We’ve been experimenting with Vivox, so the entire presentation was streamed via the new VivoxVoiceModule; running on the latest trunk code for OpenSimulator; both for the most part performed pretty admirably. A lot of the improvements from IBM and Intel lately into OpenSim’s packeting have been paying dividends. Mono’s previous concurrency “record” was about 40 users (for comparison .NET’s current record is 65).

So, what’s in store in the future and near-future for OSGrid? I had a couple of announcements at the opening presentation.

First – Hello General Store

The general store is the first “webshop” based on OpenSim that integrates directly into the grid itself. Listing of items, setting of permissions, etc are all done from within the viewer – directly integrated with your inventory itself.

This has one major advantage outside of the improved convenience – it means you do not need a region to mediate the transaction. Every transaction can be done directly on the inventory server (infact this is exactly what we do.); but what does this exactly mean?

When you create your general store – a special undeletable folder is created in your inventory called ‘My General Store’, items placed into this folder that are marked ‘Allow anyone to copy’ are listed on our website automatically, providing you are the creator of the item in question (and have copy/trans permissions on it).

Purchasing of items will have them sent to your inventory directly via the inventory server (although you will need to relog after a shopping trip for the items to appear.); saves a bit of time and effort doing the transfers – and you dont lose a transfer because you were in busy mode.

User Achievements

Many of you spotted our new achievements system located on the OSGrid website – it’s mostly a bit of fun right now (and probably will always be), but we are going to be opening achievements up to region operators across the grid. If you have something open to the pubic (some form of competition, game or other activity that is ‘achievement-worthy’) you can offer achievements as rewards.

The exact process is yet to be exactly finalised – but you will recieve a bit of LSL at the end you can include which allows you to award your achievements to specified users. There will be some caps on who is eligable to be able to award achievements (particularly so that people do not just set them up for friends)

“More information soon”

Acknowledgement of Direction

OSGrid has traditionally been a test grid for OpenSimulator – that has been good and bad – in our case however, we’ve definetely moved on from those roots – OSGrid today is now more of a social space than a testing one. As a group, the admin team has decided to acknowledge this as part of OSGrid’s long term direction – and include those aspects in our mission statement (while preserving our current roles too).

While the testing aspects will always be present, we’re going to be focusing on making the social aspects more useful; such as improving our events calendars and website integration features. We would definetely like to see more live events – and will help promote any regular events to our wider communities.

Some of these changes will be more profound, which is actually tied to…

Continents

We are going to be introducing two new continents into the OSGrid ecosystem; so there will be three major continents in total. For lack of a name so far, they will be ‘Terra Alphus’, ‘Terra Betus’ and ‘Terra Gammus’ (subject to change). The current continent centered around 10,000×10,000 is ‘Betus’; and will not be changing.

Alphus will be the most structured of the continents – and subdivided into three zones based on the server geography – US, Europe and Asia. Regions connected to Alphus need to be approved by a small committee, and subject themselves to a few construction limits. Alphus will:

• Consist only of regions on dedicated server hosts (or good quality VPSs)
• Have a reasonable uptime (that is they are significantly likely to be online)
• Follow a master terraforming pattern.

Regions in Alphus will be organised so that servers located in the US are grouped with other US servers; EU with EU and Asia with Asia — meaning border crossing between Alphus regions is a lot more likely to be successful. The goals with the Alphus area is to ensure a more consistent user experience [especially for new users] and can be thought of as a ‘grid within a grid’ of sorts.

Betus is the current continent – it’s not going to be touched (other than perhaps by a few regions moving into Alphus); the current strategy of nearly-anything-goes is not changing here. You can place your own regions in this section without any considerations at all.

Gammus is the final section, and also a new continent – this will be tied to our new highly experimental region launcher. Regions hosted from home using our launcher will end up here. Because these regions are less likely to be online at any given moment, we are conglomerating them together away from other regions – so that the other regions on the grid are not affected by constant neighbour checks.

In summation:

• Your current regions arent changing or moving. If you want to setup a new region on any random coordinates, that’s fine too.
• The new continents will be fairly close to each other in coordinate terms (within 500 coordinates; or within reasonable scroll distance)
• The goals of the introduction of the two other continents are to improve user experience (especially with border crossing, etc.)
• This is not a grading system; Alphus regions are not better than Gammus – only that Alphus voluntarily comply with a tighter set of user experience restrictions.

New Orientation Sims

We’re going to be working on some new orientation island sims with OSGrid; particularly to aquaint people with what OSGrid is and isnt. These are going to be seperate from our welcome area (LBSA), but we are going to look at ways we can integrate them together (such as providing a chat bridge with a helpers group, etc.)

Again, more information coming soon.

If you haven’t popped your head over onto OSGrid in a while, you might want to take another look. We’ve made some reasonably big improvements in recent weeks; above pictured is part of the new LBSA Plaza (welcome area); but the real improvements have been in our website.

I mentioned previously the development of Elgg integration on OSGrid – we put that into production just over a month ago, and have since spent quite some time refining the integration. Initially when we deployed, there were a couple of deficiencies in features over the old website – we’ve quickly gone past there, and the new website integrates a whole bunch of shiny new features.

Many of these features are or will be linked to popular places inworld – such as the website event calendar being visible on billboards inworld (using PHP+GD+osSetDynamicTextureURL). We’re working on doing some of the reverse too (such as each region getting it’s own “Page” automatically — similar to how each avatar has it’s own profile page.)

OSGrid itself has grown pretty dramatically in this period too – it grew on almost every metric by a full 25% in the last 4 weeks. Regions, users, active users – all shot up. Infact, using the stats on the OpenSimulator.org grid list (skipping grids with missing data) – OSGrid now represents between 48 and 56% of OpenSimulator grid users; it’s by far the largest and busiest OpenSim grid. OSGrid currently has about 2,100 active regions (by comparison, the Second Life mainland is approximately 5,000 regions)

Some of the other improvements we’ve added was a new achievements system (pictured above), which we will be expanding to encourage exploration and participation in OSGrid events. We’ll be rewarding people with ‘achievements’ for various things such as participating in official (and some unofficial) events, exploring, building and more.

Which brings me to OSGrid itself – it’s nearly turning 2. On the 22nd of this month, we’re going to be celebrating our second birthday. We’re still sorting out what exactly the celebrations will be – but you can find them on OSGrid’s Event Calendar closer to the 22nd.

So if you haven’t already – come register an avatar and take a peek.

[Apologies to readers for the lack of updates in the last 3 weeks - I've been buried in work, I'll be posting June's commits wrapup in the next few days -Adam]