Fixing Bent Leg Syndrome
I noticed that when recreating my SL shape in OpenSim, and using maximum height and leg lengths, I have the infamous bent-leg syndrome (the default OpenSim Ruth avatar does not suffer from this).

I decided to have a play with some of the settings in the OpenSim.ini file, in the Avatar Control section.

The first I tried was this entry:

; Max force permissible to use to keep the avatar standing up straight
av_capsule_standup_tensor_win = 550000

Setting this value higher, to 700000 fixed the bent-leg, but walking up inclines and stairs was quite difficult.

I then put that value back to the default value, and tried this one instead:

;girth of the avatar. Adds radius to the height also
av_capsule_radius = 0.37

I was not sure what this parameter actually was (initially), but I tried it lower, at 0.17, and I seemed to have even more bent-legs than normal, so, full of excitement, I then changed it to 0.57, and bingo, bent-legs fixed! I then tried walking up inclines and stairs and no problem :) However, when I spoke of this succcess in the opensim irc channel I was told by one of the developers that this change would result in my avatar having a bigger radius, in other words, I may have difficulty in walking through narrow doorways, so my vampire coffin weekends would be most definitely out :)

He suggested that I play with another setting:

av_height_fudge_factor = 0.52

I changed this value to 0.42, and again, success! I will leave this setting as it is.

Accessing your OpenSim locally, when in External Mode
After you have changed your External_Host setting in the default.xml file in the Regions folder to allow visitors to come into your region, you find that you have to come in the same way, and suffer the same lag effects as your visitors. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to access your region locally? Well, you can! Try this little trick: Go into your Windows\system32\drivers\etc\ folder, and look for a file called 'Hosts' (no extension). Open this file with notepad, and add the following line at the bottom:

127.0.0.1 myregion.hostname.com

Replace myregion.hostname.com with the actual external hostname you are using. Basically when you use the external hostname in your viewer, Windows will resolve what IP address this refers to, instead of the external web DNS servers (who will point that address to the IP address of your PC modem or router). In this case, whenever Windows comes across the myregion.hostname.com hostname, it will resolve the address automatically to 127.0.0.1, which as we learnt earlier, is the special address for this machine.

Edit: One or two people have reported that visitors could not log in when using this method. If you have any problems then just remove the entry. Meanwhile, I will look at a more universal solution to logging in locally while visitors log in remotely.

Rock