#osgrid — Public Fediverse posts

It's one of the most well-known OARs, and I guess every OpenSim user with a little more experience has come across at least one instance of it: the Universal Campus.

It was built by Michael Emory Cerquoni, an early OpenSimulator developer first known in-world as Nebadon Izumi who released his creations under the Oni Kenkon Creations brand, and who is also the builder of Wright Plaza, OSgrid's famous old freebie sim. The project was a collaboration with the now-defunct Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds at the University of California in Irvine, and it was designed and intended to act as an actual virtual campus.

Due to the size of the project as a whole and the main building in particular, Nebadon built the Universal Campus as a mega-region, an OpenSim hack from around 2009 that made it possible to stretch a build across multiple standard regions, in this case two by two. So the Universal Campus is not one OAR, it's four, one for each region.

The first publicly available version of the Universal Campus was released in 2011, so as futuristic as it looks, it is already roughly 13 years old.

The main building shown here is outright gargantuan. It is still one of the biggest buildings around the Hypergrid. At a length from north to south of over 200 metres, it actually had to be built across a region border. Today, a decade after the introduction of varsims, this is no longer a problem.

Although it's possible to walk from everywhere on the island to everywhere else, a network of custom-made teleporters with ten destinations reduces travel time greatly. One destination is right in front of the main building, and two more are inside, the only two in-door destinations, such is the immense size of the building.

Image description

The picture in this post is a digital rendering from inside a 3-D virtual world based on OpenSimulator, generated in a regular client for this kind of virtual worlds, also known as a viewer, using shaders and generated shadows, but without ray-tracing. It shows the main building of the Universal Campus as mentioned in this post.

What OpenSimulator is

OpenSimulator, OpenSim in short, is a free, open-source, cross-platform server-side re-implementation of the technology of Second Life. The latter is a commercial 3-D virtual world created by Philip Rosedale, also known as Philip Linden, of Linden Lab and launched in 2003. It is a so-called "pancake" virtual world which is accessed through desktop or laptop computers using standard 2-D screens rather than virtual reality headsets. Second Life had its heyday in 2007 and 2008. It is often believed to have shut down in late 2008 or early 2009 when the constant stream of news about it in mainstream media broke away, but in fact, it celebrated its 20th birthday in 2023, and it is still evolving.

OpenSimulator was first published in January, 2007. It was made possible when, in 2006, Linden Lab open-sourced the official Second Life viewer, which is how client applications for Second Life and OpenSim are called, thus laying its viewer API open. This led to the development of third-party viewers. After the development of third-party viewers had started, OpenSim was developed against them and the Second Life viewer API. It does not have its own official viewer, but most of the popular third-party Second Life viewers are compatible with OpenSim as well.

Unlike Second Life, OpenSim is not one monolithic, centralised world. It is rather a server application for worlds or "grids" like Second Life which anyone could run on either rented Web space or at home, given a sufficiently powerful computer and a sufficiently fast and reliable land-line Internet connection. This makes OpenSim as decentralised as the Fediverse. The introduction of the Hypergrid in 2008 made it possible for avatars registered on one OpenSim grid to travel to most other OpenSim grids.

What grids, regions and sims are

Second Life and the OpenSim-based worlds are called "grids" because they are flat worlds divided into square areas of 256 by 256 metres each which is roughly 280 by 280 yards. These areas are called "regions". Regions can be empty, in which case they're shown as ocean, but they can't be entered. In order for any actual content to exist in a region and for avatars to be able to enter regions, a simulator, sim in short, has to run in a region.

In Second Life, a sim is always one region. OpenSim had a hack from 2009 on that was called "mega regions". It exploited a feature in third-party Second Life viewers that was not used by Second Life itself, and that made it possible to extend a sim across multiple regions in a square arrangement. The Universal Campus itself is built as a mega region of two by two standard regions. Since this hack was buggy and limited, varregions, now known as varsims, were first developed for the OpenSim fork Aurora-Sim. Eventually, they were officially introduced into OpenSim in 2014. They theoretically allow for a sim to stretch across as many as 32 by 32 standard regions with no borders in-between.

Unlike Second Life, OpenSim also has the option to save entire sims into archives and load them from archives, so-called OARs which is short for OpenSimulator Archives. Many of these are available online. Mega regions are saved in one OAR for each region, and as the Universal Campus was designed as a mega region and pre-dates varsims, it is divided into four individual OARs. A varsim, on the other hand, can be entirely saved in and loaded from one OAR.

Where the pictures were made

Particularly, the picture was created at UniCampus, an instance of the Universal Campus in OSgrid (https://osgrid.org) owned by one of the grid admins. Launched in July, 2007, OSgrid was the first public OpenSim grid and intended as a testbed for OpenSim's development. Next to Wolf Territories Grid from 2021 (https://wolfterritoriesgrid.com/, https://www.wolf-grid.com/), it is one of the two biggest OpenSim grids; each one of these two grids has more landmass than Second Life.

OSgrid also adopted the early OpenSimulator slogan "The Open Source Metaverse" immediately after its launch. It still uses that slogan, and the term "metaverse" has been commonly used by the OpenSimulator community ever since.

Camera position and general setting

The picture was taken from a point of view higher than the eyes of an avatar, ca. three metres or ten feet above the ground. The position of the camera is near the inner edge of a wide path that describes an eccentric path of three quarters of a circle around the likewise circular main landing zone as well as just a bit south of the southern edge of a wide, straight path that least eastward fromo the main landing zone. The direction of view is almost northward and slightly to the west. Also, the camera is tilted upward by a few degrees due to its low position and the height of the building.

All dimensions in this description are estimated.

Main building, southern end and main entrance

The main building of the Universal Campus is the centre-piece of the image. It is a gigantic building that towers high above all surrounding trees, although it is not actually a tower, nor does it have one. It is rather a lengthy building that stretches from north to south. In the image, the middle of its front is at one third of the width of the image from the left-hand edge, reaching to the left as far as one sixth of the width of the image from the left-hand edge. The conference hall at the far end is at one third of the width of the image from the right-hand edge with parts of the building almost reaching the edge. Its supporting structure mostly shows textures with highlights included which suggest that it was made of stainless steel. Otherwise, glass with a horizontal gradient between lighter grey and darker grey on the outside and a plain darker grey tint on the inside is the most commonly used material. The building does not have any exterior walls.

The southern entrance, the main entrance to the building with the main landing area right outside the doors, is surrounded and marked by a tall geometrical structure which is rather complex in spite of only having straight edges. It resembles a spaceship from an early video game as roughly as it resembles the letter A or an upside-down V. It is almost perfectly symmetrical around both vertical planes. Its medium grey surfaces are untextured otherwise and don't mimic any particular material.

On each far side is a vertical "column" with a footprint with the shape of a trapeze, very roughly four metres or thirteen feet wide and four metres or thirteen feet thick. The short side of the trapeze, measuring only a bit over three and a half metres or twelve feet, is on the outside. These columns rise up some nine metres or 30 feet on the inside. The top slopes downward towards the outsides, so the columns are less than eight or about a half metres or 27 feet high on the outside.

The centre and top piece of the structure, right above the doors and roughly seven and a half metres or 25 feet above the ground, is roughly ten metres or 33 feet tall and roughly four and a half metres or fifteen feet wide. It has a rectangular cross-section when looked at from inside the building or from the main landing area, but a heptagonal cross-section when looked at from the sides. Its seven visible faces are all rectangular. At the bottom, it is roughly five metres or roughly sixteen and a half feet thick with only one surface. The top is roughly five metres or roughly sixteen and a half feet thick, too, but with a pair of surfaces of the same size at an angle of under five degrees, forming a slight ridge at the top.

The inner and outer sides of this centre-piece are each made up from an upper surface which is a square and sloped outward from the top and a lower surface which is a rectangle and sloped outward from the bottom. They meet at an angle of roughly 20 degrees.

On each side, two irregularly-shaped structures of seven surfaces each connect the seven edges of the sides of the centre piece with the four edges of the inner sides of the columns. Six of these surfaces are more or less slightly twisted because they connect edges at different angles with each other. The only planar surface is the one that connects the bottom edges which are all horizontal.

Two pairs of double glass doors make up the actual main entrance. Each door blade is about two and a half metres or eight feet wide and about five and a half metres or eighteen feet high. The glass has the same horizontal gradient texture both on the inside and on the outside so that all door blades can be identical. The only difference between the door blades is whether the door script opens them clockwise or counter-clockwise. The texture is arranged in such a way that there are narrow lighter areas along both vertical edges when the hinge is on the left, and there is a wide lighter area on the lock side and a narrow lighter area on the hinge side when the hinge is on the right. The narrow sides of the door blades are opaque when looked at from the outside but, due to OpenSim's limitations, not when looked at from the inside. The doors open inward by 90 degrees, and they do so when they're clicked, or when an avatar approaches them. They can be closed manually by clicking them again, otherwise they close automatically after ten seconds.

Each door blade has one simple door handle on the inside and the outside tinted the same generic grey as the large structure surrounding the doors. The handles are only a few centimetres wide. The grips have a square cross-section. Above and below, there are thicker parts which connect the grips to the doors while being flush with them on the sides and facing away from the door blades. Altogether, each handle is half a metre or one and five eighths feet long. The top of each handle is about one and three quarters metres or five and three quarters inches above the ground.

Between the two door pairs and on their sides, there are altogether three columns with a rectangular footprint of roughly 90 centimetres or three feet width by 30 centimetres or one foot thickness, each roughly seven and a quarter metres or 24 feet tall. Above each pair of doors, they are connected with a horizontal beam that fits between the top surfaces of the columns and the top edges of the doors while being half as thick as the columns.

The spaces between the large structure around the entrance, the columns and the horizontal bars are filled with glass panes.

The whole door ensemble does not sit exactly at half the thickness of the large structure. It is shifted outward by about half a metre or one and five eighth feet.

A structure shaped like an almost flat pyramid, but with a flattened top, is mounted upside-down against the bottom surface of the centre of the large structure around the main entrance. The glass pane above the doors passes right through its middle. A square light is installed on the flattened top which is actually the bottom now, illuminating the entrance area when it is dark. Otherwise, this flat structure has the usual brushed stainless steel texture which appears rather dark here.

On each side of the entrance area, a cylindrical column with a diametre of roughly four metres or thirteen feet rises some 20 metres or 66 feet upward. Each column is slightly tilted inward along the longitudinal axis of the building and outward to the sides. On each side, farther outside, there is another, even taller column, easily over 30 metres or 100 feet tall. These columns are tilted along the longitudinal axis of the building at the same angle, but outward to the sides at a smaller angle. They make up the southern corners of the main building. All four columns are textured to resemble brushed stainless steel.

A semi-cylindrical structure connects the complex main entrance structure through the inner columns with the outer columns on the ground. Its diametre is roughly 2.40 metres or eight feet. It uses the usual brushed stainless steel texture, but the brushing direction is radial, and the texture is stretched along the axis of the cylinder so much that its nature is anything but obvious.

Between the columns and the main entrance structure, there are three more glass panes. The panes between the inner and outer columns are mounted halfway into the building whereas the one around the main entrance structure is almost all the way inside the building. Three horizontal stainless steel rods of about 30 centimetres or one foot lead through each pane. They are roughly evenly spaced, but closer to the upper and lower edges of the glass panes than to each other. The rods that pass through the panes between the columns grow to a diametre of roughly 45 centimetres or one and a half feet towards their ends before ending in short cylinders with diametres of about 1.80 metres or six feet.

On top of the inner columns and partly intersecting with the outer columns, a massive, upright, flat structure with stainless steel textures serves as the southern end of the roof. It has to be about 50 metres or 160 feet wide, about 15 metres or 50 feet tall and about 3.60 metres or 12 feet thick. The front and rear surfaces are slightly countersunk with margins of slightly varying thickness all around except for the bottom. The top edge has a fairly short horizontal section of ten metres or 33 feet in the middle from which it curves downward in sections of ellipses. The bottom edge is almost horizontal and leads to corners from which short 45-degree slopes lead upward. The slopes from the bottom and the ellipses from the top meet in rounded corners. Unlike the columns below, this roof end is mounted vertically.

Main building, Universal Campus logo

The roof end also carries the logo of the Universal Campus, sitting at half the height of the outer countersunk area of the roof end and ever so slightly to the left of its middle. Its base is a circular, conical structure with a diametre of ten metres or 33 feet, the sloped edge being black. The actual logo is part of the texture on the front surface of the cone. It has a diametre of about seven metres or 23 feet.

The inner 80% of its diametre are filled with a gradient from medium dark grey at the top to medium light grey at the bottom. Three shaded three-dimensional primitive shapes are displayed in this area, a cube with one corner each pointed to the top and the bottom at the top, a sphere in the bottom left, a tetrahedron in the bottom right. At the bottom of this area, "Patefacio radix" is written in medium dark grey letters, in a wide sans-serif typeface and in what is likely to be small caps. It is Latin for "open source". Below, the Roman number MMXI, 2011, marks the year of the first public release of the Universal Campus.

A thin dark grey circle separates this area from the outer 20% which are light grey. Re-using the same typeface as in the inner part, and in dark grey with blue shading, "Universal" is written at the top and "Campus" at the bottom, both capitalised with otherwise small caps and following the circular shape of the logo.

29 identical black circular spots, very roughly evenly spaced, protrude from underneath the logo all around it by a bit more than their own diametre. They separate the logo from the surrounding white area which, in turn, is surrounded by the aforementioned black conical slope.

The Universal Campus logo is illuminated from below. The light source sits in a slot in a cylinder on top of the main entrance structure, about two metres or six and a half feet long and a diametre of about 30 centimetres or one foot. This cylinder has spherical end pieces, and the whole arrangement has a simple, glossy, medium grey surface.

Main building, side

Each side of the building, all the way to the conference hall at the northern end, is tilted outward at the same angle as the corner columns around the front and much simpler in design. Starting north of the side entrances right behind the front, a semi-cylindrical structure on the ground, similar to those at the front, extends northward towards the conference hall, only interrupted by another set of side entrances shortly before the conference hall. Farther up, there is another cylindrical structure of the same diametre and with the same texture on each side, but with a cutout on the upper inner side of a bit over 90 degrees to help carry the upper floor on the right, actually semi-cylindrical on the left and stretching all the way between the columns on both sides. Even farther up, right below the roof, another cylindrical structure is installed, but cut out on the inside by 60 degrees upward and 75 degrees downward.

Eight cylindrical beams with a diametre of roughly 90 centimetres or three feet and the usual stainless steel texture serve as the near-vertical supports. Nearly evenly spaced, except for the first being closer to the second, and running from the bottom to the top, they divide each side into eight full-sized sections and one small section right in front of the conference hall.

As mentioned above, the building has four sets of side entrances. One on each side is right behind the front behind the colour and the first support beam, one on each side is just south of the conference hall between the seventh and eighth support beams. The doors are identical to the ones that make up the main entrance, but each side entrance has three pairs of doors instead of two.

Between the three double doors, there is a filler column with a rectangular vertical cross-section, a width of about 45 centimetres or one and a half feet and a thickness at ground level that is slightly less than the width. While the inside surface is vertical, the outside surface is sloped in parallel to the outward tilt of the side of the building. Similar but wider columns are installed on the sides of the doors, being the closest that the building has to outer walls. Another structure with a rhomboid north-south cross-section sits on top of each set of four pillars, connecting them and carrying a glass pane on top. Its inside surface is sloped outside, its outside surface has a stronger slope than the outer side of the building. Also, its texture is lighter than that of the pillars.

Everything else between the vertical and horizontal structures on the sides of the building is filled with glass panes, all with a light vertical streak down their centres, blurred by the gradients on its sides.

Main building, roof

On the visible right-hand side of the building, right above the positions of the first seven of the eight support beams, curved brackets reach down from the roof, holding the upper horizontal cylindrical beam from the outside. They appear to be dark grey, but they actually have the usual brushed stainless steel texture. These brackets are installed on both sides across the outer parts of the roof, and slightly larger versions span across the centre of the roof as can be seen from below through the windows of the building.

A little bit of roof is visible underneath these brackets. The roof has four identical sections from its end to the conference hall. All are mostly planar with a rounded outer side. From above, they have the most elaborate surface of the whole building. It is almost black. A bump map or a normal map divides it into slightly embossed and slightly less rough rectangles, slightly countersunk and slightly rougher rectangles and the another bit smoother lines in-between. The rectangles are of varying size. They have an aspect ratio of four to five along the building's longitudinal axis by three to four along its transversal or vertical axis. In addition, the texture on these roof segments is glossy, giving it a plastics-like appearance. From below, however, it is smooth and transparent with the same tint of grey as the glass panes.

Between the inner and outer sections of this kind on each side, there is one long textured strip, on top of which rest the larger brackets across the centre of the roof. Its texture is slightly glossy, but hard to identify as resembling something: It consists of stretched rectangular fields of medium grey, arranged transversally, with very thin dark grey outlines, surrounded and interrupted by narrow areas of medium light grey which are emphasised by bump-mapping or normal-mapping which makes them appear embossed as well as specular-mapping which makes them appear glossier than the rest. Within these fields, but at some distance from its outlines, there are more nested rectangles, from outermost to innermost: medium dark grey, dark grey, medium dark grey, medium grey and slightly bumpy, medium light grey and bumpier as well as appearing to be slightly countersunk, light grey and appearing to be even more countersunk. This pattern repeats over a hundred times over the length of the southern part of the building. It is on the bottom face of these two strips as well, but not on its narrow sides.

The very middle of the roof is simply one long glass pane. It is separated from the dark sections to its side by what seems to try to resemble rectangular aluminium profiles with the long sides oriented vertically. On each side, at a height right above the glass pane, there is a stripe that glows white in the dark while not actually being a light source; this is another OpenSim limitation.

Main building, domed conference hall

Beyond these parts of the building, a large geodesic dome rises up, below which is the conference hall. It is assembled from triangular glass panes in seven rows, four of which the image shows from outside, and untextured light grey cylindrical rods. The glass panes have the same tint or texture on both sides. The ones in the two bottom rows have the usual grey tint. The two rows above have the same lighter texture which most of the other panes on the building have on the outside. Unusually, this geodesic dome has no points at which five triangular panes meet. On all points which aren't on the bottom edge, six panes meet except for the very top where only four panes meet.

The dome is surrounded by a huge, disc-like object of varying thickness, but very thin on the eastern side which is revealed in the image, that is well over a hundred metres or 330 feet in diametre. It is bascially an eccentrical cone with a circular outer shape and a way off-centre hole towards it slightly slopes down. The geodesic dome mostly rests on the edge of the hole which means that the outer edge of the disc is shifted way to the east. There is also a cutout towards the south all the way to the circular hole, uncovering the roof of the southern part of the building. The western edge of the cutout deviates from being parallel to the longitudinal axis of the building by a few degrees to the right. The eastern edge of the cutout points at the centre of the circular hole.

Along the outer edge, the top surface of the disc is tapered over a distance of about seven and a half metres or 25 feet so that the outer edge is almost razor-sharp. For unknown reasons, the western edge of the cutout shows a similar sharpness by being tapered at the bottom.

The upper and lower surfaces of the disc shows variations of the usual brushed stainless steel texture. The cutout faces, however, show a dark grey texture with four darker grey grooves upon zooming in.

Right below, there is a second, similar asymmetrical cone, but smaller in diametre, even thinner and with a bigger slope. Its outer edge touches the first disc from below. Being dark coffee brown, it is the only outward part of the building that is not a shade of grey. Also, while it is half-transparent like tinted glass from above, all other surfaces are opaque and glossy, so it's possible to look through it from above, but not from below.

The inner edge of the brown cone connects to a ring around the conference hall at about roof height on the outside or the top. The ring describes about three quarters of a circle with the opening oriented towards the southern parts of the building. It has a slightly darker tint on its brushed stainless steel texture.

The ring also serves as the upper connection between the seven cylindrical pillars that surround the conference hall, four of which are hidden behind the building itself in the image. They have a diametre of about six metres or 20 feet, and they vary in length by a few metres. They all stand on the ground, and they are sloped outward from the conference hall, partly intersecting with the two cones above.

Main building, interior

Since the outer surfaces of the building are mostly glass, more can be seen inside the building than just the underside of the roof. Horizontal support cables are mounted between the textured roof strips and underneath each of the seven central roof brackets. They are similar to those through the side window-panes in the front, but longer and thinner. From all of these but the southernmost one, two darker, thinner and shorter support cables lead downward. Another pair is mounted farther south against the textured roof strip on its side. These fourteen vertical cables support the upper floor on its inner sides.

The upper floor is roughly U-shaped with the opening towards the south and the main entrance. It also serves as the ceiling for the ten seminar rooms on the ground floor, five on each side, above each of which it extends inward with a semi-elliptic shape. Its bottom side, the ceiling, is light grey. It has a bump map or a normal map which not only roughens it up but also divides it into octogonal pads with rectangular spaces in-between. The vertical surfaces towards the aisle have a texture that simulates small, square, dark grey panels in four rows held in place with one rivet in each corner. The seams between the panels are black. On some surfaces, the textures have obviously been stretched horizontally, making the panels rectangular, the rivet heads elliptical and the vertical seams wider than the horizontal seams. The upper side with its bluish-grey patterned carpet texture cannot be seen in the image.

The entire inner edge of the upper floor is protected by a railing. It consists of one mostly light grey rail with a rectangular cross-section on the floor, an identical rail that is a bit over 1.20m or four feet high above the floor and a number of small, slightly darker grey vertical beams with a square cross-section which connect them. The whole railing lacks texture and gloss.

Of the seminar rooms on the right, only the separation walls can be seen through the panes on the right of the building. These have mostly tan textures but with coarse and blurry stripes of various greys at the top and bottom.

Through the right-hand pane in the front, two seminar rooms on the left are visible, the rooms A7 and, north or to the right of it, A8. The seminar rooms A7 through A9, as well as A2 through A4 on the right, have a variety of untinted glass doors each: one in the northern corner towards the central aisle, another one in the southern corner, and one in each of these two corners that leads to the neighbouring seminar room. Apart from the lack of tint or texture, the glass doors are identical to the entrance doors.

The aisle-side wall of each seminar room can be described as convex although it is not rounded. It rather consists of four segments separated by narrow vertical columns with square footprints. They are connected by a number of horizontal rods with a rectangular cross-section. One is always right under the ceiling. Three more are roughly at 65%, 50% and 33% height above the ground. For the outermost segments, this is the height of the glass doors, so underneath the rod at 33% height above the ground, they have another vertical rod to separate the doorway from a narrower piece of wall. At some 12 or 13% height above the ground, there is another rod, and the last one is on the ground, in both cases except where there's a doorway.

The space between the latter two horizontal rods is filled with a wooden panel, showing the same reddish wood grain as all wooden-textured furniture in the building and on the sim. The other spaces have untinted glass panes in them. To illustrate the dimensions: The wooden panels are about 1.80 metres or six feet high, so for realistically-sized avatars, the only way to look into or out of the seminar rooms is through the doors.

On the vertical rod next to each aisle door, a sign with the room number is installed. The sign itself is simple, flat and rectangular. It is entirely black except for the white room number written on it in a regular Helvetica sans-serif typeface. It is attached through a glossy white cuboid that serves as a very simple mounting bracket.

Furthermore, there is an easel with a blank whiteboard standing next to each aisle door. It is a simple construction from cuboids, cylinders, a tetrahedron at the top and small spheres for feet and joints. Apart from the whiteboard which is mostly white and untextured except for the plywood texture on the back, the whole thing shows a brushed stainless steel texture with some gloss added.

Inside each seminar room, visible through the window-pane behind the easels, there is a whiteboard which is a much more elaborate construction. Each room has two of these. There is also a dark grey HDTV screen attached to the middle one of the three columns with a wall-mount swivel arm. A bit of furniture is barely visible through the closed glass door: Each room has seven quite long tables with elliptical ends, one long light grey foot on two legs with a wooden plank between them and a dark grey surface surrounded by wood grain. Six of these tables are for seminar participants with two chairs each. These chairs consist of two wooden parts in the shape of a stretched U with rounded sides and dark grey padding, two small metal rods connecting them and four conical metal legs. The seventh table is for the teacher whose chair is identical to those for the participants, only that it has an extra headrest in the same style as the rest of the chair plus a pair of elliptical armrests.

Main building, further interior objects

The large object that appears to be standing in front of seminar room A7 is a teleporter that was specifically designed for the Universal Campus due to its size. It is actually standing in the middle of the aisle, the control panel turned southward towards the main entrance. It is mainly a rectangular console on a massive angled stand. The frame around the control panel included, the console itself is about one and a half metres or five feet high and about three metres or ten feet wide. Above the control panel, there are two tiny spherical light sources on small trapezoid arms. They actually emit light to illuminate the control panel of the teleporter.

The control panel is labelled in a typeface not entirely dissimilar from Futura. On its left, there is a top-down view of the entire Universal Campus with the north oriented to the left. It shows the various buildings and other places. Ten circular markers are placed on the map, all with a glossy grey frame and a black number from one to ten. All markers but one are yellow; one is always glow-in-the-dark green. In this case, it is marker number 6 to the right of a rectangular building with a circular extension in its bottom corner. Below the aerial view, there is another, slightly bigger yellow circular marker, but with a red frame surrounded by a glowing red aura while not glowing itself. It has the number 2. Next to it is a label with an arrow-like point to the left that reads, black on white, "This is currrent (sic) location". It is up to the user, however, to find the marker with the same number on the map.

On the right of the control panel, there is a touchable list of destinations with their numbers in markers of the same size as the glowing red one in the bottom left, but with the usual shiny grey frame. The labels with the names of the destinations are identical in style with the current location marker:

• 1: Main Landing Zone
• 2: Main Building Lobby
• 3: Main Conference Hall
• 4: Recreation and Conference Center
• 5: Observation Deck and Sea Lab
• 6: Science Lab and Conference Room
• 7: Campfire and Beach Zone
• 8: The Light House
• 9: Engineering Conference Center
• 10: Helicopter Landing Pad

Just like on the map, destination number 6 is the only one with a glow-in-the-dark green marker and a glow-in-the-dark green label background. It is the currently chosen teleport destination. Upon clicking another one, it would be marked green, as would be its marker on the map. Below the list, there is another white label, but with an upward arrow point on its left-hand end that points to the column of numbered markers. It reads, "click to select location then right click and teleport!" This means that if the user were to right-click the panel, thus opening a pop-up menu, and then choose the option "Teleport", the avatar would instantly be relocated to whichever location is selected on the teleporter. To the right of this label, there are two small red triangles with glowing auras pointing upward; they appear to be non-functional.

The background of the control panel is glossy medium grey. The rest of the structure is glossy with a gunmetal-like dark grey texture.

There are also quite a few potted plants inside the building. On the sides of the teleport panel, there are two identical açaí palms in square terracotta pots with wide rims. Like the other potted plants, these mostly dark green plants with long pointy leaves are kept at an indoor-compatible size, namely about three and a half metres or eleven and a half feet tall. Also, like the other potted plants, they are made of only four flat and surfaces with partially transparent pictures of the plant on them, arranged in angles of 45 degrees to one another.

Through the main entrance, a slightly taller Jacaranda tree with dark lilac flowers can be seen. It is planted in a bulgy terracotta pot with a smaller rim than the square ones which is supposed to be round. In order to reduce the impact on graphics performance, however, the pot is actually hexagonal. There is also one of the two angled flights of wooden stairs leading to the upper floor and, outside the building again, a small but wide maple tree with brown autumn leaves. A look through the side entrance to the right shows an even slightly taller Bougainvillea with purple flowers. Above these doors, the underside of the upper half of the other flight of stairs is shown. The steps are not covered from below, and the spaces between them are open.

Some of the unusual dividers on the upper floor can be seen through the windows, too. The main element is a half-arch of a bit over 90 degrees from the floor to the tilted structures on the side of the building. Its core is a thin, roughly 1.80 metres or six feet wide circle segment with an inner radius of about four and a half metres or fifteen feet and a dark grey texture which resembles some kind of rock. It is lined on both the inside and the outside with arches with a brushed stainless steel texture. The inner arch is about 45 centimetres or one and a half feet wide, the outer arch is slightly narrower, and both are significantly thicker than the core arch. From both ends of the arch, narrow brushed stainless steel bars extend to the centre of the arch where they meet. They are thinner than the stainless steel arches, but thicker than the core arch. Finally, the area between the two bars and the inner arch is filled with a grey tinted glass pane.

On each side of the upper floor, there are six such dividers. The southernmost ones are installed right above and north of the stairs and attached directly to the vertical structures on the sides. Between the other ten and the side structures, there are horizontal extensions in much the same style. The arches themselves are extended to the sides by two rhomboids in the same style, a longer one of some four and a half metres or fifteen feet with four cylindrical connectors of roughly 60 centimetres or two feet of diametre on its corners underneath which avatars can pass and a shorter one of some three metres or ten feet which connects to the vertical structures. The latter one also has a third stainless-steel-framed rhomboid all the way down to the floor underneath itself which is filled with a grey tinted glass pane.

Avatars in OpenSim and the avatar vendor rooms

On the eastern side of the building, barely visible through the large glass surfaces, there is an area that offers complete classic avatars as well as classic avatar accessories.

Unlike in most other 3-D virtual worlds, avatars in OpenSim-based worlds, just like Second Life, are not monolithic. They are highly modular, they are highly configurable, and they have evolved over the years. The most basic classic avatar consists of five components that always have to be there. The only one that cannot be replaced is the system body which is automatically generated by the viewer application. OpenSim has the same system body as Second Life. The four components that can be replaced but never removed are the shape which greatly defines the look of the avatar with 88 parametres, the skin which is a set of three textures for the head and which can be tinted with parametres, the upper body and the lower body, the hair which defines the shape and length of the classic hairdo growing out of the head as well as its texture, and the eyes which are basically only a texture again.

Classic clothes are also referred to as layer clothes because they are just that, layers of textures painted onto the system body. Their order is defined by nine categories, in each of which a classic avatar can only wear one kind of clothing. A few of these have an influence on the shape of the avatar: The shirt and the jacket can widen the arms to simulate sleeves. Likewise, the pants can widen the legs downward to simulate pants legs and even bell-bottoms. And the shoes can both raise the avatar in general and grow a sort of spike out of the heel, lift the whole avatar except for the toe area because the system body does not actually have toes and thus generate high heels. A separate layer is for skirts; it textures a part of the system body which is usually fully transparent and thus invisible. In 2011, four tattoo layers were added between the skin and the two underwear layers.

It is also possible to attach objects to an avatar at 30 different points, and it has been for as long as OpenSim was around. This was quickly used not only for things carried by the avatar, jewellery or other accessories, but also for more realistic hair, for better-looking shoes in comparison with the painted-on classic shoes, for various ways of having new shapes of skirts, for collars, for pants legs et cetera.

Originally, these attachments were made from primitive objects or "prims" in short: basic shapes like cubes, spheres, cones and the like which can be generated and manipulated a lot in-world without needing external software except for making textures. Since building complex objects from them is somewhere between highly complicated and impossible, it was made possible to import sculptmaps as exported from 3-D software like Blender and use them to create more complex prims. All kinds of prims can be made flexible with a little bit of physics which is used for hair and skirts as well as for flags, but the physics don't have collision detection.

The next step was the introduction of mesh. Mesh allows the user to directly import 3-D files in the Collada format, texture mapping included, without having to resort to sculptmaps. Mesh came to Second Life in 2011, as did experimental mesh support in OpenSim. The first stable release of OpenSim with mesh support came out in 2014. On avatars, mesh was originally used for hair, shoes, jewellery and other accessories. It really started a revolution with the introduction of rigged mesh which automatically latches itself to multiple points on the avatar. This made it possible not only to create clothes that move with the avatar's movement, but even to create all-new, better-looking bodies and heads. Nowadays, most avatars consist entirely of mesh.

The newest technological advancement for avatars was Bakes-on-Mesh which came up from 2019 on. This allows classic layer textures to be put onto worn mesh, especially mesh bodies, and in greater numbers than on the system body. The main purpose was to get away from skin appliers, scripted devices that have to be put on and used to put a different skin onto the mesh body. Also, the remaining onion layers around mesh bodies that were necessary for tattoos, but made mesh bodies unnecessarily complex, had become obsolete because Bakes-on-Mesh allows for wearing classic layer tattoos on mesh bodies. But it also makes wearing layer clothes possible again which can make sense in the case of skin-tight clothes.

The latest version of the Universal Campus from 2012 already uses mesh for a few things, mostly rocks. The main building itself and everything else shown in this image is still put together from prims and sculpties.

As for the contents in the avatar vendor area, none of it is newer than from 2011. Everything is still from times before mesh. The complete avatars come with layer clothes, but no attachments. They, like the skins and hair attachments, were created by Ina Centaur under the OS Avatars label around the same time as the Universal Campus. Many of the other items, the majority of which were made by Nebadon Izumi himself, are even older. All of them are offered under free licenses, however. In order to announce their availability, three of the divider extensions have signs mounted above them which can be made out in the picture. They are oval, black with a stainless steel frame, and they have the glowing, but not light-emitting white word "AVATARS" written on them in all-caps and in a typeface which looks to me like a regular Linux Libertine. The writing even uses proper kerning between the "A"s, the "V" and the "T".

In the first two of the three avatar vendor rooms, the rear sides of four stainless steel vendors each, lined up on the outer side of the room along the longitudinal axis of the building, and especially the signs above them on thin cylindrical stands can be made out, the only ones that aren't hidden behind something. The first four vendors offer one female skin each, the other four offer one male skin each. The displays on these eight vendors are oriented away from the camera.

Main building, upper floor, western side

The first two rooms on the western side of the building are conference areas, the other two are empty. Not much of them is visible except for three of the dividers, a semi-circular couch with a wooden frame and ten seats, a small banana tree in a hexagonal white concrete pot, another whiteboard and two HDTV screens in stainless steel casings on floor stands. One of them shows the monochrome test pattern which is actually on all of them, and which includes several screen-testing elements as well as a large medium grey circle in the middle with a white, a black and a thinner medium grey border around it and the digit 2 in black and in a heavy, condensed sans-serif typeface and a white square grid on medium grey ground with the capital letter "C" in two combined fields at the bottom.

The main landing area outside the main entrance

In front of the main entrance, there is the main landing area of the sim, a part of which is still within the image towards its bottom left. It is circular in shape with a diametre of about 40 metres or 130 feet. The centre of this circle is about 35 metres or 115 feet south from the main entrance of the main building. It shows the same light grey texture reminiscent of concrete that is used on most paths on the island. The texture is not shrunk to a realistic size, so it appears coarse and having a low resolution.

The outer edges of nearly all concrete surfaces on the island are lined with low walls of varying height and width. They all have the same concrete texture, but at a smaller scale and without the light grey tint so it appears almost white. The main landing area actually has two rows of walls around it. The inner walls are a bit over 1.20 metres or four feet high and about 1.50 metres or five feet wide. The outer walls at a distance of roughly three metres or ten feet are about 1.65 metres or five and a half feet high and about 1.80 metres or six feet wide.

At the ends, the gaps are closed with walls a bit lower than the inner walls and roughly 90 centimetres or three feet wide. The spaces between the walls are filled with dirt. They form planters with identical shrubs in them; the short planters in the northwest and the northeast visible in the image have five plants each. These shrubs are not named in-world. They appear to be of tropical origin, and they have flowers with petals that are mostly white, yellow towards the centre and magenta along their edges. Like all trees on this sim, the shrubs are made of simple, textured sculpty prims for the trunks and branches, and the twigs, leaves and flowers are semi-transparent textures on intersecting two-dimensional surfaces, a popular way to make plants in Second Life and OpenSim before the arrival of mesh. The textures used for all plants on this sim are photo-realistic as far as the maximum possible or feasible texture resolution allows.

On the left-hand edge of the image, in front of the northwestern planter, there is another teleporter which is almost identical to the one that can be seen inside the building. There are two differences, however: Its current location is number 1, and the selected location in the image is number 4. Another one of the unidentified shrubs appears between the teleporter and the left-hand edge of the image, partly hidden behind the teleporter.

Another single-target teleporter is standing on its right. It is a custom addition to this particular instance of the Universal Campus. It was built by Neovo Geesink, formerly of Metropolis Metaversum fame and now involved in OSgrid, in his trademark style. This style includes a particular brushed stainless steel texture which, unlike those used by Nebadon Izumi, emulates the surface having been brushed circularly. The stand under the panel is a simple cone, flattened to an extremely elliptical footprint. The panel is as high as that of the original teleporter, but only slightly wider as it is high. The frame around the image in the centre is slightly narrower than that on the original teleporter.

The image itself shows an aerial view of its single hard-coded target, a sim named TeleHub, built and operated by Neovo. It is nothing more than a single region, a square of 256 by 256 metres or 280 by 280 yards, surrounded by blue ocean and a wall made of beige bricks which is about ten metres or 33 feet high. The ground is tan and divided into four triangular areas by two diagonal lines. In each area, there are 141 single-target teleporters similar to this one, but with a higher panel, in rows of eleven. A few show previews of their targets, but most are unused with black screens. In the very centre, there is a small circular platform on which avatars land after teleporting in. It has a beige top surface with a hexagonal tile pattern and a woodgrain texture on the sloped surface all around. Four arches with textures resembling rough taupe stones and black signs on them lead to one triangular area each. The position of the camera is off one of the corners and pointing diagonally downward to one of the yellow division lines.

Yet another one of the identical unidentified shrubs is behind this teleporter and shown to its right.

In the background, the low walls on the sides of a path appear between the shrub behind the teleporter to TeleHub and the main building. The path is straight and leads northward along the western side of the building.

Even farther in the background, behind the two teleporters, there is some vegetation. From left to right, it starts with an unidentified tree of about eight metres or 26 feet of height. It has reddish-brown bark, medium green leaves in pairs and what could be taken for pale yellow-ish fruit. Below it, there is a large bushel of khaki-coloured grass that stands about two and a half metres or more than eight feet high. The tree intersects with another maple tree with brown and tan leaves that is about ten metres or 33 feet tall with more massive greyish trunk and branches. Immediately to the right again and partly intersecting with the maple tree, there is an even unidentified tree, about 17 metres or 56 feet tall, with grey bark on a fairly slim trunk and a messy crown of dark, brownish-green leaves which are so small that the texture makes it impossible to tell individual leaves. This tree is partly hidden behind the building already. It has another two bushels of the same tall grass underneath it which, due to the point of view, only seem to stand immediately to the right of the trunk.

Behind this vegetation, right below the crowns of the trees, the horizon separates the sky from the sea. What little sea the image shows is medium light blue. The sky right above the horizon is very light cyan, and around half the height of the image, it gradually changes into a tone of blue similar to that of the sea. From the top left corner of the image downward and to the right, more than half of the sky is covered by a cirrus-like thin cloud with a small hole above the roof end of the main building. On the right, the cloud dissolves into smaller clouds above the geodesic dome and the surrounding thin cones.

Further additions to the Universal Campus include five easels of the same type as seen inside, but with custom writing in it. They are lined up next to each other in front of the northeastern planter, starting right next to the wide path towards the main entrance. The writing on all five easels is done in black and in an unidentified humanist sans-serif typeface which appears condensed due to the texture having been stretched vertically, thus losing its original aspect ratio. Only the writing on the first of the five is visible from the camera's point of view, though. It reads in three lines, "To download a free copy of the Universal Campus Var Region." This is followed by a blank line and one more line that reads, "Click here for notecard". Upon clicking the easel, it gives the avatar a notecard with an Amazon cloud storage URL following an explanation that it contains the Universal Campus as a varregion archive and followed by a full copy of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

Around the main landing area and the main building

Due to limitations in construction with prims, the ground of the main landing area is slightly higher than that of the three paths which lead away from it. The widest one of these paths is about one third of the diametre of the landing area in average width that leads to the main entrance. It is trapezoid in shape, and its sides line up with the centre of the main landing area. Two more trapezoid paths, also widening with the distance from the centre of the main landing area but only half as wide as the first one, lead westward and eastward from an imaginary point a little north from the centre of the main landing area. The western one is not visible in the image except for on the aerial view on the teleporter. The eastern one makes up most of the foreground along the bottom edge of the image.

On the outer corner of the northeastern planter on the eastward path, there is a lamp post standing on an almost white, cylindrical concrete block of about 1.80 metres or six feet of both height and diametre. From the camera perspective, it is in front of the main building and near the westernmost front column. It appears to be almost parallel with the column, but the lamp post is vertical while the column is tilted roughly northwestward.

The lamp post itself is about seven and a half metres or 25 feet high and very slightly conical with an elaborately-shaped round foot. At the top, it describes a sharp 90-degree angle towards the path, rounded on the outside, forming a corner on the inside. It then extends conically towards the path by another roughly 1.50 metres or five feet before ending in a small sphere. The bottom of the sphere is flattened, and the actual light source is installed on this flat surface. It is round, glowing and emitting slightly yellowish light. The rest of the lamp post is light grey or white and highly glossy.

The walls lining the paths to the sides of the main landing area rise no more than about 30 centimetres or one foot above the paths themselves while being twice as wide.

In the bottom right corner of the image, the path to the east intersects with a circular path around the main landing area that begins and ends near the southern side entrances of the main building. Its centre is some ten metres or 33 feet north of that of the main landing area, and its outer diametre is about 100 metres or 330 feet. Due to the aforementioned limitations, it is a little bit higher than the trapezoid spoke path at the bottom. Its walls rise about 60 centimetres or two feet above itself and about 80 centimetres or a little less than three feet above the path to the east, and they are about 2.40 metres or eight feet wide.

Between the main building, the path to the main building, the planter northeast of the main landing area, the path in the very foreground and the circular path on the right, a large patch of sim ground is still unused. It shows a green texture with some slightly darker or minimally more yellow-ish areas. The texture has a fairly low resolution. It is coarse and blurry, and at the same time, even this patch of ground reveals the repeating texture tiles. The ground itself is rather bumpy as though it has been manually treated to be like this. All the same applies to the corresponding area to the west of the path to the main building of which fairly little of it is revealed in the image.

Right before its end near the right-hand entrance, the circular pathway first branches diagonally to the right to another path three small steps down. On both corners of this junction, there are fairly cylindrical platforms inserted into the walls. Both have a diametre of about 3.60 metres or twelve feet and a height of about 1.20 metres or four feet above the branched-off path or a bit under 90 centimetres or three feet above the circular path. The walls along the branched-off path are fairly small, only some 45 centimetres or one and a half feet high and about 60 centimetres or two feet wide.

After about 15 metres or 50 feet of length, the branched-off path continues down a set of stairs. Due to how low the camera position is, the stairs itself are hidden from the camera, but the block and guide rails along the far side of the stairs, the northwestern side, are not. The block is the same shade of grey as the surfaces of the paths. It serves as a primary guard on the sides of the stairs. It is about 90 centimetres or three feet wide. It ascends from the usual wall on the side of the path which it overlaps by the same amount on both sides, and it does so at an angle of roughly 25 degrees. It reaches its peak right above where the stairs start at a height of about two metres or six and a half feet above the path. From there, it descends at an angle of about 35 degrees which, curiously, is a little less steep than the stairs themselves.

The guide rails are dark blue flat slabs, about 30 centimetres or one foot wide and about seven and a half centimetres or three inches thick. They come in stacks of four, arranged above one another with round about one and a half times the thickness of one rail worth of space between them. They are parallel to the descending surface of the block. The lowest one has a distance to the block of circa 30 centimetres or one foot. Each set of rails is held together and in place by two shiny, textureless blocks of 120 centimetres or four feet of height and a square top surface which, however, slightly narrows downward to the large concrete block below when looked at from parallel to the rails. Upstairs, the four rails extend beyond the stairs by roughly seven and a half metres or 25 feet. Their upper ends are lined up almost exactly vertically. The whole arrangement is slightly shifted out of centre on top of the block, away from the stairs. A second, identical set of rails is installed further downstairs for no apparent reason other than looks. Such rails are actually on both sides of the stairs, but the image only shows them on one side.

Shortly before the stairs, one lamp post like the one is installed on the wall on each side of the path towards the stairs, complete with the cylindrical block underneath. In the image, the lamp post on the right with the exception of the foot and the cylindrical concrete block underneath is almost entirely obscured by two trees. One is identical to the tree with the chaotic brownish-green leaves to the left that is partly hidden behind the main building. It has another bushel of grass around where its roots were if it had any. Another much larger one is standing to its right, its trunk and most of its crown outside the image already. It is unidentified, too, but it shows some signs of being an acacia tree. Its bark is mostly greyish-brown with some rusty red patches on it. Its leaves are long, pointy and various tones of pale light to not-quite-as-pale medium green.

Immediately after the path towards the stairs branches off, the circular path leads into a straight path that runs parallel to the eastern side of the main building. The walls on its side have the same size as those on the sides of the circular path. On both of its ends, short, wide platforms lead to the side entrances of the building, connected to the path via two small steps each. These platforms do not have walls on their sides. At the far end, the straight path leads into another circular path, this time around the conference hall.

Some more vegetation is to the right of the path along the eastern side of the main building, all standing on sim ground. Right behind the unobstructed lamp post next to the path that leads downstairs, there is a fairly large unidentified tree that almost reaches the edge of the roof of the building. Its crown has rather dense foliage in a quite saturated medium green tone. The bark texture on its thin trunk and branches is mostly taupe with bits of copper brown and fairly smooth except for long dark rifts along the trunk and the branches as well as a few dark holes.

Behind the block and the dark blue rails along the stairs by the right-hand edge of the image, a gigantic version of the unidentified shrubs in the planters is located on the edge of the downhill slope which necessitates the stairs. It is about five and a half metres or eighteen feet high, and its flowers are up to 60 centimetres or two feet in diametre.

Farther in the background, also behind the lamp post and a little behind the shrubs, there is a group of seven pine trees of varying size. They have semi-transparent, conical surfaces around their trunks with textures which give the impression of very dark green needles. There are also bushels of tall grass on the ground between the pines.

Lastly, one of the four main light sources is the simulated Sun. Since it is shortly before noon, it is standing almost vertically above the sim and shining what is technically grey light down on it. The sim uses OpenSim's default daycycle in which the Sun always goes through the zenith. The same applies to all converted older daycycles originally available in OpenSim. The Sun is also the only light source on the sim whose light casts shadows. The other four main light sources are three types of ambient light in darker taupe, bluish slate grey and Prussian blue. These three neither have a specified direction of light, nor do they produce any shadows.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #ImageDescription #VirtualPhotography #VirtualArchitecture #Sim #Varsim #OAR #NebadonIzumi #UniversalCampus #OSgrid #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #OpenSim #OpenSimulator

Here's a newsflash for everyone interested in #OpenSimulator:

AviTron will shut down on August 28th.

I guess #AviTron shutting down isn't the actual surprise. It's rather AviTron having survived for more than two years plus the fact that grid founder and owner Alexsandro Pomposelli, also known as Alex Ferraris, has announced a grid shutdown for the first time. Now, if he also gave out IARs and OARs to his residents, that'd be a miracle.

I mean, he really rose to infamy when he managed to run his first grid, #AviWorlds, into the ground a whopping 13 times within 10 years. You can read about much of the drama on #HypergridBusiness.

All closures were permanent and unannounced, whatever the reason for the shutdowns might have been. Now, these reasons included various kinds of drama as well as AviWorlds running out of money or Alex running AviWorlds on servers in his garage, dismissing all criticism that the power supply was absolutely inappropriate for that. Guess how the latter ended.

Never did the residents get any backups. No IARs, no OARs, and if they had invested money in the grid, they lost that, too. It wasn't like Alex couldn't or didn't want to create IARs or OARs. At least the last few times when AviWorlds came back, all the official sims owned by Alex himself looked just like before the previous closure.

In one case, not only AviWorlds went down the gutter, but so did the grid hosting company Alex had started. That hosting company took about half a dozen active grids with itself, leaving their owners without at least recent backups.

Alex eventually sold AviWorlds, backups included, to Josh Boam in 2020 and wanted the name and the domain back shortly after. He got neither. This incarnation of AviWorlds is still up and running.

Afterwards, Alex launched #VirtualVille which, again, didn't even get to live for a year before it shut down out of the blue, leaving Alex' faithful followers as well as clueless newbies with no backups.

In early 2021, he came back with AviTron which, so he promised, would be different. Well, it was different in a few ways. The grid had its own hosting company again, now running in South America and staffed with cheap labour. Alex could claim that he had created jobs down there.

And he was shooting for the top. He saw the #Hypergrid as either a competition between grids or an out-right war. Either way, he announced that AviTron would win over all other grids. It was never clear if he wanted AviTron to achieve that by having both more land area and more residents than even #OSgrid, the biggest OpenSim grid which had had 14 years to grow to its size, or be it by actually vanquishing all other grids and becoming the only surviving OpenSim grid.

The latter doesn't sound too far-fetched, considering his aggressive tone. On #OpenSimWorld, he was constantly lashing out against critics and even announced to doxx them in real life. At the same time, nobody was allowed to reply to his posts and comments.

Later the same year, he struck an exclusive deal with #Sacrarium. The Kazakh-Russian grid which had been built around the distribution of illegally obtained #SecondLife content, which was now specialising in just that, had introduced a monthly subscription fee for granting Hypergrid access to individual avatars after a series of grid blockings. AviTron's deal was for the whole grid to pay the fee so that all its residents could have free access to Sacrarium. However, Sacrarium demanded AviTron put all content on the grid on no-export, thereby at least theoretically making it impossible to take any content from AviTron to other grids. It was completely unclear where Alex wanted to get that money from.

It was then that AviTron really exploded with new users. Alex claimed that they had all found new homes. In reality, however, there were two kinds of new users. One was the freebie junkie who only went to AviTron to always get the latest new arrivals on Sacrarium first. Since these were rare, many of them began to satisfy their hunger for freebies by going around the Hypergrid and copybotting entire sims wholesale, especially when there were purpose-built, one-of-a-kind buildings on them. This led to AviTron being blocked by more and more grids.

The other kind were freebie sim owners outside AviTron. They created avatars on AviTron, went to Sacrarium, often picked up everything from every freebie store and then circumvented AviTron's no-export setting and removed the no-transfer restriction on the Sacrarium boxes. What used to be exclusive Sacrarium content was now spreading across the Hypergrid full-perm, causing some more "How dare you steal my stolen content" #drama.

When geopolitical events rendered the Sacrarium deal null and void, AviTron lost what little appeal it had to anyone but total newbies.

By the way, there were actually AviTron users who sold copybotted Second Life content for money, either in-world for Gloebits which can be exchanged for real money or even in webshops for real money. This was illegal as per AviTron's TOS, but Alex' reaction was that if it's illegal, it isn't happening.

Speaking of content and TOS, for quite a while, the AviTron TOS said that everything on AviTron's asset server is Alex' exclusive intellectual property. This applied to what little stuff was created on AviTron, legal freebies from the rest of the Hypergrid, even when they actually had licenses on them, legal payware from the rest of the Hypergrid and even Second Life content that was circulating on the Hypergrid. Alex was publicly called out for this, and he actually had to change the TOS under that pressure. It would have been interesting to see reactions in Second Life upon lots of creations by Maitreya, SLink, BlueBerry and others suddenly allegedly being the intellectual property of an OpenSim grid owner.

AviTron is also responsible for the "Inaccurate" value for the visitor count on OpenSimWorld. It was introduced after AviTron staff had parked some 20 permanently AFK avatars on a sim owned by a resident who didn't know any of Alex' history and put full faith into him. Generally, this is a very popular method of manipulating visitor stats and pushing sims up OpenSimWorld's oh-so-prestigious list of most popular sims, but nobody had had the audacity to place more than four AFK avatars yet, much less 20. And Alex insisted in them all actually being regular traffic.

Eventually, the pressure became so immense that AviTron was forced to retreat from the OpenSim community by and by. First, after Sacrarium, AviTron became the second of still only two grids to be completely banned from OpenSimWorld. A lot has to happen for this measure. In February of 2023, AviTron stopped reporting stats to Hypergrid Business; before that, AviTron ranked second in active users and first in new registrations, but only 17th in land area, being a bit more than 1/40 as big as OSgrid. With five regular monthly users for each standard region (in OSgrid, it's the other way around), it was clear that people weren't looking for new homes.

When Alex started charging AviTron residents for things that are normally free-of-charge, some expected that AviTron's end by going broke was coming closer. It wasn't to be.

The last "sign of life" was when AviTron officially closed its Hypergrid access for whichever reasons. It wasn't too much of a loss for the Hypergrid, I guess, seeing as how many grids had blocked AviTron already, some only having that one grid on their block lists. Alex was infamous for closing Hypergrid access on his grids and then bringing it back, but this time, it was final.

Now AviTron was isolated by choice, but it was blocked by large parts of the Hypergrid anyway. With the Hypergrid connection gone, no new content came into the grid. Alex says he has invited creators to come over to AviTron. I guess actual established creators of legal content were asked to fully relocate from where they had been before to AviTron where their creations would have been no-export. It's clear that and why they refused to do that. And those who referred to putting copybotted SL content back together and replacing its missing scripts if necessary as "creating" had the same reason not to follow his call.

Also, advertisement had become difficult. Hypergrid Business had stopped writing about AviTron except for the stats in late 2021. OpenSimWorld had banned the grid and its residents, but even without the ban, AviTron sims wouldn't have been allowed on OSW due to being disconnected from the Hypergrid.

Without Hypergrid access, AviTron must have lost lots of users. Three freebie hoarders must have gone elsewhere, as have the Sacrarium exporters who may now resort to stealing directly from Second Life. Even newbies who had discovered AviTron's glossy website with its spectacular pictures blistering with stolen content by Googling the term #Metaverse must have left for greener pastures after finding out about the Hypergrid through other avatars.

With nothing left to keep the grid running for, no revenue stream, the grid's reputation in shambles and, most importantly, nothing to brag about anymore and nowhere to brag about it, it's only logical to shut AviTron down. I wonder if it'll pass out IARs and OARs this time, and I wonder how many grid residents will actually be left to ask for them. After all, he doesn't have a track record of doing so.

Lastly, I wouldn't be too surprised if Alex came back with a new grid under a new name. And sadly, I wouldn't be too surprised if he still had faithful followers who'd immediately be on board again.

#VirtualWorlds

And #drama in #OpenSim has reached new levels. Now it's two copybotters against each other. Both have actually stolen already stolen content.

The difference is: One has stolen content that someone else has stolen from Second Life and got caught trying to sell it for real money. He actually threatens the other one with Interpol for content theft. He also seems to have boatloads of alts under different names, and he has already created at least one sock puppet account on #OpenSimWorld.

Said other one was caught by #OSgrid officials walking onto official sims like #LbsaPlaza with a copybot viewer and at least the clear intent to copybot the entire sim wholesale, custom structures and all, if not even actually doing just that. Mind you, Lbsa Plaza is the only sim that's always populated with avatars which aren't alts of the sim owner, so there's also always a number of avatar inventories to copybot. He denied all accusations and blocked OSgrid from his grid in retaliation.

Seriously, these are the moments when I wish Linden Labs, along with the actual content creators, would send in the authorities. If they put enough effort into the investigations, I could see at least one certain grid being shut down and a number of people being convicted and arrested. But this won't happen, especially not in this case, for various reasons.

One, the financial damage is too small, at least in this case. It simply isn't worth pumping so much money into lawsuits and criminal investigations.

Two, in this case again, it'd have to be global investigations across several continents. The former guy has Spanish as his native language and obviously uses Google Translate to post in English, the latter runs a grid with a .ru domain. So we probably aren't talking about U.S. citizens and most likely not even about people living anywhere in the Western world.

Three, if Linden Labs actually decided to take world-wide legal action against stuff like this, they wouldn't concentrate on these two. I think they'd more likely go all-out and try to combat the theft and distribution of SL content all over the #Hypergrid, thereby threatening the existence of entire grids, but at least almost all freebie sims launched over the last five years or so. Pandora's box would be wide open.

#OpenSimulator #Drama

What really gave me to think when looking at Hypergrid Business' OpenSim statistics for May was the varying discrepancy between active users, Hypergridders included, and land mass on the various grids.

The biggest grids in land mass are both special cases. Being the second-largest grid with 29,248 standard regions, the Wolf Territories Grid is one because it's largely varsims, and at least the mainland is varsims from 4x4 upward. Whereas other grids are dominated by standard-region-sized sims, a typical Wolf Territories sim is 16 of these. Also, @Lone Wolf himself is probably still the owner of the most land in the metaverse. At the same time, the Wolf Territories Grid tops the list of most active grids with 6,232 MAUs.

OSgrid, largest with 32,547 standard regions, easily leaving Second Life in the dust, and second-busiest with 5,186 MAUs, is a special case because it doesn't offer land rentals. Everything that isn't an official sim is attached to the grid and hosted by its users. Size-wise, that goes from single personal sims hosted at home to whole archipelagos of varsims like Tropicana Estates (which used to be a whole lot bigger even) or Nautilus Estates. Technically speaking, OSgrid is the one grid with the most region servers. Also, for this reason, OSgrid's land mass always takes a little dive whenever they do a clean-up and remove dead sims from their map because many don't shut their sims down properly when removing them. At the same time, of course, OSgrid is a popular destination for Hypergridders even beyond parking your avatar at Lbsa Plaza.

Now let's take a look at some other grids.

Kitely is the third-largest grid with 18,077 standard regions, but the 20th-busiest grid with only 627 MAU. But it's a popular builders' grid due to its stability. Kitely's trick to cope with that much land is to shut all sims down when they aren't populated and start them up again when someone wants to enter them, a trick that was later re-implemented by DreamGrid.

ZetaWorlds is the fourth-largest grid with 12,910 standard regions, but only the 21st-busiest grid with only 596 MAU. I doubt that this includes the 3rd Wind community. Still, one reason ZetaWorlds is so large and underpopulated is its huge ocean, consisting of dozens upon dozens of varsims; I think it was 3x3s. It's so big that it takes well over five minutes to cross in a motor boat at full speed. Even Stark, a nudism-encouraging archipelago of 14 4x4 vars, that's still 224 standard regions in the hands of three owners, doesn't make up a large percentage of ZetaWorlds' land area. The lack of MAU can be explained by ZetaWorlds not letting avatars from lots of grids in for reliability reasons.

Alternate Metaverse is actually balanced. It's the fifth-busiest grid with 2,025 MAU and the fifth-largest grid with 10,178 standard regions. This may not seem balanced, but AMV residents love to build big, too. Grid owners Cataplexia Numbers and Clifford Hanger seem to almost always build vars because they always need lots of room. Welcome and Annex are exceptions because they're practically entirely indoors. Chris McCracken builds vars so big that even he gets lost without a proper map. And AMV was where Jimmy Olsen inflated Norway-themed Alfheim from an already respectable 4x4 with lots of details to a 10x10 giant before it sadly vanished. At the same time, AMV has loads of events which also attract Hypergridders.

GroovyVerse, sixth-largest at 7,837 standard regions and 23rd-busiest with only 514 MAUs, is a community effort in building a whole lot of land. It's actually building a sim-crossing railway network which by now may be larger than the one in the Wolf Territories, and that one already takes quite some time to travel.
One reason for the lack of activity may be because only few sims are advertised on OpenSimWorld, and so only few people know about them in the first place. That's partly because of @Hyacinth 🏳️‍⚧️ ☮️'s very justified love-hate relationship towards OSW to say the least. In fact, she "loves" OSW so much that she is working on an alternative to replace it.

Shoalwater Bay is another interesting case: The tenth-largest grid with 1,072 standard regions isn't even in the top 25 of busiest grids. The reason becomes apparent if you look at its grid map, and the grid name is a dead giveaway: It's a sailing grid with only 49 adjacent sims, six of which are 8x8 vars, the other 43 being 4x4 vars. Over half a dozen sims don't even seem to have any actual land on them.

The GBG Metaverse, formerly GreekLife Breath Grid, is the opposite case. It's the third-busiest grid with 2,239 MAU, but only the tenth-largest grid with only 956 standard regions. This is astounding for two reasons. One, GBG is the result of two grid mergers. First, the Tranquility Grid was merged into the younger Little Breath Grid. And then Little Breath merged with GreekLife. Two, GreekLife used to make renting at least one sim mandatory for every resident. GBG has switched to a different model: Your inventory is limited to 5,000 items unless you rent land or donate. Still, I wonder where the discrepancy comes from, seeing as GBG doesn't have any super-popular events or freebie sims.

Even more extreme: Darkheart's Playground and WaterSplash are number seven and eight in MAU, both between 1,600 and 1,700. But neither is even in the top 40 of largest grids. However, both are famous for one very popular freebie sim each, Darkheart's Boutiques and iPleasure respectively, the latter being the home of the R. Lion "brand". I think both grids have only got about half a dozen sims each or so. So either the stats are vastly dominated by Hypergridders, or people create alts on these grid to make grubbing freebies and passing them on to their mains easier and circumvent grid blocks. For example, AFAIK, ZetaWorlds has blocked both, and in the case of Darkheart's Playground, the block is mutual. I'd really like to see the faces of the users when they discover that most content offered on both grids is no-transfer.

Last but not least, Neverworld makes me wonder, too. It reported 1,101 MAUs, ranking ninth, on only 343 standard regions, ranking 22th. And that's considering this grid is mostly vars, too. Most of it is joined together in one big mainland connected by a network of streets. A lot of it is owned by grid owner Govega Sachertorte and split into parcels for everyone to rent for free, even Hypergridders. Still, most of that land is vacant, maybe also because you can't set your home out in the Hypergrid, so it isn't quite useful as a dwelling-place unless you're a Neverworlder. What probably causes the most traffic, however, are Nexus Storm's several large freebie sims.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Grid #WolfTerritories #WolfTerritoriesGrid #WolfGrid #OSgrid #Kitely #ZetaWorlds #AlternateMetaverse #AMV #GroovyVerse #ShoalwaterBay #GBG #DarkheartsPlayground #WaterSplash #Neverworld #OpenSimStatistics

Cherry Manga has made a nice Funko-style figurine of Mal Burns in his memory. She has even turned it into a statue which is on display and up for grabs at Lbsa Plaza in OSgrid.

I'd show you a picture, but I'd have to do that on another channel. And the background is so detailed that it'd take me an eternity to describe the image adequately.

#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #OSgrid #LbsaPlaza #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

I'm really curious about OSgrid's 18th birthday this year. Not so much because this is the first time that an OpenSim grid celebrates its 18th anniversary, but rather because I want to see how many exhibits it'll have.

The last years, it has always been the same. OSgrid set up four varsims with over a dozen parcels for exhibits each year. When the birthday celebrations started, one was usually fully booked, one was partially booked, and the other two were shut down again. Last year already, I think the second sim had something like three parcels in use.

This year will be the first celebration since the Asset Reset. Since OSgrid's asset server went completely haywire, causing loads of people to move to other grids. And since OSgrid as a whole was shut down indefinitely for the asset server to be purged and rebuilt from the ground up which caused even more people to move to other grids.

Let's just say the days of OSgrid being the biggest in anything are over. Even if Hypergrid Business no longer publishes stats, I guess it's clear that the Wolf Territories are number one now.

This also means that OSgrid will probably have even fewer exhibitors this year.

I also wonder if any of the previous events will have an effect on OSG18B. I mean, last OpenSimFest was a half-dud already. The one before had lost exhibitors due to its change of concept, and the last one was cannibalised by the OpenSim World's Fair with its enormous varsim with dozens upon dozens of parcels which was booked almost fully.

On the other hand, we haven't had any longer events in a while, and even the last Hypergrid International Expo which, if I recall correctly, was after World's Fair and OSFest, was chock-full with mostly brand-new booths. But these events were grid-independent, and OSG18B is obviously OSgrid-only.

OSG18B will start on Friday. We'll see then.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #OSgrid #OSG18B #GridAnniversary

(This is technically a repost of this post, but with "unseen" images for the Unseen Image Challenge by @Altbot, a modified post text and an upgraded set of long image descriptions. I didn't have time to complete the descriptions for a set of wholly new images.)

OSgrid is probably the oldest 3-D virtual world based on free and open-source software (OpenSimulator) and run by community members. It's definitely the oldest 3-D virtual world that's federated with other virtual worlds.

These images are from OSgrid's 17th birthday celebration in July, 2024.

My little in-world sister @Juno Rowland, part-time OSgrid resident just like myself, celebrated the grid birthday with outfits based on the officially-issued women's tank tops. The first image shows her wearing one of these outfits on her pier at her now-soon-to-disappear home at Tropicana Tuneage on Friday, July 26th. She had been around the birthday sims on Thursday already, but in a different skirt. On Friday, she posed in one that's much easier for me to describe in front of a background that's a great deal easier to describe than the anniversary sims.

One day later, on Saturday, July 27th, she went and revisited the birthday exhibitions, also to see one of her favourite things, a Leonard Cohen album cover at an exhibition. The second image is from there.

Juno's look

• Body including head, eyelashes, feet and nails: Ruth2 v4 by the RuthAndRoth team ( @Austin Tate a.k.a. @Ai Austin, Ada Radius, Serie Sumei et al.)
• Shape: modified by herself from the shape in the Ruth2 v4 Extras box
• Skin: Starlight Remix Fair, NSFW, with eyebrows, but without eyeliner; originally by Eloh Eliot, "remixed" by yours truly so that Juno has a decent skin
• Hair: CS Milca by DieChaotin McMasters
• Necklace: Q's Pendant - OSgrid by Qandy Saw
• Top: Happy Bday OSG17B Black, mesh by Damien Fate, texture and assembly by Saphy Riler
• Skirt: mini-fuer-fate jeans beige, mesh and base texture by Klarabella Karamell, texture tinting and assembly by Juno herself
• Shoes: reBoot Flat Ballet Black, unrigged variants, by Taarna Welles

Image descriptions

The medium and the basic setup

Both images in this post are digital renderings from inside a 3-D virtual world, using shaders, simplified real-time reflections and an artificial sun as a directed light source for illuminating the scenery and casting shadows, but without ray-tracing. It shows a digital avatar made to look like a fairly young woman. In the first image, she is standing at the end of a wooden pier. In the second image, she is standing next to a painted portrait of Leonard Cohen which he has used as an album cover.

The locations

The images were created in two different places in OSgrid, known as sims. Both are linked to the 17th anniversary of OSgrid which was celebrated from July 22th to July 28th, 2024.

OSgrid is a virtual world, a so-called "grid", based on a virtual-world engine named OpenSimulator. OpenSimulator, OpenSim in short, is a free, open-source, server-side re-implementation of the technology of Second Life. It is not affiliated with Linden Lab, the creators and owners of Second Life.

Second Life is a centralised, commercial 3-D virtual world launched in 2003. It experienced a big hype starting in 2007 which faded away in 2008. It still exists, it is constantly evolving, and it is celebrating its 21st anniversary this month.

The development of OpenSim started in 2006, originally under the name of OpenSecondLife, then OpenSL, by reverse-engineering Second Life's viewer API and building a virtual world server against it. In early 2007, Linden Lab laid open the source code of the official Second Life viewer, the client application needed to access Second Life. This revealed large parts of Second Life's technology and made not only the development of third-party viewers possible, but also facilitatted OpenSim's development. It was also in early 2007 that the first test version of OpenSim came out.

Second Life, as well as the worlds based on OpenSimulator, are referred to as "grids" because they are split into square regions of 256 by 256 metres or roughly 280 by 280 yards. This roughly corresponds to a bit more than three by two major-league football pitches or soccer fields or a bit less than three by two American football fields.

While Second Life is a walled garden with only one publicly accessible grid that is connected to nothing else, OpenSimulator can be used by just about anyone to create and run their own grid. In 2008, a new feature called the Hypergrid was introduced that allows avatars registered on one grid to visit other grids. Thus, OpenSim is not only decentralised, but actually mostly federated. There are currently over 3,000 active grids, maybe over 4,000, and especially most of the larger public grids are connected to the Hypergrid.

Sims, in turn, are short for simulators which have to run in regions for any kind of content to be able to exist in them and for avatars to be able to enter them. In Second Life, one sim always covers one region. OpenSim has so-called varsims which can cover multiple regions arranged in a square without having borders between the regions. The upper limit imposed by the software is 32 by 32 or 1,024 regions, but anything significantly larger than 16 by 16 or 256 regions has been proven to be highly impractical.

OSgrid was the first public OpenSim grid. It was launched in July, 2007, as a proving ground for OpenSim's own development which it still is. Nonetheless, it was the first OpenSim grid to surpass Second Life in land area, and it currently is one out of two grids to have done so. Also, as early as 2007 already, OSgrid referred to OpenSim in general and then, by 2008, to itself as "the Open Source Metaverse". It has used this term for an actual virtual world 14 years earlier than Mark Zuckerberg. For about just as long, the word "metaverse" has been part of the standard vocabulary in the OpenSim community.

The avatar in both pictures

The avatar shown in the image is Juno Rowland. She is, in fact, a backup avatar for my female alt, short for alternate avatar, that goes by the same name and looks the same while being at home on another grid.

Juno is built to look like a young woman. OpenSim does not explicitly support different ethnicities, but the basic avatar-building components available in OpenSim are almost exclusively geared towards avatars looking white or Latin American and in the 30s at most. She is 1.74 metres or 5 feet 8 1/2 inches tall which is taller than the average real-life Western woman by about the length of an adult person's palm. She is fairly slim which is somewhat concealed by the loose fit of her clothes.

Juno's skin textures are light to medium-light. Highlights and partly also shades are part of the skin textures, but very subdued. Most shading on her is created by the shader built into the viewer.

She has brown eyes and black hair worn as a rather short bob that narrows downward from where her ears are and extends to a height halfway between her chin and her shoulders. Her bangs cover her forehead entirely. Strands of her bangs partly cover her eyebrows, and two of them extend down as far as her upper eyelids. On each side, a single thick lock extends forward and slightly inward. These locks occasionally cover parts of her lower cheeks.

Juno is wearing a loose-fitting black tank top with the official logo of the 17th grid birthday festivities on it. The logo stretches across about 90% of Juno's chest and from slightly higher than right below her breasts to slightly higher than the middle of the front of the shirt.

In the top left corner of the birthday logo, there is the OSgrid logo. It consists of five identical parallelograms. Each one of them resembles a rectangle which, when placed horizontally, has its short edges tilted to the right by 18 degrees. The long edges are longer than the short edges by about three quarters. These five parallelograms are arranged around a common centre at the same distance and at angles of 72 degrees from each other. There is always one pointed angle slipping under the long side of a neighbouring parallelogram. This way, the gap in the middle between the parallelograms is a five-point star. The outer short edge of each parallelogram is farther away from the centre than the parallel long edge of the neighbouring parallelogram by a bit over half the latter's width. The top right parallelogram is placed exactly vertically.

The whole logo has a light, yellowish orange tint. Size-wise, it takes up a bit more than 20% of the width and about 70% of the height of the entire birthday logo.

To the right of the OSgrid logo, there is the name of the grid, "OSgrid", written in all capitals in the same tint of orange as the OSgrid logo. The writing is about two thirds as tall as each parallelogram in the OSgrid logo is long. It starts to the right of the vertical top right parallelogram at roughly 80% of its width, and the top of the letters is slightly higher than the obtuse top right corner of the top right parallelogram. The typeface used is a heavy variant of the Futura typeface, a geometric sans-serif typeface known for fairly small lower-case characters and a lower-case "a" which is like a "d" with a shorter line, much like in hand-writing.

Right below, "The Open Source Metaverse" is written at a vertical distance that is roughly the same as the general thickness of the letters in the "OSgrid" writing. All four words start with capitals. The writing lines up with the "OSgrid" writing to the left. The typeface is the same as the one used for the "OSgrid" writing, only smaller by about 60%. It is small enough to not be easily readable in the image at the resolution at which the image was posted. The writing is tinted a light grey, resembling aluminium.

Most of the lower half is taken up by a horizontal rectangle, tinted a darker, slightly less saturated, slightly more brownish tone of orange. To the left, it lines up with the bottom pointy-angled corner of the bottom left parallelogram in the logo. To the right, it lines up with the end of the writing "The Open Source Metaverse". At the top, it almost touches the vertical line of the "p" in the same writing.

On this rectangle, "17th Birthday" is written in the same black as the rest of the tank top and the same typeface as the other two writings, but twice the height as the writing "The Open Source Metaverse". Vertically, this writing is slightly above the middle of the rectangle. Horizontally, it lines up with the other two writings on the left.

Below the tank top, Juno is wearing a straight, loose-fitting miniskirt which ends roughly the length of one of her hands above her knees. Its texture gives it a look like washed-out denim in various shades of slightly yellowish, medium-light-to-medium brown. Seams, pockets and the fly are all only part of the texture. The pocket on the front to the left from Juno's point of view is completely covered by the tank top, the pocket on the other side is mostly covered. The texture does not emulate any rear pockets.

Apart from the skirt, Juno's legs are bare. On her feet, she is wearing a pair of flat ballet shoes which mostly show a black texture, slightly lighter than the tank top, with a structure that resembles an unidentified fabric. The insides of the shoes are a medium-light, shaded tone of brown, suggesting some fabric or thin leather again. The soles are a medium-light, slightly reddish brown. They have very low heels.

Around her neck, Juno is wearing a necklace consisting what appears to be a single wire of solid gold of a similar thickness as the material used for clothes hangers plus an OSgrid logo made of gold as well. The logo is a bit over half as big as the one on her tank top. The eye through which the wire runs is attached near one of the outer obtuse-angled corners, so the logo is rotated to the left in comparison with the one on the tank top. Both the wire and the logo are glossy, the logo more than the wire, but the material appearance is textured onto both.

In both Second Life and OpenSim-based worlds, unlike most other 3-D virtual worlds, avatars are not only highly configurable in-world, but also highly modular. Everything on Juno is an attachment. Her body is an attachment, the head included. Her feet are a separate attachment; different feet for medium and high heels are available. The skin textures can be replaced, and standard skins can be worn on this body. The eye texture can be replaced, too. Eyelashes, fingernails and toenails are attachments, although the latter are fully concealed inside her shoes. Her hair is an attachment. The top, the skirt, each shoe and the necklace are separate attachments which makes it possible for her to wear all kinds of outfits. Her shape is configurable with over 80 parameters, and even that can be replaced with another one which is usually just as configurable.

Everything that Juno is made up from was made by users. Everything else, including the purpose-made texture on the tank top, was made directly for OpenSim.

The scenery in the first image

The first image was created on a sim called Tropicana Tuneage, a multi-purpose sim which is regularly used for events, but which is also Juno's home in OSgrid.

The scenery is limited to a wooden pier which Juno is standing on. It takes up the lower 45% of the image. Its water-side end would line up with the lower side of Juno's butt if she was shown from behind. The top surface of the pier is textured in a way that suggests wooden planks that run transversally across the pier. The wood is very slightly less yellowish tone of brown than Juno's skirt and varies greatly between light-medium, almost light, and medium. The sides of the pier are outside the borders of the image.

The pier leads to the southwest. The camera angle follows it almost exactly in parallel. It is oriented farther to the right by about one degree. It is also roughly at the height of Juno's waist.

Beyond the pier and behind Juno, there is nothing but blue sea with gentle waves on it. The tone of blue has a fairly low saturation, and some of the waves are partly almost medium-dark grey. The horizon is at almost precisely two thirds of the height of the image, roughly below Juno's breasts, which shows that the camera is tilted downward by a few degrees.

The sky is a very pale, greenish blue with a very faint gradient towards the horizon that suggests haze. To Juno's right, there are some thin clouds which increasingly blend in with the sky, the lower they are. A bit of cloud is above her head as well. There are no clouds to her left.

Juno in the first image

Juno is slightly left of centre, standing on her right foot while moving her left foot forward and turning it to the left. She is about to turn herself around. Her arms are on her sides, the left arm is moved a bit forward. Her hands are relaxed with both middle fingers bent inward a little more than the other fingers.

Juno's face is expressionless. Any expressions would require specific animations to be played, mostly manually which would be an extra effort. She is looking past a point slightly above the camera.

Her hair is fully covering her ears. The lock on the left of her face, the right for the on-looker, is in front of the lower parts of her cheek. So is the lock on the other side, but less so.

Lighting in the first image

The simulated time of day is late afternoon. The sun is quite low already in the west. This can be told by the shadows which Juno's legs cast on the wooden planks texture on the pier as well as some narrow highlights on her neck, her arms and her legs. The sun itself is not in the image.

Apart from the sun, there is medium grey ambient light that shines the same from everywhere and therefore doesn't create any shadows.

Save for being cropped, the image is unedited and unprocessed.

The scenery in the second image

The second image was created in a different place on the same grid named OSG17B2. The name refers to OSgrid's 17th birthday, OSG17B in short. It is the second one of four numbered exhibition sims created for the birthday, two of which were opened to the public while the other two remain unused.

In the second image, Juno is inside a building used as a gallery of music album covers.

Most of the right-hand 60% of the image are taken up by an art easel. It is about one and two thirds times as high as Juno is tall while appearing smaller due to the perspective. It is rotated to the right from the camera being directly aimed at its front by about 25 degrees.

The easel is a fairly stable and elaborate construction which looks like it is adjustable for various canvas sizes. Below where the canvas would be put, there is a shelf for painting utensils. The easel is mostly white with no texture on it. The exceptions are eleven slotted screw heads and a handle roughly shaped like a six-point star with which the easel can be adjusted to different canvas sizes. They have metal-like, partly light grey, partly light yellowish or brownish textures with medium-light orange spots hinting at corrosion. These textures include highlights and shading. The parts themselves are not shiny. Of the screw heads, only five are unobscured. One is holding the adjustment handle in place. Three are holding the almost vertical part of the easel together, one close to the top, two near the bottom. The fifth one connects the right-hand rear support to the foot.

The easel is adjusted for something way bigger than what it is carrying. It's the cover of the album Recent Songs by the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. It was released in 1979 as his sixth studio album, and it is not known for high-charting single releases. The cover is about half as high as Juno is tall. Again, due to the perspective, it appears to be smaller. Its aspect ratio is very slightly warped, it is a little wider than it is high.

The album cover is based on a frontal facial portrait painting of Cohen by Dianne Lawrence. It shows him as a middle-aged, light-skinned man with green eyes and black, medium-short hair which he wears in a somewhat asymmetrical hairdo that is slightly fuller on his left, the on-looker's right, than on the other side. The top of his hair is cut off by the top edge of the canvas. At the bottom, the portrait ends at Cohen's shoulders. He is wearing a black shirt which lacks too many details to be identifiable any further.

The background behind him is a solid, slightly pale medium blue with a minimal hint of green.

Above his right shoulder, his left shoulder from the on-looker's point of view, there is a drawing of a hummingbird which is only black and background blue and about as long from beak to tail feathers as Cohen's mouth is wide. The bird seems to be hovering above his shoulder with no intention to touch down. Its beak is oriented to the right for the on-looker and tilted slightly downward to between Cohen's shoulder and the collar of his shirt.

Between the top left corner and Cohen's hair, his name is written, "Leonard Cohen". Likewise, between his hair and the top right corner, the title of the album is written, "Recent Songs". Both are in black, fairly small, in an unidentified, very heavy geometric sans-serif typeface and in all-caps.

The narrow right-hand side of the box that has the portrait on its front has a medium-dark wood texture, slightly reddish, slightly greyish, with the grain perpendicular to the long edges.

The wall behind the easel is mostly white with a black circular pattern on it. It consists of 39 concentric circles whose thickness increase from the outermost to the innermost circle. Instead of a 40th circle, there is a dot in the centre which is a little bigger than the thickness of the innermost circle. The texture itself is a bit over one and a half times as high as Juno is tall and twice as wide as it is high. Thus, it has ample of white space on both sides whereas the outermost 16 circles are more or less cut at the top and the bottom. Two of these patterns are within the border of the image above one another. The upper one is cut off by the upper edge of the image in such a way that only the two innermost circles are complete.

The wall makes up a bit less than the upper two thirds of the background of the image. Apart from Juno and the easel, everything below is ground. The edge between the wall and the floor shows that the camera is rotated from being perpendicular to the wall by some five degrees to the left. Thus, the easel is rotated to the right by about 20 degrees from being parallel to the wall. Besides, the camera is as high above the ground as Juno's waist and tilted downward only very minimally.

The ground is a medium orange in the bottom left corner of the image. It gets a little darker and more purplish towards the opposite corner where it meets the wall.

Juno in the second image

Juno is on the left-hand side of the image. standing in front of the easel, a little left of its centre, and facing it. The image shows her to the left of the easel and from the rear right. Her head is tilted downward as if she was looking at the album cover. Her face is entirely on the far side of her head. The bottom of her hair is shifted to the back and to the left because she is actually in motion. Her right ear is still fully concealed under hair.

Her arms are relaxed on both sides. She is resting her weight on her right leg while having lifted up the heel of her left foot.

The right strap of her tank top is hovering above her right shoulder at a distance of a little more than the thickness of one of her fingers. The background appears through the gap.

Lighting in the second image

The only light available in the image are the omnipresent medium grey ambient light and several white point lights on the ceiling beyond the edges of the image, only one of which is on this side of the wall. The sun is fixed straight above the scene, but the roof of the building which is outside the image is in its way. Since shadows are on in this picture, the roof keeps the sunlight out. Point light sources like those on the ceiling don't cast shadows, so they add to the ambient light, but they only illuminate avatars, objects and the like from one side. The highlights on her legs hint at the position of the sole point light on this side of the wall, namely behind and slightly to the left of Juno.

Save for being cropped, the image is unedited and unprocessed.

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OSgrid is offline again. Not for a few hours or so like just about everyday for quite a while now. This time, it was closed for maintenance for the foreseeable future.

The asset server is in such a bad state now that each crash and restart caused more assets to break. Yesterday, OSgrid reached a state in which it was no longer even possible to save inventories as IARs as they all ended up corrupt. So instead of closing the grid on March 21st to wipe the asset server clean, they had to pull the plug immediately.

One could say this means that lots of OSgrid users who wanted to wait until the last moment to save their stuff have lost lots of content. I say they've probably lost it already before the grid closure because chances are it was already broken at that point.

Seriously, the last time I've logged my OSgrid alt in, and that was last week, almost none of his attachments worked. No body. No hair. No glasses. Etc. I had to unpack replacements for some of the items from boxes which happened to still be intact, but for adjusted or modified items, I had to send in another "me" to deliver replacements right into OSgrid.

Now the OSgrid staff say they want to "completely rebuild the assets in a new format". At first glance, this reads like they no longer want to wipe the asset server and fix the assets themselves instead. But seriously, they've tried that for years. To less than no avail as we can see now. More assets are geb0rkt than not.

I myself rather think they've already started wiping it, and they simply want to change the way the assets are stored. And that's although OSgrid has switched to Avination-coined fsasset after the RAID failure in 2014 and the eight-month data rescue timeout until 2015. But that was almost a decade ago, and you can only change so much on an asset server in a running grid with assets on it.

Basically, instead of just resetting the asset server, they're going to tear it down and rebuild it. After all, they're still hoping for most residents (those who were active recently anyway) to return and bring their stuff back (what parts of it aren't broken anyway).

Most other grids would have called it quits at this point. And seriously, OSgrid was the first public OpenSim grid, it's the oldest grid (launched in 2007), and it's one of only two remaining grids from the 2000s (the other one is AnSky from 2008). It's probably a question of honour for OSgrid to carry on against all odds.

On a more positive note on decentralised stuff, Netzgemeinde seems to work again.

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One of the worst things that can happen in an OpenSim grid, except its complete and permanent shutdown, is the inventories of all avatars being wiped clean. It has happened in Metropolis, I think, in 2019. Many of those who were around back then decided to move away to another grid that promised to be more reliable. Those who were AWOL returned later, just to find their inventories completely empty and their avatars consisting of only the white, textureless system body. In either case, their inventories didn't even contain the "building blocks" for standard Ruth, and when they returned, a blank skin, a blank shape, blank hair and blank eyes had to be created on the spot.

Except for what they had installed in-world, if anything, they had to start over from scratch. Not exactly few decided to do so on another grid, basically starting Metropolis' shrinking process.

Now, Metropolis was one of the oldest grids, launched in 2008. When it was shut down in 2022, it was the fourth-oldest grid. For a while, it even used to be bigger than OSgrid. But this age also meant it was dragging around a whole lot of old assets that were no longer in use.

OSgrid is even older. Except for maybe the odd impromptu private test grid to get recently-created OpenSim running, it has always been the oldest grid. It was launched in 2007, so it's a whopping 17 years old now. Also, for most of the time, it has been the biggest grid and basically the "lighthouse instance" of OpenSim where almost all newbies ended up.

In other words, a whole lot of people contributed to the filling of what has been one of the most troubled asset servers in OpenSim for years already. The admins had tried quite a few things over the last few years to improve the situation, only to worsen it. Assets in inventories were broken or missing altogether. Announcements that the situation would normalise in a few months (with an increasing number of months estimated) never came to pass.

What was identified as a major issue are assets that don't exist in-world, and that are broken or faulty to begin with. Some may only exist on the asset server, but others linger in the inventories of avatars, many of which haven't been used in years. A lot of these were stolen from Second Life and haphazardly imported, or they broke upon export already.

So they decided to take this last resort and reset all inventories to get rid of broken content. The announcement came yesterday.

But as it seems, they've received a whole lot of criticism. They may also have been reminded that the total inventory reset with everyone losing everything that wasn't rezzed in-world was the beginning of the end of the once-mighty Metropolis Metaversum. Apparently, the OSgrid admins all pack lightly, and they seem not to be able to estimate how much the still active avatars would lose and have to save or reconstruct.

Sure, it's possible to save your entire OSgrid inventory as an IAR. But that's only possible if you have land, if you have at least one sim attached to OSgrid. So this could also have been seen as a ploy to get those who don't have land yet to host and attach sims so that OSgrid can outgrow the Wolf Territories Grid again and reclaim its spot as the biggest grid on the Hypergrid. I mean, it's commonly known that OSgrid doesn't take Lbsa Plaza not being the top spot on OpenSimWorld either. Besides, many simply don't have what it takes to host your own sim, not even temporarily.

And so Dan Banner, one of the admins, changed the asset reset announcement. The OSgrid team had understood how bad an idea it actually is to purge all assets that aren't rezzed in-world and delete everything from everyone's inventories, actually including payware from commercial grids. It would drive people away from OSgrid even faster than the current situation which mostly has them create backup avatars elsewhere.

It would not only drive them away from OSgrid, but over to commercial competitors like Kitely or Wolf Territories which not only aren't younger than OSgrid, but which have their own powerful asset servers and actually take good care of them. Especially the Wolf Territories Grid comes with the advantage of being only three years old and never having been used as a gateway for mass-importing tons of copybotted content. Also, these commercial grids have stable sources of income in the shape of land rentals. OSgrid doesn't have land rentals at all; all sims that aren't official are hosted by their users and attached for free. So OSgrid only makes money from donations and an annual in-world auction.

And indeed, @Lone Wolf has just reported that 87 sims were just recently moved to Wolf Territories via OAR export and import. This greatly reeks of a beginning OSgrid exodus.

This must have caused a change of mind among the OSgrid admins. They still consider a reset, but now they want to try to restore the assets in people's inventories afterwards. That's all we know now.

Metaworld Opensim Social wrote the following post Mon, 10 Feb 2025 00:24:54 +0100 Asset Reset - OSgrid News
https://www.osgrid.online/news/asset-reset/

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