We’ve just launched our brand-new OpenSim & realXtend hosting service – at what we think are pretty decent rates. $49.95/mo gets you 1024MB of dedicated memory plus a dedicated processor core, including fully managed OpenSim support. James Stallings (a veteran OpenSim sys-admin and grid operator for OSgrid) is managing the operations side and providing full-time dedicated support for SimHost.

So what’s that price get you?

• Fully Managed Support (we’ll deal with sim crashes, and keeping your simulator alive.)
• Regular Updates of the official OpenSim Software (we know you like the latest shinies – so we can provide them)
• Good Quality Hardware – 1GB of dedicated memory + 1 Processor Core is our ‘minimum’.
• Warm fuzzy feeling that money you pay is going to feeding OpenSim developers (our profits are being reinvested in the platform)
• Grid Agnostic Connections – Run your own grid (Standalone), Connect to OSGrid or any other public grid. It’s your choice. We wont force you into our own private grid.

For a little bit extra per month, we have a premium plan that includes 4 regions, the option to use modular realxtend (modrex — not compatible with some other features, just ask us.) and the option for us to run versions that aren’t quite properly tested yet (they require more support on our behalf, hence the higher rate.) – such as megaregions and other more experimental features (we’ll need to talk with you about risks first though.)

If you input the promocode “ADAMFRISBY” (no quotes) you will get a bonus $5.00/mo off the pricing too. (So you can get our standard package for only $44.95/mo).

Web: www.simhost.com
Live & Ticketed Support: www.simhost.com/support

If you have any questions – feel free to contact support and they will be happy to answer them.

A picture is of course worth a thousand words.

How to get it?

Please remember, this is alpha software. Not like OpenSim ‘it sort of kinda works’ alpha, but really early code. It may break. It may trash your sim. It may kill small children. You have been warned. Please note, this requires a working realXtend authentication server – if you have a dedicated server on a public IP, you may use the ‘users.realxtend.net‘ service, otherwise a copy of the auth server is included with the standard realXtend server package.

SVN – ModRex is only availible via SVN at the moment.
svn checkout http://forge.opensimulator.org/svn/modrex/branches/0.2-alpha/

Known Issues

This version is not compatible with the Second Life viewer at all due to the Auth server dependency, installing modrex will disable SL based logins. This is a known issue and will be fixed in the next release.

Final Note

This is a preview release and does not construe a final public version not something in search of widespread testing, we’re still actively working on this – a more polished final version is currently in progress which I will encourage widespread testing. This version is not feature-complete with realXtend 0.4 – if you want to use realXtend features in a production or semiproduction environment, I would recommend using the standard server software for the moment.

So, we’re hitting the point where our current work is nearing closure with the Modular Rex code – the biggest thing worth noting right now is some new extensions to allow extra rex properties to be attached to objects. This wasnt implemented quite how I originally envisioned – I ran into some issues where subclassing something simply wasnt practical. While it was possible to do – the number of workarounds required to keep it running in the long term pushed the work in another simpler direction.

The above shows an object stored in ModRex with the additional properties set — to handle this, we’re actually using a second Entity array inside of a module, which monitors agent connections and feeds the array to anyone who can parse it (ie Rex-derived clients). Why not subclass? The short answer here is we ‘construct’ SceneObjectPart classes in a wide variety of places – including serialisers. Replacing all those references with a ISOPFactory class required making a few too many changes for me to be comfortable with. I’d argue it needs to be done from an architectural perspective, however we’re also discussing doing a SceneObject overhaul, and it would be foolish to do such a work when the replacement is nearby.

So – what still needs to be done? Well there’s still the matter of the CommsManager – right now we can use the local comms manager to access inventory ala standalone-mode, however this does require a degree of database synchronisation between your OpenSim UserDB, and the authentication server. In the long term some bigger changes are needed – most notably, I would like to ‘do away’ with the use of UUID’s as usernames and move to the more logical (and unique) Rex Account schema (user@host).

Finally – there’s some nifty parts to ModularRex which I hope to expose to configuration options soon, and that’s breaking up the features more thouroughly. There’s a number of people who want to use Rex features like their avatars and/or meshes, but dont want to rely on the Rex Authentication system — internally this is quite possible to do and once the main pieces are all signed off, that’s one area we’d like to work on.

Update #1: Better Screenshot

OK, so I managed to get OpenSim’s asset system working with modrex again, so Meshes are now sort-of working with modrex (albeit buggy). [Clicky]