Which brings me to the following pretty screenshot:

This is a fresh install of Gridmix – one of the main aims of the package has been to make it so it requires very minimal configuration to look good, and do what you want. It’s pretty easily adapted for either a private or a public grid with a host of settings suitable for each.

For example – Signup & Registration, for private grids you might not care about verifying email address. In which case, you signup form is configured like so:

But if you are running a public grid – and you want to ensure signups are legitimate, you will want to verify email addresses, enable a captcha — and assuming you are in beta, you might want to say enforce a ’signup code’ to limit who can create accounts. Your signup form might look like this instead:

The entire skin is very customisable – not only can we easily substitute alternate themes in, but the entire default skin has been setup so that all the images and CSS can be HSL shifted at any time (allowing you to easily recolour your grid with minimal effort)

In addition, we’ve implemented a Mediawiki-Syntax parser into the content management system – allowing you to edit each page on the site using wiki-syntax. This allows you to ensure a consistent appearance across all pages – and keep that in the event that you choose to change the theme.

Finally – there’s a bunch of features in there which I know many people will find a big improvement over what Wi supports; such as Google Maps based world maps (which are generated in realtime – and include live positioning of all online agents on the grid – see the green dot.)

Cost, Availibility, etc.

We’re providing GridMix as an alternative to Wi for all current (and new) SimHost customers who have private grids. This will be a private beta for a period of around three months while we work in any specific feature requests and bugfixes that our customers bring to us – if you are a current customer, just contact support and we can get you setup with GridMix fairly quickly.

We’ll be releasing a limited “core” version as open source software sometime in the future (once we’re out of beta) – we’ve built this all using a MVC framework and have spent some time ensuring that it is both secure, functional and a lot more useful than Wi was. One of the big improvements has been the implementation of an ACL system based on the godLevel – you can now delegate users with a range of roles which grants them certain powers to ban or edit users or change grid settings.

It represents a complete ground-up rewrite, no-code has been copied from the original Wi (or anywhere else), the only foreign code is the base MVC framework. We’ll be adding new features fairly regularly as time goes on – some of the features we plan to implement include some compatibility with the search system, events calendar support & some analytics.

The full version will be available for a fee to non-customers, and a hosted version will be free to all current and future SimHost customers, who have one of our hosted grid packages (or a dedicated server). If you are a current (or potential) SimHost customer and wish to participate in the beta – as I said above, please contact us via support for more information.

This tool is a from start-to-finish utility for launching regions, it will automatically negotiate with your router to forward ports as required; and it will handle automatic updates of new versions using the official OSgrid.org Binary Releases. The basic release contains all the features of the default OSgrid binary release (including preconfigured Groups, Physics, Scripts, etc.). Shameless Plug: Obviously this has all the limitations of regions hosted from home – namely bandwidth & network considerations – if you want to host something permanently and reliably with support, come take a look at SimHost.

This new version of the launcher includes the following new features

• Confirmed & Tested Linux Support (and presumably OSX with Mono)
• New Zip Library (uses Ionic.Zip now) – works better on Linux.
• Completely rewritten UI – Now provides a great deal more feedback on what the tool is doing at any specific point in time.
• Ability to manually position a region optionally.
• Basic Input Validation (Bug: Glitchy on Linux – if you cant close the tool, input a few characters into the current field)
• ILMerge’d Release – now just one self-contained .exe

To use the tool, follow the following steps:

1. Drop the .exe in it’s own folder somewhere. Run it.
2. Enter a region name – must be between 1 and 64 alphanumeric characters. Some symbols & UTF8 characters are fine too. Known invalid symbols include: [ ] \r \n.
3. Select either automatic positioning (default), or enter a pair of free coordinate values. X first, followed by Y. Coordinates must be between 0 and 65,535.
4. Enter your Avatar Name on OSgrid.org – Firstname followed by Lastname.
5. Click Launch
6. At this point, the tool will download, unpack and install your region – you may be prompted to perform certain tasks manually (such as if Automatic Port Forwarding fails you may be asked to port forward manually.)
7. Once the OpenSim console appears – you should be good to go.

How to get this tool:

This is an Open Source utility released under a liberal BSD license. The latest source may be obtained via github

Source Code: http://github.com/AdamFrisby/OSGridLauncher

Release Download: http://www.adamfrisby.com/OSGL-r0.22.exe

Enjoy.

I see on a fairly regularly basis reports that OpenSim supports 45,000 prims versus Second Life®’s 15,000. It’s rubbish; but it comes from a somewhat logical source. The viewer itself will not display more than 45,000 objects in the ‘prims parcel supports’ field. There’s no technical reason for it – it just clamps the value (and I’m not entirely sure why). If OpenSim is set to unlimited prims (or 99,999,999), the viewer will show it as ‘Supports 45,000 Prims’ and not what it really is (’Supports “99,999,999″ prims’).

But, you can go well above that boundary. Some of Shenlei’s Leviathan builds are now breaking the 160,000 primitive count mark (and I have no doubt she intends to push it further!), but those builds are incredibly intensive on other aspects of the system, particularly memory usage. Primitive counts as a resource delimiter have never been accurate as far as underlying consumption goes; how they evolved goes straight back to when SL was still a MMORPG with nifty building tools (circa 2002-2004).

This is evident in SL – certain scripts cause “lag”, popular clubs can block other users from accessing the region (by eating up the whole max avatar count) – neither of these is factored into the current resource limits. This is applicable in OpenSim too – an unscripted region will behave better than a scripted one, an empty region will have uptimes measured in months, a popular one in days (or hours).

So, with this entry I aim to do two things – first dispell the myth that OpenSim supports 45K primitives. That is incorrect – OpenSim supports whatever you tell it to handle, whether it behaves is up to the underlying consumption required for your build, and what you are hosting it on. And second – clarify where the limits really are, and how you can optimise them.

With SimHost, we needed to give a number to our potential customers that is indicative of their usage, in a manner that can be understood like prim counts, but reflects the actual capacity used. We decided to go with RAM usage – this is because memory is the primary requirement of the OpenSim software. The amount of memory a region needs is pretty much directly proportional to all the other requirements (scripts need a roughly equal amount of memory as CPU, so do avatars, prims, etc.). There are other limits too – network bandwidth, processor usage, etc. All of these can become a bottleneck depending on the design of a region.

To give you a rough estimate of capacity-by-memory, one of our heavier customers has a 10,000 prim sim which hosts weekly meetings; it’s somewhat scripted – memory use for this region is between 405MB (Resident) and 1070MB (Total). Each avatar to the region adds between 20 and 50mb to the “resident” figure (and when occupied, some of the paged memory moves into the resident as it is accessed). If you use this as an example – 1024MB of resident memory should get you a “standard region equivilent”; if you want to start pushing on it further, then you might want to allocate 2GB dedicated to the region.

Network bandwidth is directly tied to # of avatars plus, # of primitives plus, # and size of textures. You can drop your bandwidth requirements fairly dramatically simply by building more efficiently, encouraging texture re-use, optimising your textures, etc. Sculpties actually work to your benefit here – since they can replace many prims with just one; and that one is ‘instanced’ – so that every copy you use, is only downloaded once by the viewer.

Processor usage is generally not a problem; to avoid any issues – giving a region a dedicated core will let it do it’s own thing. Scripts are about the only thing that can really push this figure (and physics to a much lesser degree). With recent updates to OpenSim enabling much larger concurrencies – processor usage is beggining to appear; but an average user will often struggle to push an average CPU core usage of more than 10%.

So, next time you see the claim that ‘OpenSim supports 45,000 prims’ (as I often do) – think of it not as a hard limit, or even a ballpark figure that is remotely accurate. OpenSim will try serve whatever you tell it to — but whether it does so successfully is more likely to be up to other factors relating to the underlying hardware; than the software itself.

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.