For those who use Second Life, I’m sure the thought has occurred that land is expensive and that often restricts peoples’ creativity. Well the future may be here in the form of Open Simulator, an open source project to create a virtual grid system very much like Second Life.

The OpenSim project allowed users to download and run the code necessary to host your own simulator, with the possibility of connecting it to one of the various public grids that exist. While still being in development, much of the system works as expected. Scripting is still hazy although that is the focus of the dev team at this time.

I experimented with the simulator code recently, testing a standalone sim with a single avatar successfully. My next step being to connect my sim to a grid, I worked last night on registering with OSGrid without totaly success.

While my sim is registered with the grid and shows up on all the maps, avatars are unable to visit including myself. This may sound like a fatal flaw, but actually it’s probably quite a simple firewall problem, albeit one that I couldn’t fix in my sleepy state.

The community surrounding OpenSim and OSGrid seems very strong, indeed there were a few users who worked with me, trying to iron out my problems. Far from the SL grid, where I get accosted by Nazi Ronald McDondalds and perverted newbies, the OSGrid is made up mainly of techies and serious folks who are only too happy to help others.

I will continue to work on this with the nice people, both on the grid, in IRC (at freenode#osgrid and freenode#opensim) and on the OSGrid forums. Hopefully I’ll manage to solve my problem, and from there I’d like to contribute to the project where I’m able.

Check out the projects, people have put a lot of work into them and they need to become more mainstream. I won’t publish masses of stuff at this stage, the OpenSim wiki contains a lot of interesting and useful docs. Have fun