Månad: november 2013

Now when we have to move the stores and gallery again I have been thinking hard about if I should scrap the total project. No more virtual worlds. Leaving Second life and close the Opensim servers. It is a lot of work to run everything and maybe I can make better use of my time and money. I can log in now and then but I do not have to be a creator.

My problem is that I really believe that virtual worlds have a future. Today it is hard to make a buck and keep it going. Opensim have great potential and many dedicated developers working on it. But there is not many applications outside a few education and entertainment grids. We are a exclusive group that do this.

Everything in my body, brain and business sense tells me to give this up.

Well, I am probably a idiot. But I think I keep going. As a artist you always have to fight the odds  so I am used to it. I have decided to continue to believe in virtual worlds against every good reason. See you around the grid and hopefully on the next Opensim conference.

Avalon town is closing down. Avalon have been the home for Nilsart gallery, Art space magazine and 2worlds2go for many years and I am very sorry to see it go. Of course it is a lot of work to run a a large community with art gallery’s and shops.

And Avalon town have always been very well managed. A very nice build and I have been proud to make it a home for Nilsart gallery. I like to walk around in this nice build with very little clutter but I suppose at the end of the year that’s over.

A sad day for Second life.

I am waiting for the day when I can sail and wind and weather makes a difference. My ship moves as it should on beautiful simulated waves.

So.

I have been testing Aurora sim https://aurora-sim.org/ and I used it on a 64 bit Linux install. It is my developer machine for Linux so I have a lot of library’s on it and Aurora compiled just fine. No problem to set it up but I never go the database to work so I just switched to MySQL and it worked great.

I wanted a 1024*1024 sim and that was no problem. I got a lot of space. Made a terrain file and installed also worked great. And I loaded some IOR files and then I was in some trouble. Worked for a while and then I got some asset loss. Textures and buildings disappeared. But it is a alpha software so that’s ok I guess. Could be some database or connection problems.

The big think with Aurora sim is that you can get big areas to sail or fly around in and you can move between sims.

The bad thing is that like Opensim and Second life the physics sucks big time.

I have been trying to make skies, surf boards, boats, planes and trucks and it is no use. It is just to bad. I have even tried to make my own physics but the only thing that interacts with the sim is push() and it is not responsive enough to get any feeling.

In Opensim you can run several sims as one but it is a little bit of a hack.

This is my from the OSgrid I have added a island I am building right now. What structure that will finally win Opensim or Aurora I do not know. The developers say that the problem is in the viewers not the servers.

I will continue testing the Aurora installation. Big areas makes it possible to do fun stuff together with friends and There world have a great working physics engine for vehicles so it is possible to make it work. But I think it must be in the viewer.