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]

This weekend, I have been experimenting with replacing OpenSimWI with open source social networking software – Elgg. For those who haven’t used or seen Elgg before, it is very similar to things like Facebook – user profiles, groups, etc.

The key with what we are aiming to do however, is eliminate the duplicated data. That is, if you have a group “inworld”, the exact same data should be used on the website. Join a group on the website – it should show up in world. The way we have done this has been to rewrite the Elgg database layer so that it reads and writes from the same databases the OpenSim Grid Servers do.

The result is you can participate in the grid, without needing to be logged in. Grab an RSS feed of your group notices or send someone an offline IM from the OSGrid website.

Custom Profile Pages (Editing)

A Sample Profile

Friends List (Detail)

Group Listings (Popularity Tab)

Group View

When?

There is no deadline for when this will be launched, but we’re hoping to do so within the month.