• Announcing MyROAR for all Region Owners

    Region Owners – announcing a new tool to view some data about your regions, and give you the ability to edit some information about those regions. If you own a region on ReactionGrid, you can now log in to http://myroar.reactiongrid.com with your ReactionGrid avatar account and view information about your region online.
    It’s an early stage application, but it will be growing! What you see when you log in is a slice from our core ROAR application that powers the whole of ReactionGrid. With the full version of this application, we have a web-based administration for our grid, enabling us to add regions, move region coordinates, check to see if a region is currently busy, and more. The lite version of ROAR is now available for free to anyone with a private grid hosted on our servers, but for region owners on ReactionGrid, there was no web admin until now.

    So, what does it do?

    Primarily, you get a count of the number of prims on your region, and the number of scripts. We have tracked nearly all the regions on the grid now, and we are starting to see patterns as to how many prims and scripts are “a lot”. Scripting can be tricky to quantify, since a single script could be harmful to performance, but any region that is showing over 150 scripts will take a long time to start up and will not perform nearly as well as one with 50-100 scripts. From the data we have at hand now, we can say that a significant quantity of support requests have been submitted in recent months from regions with over 200 scripts actively running on them. If you are experiencing a high number of crashes, then this could be an indicator that you need to review the quantity of scripts on your regions.
    Prim count – we have some regions with very high prim count, few textures, and virtually no scripts, and these regions run very well. There is more of a hit on the client on these regions since your client will have to download data about all the primitives on the region, but in general, waiting for that information to come down is all that is required then you can explore the region (see Wizzy sim for an excellent example of this!) More textures will be more of a hit, more complex primitives is also a hit (lots of hollow twisty path-cut spheres, for example) on client rendering.
    You can edit the description and category of your region – this data is shown here and is a great way to find and read about interesting regions on the grid. So far we’ve tried to add descriptions ourselves to some regions, but you know your regions better than we do, so please update your region descriptions for the world to find out more about what you do!
    There’s a button to save your region’s current state to an OAR file as a snapshot. We actually automate this process for all regions on the grid, but this gives you the power to take a snapshot when you are ready to do so. That snapshot is then safely stored, and remains there in case you need to restore your region. If you ever wanted to roll back, you could just drop in a ticket to our support department at http://metaverseheroes.com and we could revert your region for you.
    Region status – admittedly isn’t massively useful in its current form, but if you see text along the lines: “Region: ONLINE: 1” then your region may be alive. If you see the text that something went wrong and the region may be down, then it may be down. I would love to get more useful information from this, so we will be working to get more data here.
    This is version 1.0, there will be new releases and upgrades to this over time as we add more functionality- some items on the wish list (that are not hard to achieve) include a web interface for remotely loading terrain heightmaps, and a history / version system for OAR backups. Feature requests are very much appreciated, please drop them in to http://metaverseheroes.com and we’ll collate them and see what you want us to provide, and see if we can help to provide those features for you!
  • Grid Hopper meeting for Educators

    Haley Dunning of MyMichigan simulator is hosting the first Grid Hopper meeting for educators on her region, MyMichigan, on January 6th at 8:00pm EST  (01:00 UTC Jan7). All are welcome to attend!
  • Movie Night Postponed

    Movie night is taking a break this week due to the festive holiday season. But rest assured, the movies will return soon and be as bad as ever in no time at all. Watch this space for updates on our next event!
  • UPDATE: Grid Maintenance Dec 10

    Prior to our previous announcement we’re putting plans to upgrade on hold – there are some significant bugs in OpenSim 0.6.8 that failed our test plans over the past few days, and as such we are not going to be rolling out an upgrade this week. Core OpenSim developers are aware of the issues, and we’re working with them to provide as much feedback as possible and help get 0.6.8 up to standard.
    However, since folks were made aware of some downtime, we will be using this time to do restarts of several regions and carry out some essential maintenance tasks to keep the grid running smoothly. For this reason, between 10am GMT and 1pm GMT today you may see regions rebooting around you. If anyone is on a region about to be rebooted, we’ll attempt to give you plenty of warning.
    Many thanks for your patience – we will keep you updated on any changes to our plans to roll out newer code. We are very hopeful that once these bugs are squashed that we will have a new version of OpenSim that we can roll out to you folks, but we are not going to rush anything into our grid without it passing all of our test plans.
  • Major Grid Maintenance, 10th Dec 09

    We’re planning on upgrading ReactionGrid from OpenSim 0.6.6 to 0.6.8 on Thursday, 10th December between 9am and 1pm GMT. The upgrade requires that all regions are taken offline before the new code can be rolled out, so there will be outages for all regions, and core grid services will likely be offline for up to an hour.

    We are hopeful that the upgrade will be swift and painless, and that all outages are kept to a minimum. Likewise we hope for improved stability and concurrency on the latest revision.
    Follow http://twitter.com/reactiongrid on Thursday morning for the latest status updates on the upgrade. Post upgrade, we ask you all be vigilant and watch out for any new issues that arise, reporting any difficulties to http://metaverseheroes.com
    Thanks Gridizens – we really do appreciate your patience and I really hope this improves stability for us all.