Create own VR Server with OpenSim
OpenSim is an open source VR (Virtual Reality) server that is similar to Second Life, but the land is hosted on your own computer rather than hosted on the Second Life server. This means that there is no more expensive monthly fee to pay to maintain the SL land. However, if your ISP doesn’t allow you to host your own server on the Internet such as Verizon like me, OpenSim is almost useless except for the testing and education purposes.
I’m running the server with CombineContiguousRegions turned on and setup of 3 X 3 mega-regions. The initial setup was quick and easy with no installation. Before starting up the server, however, you need to first install some components:
sudo apt-get install nant mono-gmcs libmono-microsoft8.0-cil libmono-system-runtime2.0-cil libgdiplus libmono-i18n2.0-cil libmono-oracle2.0-cil
After OpenSim was set up, you have to use either Second Life viewer or other open source viewers to connect to the server. I’m using Imprudence latest beta because I just discovered today that Imprudence has the option on the login screen to add the VR server yourself and the localhost server is already set up in the latest build. When you login to the server first time, the default avatar is female. You can easily change the gender by adding a new shape directly in the inventory. In the beta build, Imprudence would crash if make a new outfit inside the appearance window. The default land is only one small island or many if you setup as a mega-region like me. You can manually edit the land by raise or lower the terrain, or you can export the hightmap of the land to an image file described here and edit it in GIMP. One thing to note is that you first need to logon using a veiwer in order to import the hightmap successfully, otherwise you won’t be able to logon to the server after the import. Here is my land after the modification in GIMP:
3 by 3 mega-regions connected as one big island
Click the image to enlarge
Notice the red arrow in the image. This screenshot is taken 859 feet above the ground. It means that this island is very big. It seems that by enabling the CombineContiguousRegions option, all of the regions’ region names become the first region name according to Regions.ini file.
Overall, OpenSim can be used as an alternate Second Life server unless your ISP doesn’t allow hosting your own server. It is also a good testing and education environment to test and learn the basics of 3D creation and animation.