Tuesday 7 July 2009

Opensims and epiSTEMS month 2



Well epiSTEMS has made it to month 2 and so.......



...the whole gardens changed, all the plants/flowers/tree's and what nots have all been replaced with a new set, I realised with how much I build I can probably keep up with a schedule of twelve gardens a year, maybe, ish. It has made me wonder if I really do need the land though, the mojority of my SL income (say 85%) has come through Xstreet and although i'm only talking pocket money amounts, enough to cover the land rental costs and upload fees it might be worth using the lindens dollars in a more constructive way?

Anyway, most of the plants here were not built in SL but locally offline on my PC, after looking at the Meerkat viewer that allows you to upload and backup your rezzed objects my whole building experience just exploded! It really does what it says on the tin and works, ok, sometimes I need to try a few times to upload an object and that can cost when loading into SL and it crashes for a pastime doing anything else inworld but it's FREE and is exactly what I wanted to broaden my horizons...

....so my next step was to download and install opensim locally, it's a lot easier than I thought it would be (install/setup and logging in for the first time took 30 mins top) and the freedom of having my own sim to do how I want is great! It's also worth mentioning how fast it is when not connected to a grid, I was really put off last year when I tried openlife and the Rezzable PGA grid because of building/attachments/avatars/moving/talking issues but this runns pretty smoothly and i've had no problems with the builds.

After playing with the opensim for a bit I happened to add a quick twitter post about how much fun I was having, afterwards I was contacted by the Reaction grid team who run a PG grid with an educational slant that's built up to a fair old size, I checked out the grid and it's great! everyone there is really friendly and after spending a few days there and seeing all the old linden tree's I asked I approached them about offering some gardening services and hey presto i've been given a plot on one of the sims to produce nature objects just for the Reaction Grid and they're all free to grab and copy away!

Also worth checking out the saturday b movie nights with the group which have been pretty entertaining! but it really has made me think about the SL grid and the size it's become, with so many people complaining how the Lindens have lost touch with the users it's a refreshing experience to meet a smaller team who really do appear to be doing everything right.

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