OpenSimulator 0.8 brings one much requested feature, profiles, and a fantastic new feature, variable-sized regions (varregions for short), something we got from an offshoot of OpenSim with collaboration from viewer developers. Profiles and varregions both work out of the box for new installations of D2, so if you’re doing it from scratch, you don’t need to read this. But if you are upgrading your D2, there is some manual upgrading to do. Please read on!

Profiles

For profiles to work in D2, edit your existing bin/MyWorld.ini and add this section somewhere:

[UserProfiles] 
  ProfileServiceURL = "http://myworld.com:9000"   (replace with your domain name)

Then add this extra variable under [LoginService]:

[LoginService] 
  SRV_ProfileServerURI = "http://myworld.com:9000"  (replace with your domain name)

How to Change D2 from Mega to Varregion

During all this time, D2 has been packaged with a precursor of varregions called mega-regions. Mega-regions, however, failed to work well on many details like crossing borders or teleports to the middle of the area. Varregions involves improvements in the viewers, so users need to use a relatively recent viewer like Singularity, but they solve all of the problems that mega-regions had, and make the specification of the space much simpler too.

Starting in this release (r24886, OpenSim 0.8), new installations of D2 use varregions out of the box instead of mega-regions. The default size of the space is as before 512×512, but it can easily be changed. Because the old mega-regions are difficult to deal with, existing D2 worlds are not automatically updated to varregions, so they will continue to work using mega-regions if nothing is done. However, I strongly recommend D2 users to update their worlds immediately after updating D2.

Please note: upgrading to varregion will eliminate the existing parcels in all but the SW area; you will need to redo the parcels again. Although this is inconvenient, I highly recommend changing to varregions now, because support for mega-regions in OpenSim will eventually be dropped.

1. Update your D2 to diva-r24886

    $ [mono] Update.exe

2. Change to diva-r24886/bin and restart OpenSim as usual

    $ [mono] OpenSim.exe

   Note that this will run your world still as a mega-region. Everything should work as before.

3. Make oars of all of your regions. Assuming the default 4-cell megaregion configuration:

    # change region "<SW>"  (where SW is the name of the lower-left region)
    # save oar sw.oar
    # change region "<SE>"   (where SE is the name of the lower-right region)
    # save oar se.oar
    # change region "<NE>"  (where NE is the name of the upper-right region)
    # save oar ne.oar
    # change region "<NW>"   (where NW is the name of the upper-left region)
    # save oar nw.oar

4. Shutdown OpenSim:

    # shutdown

5. IMPORTANT: Make a copy of bin/RegionConfig.ini for backup, in case you need to go back to mega-regions.
6. Edit bin/RegionConfig.ini. Again, assuming the default 4-cell megaregion that came with D2, you should see 4 blocks of region specification there, one per region. Leave the first one, and delete, or comment (with semicolon ‘;’), the other three. On the first block that is left, add the following variables:

    SizeX = 512
    SizeY = 512

   So, your entire (single) block should look something like this:

    [My World 1]
    RegionUUID = "bd60a94c-bebe-bebe-96bc-26564f652111"
    Location = "2238,2550"
    InternalAddress = "0.0.0.0"
    InternalPort = 9000
    AllowAlternatePorts = False
    ExternalHostName = "myworld.com"
    SizeX = 512
    SizeY = 512

7. Restart OpenSim

    $ [mono] OpenSim.exe

   You will now have 1 large region that has all the content, but the terrain everywhere except the SW area is wrong. Don’t panic! You are now going to load the rest of the terrain.

8. Leave the SW corner as is, since it already has the right content. Load the other 3 oars with the corresponding displacement:

   # change region "<SW>"  (where SW is the name of the lower-left, and now only, region)
   # load oar se.oar --displacement "<256,0,0>" --merge --force-terrain 
   # load oar ne.oar --displacement "<256,256,0>" --merge --force-terrain 
   # load oar nw.oar --displacement "<0,256,0>" --merge --force-terrain

That’s it! You now have a D2 with a proper variable-sized region that will work much better than the mega-region we had before. From here on, saving OARs will involve only this one region, not four. This is a true single region, not many regions pretending to be one, like mega-regions.

If you had previously changed the default 2×2 mega-region of D2 by adding more regions in bin/RegionConfig.ini, you need to delete all but the first region in that file and set the size to whatever your space size is. You will also need to save all of the oars for all of your regions and then load them into the single varregion with the corresponding displacements.

Changing the Size of Your World

If you want you can increase the size of your region by changing SizeX and SizeY in bin/RegionConfig.ini, and then restarting OpenSim. Two constraints must be observed: (1) SizeX=SizeY (so, only square regions are allowed); and (2) the size needs to be a multiple of 256.

I don’t recommend regions larger than 1024×1024, though, because the terrain will be massive.

D2 is meant to be a personal virtual world server, so some of these addons have limitations that reflect the spirit of a personal virtual world. For example, in D2 you can create at most 2 groups. I have an unlimited version of Groups, too, but that is meant for larger worlds.

Anyway, you can find all the information about these addons here. The Wifi web app has been extended with some minimal support for managing groups.

These addons are works in progress, and I will keep improving them. This is their first release to the public, so expect some hickups. Please report those issues here, but make sure to read the documentation first.

Have fun!

If you are updating your D2 in Linux from r20232-b to the latest, you will very likely encounter the following problem:

$ mono Update.exe
Using download link http://metaverseink.com/download/diva-r22043.zip
Your current release is diva-r20232-b. Available release is diva-r22043
New release available. Updating…
Downloading new release from http://metaverseink.com/download/diva-r22043.zip to /tmp/diva-r22043.zip. This may take a few minutes.
……………………………………………………………:-)
Extracting new release to /home/opensim
* Unable to unzip. Please try updating later. (Reason: Path is empty)
*********************************************************************
Your installation has been updated. The new release is in
>> /home/opensim/diva-r22043 <<
Your regions have been migrated.
Please read the RELEASENOTES to know what changed.
If you made changes to OpenSim.ini, please copy that file over
or change the new one.
*********************************************************************

<Press return to exit>

In other words, the Update tool fails to unzip the new package.

This is due to a bug in a library included in OpenSim 0.7.4, on which diva-r20232-b is based. The offending library is called Ionic.Zip.dll. Here is what you need to do in order to get past this issue.

1 – Download this version of that library and place it in your current d2 bin folder, diva-r20232-b/bin. You can overwrite  the one that’s there, or move it somewhere before placing the new version there. Note that some download tools (e.g. wget) don’t overwrite files and instead give them new names. Make sure the new version has the right name.

2 – Run the Update tool again.
$ mono Update.exe

Voila! Problem solved.

The latest D2 release has the correct version of Ionic.Zip.dll, so hopefully this won’t happen next time you need to update.

Last week I packaged a release of the Diva Distribution (D2) for OpenSimulator 0.7.4. I’m glad to see that D2 continues to be very popular. Not just there’s already a large number of downloads, but other distributions such as sim-on-a stick also continue build on it. D2 is very easy to install because of the Configuration tool that comes with it. It’s also very easy to keep up-to-date because of the Update tool that is included.

Nevertheless, medium-to-advanced users of D2 often want to change a thing or two from what comes in the package. One thing that I often hear is people not wanting to use mega-regions and, instead, wanting to use plain regions. Another thing I often hear is wanting to add more regions. These are all perfectly good things to do with your D2 installation. However, there’s the wrong way and the right way of changing the default configurations. If you change them the wrong way, things may work fine for a while, but they may break in the next update. This post explains the right way of changing the D2 configurations.

First of all, let me explain how the D2 configuration is designed. D2 uses a hierarchy of configuration files, each possibly overwriting  configuration variables defined in the parent. The hierarchy is shown in the picture on top of this post: the first config file is OpenSimDefaults.ini, the second is OpenSim.ini, the third is DivaPreferences.ini and the forth, and last, is MyWorld.ini. OpenSimDefaults.ini and OpenSim.ini are the regular OpenSim configuration files; the other two are specific to D2. DivaPreferences, as the name says, contains my preferences. If you look in there, there are several modules and connectors that you really don’t want to mess with; it also contains some of my preferences, such as mega-regions (CombineContiguousRegions=true) and permissions. MyWorld, as the name says, contains the configuration variables that are specific to your world — things like URLs, names, etc. But it can have much more.

OK, so having explained this, let me explain how to change configurations the right way. Remember, the hierarchy is overwritable, meaning that settings in the lower levels overwrite settings in the upper levels of the hierarchy. So, whenever you want to change something in your D2 installation, you should do it only, and exactly, in MyWorld.ini. Here is an example.

Suppose you want to use normal regions instead of mega-regions. That is established by the variable CombineContiguousRegions in the [Startup] section. If you look carefully, that variable is first defined in OpenSimDefaults.ini as false (so, no mega-regions). OpenSim.ini uses that default. DivaPreferences.ini, however, overwrites it to true (so, mega-regions are on). If you want to set it back to false, edit your MyWorld.ini and add that variable like this

 [Startup]

  ...

    CombineContiguousRegions = false

Reboot your world, and the change will take effect. (WARNING: if you have been building on the default mega-region of D2, I strongly advise you not to make this particular change, because your buildings in all but the SW region will become phantom)

You can do the same for just about any configuration variable you may want to change! — physics, voice, etc. If the section doesn’t exist in MyWorld.ini, simply add it there.

Why MyWorld.ini and not the other configuration files? Because the next time you update your D2 installation, the new package will bring along new OpenSimDefaults.ini, OpenSim.ini and DivaPreferences.ini files that reflect eventual changes to configurations in OpenSim; the changes you made in those files will not be carried along to the new installation. Of all the 4 configuration files depicted in the picture above, the only one that is preserved between updates is your MyWorld.ini file.

I hope this clarifies things! And happy Virtual-Worlding!

There are many improvements in OpenSim, most notably the new LSL NPC stuff — this allows you to create and manipulate Non-Player Characters (bots) directly from scripts. Really cool!

Hypergrid-wise, the most noteworthy development is the support for Friends across the Hypergrid. As explained in a previous post, I have created a world-to-world social network platform in OpenSim! Diaspora, anyone? Well, I get to actually do it and deploy it in  your worlds

Have fun!

P.S. I also made a new release for Wifi that works with Robust 0.7.2. Enjoy!

It has been a while since I made a D2 + Wifi releases. I had been waiting for OpenSim 0.7.1; the changes between 0.7.0.2 and 0.7.1 were such that I didn’t want to risk making a release in between. OpenSim 0.7.1 finally happened earlier this week, so here is the much awaited D2! Technically, it corresponds to OpenSim r15402, which is a couple of commits after the official release — I found a couple of bugs in the official release related to the Library, so I fixed them.

Things to pay attention to when you update your D2:

• This time after you Update, you need to run Configure again on your new installation, because of changes in configuration variables. In order for this process to be as smooth as possible, have your current config-include/MyWorld.ini open in one window while answering the questions for Configure in the new install. If you had made changes to your MyWorld.ini, simply add those changes to the new MyWorld.ini that is produced after running Configure.
• As usual, the Update tool will ask you if you want to preserve any changes you may have made to your Wifi pages. I always say “yes, I want to preserve my own.” By doing that, it’s guaranteed that the new Wifi installation will use the pages that I had before. However, this time there is a nice improvement in the splash.html page that shows some statistics at the bottom — see here for example. Not a problem. When Update copies over your old pages into the new install, it also places the new ones under WifiPages with extension .diva, for example, splash.html.diva. That way you can easily see the differences between the two and copy-and-paste the parts that matter. In my case, this time, I simply replaced the entire splash.html file with the new one; you may want to check your own changes.
• Marck added support for localization in Wifi (he’s German). Now you can have your Wifi installation in your favorite language. See here for how to do that (scroll down for the LOCALIZATION section).
• The Wifi administrator account has a teaser new link called “Console”, a new feature that we have been working on. It’s undocumented for the time being, because it’s not secure enough for me to recommend using it. It will come to life in a future release.
• Bad news: Teleports between OpenSim 0.7.0.x installations and OpenSim 0.7.1 installations are incompatible, because of a bug fix in libomv. You probably knew that if you had tried to HG TP to OSGrid.
• Good news: most large grids, like OSGrid, are already running 0.7.1, so you can finally join the crowd there.
• To test HG TPs, feel free to use my own world, http://ucigrid01.nacs.uci.edu:9001. It’s somewhere in the 5000’s and reachable from all D2’s if you haven’t changed your coordinates.

Have fun!

UPDATE (5/7): I realize that many people may not have noticed the subtle differences in HG addressing that happened between 0.6.9 (HG 1.0) and 0.7.0.x (HG 1.5), and then between 0.7.0.x and 0.7.1. Let me explain.

An HG address in the old HG 1.0 was simply the address of a particular simulator. HG 1.0 did not have the concept of “grid” in place, so even if a simulator was part of a grid, its HG address was the simulator’s address. For example, in the UCI grid you could reach individual simulators with addresses like ucigrid04.nacs.uci.edu:9007 (the Gateway 7000 region); note that ucigrid04 is the machine where that particular simulator runs, and 9007 is the HTTP port of that particular simulator.

With HG 1.5, the concept of “grid” has been put in place. A “grid” is a collection of simulators running under the same authority and that  share one single “Gatekeeper.” The Gatekeeper is central to HG 1.5 security and, in grids, it usually runs in the Robust server. The Gatekeeper is the entry point to every single incoming request like link region requests and agent transfer requests. In HG1.5 you cannot link directly to simulators anymore; you link to Gatekeepers wherever they live. For example the Gateway 7000 region in the UCI Grid is now accessed like this: http://ucigrid00.nacs.uci.edu:8002 “Gateway 7000″.  A few of things to notice:

• First, the “domain:port” syntax that was used before (and that is still accepted for the time being, but considered obsolete) has been replaced by a full-blown URL starting with “http://”. This is so that HG services can be implemented by regular web applications. For example, the Gatekeeper of ScienceSim lives in http://grid.sciencesim.com/grid/hypergrid.php — yes, a php script.
• Second, the URL is that of the Gatekeeper, not of the region itself. The region is referred to by name after the URL, and when the name has white spaces you need to use quotes. If you want to reach UCI Grid’s Gateway 7000 region, you can pull up the map in the viewer and type exactly what I just wrote in bold up there. Or if you want to use the link-region command on the sim console  you can type:
  $ link-region <local_x> <local_y> http://ucigrid00.nacs.uci.edu:8002 “Gateway 7000″
• Individual Gatekeepers may have different policies in place concerning incoming links, so a link request to specific regions inside a grid may very well fail; or it may be required. If you simply specify the URL of the Gatekeeper and omit the region name, the Gatekeeper is supposed to link you to a default region in that grid, if it is defined. If that’s not defined in the target grid, then the link request will fail.

For standalones like D2, there is no difference between “grid” and “simulator” — they’re one and the same. In standalones, the Gatekeeper runs inside the simulator. As a consequence, the HG address is that of the simulator itself. But  the points made above still apply, conceptually speaking.

UPDATE (5/8): well, foo! I found one wrong configuration variable in diva-r15402. I made a new release diva-r15402-b that corrects it. If you updated to diva-r15402, please update again, so that you get diva-r15402-b. No need to run Configure on this small update. Just run Update, switch to the new installation, run OpenSim from there and you’re done. (If you update from an older release, then you need to run Configure, as the instructions say).

Also, I found that it’s better to remove the old hyperlinks from the DB so that old formats don’t get in the way of your travels. It’s very simple. Login to your DB and issue this statement: DELETE FROM regions WHERE flags=524  (524 are hyperlinks)