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.
2. Mars Roleplay
I splashed out on a new server, this one is even more powerful than my development rig, and used it to set up an even bigger Mars simulation.
This is comprised of four 8×8 regions arranged in a square. An 8×8 region means that it occupies 64 grid coordinates, so with four of them that means the new landmass is the equivalent size as 256 standard regions.
1. Mars Roleplay
I saw a video someone made showing a run through (literally, avatar running) of a region she had built and had moved to a Raspberry Pi to see if it would cope with it. It was a beautifully made region and there were plenty of animesh avatars and a few NPCs populating the area, and it handled it all very easily.
I've been hankering to make a Mars simulator, and with opensimulator you can set the gravity and terminal velocity, which is a good start. Also, using Windlight features you can change the colour of the sky, and I found some nice Mars'ish looking ground textures. I also had a Raspberry Pi 5b with 8Gb memory not doing a lot.
Initially I started with a single 1×1 region (1×1 means it occupies one grid coordinate). I repurposed a mesh island and re-textured it with the same textures I used for the ground, and then tweaked the underlying colour to make the mountains slightly darker than the ground so they stood out more.
The result, as you can see is rather pleasing. I stuck a sign on the ground to say 'Welcome to Mars, this sim is running on a Raspberry Pi 5, Gravity is 3.74m/s2'. I also set terminal velocity to 147m/s, but avatars won't actually fall faster than 80m/s in opensim so it only affects physical objects. There are some limitations you just have to live with.
I quickly realised though that a 256m by 256m region isn't big enough. There is a way to get rid of the water, but the area beyond the region boundaries is just a flat colour that reflects the colour of the sky, so it still looks weird. The solution to this was firstly to enlarge the region to a 2×2 (that is, it occupies 4 grid coordinates), then line the edges of the region with low mountains to hide what was beyond.
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.