random ideas for small co-op grids at i live in science land

random ideas for small co-op grids

it’s no secret that SimHost works very well for us. James allows total access of our server and i like that responsibility because i consider myself pretty self-reliant. James is only an email, or help ticket, away if i need him. when we first started with SimHost i did have a load of questions such as how to restart regions and where to find backups. after those initial few weeks i haven’t needed any intervention until our last OpenSim update, which he did in a few hours

it’s been an awesome 22 months and OpenSim has run like a top for us with the only tasks being grabbing backups a few times a week and a monthly (or every other month!) check for Windows updates and a server reboot followed by an OpenSim restart

Eros posted a rhetoric question on his blog about wanting to start a grid with 3 or 4 others (i may be totally pooching his intentions but i’m warping it into this blog post) =D

i have often had the same thought since i left Second Life. if it wasn’t for subQuark, i may have totally quit doing virtual worlds. but here i am and if i did not have subQuark’s grid to call my own, then i’d probably be thinking along the same lines as Eros is

i love the freedom of our grid – i can run around nekked (lol, i’m such a prude that i stay fully dressed with as many layers as my avatar can have!) and i don’t have to worry about anyone telling me what to do (no TOS!) =)

in my daydreaming about this i have thought about how would i go about it

for a “real” grid that could have decent concurrency, i’d look to SimHost and start with a package like we currently have. if i went in with three other people, it would cost us each $45 per month (if demand grows, you can step up to their next package with dual quad core and 16 gigs RAM for ~$270 with the 5% Ener discount) ;)

the next natural question is what does that $45 a month get each person?

that’s where it gets really gray. unlike Second Life and its hard coded limits of 15,000 prims and as many scripts as you can stand lag-wise, OpenSim is limitless

only it really isn’t – depending on your prims you could have 90,000 or 9,000 on a region (see an old post where i had over 50,000 prims on one region – pic below)

Enclave Harbour has 16 regions but we only have 32,000 prims and less than 500 scripts. with a 16 sim grid, you could build cooperatively on like the four centre ones with each being the responsibility of one person (such as making a heavily themed city) and then use the surrounding sims as outland. you could also do a 9 region grid with each person doing their own thing in each corner, or you could do just a four region grid with massively heavy builds. there are many possibilities and you’d need to go into it with flexibility and patience – and good friendship! my 30,000 simple prims might be a light load with just a few textures (think Minecraft and its low load blocks) but your 10,000 sculpts/meshes and mongo scripts might tax the entire grid!

while having very few hard coded limits is great, it also poses challenges for a small group of friends sharing a grid on a server. one solution that may happen in the future is Kitely allowing for multi-region grids or grouped placement. that would be like OSGrid but allow for “normal” concurrency. i’d love to build a heavily themed post-apocalyptic grid with DreamWalker (and maybe Sarge too – depends if McDreamy will let boys in the club) where we would each have our own region but join them together as a gritty Chinatown Blade Runner dealio =)

all these could work well for $180 a month

now that's a buttload of prims!

written by Ener Hax

June 5th, 2012 at 7:47 pm

posted in OpenSim,virtual worlds

tagged with cooperative grid, daydream

I’ve been getting the same level of control and service from SoftPaw Estates. But my own goal has been to simply have an HG home base from which to gridhop from, so, for now, I’m satisfied :-)

Now, to start a recruitment drive for Misfit’s Marauders. Mwah-ha-ha-haaaa…..

Sarge Misfit

5 Jun 12 at 7:57 pm

I’d also like to add that there are many OpenSim hosting providers that offer by-the-region pricing, as well.

I just looked at SoftPaw, which Sarge recommended, and they charge $12 a month for a 15,000-prim region for up to 20 simultaneous visitors. Here’s the link to the land page: http://softpawestates.blogspot.com/p/packages.html

It’s a shared virtual server, not a dedicated one, but sounds like a good deal. Just remember to get plenty of OAR backups, and be ready to upgrade when you outgrow the basic service.

I’m also a big fan of Dreamland, which we use to host the Hyperica grid. http://www.dreamlandmetaverse.com/en/private-osgrid-regions

They charge $30 a month for a 12,000-prim region for up to 10 simultaneous visitors, but are known for excellent support and a FANTASTIC Web-based management panel — you can restart regions, get OAR backups, create users, etc… all from a very simple web interface without ever having to learn any shell or console commands.

Once Kitely enables hypergrid, of course, all bets are off. I expect that a lot of people will move their low-use and homestead regions to Kitely and teleport over to events and parties and classes on other grids.

I expect to see a lot of other hosting providers start offering Kitely-style on-demand regions, as well. After all, do you really care if your region is up and running or not when nobody is on it? The only thing that might suffer is your crops and breedables — the vendors would have to rewrite the scripts so that everything continues to grow even when the region is turned off (the way my Farmville crops continue growing even when my iPhone is off).

Meanwhile, if you and your friends have decent routers (which, apparently, I don’t) you can get Sim-on-a-Stick or New World Studio and run a mini-grid on your home computer, and put up hypergates to your friends’ minigrids, and have unlimited — and free — space for your roleplaying adventures or anything else you want to cook up.

Maria Korolov

5 Jun 12 at 8:38 pm

“Chinatown Blade Runner dealio”

take a week off blogging and implement.

thanks!

would like the big coka cola sign to!

and steam.

Breen Whitman

5 Jun 12 at 11:46 pm

This blog answers so many of my rhetoric questions.

I have many more LOL or more like How-to’s

Scaleability issues, when people want to own regions on your grid and/or release them.

Being able to offer some awesome avatars as default rather than ruth.

Giving residents the option of closing their region or opening it to hop onto HG.

BTW Chinatown Blade Runner would be so cool!

Eros Deus

6 Jun 12 at 10:38 am

Hi Ener,

All worlds on Kitely are on the same grid already. What we intend to work on, once we turn Kitely Credits into an inworld currency, is to enable people with premium plans to create bigger worlds. People who have multi-region worlds will then be able to give building permissions to a group of friends so big land masses could be developed cooperatively.

Using a collection of worlds, blamgates, and Kitely’s built-in world access controls, role playing groups are already able to have their own private (or public) universes inside Kitely. Bigger worlds will finally enable people to have them on multi-region continents and not just on region-sized islands as they can now.