Wednesday 1 October 2008

Diary: 1st October 2008

Premium Content
There is a lot of freebie content in the OpenSim Community, and the garden in OSGrid's Wright Plaza is well stocked in that regard, and by using Second Inventory you can move all full-perm objects from SL to your OpenSim. However, to make your OpenSim experience really great you will need some premium content, but the news there is not so good.

I have been speaking with a number of premium content makers in SL, the sort that rely on more than just prims - the gurus of animation, texturing, particles, scripting etc. who provide us with our quality poseballs, beds, dances, showers, plants and trees, and so on.

None of the creators I spoke to were prepared to supply their products to the OpenSim community, simply because they had no protection against their intellectual property getting out into the wild and destroying their SL business.

I was wondering if this could be managed by having a Premium Inventory Content Server (PICS), that could serve all the independent grids, containing the premium content purchased by customers, but held securely, and with full permissions applied. The server could have a merchant window, similar to SLX, but the products are never actually delivered to the customer, but are maintained on the PICS and are accessed in parallel with the normal content on the customers own Inventory Server in his OpenSim. In other words, a mixed local/grid mode as far as inventory is concerned.

The good news is, I finally managed to find a very realistic bathroom shower particle effect, that was full-perm. I had searched for quite some time. I found a link for it here.

Gridnauts Project - Latest News
OGP teleports between the Linden Lab beta and preview grids and OpenSim regions, running in both grid and standalone mode, are now a fact of life, with over 100 residents teleporting successfully. The OGP teleport specification has now been released, but bug fixing is still ongoing. The Gridnauts team are now currently considering the next steps, exciting days indeed.

I sincerely hope that avatar appearance at start and end of teleport can be maintained, and if the entire inventory of the avatar cannot go with him on his teleports, then at least an avatar suitcase facility. After all, when you travel in RL you do not take everything you own with you, do you? You take a suitcase.

Some Terminology
Maybe it is time to start a small glossary of terms. I will get the ball rolling with these two. Please feel free to add some more in the Comments. I will collate the best.

OpenSimmers (NOT OpenSinners, that was definitely a typo!): people who own and operate an OpenSim region or regions.

OpenSimmering: Getting frustrated with a release that fixed one bug while introducing three others.

Have fun

Rock