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.
