects can (and do) happily chat to each other across all these configurations.
There is a video overview of the scripts discussed below, showing you how it works and how simple it is to use. Hopefully it will ignite ideas on what you can do with it. YouTube: OpenSimulator integr-grid object communications
In the image at the top of this article, you can see an example of inter-region communications at work. The master - the object you see in the image - sends out a request for information from objects in other regions. Their response is the number of agents (account-based avatars) and NPCs (non-account-based avatars) in each region. It takes less than a second from sending out the request to receiving the last response. In fact, I have trouble releasing the mouse-button before all the information is returned (touching the board sends out the request). As you can see, the list includes most of my regions in mossgrid and two from OSGrid. The fact that some regions are in another grid has no relationship with how long a response takes to arrive back to the display board.