Another look at open life

Had another go on Open Life yesterday to see if I could make some simple clothes and dress my avatar without having to go to a sandbox area.

I followed this procedure:

• upload three textures to my inventory,  jeans, tennis shoes and a t-shirt;
• create a new pair of pants and wear them;
• create a new shirt and wear it;
• create a new pair of shoes and wear them;
• go into appearance mode and edit each of these putting the textures I had uploaded into the clothes;

I ended up with a passable looking set of clothes on my avatar  but the whole process was vey slow, the new clothes taking ages to rezz.

I then chatted to a new resident and gave her some jeans to wear. We then teleported to Pawpaw region to look for freebies but I crashed crossing a sim boundary [nothing new there then] and had to relog.

Finally I gave up thinking that open life is still difficult to manage and not really ready for prime time.

Building in opensim

I thought I would try to build a simple beach house in opensim to see how easy it was.

I managed to produce a house but there were one or two issues/points which occurred to me as I built it.

• The base of the house can be a single prim because they are not restricted to 10 metres;
• There are only a few textures available with the default server so I had to download some from second life and import them into opensim – fortunately at no cost lol;
• Things go together easily as long you set the base prim to simple coordinates and make sure that it’s rotation is set to zero to provide a base set of coordinates to allow all the other parts to be lined up easily;
• There is no issue with using a lot of prims as the region will allow 45000 so together with the possibility of larger prims this makes life easier.

Creating trees on open sim

First try at a papaya tree

I wanted to create a simple tree using a tree texture set up on three prims.

The first time I followed the following procedure:

• create a prim 10m high 10m wide and 5m deep
• set all the sides to transparent using the texture tab in edit
• locate a convenient texture – in this case a papaya texture comes in the default set-up
• in the texture tab select a single side and put the texture on the two 10×10 m sides – once “select texture” is selected and a side identified by clicking on it, any texture picked up only goes on that side
• change the depth 0.01m leaving a very thin prim with textures on the two main faces
• in the edit object tab place the prim in an easy to remember location e.g. 94m in the X direction
• drag out a copy of the prim along the x-axis to give two copies, three prims in all
• rotate the last prim by 60 degrees around the Z-axis from the object tab and change it’s x-coordinate back to 94m (or what ever it was in your system)
• rotate the other prim through 120 degrees and move it back
• link the three prims together by selecting them all together in edit (edit one and shift click on the others to pick them up) and using link in the tools menu

You now have a papaya tree to grow on your region.

I noticed that the client would not allow full transparency to be set and this can result in some ugly lines around the prims.  To get round this set the intial prim to transparent by using a clear texture rather than setting the transparency.

Setting up Opensim on my own machine

I have spent a little time ove rthe last month trying out various opensim servers for local use.

I tried the openlife 3DX server and found it worked reasonably well. I was able to edit everything, build objects and change the terrain.

However I did have a few problems:

• I could not add more than one region. When I followed the procedure by setting up further xml files in the regions folder, taking care to follow all the instructions such as using different ports, the regions appeared on the map but I could not go to them or see them in world.
• I set up a single region and placed a number of objects on it and at first all seemed to be going well. Then when I logged in all my objects were missing from my inventory. They were still there on the sim but when I tried to take them or a copy of them the system did not allow this.

I then took a look at the opensim standalone server which I set up with no real issues and managed to get four regions working in world. Again I could do most of the things I wanted to do such as build and terraform.

However there were two issues with this system:

• when I moved from one region to the other I ended up walking in the ground. Although I could solve this my doing an “appearance” it was still very irritating.
• perhaps more important was the problem with the physics which mean that I could not walk on objects as they did not detect my impact. Effectively everything was phantom.

I thought about this for a while and looked around for some help on line and finally came across Zonja Capalini’s excellent post about setting up opensim using MSQL as the data base.  The instructions were very clear, I only went wrong once when I failed to do as asked. In less than hour I had a server up and running and four regions loaded and terraformed. Moving between regions was no problem and the physics issue seemed to have gone away. I am not sure whether these issues were solved by the use of a better database, a more recent server version, neither or both but it seems OK.

An added bonus was that the data was persistent over server resets and my carefully crafted avatar (lol) looked the same when I relogged after mounting the server again.

Early days yet and I suppose the next step is to try to get the server onto a network but that is work for another day.