At the end of June 2009 I was interviewed by Alyne Dagger for the online magazine Bad Girls Magazine (BG Magazine). The interview was planned around may, and I received a draft questionnaire by email at the end of June. I wrote a first working draft with my replies, and we interchanged some emails until we both were satisfied with the results. Working with Alyne was fantastically easy, and the interview, first appeared on the portuguese edition of BG Magazine, no. 19, and later in the english edition, no. 19, was very nicely presented; big thanks to Alyne for her wonderful, careful work :-) I reproduce the interview here in its entirety, with permission. Text in italics is from BG Magazine, while my replies use a normal font; image subtitles, when present, are also from BG magazine. The images are all mine; some of them where proposed by me, and some of them were chosen by the interviewer.

Most of the material covered in the interview can also be found here and here, but the presentation is different — being in an interview format, the reading is probably more agile. You’ll also find two arguments about why Second Life cannot scale; these were previously published, in a similar form, as comments on other people’s blogs.

When speaking about virtual worlds, two months are like two years in RL. That’s why I include, at the end of the post, a small section with some corrective remarks; these were not part of the original interview.

The interview

HERALD OF DIGITAL FREEDOM

Intense and passionate in every project she’s got herself involved, ZONJA CAPALINI was a mix between muse and investor of the Metaverse when the Openspaces crisis blew up in 2008.

Revolted, she’s began to try to revert the price policy through mobilization and protest, but seeing doesn’t worry with the investors and residents like her, she went to the fight and had searched for solutions for her business in other metaverses, before to begin her own grid, using the Opensim as a tool.

She tells us with exclusivity how was this painful process which can have opened horizons and frontiers for the age of the free metaverses.

BG Magazine: How did you come to SL and what you did in your first SL year?

Zonja Capalini: I was captured, as many other people were, by the hype about Second Life at the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007. I first created an avatar in december of 2006, but I had some difficulties with it and did never log in. Zonja first rezzed on february the first, 2007. It was a pure adventure. Complete immersion from the first second.

At the time the process was more complicated than it is today, and it was almost not localized. I spent several days at Orientation Island, then Help Island, until I found a way to get to the mainland. I first teleported into a german-speaking infohub (all europeans seemed to be routed to that hub at the moment), and started to socialize.

I was feeling awkward, was very shy, and besides I didn’t control my avie properly, I was crashing against all the walls I found, flying unexpectedly, etc. — as everybody else. I had the impression to have landed in the recovery area of a hospital specialized in brain injuries :-)

One of my main customers is a company dedicated, amongst other things, to education.

I saw that LL was announcing voice in SL, and I thought that creating a campus for that company in SL could be a great way to allow them to have students from all over the world. I talked to the executives of the company and showed them SL, and they agreed that it looked as an interesting platform to evaluate. So that from the beginning my SL experience was dual: on the one hand I was living my own second life, experiencing the universe as a “resident”; on the other hand, I was learning to master SL as a technological platform.

Zonja, the noobie

From the experiential side my life was as everybody else’s. I slowly learned how to customize my avatar (I remember believing that my avie was very pretty when I was a noob, to buy skins, hair, prim skirts, prim shoes… I met people, made several friends, was invited to dance and to explore, and in general socialized a lot. It was extremely fun!

From the business side I learnt how to build, where to buy textures, how to script, etc.

I bought my first parcel at Aglaia (a sim that does no longer exist), and my RL friend Ludmilla Writer soon bought a parcel there too. I was using my immersive life as a way to learn about the platform too.

BG Magazine: Why did it became so important to have a state for you? And how did the Condensation archipelago grow up?

Zonja Capalini: One day the owner of Aglaia, the sim I was living in, suddenly decided that he’d be leaving SL, and sold all his sims to a new owner. All the tenants were given a deadline to leave; we lost the setup fee, and we became homeless. I realized I could not have a stable place for my experiments and my creations unless I was the owner of my own sim. The same was true of the company I was working for, of course. So my company bought a sim, and I bought another one, Condensation Land. In SL, if you want to be able to control your experience, you have to own a full sim (which is far too expensive by the way): if you’re in the mainland, you’re subject to griefing, and you can’t be sure that your neighbours won’t create a really ugly building, or open a freebie shop, etc., so that your experience will degrade horribly. And if you rent space in a private estate, you are subjected to the arbitrariness of the sim owner, without an effective way to complain if you are mistreated or plainly scammed.

To be able to finance Condensation Land I started by sharing it with my Friend Ludmilla and some refugees from Aglaia, then rented some land to several people I had come to know in SL. At the time I was a Second Life evangelist, so that I brought several friends from RL too and convinced them to rent a plot of land in Condensation.

When Condensation Land was almost self-sustaining, I bought Condensation Beach, another full sim, and started to rent some plots there too.

Then the Lindens announced that you could get openspaces in a number lower than four, and that you could place them anywhere. And shortly they lowered the price to be prim-equivalent to a normal sim: a normal sim allowed up to 15,000 prims and costed US$ 295, and an Openspace allowed 15,000/4 = 3750 prims and costed US$ 300/4 = US$ 75. That seemed very fair, and allowed you to terraform more beautifully, avoiding the crowded landscapes you found in most of Second Life. So that I decided to keep Condensation Land as a full sim and move the rest of the archipielago to openspaces.

First version of Condensation sim, february 2008

I first ordered the Condensation South openspace, and moved some of my tenants there. Then we had a long talk with Ludmilla and we agreed that she’d be getting her own Openspace too. The problem was that her parcel was in Condensation Beach, which was a full sim, and at the time converting a full sim to four openspaces was taking a lot of time, because the new Openspace product was extremely successful and the ticket queues were collapsed; Ludmilla was a very active resident at the time, and she could not stay homeless for an extended period of time, so that I bought the Condensation SouthWest openspace, cloned the terrain from Condensation Beach, and moved all of Ludmilla’s stuff to Condensation SouthWest in preparation for the conversion of Condensation Beach into four Openspaces.

This conversion took a lot of time to effect, and during this time the landscape in Condensation was awful, to the point that some of my tenants left, but finally we got four new sims: one was Condensation Beach itself (zilched in the conversion process, which is ridiculous btw), another was Condensation North, and the other two I sold in the open market.

Then I re-cloned back the terrain from Condensation SouthWest to Condensation Beach, moved all of Ludmilla’s stuff from SW to Beach, terraformed SW and N, and offered to my remaining tenants to migrate to ampler, more beautifully terraformed parcels in these openspaces.

Then the openspace crisis started.

BG Magazine: How was your reaction when the Openspaces crisis came? Did you believe you could make change or start a movement to change the Linden Lab price policies?

Zonja Capalini: Well I joined the protests actively. The outrage was immense. It had taken us months of time, a lot of money, and a lot of hours of hard work to migrate to the openspaces. The announcements came approximately one month after we had been able to do our inauguration party. I simply could not believe what was happening. The Lindens were increasing the fees by a 66% just six months after announcing the Openspace product, and, to add insult to the injury, we were being called abusers! The notion that one can abuse a program is simply ludicrous: think about “abusing Excel”, for example — it sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous. The Lindens were treating us as retarded children. They were calling us “abusers”, when clearly they were the ones abusing us, making use of the fact that at the moment there seemed to be no clear alternative to Second Life. If there had been a clear competitor they would have never dared to take such a step.

BG Magazine: When you understood they would not come back, you started a migration. How was the process?

Zonja Capalini: It was a very, very bitter experience. Till the openspace fiasco I was a strong believer in Second Life, and a big evangelist, I had brought several companies into SL and a lot of RL friends too. Now the Lindens had made me look as a stupid fool by convincing enterprises and friends to make business with a company, Linden Lab, which proved to be unreliable, to have a maddening and erratic price policy, and to be completely out of contact with their user base.

My first reaction was to open an account in Open Life. At the moment many people were doing the same, going to Open Life was an illuminating experience because you’d find huge crowds of frightened Second Life emigrees. I prefer not to reproduce here literally was being said about the Lindens in Open Life at the time. Everybody was explaining their personal drama, telling how much money they had lost due to the price raise, and swearing they’d not trust Linden Lab anymore, never.

I bought a private cluster of four sims in Open Life to get some experience in the new world, I cloned the terrain from SL, and I started to migrate stuff using Second Inventory.

Condensation recreated in another grid: victory

I learned a lot in the process, but at the same time I realized that Open Life was not the place to be: there was no serious company behind (indeed most of the time it looked like a one-person project), scripts behaved erratically when they worked at all, and, above all, you were substituting the Lindens by the Openlifes, which was no improvement at all (indeed it was worse because of the above: there was no real company behind, etc).

I tried Legend City Online too, but it was performing so poorly that after some few attempts I stoped caring. And finally I also tried OSGrid, but OSGrid is not intended to be a stable grid, but as an experimental grid for technical pioneers.

Since both Open Life, LCO and OSGrid were based on Opensim, I decided to give it a try myself. I downloaded Opensim and MySQL and installed my first Opensim. Here’s a blog article I wrote about it.

I discovered that Opensim is a charm to work with! You can make a backup of your database and some few control files, and clone your micro-world anywhere else, avatars, inventory, terrain, scripts, objects, everything! After having lost inventory in Second Life (not to speak of Open Life too), feeling that you can always go back and recover inventory or assets if you need it is really invaluable. Besides, Justin Clark-Casey, a core Opensim developer, was developing a very nice tool to zip a whole region to what’s called an “Opensim Archive” — you can pack a region, terrain and all objects, into a relatively small .oar file, and unpack it in the same or in another world! Once you get used to regularly backing up your stuff, you realize that your property in Second Life is sequestered! You paid for it, but you can’t take it with you elsewhere, so you are in fact bound to continue using Second Life if you want to make use of it.

After quite a lot of work, I completed the migration of the Condensation Land archipielago to Opensim, and abandoned all the sims in Second Life except the Condensation Land sim itself. The process is described in detail here.

BG Magazine: What’s the main differences between SL Grid and Opensim grid? What’s the cool things and the ones to be improved?

Zonja Capalini: Well indeed there’s no such thing as an Opensim grid. Opensim is a program, a 3D application server, in the same way that Apache is a 2D application server; you get your web pages from Apache (or some other server brand), and you get your 3D spaces from Opensim.

Then using Opensim you can build grids, or host your own sim and join it to a preexisting grid, like OSGrid, for example.

I opted by creating my own grid — I thought I would learn more this way, and, above all, I wanted to have full control over my inventory, my objects, etc.

To me the coolest thing about Opensim is that you’re the grid owner. This means that you decide who’s to have an avatar there, you can use arbitrary names for the avatars, and, above all, you are in full control of your grid. You can backup the database where mostly everything is stored and recreate your grid somewhere else: no more inventory loss. You can create a full backup of a region and clone it in some other grid or give it to somebody else. You can make a full backup of your inventory and clone it in somebody else’s grid (that’s experimental at this time). And you can decide whether you run your grid as an isolated walled garden or whether you want to open it to the hypergrid, so that effectively you’re participating in a worldwide federation of grids, the Opensim metaverse.

Recreation: Zonja works her hypergrid

Another cool thing about Opensim is that you have easy access to the developers and to a lot of very helpful people. You can post your questions to opensim-users or opensim-dev, and there’s a big possibility that somebody will quickly answer your question. I’d call that a really excellent support. And in case you need a particular feature, you can offer to pay for it and find somebody who’ll implement it for you. Compare that to Second Life, which is extremely stagnant as a software platform: since the latest big changes (i.e, voice, Windlight, Havok 4 and Mono) they have added absolutely nothing to Second Life.

Hypergrid Condensation

The not so cool thing about Opensim is that it’s an alpha product, and therefore you can’t expect it to be as stable as Second Life is. And at the moment it’s a product for people with a somewhat strong technical background, if you want to do serious things with it. But anyway some of the latest releases are quite stable; indeed, if you take care to build things carefully, being in Opensim feels no different from being in Second Life.

But the real challenge for the Opensim grids is how to get access to quality content. At the moment you can find tons of freebies in many places, including Second Life, and some of these freebies (i.e., the ones that are full perms) you can move to Opensim. Most freebies are garbage, but some are not, so that if you’re careful you can get a pretty decent collection of stuff into Opensim. The problem with this approach is that it is extremely time-consuming, you have to be very careful and systematic if you want to avoid ending with an inventory which is a completely unusable mess, and not everybody has the time, the patience and the meticulousity to spend a lot of hours making this migration.

My guess is that the first quality merchants that find a way to sell their stuff in Opensim will make a lot of money. I wouldn’t have cared to pay again for my favourite stuff if I had known that this time it would be really mine.

BG Magazine: You still have a full sim in world. Why didn’t you leave completely Second Life after disappointment with Linden Lab policies?

Zonja Capalini: Second Life is still very interesting as a place. Nowadays, the biggest problem of Second Life are the Lindens :-) You can’t set up a world, tell people to create it, and then manage it as if it was yours. I’m from the time where the slogan was “A world created and owned by its residents”. Well, I took that very seriously :-) Second Life is still the place to be if you want to shop, party and socialize. But Opensim is growing and bettering very fast, so that this might change sooner than most people expect.

BG Magazine: Do you believe that other virtual worlds can someday be bigger than Second Life? Do you believe we can someday use an avatar in more than one world?

Zonja Capalini: Second Life is based in a model which cannot scale properly — not because of technological problems, which can in principle be overcome (although I have serious doubts that Linden Lab can effectively manage it), but because in the end it’s a model which is absurd. Think about the web: you can choose to host your web anywhere, including at home if you don’t have a lot of traffic. There are huge webs which get millions of hits a day and have access to huge bandwidth, and small, home based webs used by small communities, or even families. If somebody suggested to create a single, all-encompassing web where all the pages in the world would be hosted, you’d call her a fool. The same is true of the metaverse. The idea that there should be a single provider for the metaverse is absurd.

Still another comparison: back in the 80s, there was a big network called BITNET that offered a lot of the services we’re nowadays used to: it had email, a form of IM, file transfer, and some primitive forms of file servers (the predecessors of the WWW). This network died and was substituted by the Internet not because of the technology, but because it was centrally administered.

When a new node joined the network, the network administrator had to compile huge routing tables, which were customized for each node, and each node administrator had to install the updated routing tables. Of course, most node administrators were lazy or incompetent, the tables did not get installed, traffic was lost, etc. The internet won because it does not have a central authority and because it autoconfigures. The same is true of the metaverse: people want freedom, not to have to submit a ticket and wait an undetermined number of days to have the simplest of tasks done. People want freedom, not to be told what to do at their own homes. People want freedom to choose how they will use their sims; if they want to place 30000 prims in a region and have only three concurrent visitors, that’s their choice. They don’t want to be imposed arbitrary prim limits, as they don’t want to be charged for a 100 avatar capacity sim when they will never get more than 20 persons in their island.

Zonja at Hypergrid metaverse: new life

Regarding your question about using the same avatar in different worlds, you can already do that right now using Opensim. There exists a mechanism called “hypergrid” by which you can teleport between worlds, keeping all your inventory. This or a similar technology is clearly be the future for the metarevse. Here are some blog articles I wrote about hypergrid: [1],  [2], [3], and here’s a video showing an hypergrid travel from OSGrid to my own grid, the Condensation Land grid.

BG Magazine: Do you still have plans and projects for Second Life or do you believe it is better migrate to other worlds forever?

Zonja Capalini: Well we have already migrated to the hypergrided Opensim metaverse :-) I have no plans for Second Life at the moment, and I doubt I’ll have them in the future. Second Life is technologically stagnant, run in a very unprofessional way, you’re subject to arbitrary price changes, and the content you buy is really not yours, because you can’t take it with you. In Opensim there’s very quick technical change and evolution, you can run it yourself, it’s much much cheaper, and you own what you create and what you acquire. Second Life is a nice place to shop and go dancing. For serious projects and for the enterprise, Opensim is the tool of choice.

SL Zonja: Now only for socialyze

[The interview ends here]

Some final remarks

Things move fast in the virtual worlds scenario. So fast indeed that in only two months, two of the statements contained in the interview would have to be revised.

On the one hand, Linden Lab has lately added HTTP-in LSL functions, taken its Avaline offer out of beta, announced the LLMedia API, and showed interesting prototypes of other technologies to come, apart from completely redesigning their web and spreading rumors about new improvements in 2010. One cannot continue to  sustain today that Second Life is a technically stagnant platform — a very welcome change indeed :-) Anyway in other areas they continue to be hopelessly incorrigible: the umptenth price policy rectification for Openspace Homestead sims is a pathetic case of “too little, too late” — and they continue to treat their customer base as retarded children: putting a title that starts with “Good News” to that blog post looks like a weird mixture of sadism and blatant marketing inepcy ;-)

On the other hand, OSGrid turned two at the end of July and announced several improvements: a General Store, a completely redesigned web, including an achievements system, and a focus broadening to include new, more user-friendly continents apart from the traditional, test-oriented core. Therefore, my statement that “OSGrid is not intended to be a stable grid, but as an experimental grid for technical pioneers” should also have to be revised, at least partially — and that’s also a very welcome change.

[Update 20090721:] Added links to source code and a reference, corrected some typos.

[Update 20090723:] You can download an OAR with the sample bottle and the generator at rexxed.com: http://www.rexxed.com/2009/07/klein-bottle/

[Update 20090725:] OSGrid users: the sample bottle and the generator are now available at my store in OSGrid.

Introduction

Most objects in Opensim and Second Life are made of prims. Indeed, if we exceptuate avies, wearables (i.e., non-attachable clothes and body parts), Linden trees and particles, everything you see is made of prims. Prims are small, often uncomplicated geometrical shapes, like a cube, a sphere or a cylinder. By combining (“linking”) prims, builders create more complex objects like houses, vehicles, shoes, hair, jewellery, etc. When prims are linked, the resulting object remembers the order in which they were linked (which is important, for example when an object is scripted) and some other properties; the set comprised of the linked prims and these additional properties is called a link set or linkset.

Linksets in Second Life have several limitations: two prims can’t be linked if they are too far apart, and an object cannot contain more than 256 prims. This is the cause all kind of problems. For example, if you buy a big house, i.e., a house that has more than 256 prims or that it is very large (and therefore its prims are very far apart), the house can’t be assembled into a single object, because of the above rules. Then the house is normally packaged with a rezzer, a scripted assistant that helps you to position the house; once the house is positioned to your liking, you normally ask the rezzer to freeze the house in place, and then delete the rezzer.

Opensim (when used with an appropriate viewer, like the Hippo viewer) supports large linksets, i.e., objects comprising more than 256 prims. In this post I’ll describe some experiments I made with large and very large linksets. In one of these experiments, I created a single object consisting of 2889 prims. Such extremely large linksets are difficult to manage and create, but once you get them built they work wonderfully.

Klein bottles

In August 2008, I visited in the Wales Springs region of Second Life a fantastic sculpture by Suzanne Graves. The sculpture reminded me of a Klein bottle [indeed, technically speaking Ms. Graves' surface is not Klein-like, because it has an odd number of curls], and I decided to try to write a script to generate Klein bottles (you can find the script in the appendix at the end of this post).

After some attempts, I got the scripts working, and I generated a nice bottle, which I placed on top of my club, in the center of the Condensation Land region in SL. I made a fun video of my friend Ludmilla and myself dancing inside the bottle :-)

Since the bottle existed in Second Life and consisted of thousands of prims, it could not be linked into a single object. The bottle stayed there several months, and when the Openspace fiasco started we had to concentrate in a single island and I had to delete it because Condensation Land got cramped and Second Life has a 15,000 prim limitation.

When I migrated the Condensation Land archipielago to Opensim, I was not able to migrate the bottle, because it was not linked. I still had the program, though. Some tests I made when testing the brand-new Rezzable Private Grid Alpha indicated that the script could not be run unchanged (I tried to run it and brought the sim to its knees :-/). But now I was the owner of my own grid, and could look at the Opensim console while working with the script, so that I could see if something was going wrong, stop the server, etc. And the Hippo Opensim viewer, since version 0.5.0, allowed linksets larger that 256 prims! I absolutely wanted to test this feature and see what could I do with it.

The Opensim experience

I had to adapt my Klein bottle generator for Opensim — the technical details are in the Appendix at the end of the post. Once the generator had run (which took around two hours), I had a collection of 2888 unlinked prims, i.e., the bottle itself (2880 prims), and 8 prims that had beed doubly generated because of a small bug in the program. I then created a central transparent prim destined to serve as the root prim, and started to link the vertices to the root prim.

Up to around 1000 prims everything worked flawlessly. When I tried to link more prims, the linking operation started to be progressively slower; in some cases, I was thrown out of the grid and had to relog. When I got over 2000 prims, further linking was simply impossible: the client got so busy that it stopped responding to pings from the client, and the regions started to drop the scene; the client itself timed out, and threw me out before the linking operation was complete…

What to do? I then realized that I was always using the same linking approach, imported from my SL experience: I was selecting a moderately big number of prims, say 150, and trying to link them to the previously linked large linkset. Maybe if I separately linked the remaining prims into another large linkset, I would be able later to link the two linksets between them? Well, I tried this approach, and it worked! :-) I had to create another, temporary root prim, link the remaining prims to the secondary root prim, link then the two linksets, enter “select linked prims”, unlink the secondary root prim, take the object, and re-rezz it. And that was it! The final linking took some time, but I was not thrown out of Opensim :-), and both taking the object and re-rezzing it took an inordinately big amount of time, but apart from that (which is very understandable if you think of what’s really going on under the hoods) everything worked fine. I was able to move the huge 2889-prims linkset, to rotate it, to copy it, to make it full bright, to apply some glow, and even to set it rotating! :-)

What seems to be happening (this is all inference, I have not looked at the code)? Well, it appears that if you link “n” prims to an existing linkset, this is equivalent to recreating the linkset “n” times, one for each newly linked prim. This is not a problem when the existing linkset is small and the number of prims is also small, but if you’re attempting to link, say, 300 new prims to an existing linkset of 2000 prims, this involves 300 recalculations of a linkset averaging 2150 prims, and this is too much for the client, which hangs miserably.

To the contrary, if you’ve got two large linksets and you try to link them, there’s only one recalculation operation for the new linkset. And this operation, albeit slow, occurs in a lapse of time small enough so that the client does not crash.

Here’s a video of the new bottle, rotating on top of my club in the Condensation Land grid:

Appendix: Program code

Here is the code for the scripts (I’ll post a link to a downloadable version of the code as soon as I find some time) [Update:] including links to the downloadable source. The main script goes inside a standard cube, and works in the following way: a Klein bottle is a bidimensional surface immersed into a 3D space; apart from an irrelevant twist, it can be considered as the product of two circumferences, and therefore it can be parameterized using two variables “u” and “v”. Some formulas I found at Planetmath calculate the corresponding 3D points taking “u” and “v” as an input.

We generate only the edges (each edge will be a prim; the code for generating the vertices is commented out; I didn’t figure how to generate the sides). Since we are parameterizing in “u” and “v” and we can only generate a finite number of prims, we have to decide on how many partitions of 2*PI we’ll use for “u” and “v”. These are the “m” and “n” variables of our program. In our example, we generate 120 partitions of “u” (the “slices”) and 8 partitions of “v” (the “stripes”).

The program calculates the vertices, and then computes the positions of the edges; the edges are generated by rezzing a small prim (“Cylinder”), which is then rotated, resized and colored; part of this job is done by a small script residing inside “Cylinder”; the script auto-deletes itself on completion.

The drawLineSegment routine I cannibalized from somewhere, but I didn’t write the reference [ I know, I know! :-) If someone knows the reference, I'll happily include it here] [Update] http://lslwiki.net/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=LibraryBezierCurveDemo (thanks, Trevor! :-)).

Please note that I had to insert a llSleep call after each rezzing — otherwise XEngine starts to choke, compilation starts to fail, and the bottle generation aborts.

Download source code

This is the small script that goes inside “Cylinder”.

Download source code

Hypergrid

I’ve already blogged (here and here) about hypergrid, a virtual world architecture that allows the federation of Opensim grids (or “worlds”), and in particular teleports between grids. Using hypergrid, you can teleport, for example, from OSGrid to my grid, the Condensation Land Grid, or between OSGrid and Sciencesim, or between Sciencesim and the Cyberlandia grid, etc. Wagner James Au reported in the New World Notes blog about a demo run by Tom Murphy at the Metaverse University in which hypergrid teleports were shown between grids located in different parts of the US. Hypergrid is developing very fast, and once it’s stabilized and distributed widely, it will implement the vision of a world-wide network of connected grids, where big corporate or educational grids will coexist with small, home-based grids. And thanks to the hypergrid teleport, all these grids will appear as a single world like Second Life is today — hence the name “hypergrid” :-)

Here’s a sample video showing hypergrid teleports in action:

In this article I’ll discuss some details of the current hypergrid architecture, some of the security risks involved, and how a new, more secure hypergrid architecture (sometimes called “safe hypergrid” or “hypergrid 2″) is being developed.

Taking a look at the Opensim console

If you own an hypergrid-enabled Opensim installation, try the following: log in, and teleport from one region to another. You will see a lot of information scrolling through the Opensim console, but if you look at the logs, you will find something similar to the following (I’ve trimmed the timestamps and the full module name to make the information more legible):

[LOCAL INVENTORY SERVICE]: Requesting inventory for user 17fff378-c1ad-4b42-ae8a-dcb644a5ceaf
[LOCAL INVENTORY SERVICE]: Received inventory response for user 17fff378-c1ad-4b42-ae8a-dcb644a5ceaf containing 17 folders and 32 items


What are these lines, and what do they mean? Well, the Linden viewer (and therefore all the current SL and Opensim-compatible viewers, since they all are, to some extent or another, based on the Linden viewer) assumes that the region you are in will cache (i.e., make a copy of) all your inventory, so that when you interact with your inventory (for example, when you search for an item, wear some clothes, remove an attachment, etc.), this interaction is handled by your current region, which then forwards the request to the inventory server, if needed.

Why is this so? I really don’t know — all I can do is speculate. Maybe the Lindens designed Second Life in this way in the hope of minimizing the number of interactions with the overloaded inventory servers, or maybe there’s some other reason. The fact is that the Linden viewer works this way: when you teleport to a new region, all your interactions with your inventory are handled by this new region (in many cases you won’t even notice it, because all your inventory will have downloaded and will be cached by the viewer anyway).

A problem of trust

This mechanism works well in Second Life, where all the servers are owned and controlled by Linden Lab, and therefore trusted, i.e., you don’t expect a Second Life region (or, better, the server that runs the region)  to act against your interests, or the interests of Linden Lab. Of course you can find an island run, or occupied, by griefers, and then the avatars in the island might harass you. But the idea that the server itself may act against you is unthinkable in the Second Life grid.

Let’s now try an hypergrid teleport, and look at the Opensim log. We willl find lines similar to the following:

[HGStandaloneInvModule]: Processing request for inventory of 17fff378-c1ad-4b42-ae8a-dcb644a5ceaf
[HGStandaloneInvModule]: Sending back inventory response to user 17fff378-c1ad-4b42-ae8a-dcb644a5ceaf containing 17 folders and 32 items

Apart from the fact that the module issuing the message has changed, nothing else seems to be different. Now that we are in a foreign region (i.e., in a region outside of our home grid), let’s wear something — the foreign region will honor the request, ask for the item to our grid’s inventory service if it does not currently have a copy of it, and once it receives the requested item, it will send it to our viewer. Now let’s purge an item. The mechanism is the same: the region will ask our home inventory service to purge the item, and then send us an acknowledgement, so that the item will dissapear from our inventory.

What about trust in this case? Well, we are in a foreign region, right? This means that we are in a grid that is not our home grid. Who can tell us that the foreign grid is not operated by pirates, instead of by nice people? Since our inventory is being copied to the foreign region, how can we know that the foreign region operators aren’t using a modification of Opensim that copies all our inventory to their grid, full rights and everything, so that they can use it themselves, or resell it as if it was their own?

Obviously this would be a very bad thing. However, it becomes quickly apparent that in an open intergrid situation we can’t really assume that we know anything about the region we are teleporting to — Indeed there is a situation much worse than our inventory being simply copied: imagine that the region we are teleporting to is run not by thieves, but by evil griefers. Since our home inventory service has to honour purge requests sent from the foreign region, the region itself can send a set of purge requests and erase all our inventory!

Cristina Lopes indeed programmed an experimental region (called “Do Not Come Here” for reasons you’ll quickly understand) that does exactly this: it erases all your inventory, as a proof of concept of the security problems of the current hypergrid implementation. That’s why if you look at the list of public hypergrid nodes in the Opensim wiki you’ll find a cautionary text that says “For the time being, and until the security concerns are addressed, we advise you to be careful about who you link to.”

The solution: grider, and the safe hypegrid

What’s the solution to this problem? Well, at first glance it seems very easy: write a modified version of the Second Life viewer that interacts with the inventory by talking directly to our home grid inventory service instead of using the region we are in as a cache. This way, we avoid all the risks and the hypergrid becomes safe.

The problem with this approach, now, is not technical, but legal: the Second Life viewer was released as open source using a GPL license. Basically, this means that if you make a modification to the viewer, you have to make your modification public, and your modification has to have itself a GPL license or a license compatible with GPL. On the other hand, Opensim is using a BSD license; this means that everybody can take the Opensim source code, modify it (or not), brand it with another name, and sell it.

In practice, this creates the following situation: no person that has looked at the code for the viewer can develop for Opensim, because this would automatically change the license of Opensim code to GPL, which is incompatible with BSD.

But we have just said that we need a modification of the viewer, and the lead architect for hypergrid is Cristina Lopes, who is a core Opensim developer, and therefore she cannot look at the viewer code!

To overcome this problem, Cristina Lopes is developing Grider. Technically, Grider is a proxy: a program that sits between the viewer and the internet, intercepts the viewer requests for inventory, and translates these requests into the safe hypergrid (or hypergrid 2) protocol. This can be written without looking at the viewer code, only examining its behaviour, which avoids the license conflicts. If you look at your Opensim.ini (for a sufficiently advanced revision), you’ll find a section named [Hypergrid] with a single line that says

safemode = false

and the following comment “Keep it false for now. Making it true requires the use of a special client in order to access inventory”. This “special client” is Grider.

How does it work, in practice?

Grider is an early prototype, a proof-of-concept more than a finished product, so that when it becomes widely available it will most probably be very different from its current incarnation. Anyway, at the moment of this writing, Grider starts by asking for the path to your favourite viewer (say, the Second Life viewer, or the Hippo viewer), stores it for subsequent runs, and then starts that viewer. For the time being, a hack has to be used here: in the “First Name” field, you have to write your first name, followed by a period, followed by your second name (that would be “Zonja.Capalini” in my case); in the “Second Name” field, you’ll write the name of the destination grid, for example “osgrid.org”, or “condensationland.com:9000″ (the port defaults to 8002 if it is not specified); finally, you’ll write your password as usual in the password field.

Remember that we are still using our viewer, but we have started Grider, that silently sits between the viewer and the internet. Since we have specified our avatar name and the grid we are connecting to, Grider knows where to log in, and the address of our home grid. From now on, every time we interact with our inventory, Grider will intercept the viewer’s instructions and translate them into the safe hypergrid protocol (e.g., it will talk to our grid’s inventory service, not to the region we are in). Very simple. We won’t notice anything different, but we’ll be safe!

A glimpse at the future

Hypergrid 2 decouples inventory handling from the regions, so that you can be in one grid and interact with your inventory, located in another grid. This seems to be the trend of thought in the development of Opensim: decoupling user authentication (i.e., log in services) from inventory management, region and asset management, messaging, etc., as to make all the services as independent as possible.

So that we can imagine a future in which we log in to the metaverse using our Google account, teleport to a region hosted by Amazon Cloud Computing services, have our friends managed by AIM, and store our inventory in our own PC, for example. And we’ll still be able to communicate, meet, build together, share, etc., with our friend, who may be using the same providers as we are, or completely different ones. We’ll be able to get almost (or completely) free, light-use regions from some providers, or host them ourselves in our home computer, or even in our laptop, and meet with some friends there, or hold meetings with some few people; on the other hand, several companies will offer “premium” regions, capable of holding hundreds of avatars simultaneously. We’ll have our inventory at home, or hosted by a provider, or both things at the same time. Companies selling inventory hosting services won’t necessarily be the same companies that sell regions, or user authentication services. We’ll have several avatars, as we now have several mail addresses; we’ll use some avatars for some purposes, and other avatars for some other purposes, as we currently do with email addresses. And we’ll be able to buy two copies of a nice dress with one of our avies, hosted at A.com, and send one copy to another of our avies, hosted at B.com… The possibilities are mind-boggling now (although most probably all of this will look ridiculously simple in a few years :-)) — and Hypergrid 2 is a first step in this direction, towards this exciting future.

The Openspace fiasco

Six months ago, I blogged about the Openspace fiasco and how it made business customers and creative residents equally angry. 

In case you’ve not read the post, let me make a quick summary: I work for a company which we will call “C”; C owned a standard sim C1 and three openspaces C2, C3 and C4; at the same time, I was the owner of the Condensation Land archipielago (the Condensation Land, Condensation North, Condensation Beach., Condensation South and Condensation Southwest sims); all the islands were Openspaces, except Condensation Land. When the unjustifiable increase of 66% in the price of Openspaces was announced, C’s executives asked me to start researching for an alternative to Second Life, because they had lost their confidence in Linden Lab. I was also forced to look elsewhere for my own islands, because most of my tenants were not able to afford the price increase, got fed up, and left Second Life.

In this post I’ll describe the alternatives that were considered, the decisions that were taken, and what we learned in the process. Although the experience has been bitter in many aspects (having to abandon land which you have carefully created and helped to make beautiful is awful; Second Life customer service is a disaster; etc), the final results are quite interesting. I’ve though to share them, in case somebody can find them of interest and profit from our experience.

Personal side

My first reaction was to take a look at competitive virtual worlds. I opened an account in the Open Life Grid, and ordered a private cluster. 

The initial plan was to migrate the Condensation Land archipielago to Open Life and learn as much as possible in the process, so that I could later advice C properly. I saved all the terrain files from Second Life, I bought myself a copy of Second Inventory, I took copies of all my creations into my inventory, and I started to download everything to my hard drive.

What I learned in the process: Building unique objects for the Second Life grid is completely different from building while having several worlds in mind. If you have to transfer stuff to other virtual worlds, you have to be much more organized, link your prims, keep consistent names, etc. (Yes, I was a lazy builder :-)). Indeed, the best way of building is by using your own grid, or a standalone sim, but we’ll get to that later.

After a lot of hard work, I had an quite complete version of Condensation in Open Life in 16 days; all the work was done in my spare time, and I had to learn the techniques, link the prims, etc.:

The building experience was fine, but other things in Open Life were not. Scripts behaved erratically, as did inventory and asset services. A single bad script was able to take down the script engine for four full regions; this was specially ugly when you owned a mainland region, since if a neighbour was using a “bad” script your own scripts would not work and there would be nothing you’d be able to do about it. And wearing inventory worked one time and did not work the next, inventory renames randomly failed to persist, etc. Customer support was very friendly (a very welcome change after the robotic support from the Lindens), but overall Open Life gave me the impression to be a one-person project, with no serious company behind, and I did not feel convinced enough to put all the eggs in that basket, especially after the Openspace fiasco. This proved insightful, because two months later Open Life restricted the use of Second Inventory, effectively locking your own creations to be used only inside Open Life.

What I learned in the process: Never, ever build or create contents in a world that doesn’t provide easy, clear, manageable tools to backup and restore your stuff to the same or to another world. Being able to have a copy of your creations in a pendrive in your pocket is a must for virtual world developers. Opensim has very nice tools for backup and restore; more about that later.

On december the 18th, 2008, I went to the second Rezzable crash party, and thanks to the nice people at Rezzable, who allowed us to create an account in their private grid to play and experiment, I was able to get a feel of how a small Opensim-based private grid performed.

In the meanwhile, Second Life mass land was shrinking fast, and the Lindens lied, as usual pretended nothing was really happening.

Opensim was looking better and better, while Second Life was losing the little credibility they had left, if any, and other worlds didn’t look serious and/or stable enough for enterprise use. The only alternative seemed to be Opensim, so that I downloaded Opensim and MySql, created my first region, and blogged about my experience.

What I learned in the process: Installing Opensim is fairly straightforward, if you have some technical skills. Having one or several sims in your own PC allows you to create content, experiment, etc, without depending on an external company (and you don’t have to pay for uploads :-)

Business side

In the meanwhile, I had to find a solution to my employer’s problems. After a lot of discussions, we decided that I would buy C2, C3 and C4 from them, then they would sell C1, then I would rent C2 to C, and I’d consolidate C3, C4, Condensation South and Condensation SouthWest into a full sim and attempt to sell it. This was a complete and total mess. The discussions at C took too much time, and after the island transfer C1 had to be abandoned because the billing period was over. Then I got a six-months bill for one of my islands, which I was supposed to pay too, even if the fusion of the four islands would have had a paying date of two months in the future, and I had ordered the conversion into a full sim one week before. Since I refused to pay the bill, I lost the four Openspaces (I had already taken all the objects and terraformed the remaining islands, I was furious at the stupidity and rigidness of customer care, and I was not willing to take the time to terraform again Condensation South and Condensation SouthWest, only to have them taken down some few months later).

What I learned in the process: If you are absolutely forced to do business with the Lindens (which I obviously won’t recommend, given my experience), don’t even think there will be somebody there who knows about you and about your business. 3,540 US$ + VAT per year doesn’t entitle you to be treated like a customer. They don’t even have a list of how many islands you own, or how much money you spend per month, so that they can care about you and advice you properly. Or if they do have such a list, it doesn’t show. Plan ahead of them, taking into account the inneficiencies of their support system — you’d better do, because you’ll be paying for them (i.e., when you transfer an island, neither you nor the buyer can use the island in the meanwhile — but you have to pay for it anyway, and there is no guarantee about how much time it will take them to implement the transfer; if their queues are collapsed, you pay for their collapse).

Hypergrid

Business side

I set up a nine-sim Opensim test grid for C, using an old Athlon X64 core duo 3300+ at 2 GHz with 2 GB of RAM. Configuring everything was a little messy, because the server resides inside the company intranet, and I had to do quite a lot of tweaking in the regions xml files and at the firewall; but once everything was set up, the results were fantastic! Using a symmetrical 2 Mb SDSL line, which costed C around 240 €/mo (yup that’s expensive, but there’s no real alternative in C’s zone of the city), we had nine sims working! That’s less than 27 €/mo per sim (< US$ 36/mo per sim), but of course these calculations are nonsense, because you can put as many sims as you want into an opensim installation without increasing the price :-), and without increasing CPU consumption. Indeed, when there’s nobody logged in, CPU usage is near to 0, so that if your use of opensim is on-demand (i.e., if you only need it some parts of the day, for example if you use it for lectures, as is the case with C), you can even use a non-dedicated machine.

What I learned in the process: Second Life is grossly overpriced, and their product is monolithic and quite inflexible for educational and corporate uses. The idea of a permanent world is very nice, but it’s unneeded and overkill, and also bad for the ecology; above all, and compared to Opensim, it’s unbelievably expensive. Opensim allows you to switch on your virtual world when you need it, and switch it off afterwards. Since you don’t need a dedicated machine (or even a powerful one), your hardware costs are near to zero, because you can recycle an old desktop from the accounting department, for example. The only thing you really need (and you have to pay for) is bandwith. And this will get cheaper, much cheaper, as time passes.

I made some capacity tests: the 2 Mb SDSL line was more than able to handle 15 simultaneous avies! C uses Opensim mainly for education, and they never had more than 10 avies in Second Life at the same time, so that the only remaining problem to solve was voice. At the moment, Opensim had no working voice system, and voice is essential for education, so that I gave a try at Skype conferences. The result was astonishing! Skype voice quality is by far much superior to Second Life voice quality! In particular, 3D spacial voice is a nuisance for education (because it forces you to constantly zoom around the virtual classroom when the speaker’s voice is not audible enough), and Skype’s dynamic feedback and noise cancellation algorithms are so good that most virtual students can attend the class without even having to mute/unmute their microphone.

Having tested that, C decided to completely migrate to Opensim, and leave Second Life altogether. They are happily living in their own private Opensim grid now.

What I learned in the process: Opensim is ready for prime time for educators, at least when the classroom is composed of a small number of students (and this will for sure improve very quickly in the near future). Students and teachers don’t need fancy avies and wonderful dresses; a ruthed student can learn exactly the same as a fancy student avie. And, besides, most people don’t want to spend time tweaking their avie, if the only reason they have one is to attend some classes, as it often happens. Of course, if somebody wants to look nice, there’s plenty of freebies everywhere.

Ludmilla’s side

The Condensation archipielago was now reduced to three islands, since we had lost Condensation South and Condensation Southwest. When the six-month billing period for Condensation North expired, we relocated the (few) tenants to Condensation Land and abandoned the island. Now we were left with Condensation Land and Condensation Beach, Ludmilla Writer’s island. Ludmilla, an RL friend of mine, cannot afford the price increase, and Condensation Beach will be abandoned too.

Ludmilla is a typical example of what the highly inept management of the Openspace crisis has done to a RL resident: when the 75 US$/mo Openspaces were announced, she decided to rent a whole Openspace for herself, making a big effort, because she’s not a rich person in RL. She bought a wonderful castle, for which she paid more than L$ 10,000, and tons of other things, just to make the island beautiful. The island was never used for big events, as I explained in my earlier post: even the opening party for her island was made in Condensation Land, which was a full sim. Then, after a lot of work with terraforming, after paying a lot of money for her land, and after buying tons of objects to make her land beautiful, she was suddenly declared an “abuser” and forced by the price increase to leave her land. Condensation Beach will be shut down on may the 5th; if you want to visit Ludmilla’s island, you’ll have to hurry :-(

Personal side

On my part, I started to migrate the Condensation archipielago to Opensim. The experience gained in Open Life was very helpful, and this time the migration was much faster. I installed the Web Interface package and tweaked it a little to make it work for my grid, which is a standalone (the web interface is supposed to work only in gridded configurations), and then recreated the whole archipielago in some few weeks. Here’s a screenshot of the login screen to our grid, as of March the 6th:

Opensim continued to develop and improve. Diva Canto improved hypergrid to allow specifying the destination universe by using the map (so that jumping to another grid gets very similar to jumping to another page using the navigation bar of your HTML browser):

Justin Clark-Casey wrote the Parallel Selves Message Bridge, an Opensim module that allows you to IM your Second Life (or OSGrid, etc.) friends while in your own grid:

Favio Piek and Ludmilla Writer, co-owners (with me) of Arrabal Tango Club, worked hard to create a replica of the club in our grid.

Shoshisn Shilova was so kind as to lend us several of her wonderful sculptures to decorate the islands.

Flourishing Condensation Land

I created a virtual worlds art exhib in the southeast part of Condensation Land, and have got several offers from our wonderful Flickr friends to show their work there. I routinely make a copy of my universe, zip it, and copy it to my pendrive. Sometimes I unzip it in my own PC, and play with it. The feeling of having a copy of all your stuff, including your objects and your inventory, is simply awesome! :-) Now I know that I can work in my land and be sure that what I create will remain mine. If there’s some inventory malfunction, I can go back and use a backup of our universe. If somebody loses a building or another object, I can get a copy back in minutes. If I need a new island, I can create it at will, also in minutes. I can back up complete islands and recreate them in other grids in the simplest of ways. Justin Clark-Casey is developing a function to save inventories and restore them to another grid, so that I can safely build an inventory in my own grid and know not only that I won’t lose it, but that I can recreate it elsewhere. And it’s me who decides when there will be an maintenance outage :-)

To say the truth, there are some few things I am lacking, compared to Second Life. Most specially, good quality dance animations. But as Diva Canto says, we only have to wait to see who will be the equivalent of iTunes for virtual hair, skin and clothes… and anims! :-)

Oh, and, above all: Condensation Land in Opensim is getting more beautiful than the Second Life version ever was! :-)

I think this is due to the fact that with Opensim, we feel that our work is really ours, that our land is really ours, that our avies are really ours. We are in full control. The exodus from Second Life has been bitter, expensive and quite painful, but the final results are more than worth it :-)

Would you like to have your own SL-like micro-world in-house, to be able to make backup copies of your islands and your inventory at will, to be able to clone your avatar with all your inventory into your friend’s micro-world when needed, to be able to pack a whole island and share it with friends or with the world, to be able to use fantastic buildings and landscapes others have created, to be able to add an island instantly, to decide how much computer power you’re going to allocate to your regions, to be able to run 10+ islands with 20+ avatars in a single computer, …?

“Sure,” you’ll say, “all these things are very nice, but this has to come at a price, right? Everybody will be isolated in their own micro-world, and what’s the fun of that?”

Up to recently, that was it. Either you were in a “big” world (Second Life, Open Life, OSGrid, etc), or you had your own micro-world, and then you were isolated in it. This started to change when Christa “Diva” Lopes, from the OpenSim dev team, implemented the first phase of the Hypergrid concept, what we can now call static hypergrid. I blogged about it one month ago; here’s an older article from Vint Falken; of course it all started with Justin Clark-Casey’s seminal post “Could there be a future without big grids?”.

With static hypergrid, grid owners decide whether their grids will be accesible from outside (i.e., if they’ll run their grid in hypergrid mode) and if so they inform other grids; other grid’ operators then use a simple command to link their grid to the first. This architecture gets complemented with the possibility to use prebuilt .xml files to link several (potentially thousands) of new regions at once with a single command.

That’s a great architecture, but it puts the power of jumping from one grid to another into the grid owner’s hands. And it’s good that it is so, because the foreign regions appear on the origin grid’s map, and if I were a grid operator I’d love to be able to control what appears on my map. However, it has several disadvantages for the end-user: it precludes the possibility to jump to an arbitrary grid; if grid A links to grid B and grid B links to grid C but grid A does not link to grid C, you have to jump to B to get to C, which is preposterous; in general, the major problem is that you’re limited in where you can teleport to by your grid owners. Of course SL works that way, but SL is not an open grid, at least for the moment. And if OpenSim has to become the 3D web, you have to be able to teleport, to jump, anywhere. The very same notion of your ISP determining which web pages you can visit and which you can’t visit is against the fundamental idea of the internet.

Ideally, what I’d love to be able to do would be something similar to the following: assume that I’m working in my soon-to-be-opened OpenSim Condensation grid, I get tired of building, and I decide to teleport to my friend’s Ludmilla grid (note: to another grid, not to an island inside my grid) to see whether she’s available to go exploring, so that I tp to her world, and, lo!, there she is; I greet her, and we both tp to OSGrid (the free OpenSim grid) and start exploring from there… Impossible? No! Here’s a video that demonstrates exactly that:

All this is possible thanks to the recently implemented dynamic hypergrid concept. Grid operators can continue to use static hypergrid, as before, but now you can teleport to any hypergrid-enabled sim by using one of three methods:

1. Bring up the map, and type the address of the grid you want to visit. This can be an ip address:

or a domain name address:

The port number is mandatory.

2. Type (or paste) a secondlife:// url in chat, for example

secondlife://ucigrid04.nacs.uci.edu:9007/

it will become linkable in chat history (the final slash is not optional). This is very useful to inform others where you are going, and to allow them to follow you.

3. Using the embedded browser, open a page that contains such a secondlife:// url, and click on it.

Method 1 above is the equivalent of writing an url into your web browser location bar. I can imagine a modified OpenSim client where the map is redesigned so that the location bar is always visible and you can type a domain name (the port should be optional as soon one is picked as standard, for example 9000) to teleport to a new grid. Exactly the same as with a web browser. The idea of a 3D web is beginning to make sense!

How does dynamic hypergrid work internally? Very simple: as it happens, the map doesn’t parse what you write in it, but sends it untouched to the simulator. It’s very easy then to parse your input for a url syntax and establish a temporaty link to the target region; after some time has passed, the link is severed (unless it was at the same time a static link, of course; this is not still implemented in the current version).

Dynamic hypergrid  is available in OpenSim starting at r8193. This means that you can’t use the precompiled 0.6.1 or 0.6.2 binaries (0.6.2 is at r8068). You can build OpenSim yourself, or you can wait for the next version, which should be due soon, to begin playing with dynamic hypergrid yourself.

[Update 20090106: Corrected information about names after hypergrid tp, added two captures]

HyperGrid

This post presents a user experience with Hypergrid, a technology included in OpenSim that allows teleports between virtual worlds (or grids), and includes also a short tutorial so that you can try it yourself, link your virtual world with your friends’ worlds, etc. It assumes a minimal working knowledge of OpenSim, at the level described in my previous post. Yes, yes, I know, after a “Installing OpenSim” post there should come another titled “Saving our database” or “Our first Grid” — but I’m doing that for fun, ok? :-)

Why Hypergrid matters

Hypergrid represents a radical change in the model for 3D online OpenSim-compatible virtual worlds. Up to now, we’ve been used to big, monolithic worlds (like Second Life or OSGrid), modelled under the metaphor of a flat, grid-like world (hence the term grid). The world is made of pieces called islands or regions which occupy a place in the grid determined by two integer coordinates, and these in turn determine the visibility between islands. Thus, if island A is at (1000,1000) and island B is at (1001,1000), A and B share a border: the east of A is the west of B.

This “big world” model has several problems: big worlds don’t scale well, the data is in the hands of the service provider, not the customer, and it’s easy to for the service providers to scam their customers. Besides, if OpenSim has to become the 3D web, one doesn’t understand clearly why having some islands (= having a web) should imply having neighbours or occupying a position in a vaster plane — there’s no notion of “neighbour web” in the WWW.

Enter HyperGrid. HyperGrid allows us to work with a completely different model, what we could call a “small world” model. Everybody can have a world, a grid, in the same way that everybody can have a web. You, your community, your employer, whomever. And, as webs are linked using HTTP links, so grids are linked using HyperGrid. Easy, no?

Therefore HyperGrid matters. Indeed, it matters a lot. A hypergrided universe is a universe in which you can have your own world, take your own backups, create your own contents and save it to your HD, invite your friends… and still not be isolated.

To be fair, the technology has its problems. For example, DRM as we know it today cannot work, and there also are some security concerns. Anyway, these problems will most probably be tackled, one way or another.

A question of names

Let’s say that I’m called Jane Doe in world A, and I’m teleporting to world B. What should be my name in world B? To make sense of that question, think that an avatar called Jane Doe could  already have been created in world B! For example, I am Zonja Capalini in Second Life, Open Life and the Rezzable PGA; if these worlds became hypergrided, it’s conceivable that the Zonja Capalini of Second Life wanted to attend a party at Rezzable — please note that this involves a hypergrid teleport, and is different from logging in directly to rezzable. :-)

Additionally, when an avatar rezzes at world B, it would be nice if there was a way to identify where (i.e., which world) did this avatar come from. For example, it could well be that avatars coming from, say, LLmafia.org had a bad reputation, or that avatars from lively.com had no genitalia, etc.  So, knowing where does a foreing avie come from is important.

The current implementation of HyperGrid addresses these two points in a simple and elegant way. Assume again that I’m Jane Doe in world A, and assume that the URL of world A is http://www.worlda.com:9000. Then when I take a hypergrid teleport to world B, my name becomes

Jane.Doe http://www.worlda.com:9000

Neat, no? My first and second names are combined to form the first name of my avie by placing a period between the two, and the name of the place I come from takes the place of the second name of my avie. For example, if I came from OSGrid (http://osgrid.org:8002), I would be seen as

Zonja.Capalini http://osgrid.org:8002

Currently, this new name is only seen by others looking at me, not by myself, which seems proper, but involves the small risk of finding my own doppelgänger! :-)

[Update: After a time, my own name changes too:]

Lend me your island for my map

So, anyway, how does a teleport between worlds work? The key idea is the following: assume that world B has a region called Nice Island and wants to open it to foreign teleports. World B then configures OpenSim for HyperGrid. When the managers of world A want to implement teleports to Nice Island, they configure OpenSim for HyperGrid too, and then they use the “link-region” command (described below) to include the map image of Nice Island in the world map of A. And then this image of Nice Island can be used to teleport to World B using the map. That simple! Indeed the administrators of world A don’t need to give to “Nice Island” the same name it has on world B, they can name it “Gateway to B” for example, so that you don’t teleport to world B by accident.

Open questions

The HyperGrid technology is still in its infancy, and there are a number of open questions that will probably be addressed in future versions: if I create an object in a foreign world, what should be the creator of this object, as seen from the foreign world?; Can I make friends with somebody of a foreign world?; Can I take a landmark of a foreign world and use it to tp back to that world?; etc.

Hypergrid experience and tutorial (for Windows XP)

Step 1: Use names, not IP addresses

My RL friend Ludmilla Writer and me tested HyperGrid by using two XP computers connected to the same ADSL router. My (internal) IP address was 192.168.1.38, and Ludmilla’s was 192.168.1.33. To be able to use names, we had to tweak the “hosts” file, located in “C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc”. This file normally contains some comments, and then a single line which says

  127.0.0.1       localhost

We added two lines

  192.168.1.38    zonja
  192.168.1.33    ludmilla

at the end of the “hosts” file, and saved it. We did that both on my machine and on Ludmilla’s machine. This tweak allows us to use “zonja” instead of 192.168.1.38 and “ludmilla” instead of “192.168.1.33″ as the addresses of our machines.

If the grids you are going to link don’t have dns addresses, you can use this trick — don’t forget that unless you’re making the experiment at home, as we did, you’ll need to use external ip addresses.

Step 2: Modify OpenSim.ini on both grids

The “Installing and running HyperGrid” section of the HyperGrid page in the OpenSim wiki is excellent, you can follow the instructions there to modify your OpenSim.ini files. Except for the http_listener_ port and remoting_listener_port variables, please use the port numbers as shown  (port numbers come at the end of urls, preceded by a colon — 9300 and 8001-8004 in the examples; modify them if necessary). Here are the modified OpenSim.ini files for the “zonja”

and “ludmilla”

machines.

Step 3: Modify region files to use external host names

Go to “C:\Program Files\OpenSim\Regions”. You’ll see one or more .xml files. Open them one by one with NotePad and change the “external_host_name” parameter to point to the name defined in Step 1 (if you’re using different machines to run your grid you know what to do).

Step 4: Modify region files to check that the coordinates of your maps don’t overlap

This one isn’t documented anywhere and it made us lose more than two hours! If the destination region in the destination world has the same (x,y) coordinates as the origin region in the origin world, the teleport will fail, and you will be logged off. The coordinates of your islands are located in the .xml files of “C:\Program Files\OpenSim\Regions”, under parameter names sim_location_x and sim_location_y. Make sure that these are not identical in both worlds (also make sure they are not more than 4000 apart). In our case, we set “Condensation Land”, the unique island at “zonja”, at (1000,1000) in my machine’s map, and “Ludmilla’s Island”, the unique island at “ludmilla”, at (1010,1010) in Ludmilla’s machine map. You may want to review the “default_location_x” and “default_location_y” of your respective OpenSim.ini files and change them accordingly too.

Step 5: Start OpenSim in HyperGrid mode and check that hypergrid is working

Go to Start -> Run, type “cmd” and press ENTER, type “cd \Program Files\OpenSim” and press enter, type “OpenSim -hypergrid=true”.

Wait until you get the “Region <root> # :” prompt. Type “link-region” and press enter.

You should get a reply; if not, something is not working properly.

Step 6: Link your worlds!

On the OpenSim console, at the “Region <root> # :” prompt, type

  link-region <Xloc> <Yloc> destination.world.address port Destination World Gateway

Use Xloc and Yloc that make sense to your world, i.e. close to your regions, but not adjacent. For example, since “Condensation Land” was at (1000,1000) in my world’s map, (1002,1000) was a good position to put Ludmilla’s Island from Ludmilla’s world:

  link-region 1002 1000 ludmilla 9000 Ludmilla's Gateway

If all goes well, you’ll get a handshake confirmation message.

Step 7: Log in, and make sure that home is defined for your avatar

If you have not, go to World -> Set home to here in the Second Life client; otherwise your teleport will fail.

Step 8: Open the map and wonder

You should see your islands, and, in addition, the gateway island from the other world in your map!

Here’s the map before region linking:

and here’s the map after region linking:

Step 9: Teleport between worlds

By using the map.

Step 10: Party :-)

Links

• My tutorial Installing OpenSim in Windows XP with MySQL
• The HyperGrid page in the OpenSim Wiki. It’s the source of information I’ve used to conduct my tests and to write this post.
• Vint Falken’s OpenSim goes Hyper – The Hypergrid.
• justincc’s thought-provoking Could there be a future without big grids?
• justincc’s What is the Hypergrid?

Update 20090201: Included instructions for Windows 64 bit as reported by Xen Zerbino (Thanks! :-)).

Update 20090123:Fixed a bug in OpenSim.ini detected by Alpha Runningbear. (Thanks!)

Update 20090105: Reworded step 6 to eliminate some tech-talk, added a fall-back for initial log-in, and describe the shutdown procedure in as per Vint Falken’s suggestions 1 and 2 (thanks! :-)).

Note 1: OpenSim is considered to be alpha software. This means that many things you expect from your daily use of Second Life don’t work in the same way, or simply they don’t work at all. Development of OpenSim is very active, tho, so that we can only expect OpenSim quality and features to better with time.

Note 2: This is not for the faint of heart. :-) You’ve been warned! :-)

Note 3: All the information presented here was valid on January the 3rd, 2009. I’ll correct errors that are brought to my attention, but this post should not be taken as a substitute of the official OpenSim wiki.

The purpose of this post is to present a short, comprehensive, do-it-yourself tutorial for the installation of OpenSim in a Windows XP machine, using MySQL as a back-end for persistence. I’ve tried to write the tutorial in such a way that you can understand it even if you’ve got no previous exposure to OpenSim or to database concepts; however, some familiarity with the operating system is required, in particular you’re assumed to know how to 1) open a system prompt; 2) open a text editor and create a file (the “notepad” application will suffice). A step-by-step procedure follows; you’ll be asked to download some files; these files implement OpenSim and MySql.

Step 1: Download OpenSim here and install it, using all default options.

OpenSim (http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page) is the Open Source Simulator, the set of programs that will allow you to create Second Life-like islands in your own computer, and eventually link them to the world for other people to see.

Step 2: Download MySQL 5.1 (for Win32 or for Win64; the Windows ZIP/Setup.EXE option worked for me). Install with all default options. You will be asked for the “root” password, chose it carefully, you’ll need it below [use that path if you've neved worked with a RDBMS, or don't even know what a RDBMS is; otherwise, you should define a special user for OpenSim-related questions].

Step 3: You’ll need the MySQL GUI tools too:  http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html. Again, install with all default options.

MySQL is the program that will implement persistence in your islands.  “Persistence” is the technical term used to describe the fact that your appearance is the same (it persists) between logins, the islands are the same too (they also persist) between logins (assuming there’s not been somebody to alter them, of course, or a script has altered the world, etc).

To implement persistence, we will need to create a MySQL database. You must chose a name for your database. “OpenSim” is a good choice; or you can think big, and use the name of your own future grid :-)

Step 4: Go to Start -> All programs -> MySQL -> MySQL Server 5.1 -> MySQL Command Line Client and type the root password (alternatively, open a system prompt and connect to MySQL using the OpenSim-specific account). When you get the “mysql>” prompt, type

  create database MyGridName;

substitute “MyGridName” by the name you’ve chosen; the final semicolon is necessary; you should get a “Query Ok, 1 row affected” reply.

[If you've created an OpenSim-specific account, grant this account all privileges on the database you've just created]

Step 5: Go to “C:\Program Files\OpenSim”, and create a file called “OpenSim.ini”. Cut and paste the text below into it, reconstructing the “broken” lines (if a line begins with a blank, eliminate the first three blanks only and join it with the previous line).

-------------------- Cut here -------------------
[Startup]
region_info_source = filesystem
gridmode = False
physics = OpenDynamicsEngine
meshing = ZeroMesher
physical_prim = True
see_into_this_sim_from_neighbor = True
serverside_object_permissions = False
storage_plugin = "OpenSim.Data.MySQL.dll"
storage_connection_string = "Data Source=localhost;
   Database=DDDD;User ID=UUUU;Password=PPPP;";
storage_prim_inventories = true
appearance_persist = true
appearance_connection_string = "Data Source=localhost;
   Database=DDDD;User ID=UUUU;Password=PPPP;pooling=false;"
asset_database = "local"
startup_console_commands_file = "startup_commands.txt"
shutdown_console_commands_file = "shutdown_commands.txt"
DefaultScriptEngine = ScriptEngine.DotNetEngine
asset_database = local
clientstack_plugin = OpenSim.Region.ClientStack.LindenUDP.dll
EventQueue = True
[StandAlone]
accounts_authenticate = True
welcome_message = Welcome to Condensation!
inventory_plugin = "OpenSim.Data.MySQL.dll"
inventory_source = "Data Source=localhost;Database=DDDD;
   User ID=UUUU;Password=PPPP;"
userDatabase_plugin = "OpenSim.Data.MySQL.dll"
user_source = "Data Source=localhost;Database=DDDD;
   User ID=UUUU;Password=PPPP;"
asset_plugin = "OpenSim.Data.MySQL.dll"
asset_source = "Data Source=localhost;Database=DDDD;
   User ID=UUUU;Password=PPPP;"
dump_assets_to_file = False
[Network]
default_location_x = 1000
default_location_y = 1000
http_listener_port = 9000
remoting_listener_port = 8895
grid_server_url = http://localhost:8001
grid_send_key = null
grid_recv_key = null
user_server_url = http://localhost:8002
user_send_key = null
user_recv_key = null
asset_server_url = http://localhost:8003
inventory_server_url = http://localhost:8004
secure_inventory_server = true
-------------------- Cut here -------------------

Now replace all occurences of “DDDD” by the name of the database you created in step 4, all occurences of “UUUU” by “root” (or the name of the OpenSim-specific account you created in step 3), and all occurences of PPPP by root’s password (or the password for the OpenSim-specific account). You should also replace “Welcome to Condensation!” by your own welcome message.

Step 6: Go to Start > Run. Type “cmd” and press ENTER. Type “cd \program files\opensim” and press ENTER. Type “opensim” and press ENTER [if you're running Windows Vista 64 bit, type opensim32bitLaunch instead -- you'll need to run it as an administrator]. Wait some secs. When asked for “default region config: region name”, enter the name of your first region (I entered “Condensation Land”); you can accept the default for Grid Location (X Axis) and (Y Axis), for the internal IP address  or incoming UDP,  and for the internal IP port for incoming UDP; you will then be asked for the first and last names and password for the master avatar: you can use your SL first and last names, but I’d suggest you’d not use your SL password, as this password will be stored as plain text.

We’re almost done!

Step 7: Create a copy of the Second Life icon in your desktop, change its name to whatever you fancy (in my case I chosed “Condensation”), right click the new icon and select “Properties”, and add “-loginuri http://localhost:9000/” (without the quotes) to the end of the first entry field.

That’s it.

Now open your newly created icon. You’ll see data about Second Life, which you can disregard, and you’ll know that you’re not in Second Life any more because of the red menu bar. Enter the first name, last name and password you have created in step 6, and press ENTER. [If for any reason you get a "Could not authenticate your avatar" message, you can always re-create your avatar by typing "create user first last password 1000 1000" (without the quotes) and pressing enter at the “Region <root> # :” prompt in the OpenSim window.]

You’ll log in as usual… into your own grid!!! If you’re using the same first name and last name than in SL, you’ll see the last screen of your last SL session; don’t be confused by that: you’ll also see your own welcome message, which tells you that you’re not logging into SL after all.

Wait a few seconds, and… poof! You’re logged in into your own grid!

If you display the map, you’ll see that you’re in an universe with only one island, namely, the one you’ve named in step 6.

Now, ok, you’re ruthed, which means that you’re horrible, and your world is empty, with no other avies, no economy and no shops. However, you can create prims,

upload textures, etc., and this is more than enough to give you a feeling of what the technology can do.

Final step: When you’re finished playing/experimenting/whatever, go to the opensim console and type “quit” (or “shutdown”) and press ENTER. This will guarantee that all the data (i.e., prims, outfits, terrain, etc) is correctly saved so that you’ll find it there next time you open your world.

Rationale for everything above:

• Tareru Nino’s Linden Lab decomissions over 23.000 islands in 24 hours.
• Vint Falken’s It was this… or telling you about script limitations.
• “We believe this is fair”, or how to make business customers and creative residents equally angry.
• You can also take a look at this.
• [Update 20090105:] Vint Falken’s How to OpenSim DIY on Windows XP.

“We believe this is fair”
M. Linden, in A Letter to Second Life Residents

We then threw out a party for the opening of Ludmilla’s island: