So that post on Megaregions ended up being a bit more popular than I imagined – resulting in a veritable torrent of ‘How do I enable megaregions?‘ requests both to my personal inbox, the #opensim-dev chatroom and the opensim-dev mailing lists. You can stop now. Here’s instructions.
It’s actually really simple if you are running the latest experimental code, however I need to prefix these instructions with a dire warning: this is very new code. The first prototype was done on August 28th. It’s been a week and a half since then. Yes MegaRegions are an exciting bit of technology, but no – they are not that well tested, and yes there are bugs. More than usual. It was added to OpenSim as a undocumented feature because Teravus (in his right mind) didnt want to inflict it on the masses until it had at least a modicum of testing among more experienced users.
There are known issues at this stage – do not attempt to convert an existing array of regions into a single Megaregion without taking a full backup first (apparently there are issues there too) – if you still want to go ahead and check this out; you need to be running a relatively recent Git release of OpenSim (warning: there be dragons here already), into your OpenSim.ini add the line “CombineContiguousRegions=true” under the [Startup] section, eg:
[Startup] CombineContiguousRegions=true ...
The regions need to be contiguous (that is already bordering), and you need to order the regions in your Regions.ini in a Left-to-Right, Top-to-Bottom (Correction: South-to-North, West-to-East) order. Failing to order the regions will cause the combiner to fail (new code. known issues.); it is recommended to make new regions for the purpose of this exercise. Otherwise, this is a fairly simple process to those already aquainted with setting up OpenSim regions. Credit goes to Teravus for the original implementation.
Grid etiquette right now suggests it is best to not connect megaregions neighbouring to non-megaregions for the moment, as they may introduce instabilities into your neighbours. (eg, pick random numbers for your starting coordinates). While you can connect megaregions to grids such as OSgrid, please do so away from the main continents. For loading a terrain across all the regions, I recommend investigating the “terrain load-tile” command, which allows you to import multiple regions worth of terrain from a single image. The above terrain was generated off a 2048×2048 F32 RAW produced by World Machine.
Nice work. I just wish we wouldn’t need to do these kind of hacks though, but it’d require some major modding of a client and basically sparring all other clients from access essentially due to technical differences.
Good job nonetheless.
Nexii Malthus
11 Sep 09 at 7:42 am
This is excellent work and just plain awsome Adam. I setup a four sim mega region for the Sims3D Welcome Center and it’s .. well, just what we needed.
Thanks for hearing all of the “We need larger areas”.
Tracy Welles – SL
Tracy Welles
18 Oct 09 at 12:29 am
Hey, I’ve got this working with a 2×3 setup, but it seems that one downside is we can’t set subdivided parcels to play different media in different parcels; is that true, or am I just missing something in the configuration?
NoahY
27 Oct 09 at 5:32 pm
Hi,
I recently created a mega region of 3×3. A friend of mine also created a 2×2 mega region. We attempted to put those 2 mega regions next to each other, but thats where things started to go wrong. Now we seperated them and things seem to have stabalized again.
1) I was not able to cross the border between the 2 mega regions. One time both of our servers crashed simultaneously. It did crash while I was right at the border between the mega regions when it crashed. So after logging in again and restarting the server, my avatar spawned right back in the border, thereby crashing the server again. The solution was to login directly into a Plaza region and then teleport back home.
2) Sometimes a bunch of linked prims would jump out of the region while i attempted to move it around. Finding these prims again would involve me to lower all terrain back to lowest, and start looking for the lost prims. Since this happended a couple of times, there are still some linked prims lost somewhere deep of very high, or even out of the map alltogether, like into the neighbouring sea ( offline region ). Starting the server gives me a lot of messages saying “prim region crossing failed”, while I have no visible prims crossing any border, so they must be those lost prims I think.
3) Another issue is the name of the mega region, it takes the name of the first region. While the center region was intended to be the main region. I have a 3×3 region with a center region called Square Haven, around it are north/east/south/west. I would like the mega region to take on the name of the center region instead of the first region in the regions.ini sequence. Maybe setting a mega region name would be an idea?
Thanks for the great work, I love opensim!
Phix
Phix Phixation
8 Jan 10 at 3:12 pm