Installing from source

MS Windows

OpenSim requires either the .Net framework version 2.0, or the latest Mono. It also is compiled with the C# and not the C++ IDE for those who are using the no-cost Express Editions from MS.

Subversion Repository

1. Get the source code from the svn repository:

svn://openmv.org/opensim/trunk

Building

2. In the top-level directory, run the 'runprebuild.bat' file. This will create both a VS2005 solution file, and a nant build file.

3. Open the resulting sln file with visual studio, and build it there, or if you prefer to use nant, run nant in the same top-level directory. This will build the executables.

If you don't care about physics (walking on prims, etc), ignore the rest of this section.

Physics

Open Dynamics Engine (ODE)

If you want to implement collision-based physics, OpenDynamicsEngine (ODE) is the furthest along at the moment (9/07). It is not fully supported, but is starting to work somewhat reliably using a small number of regions per sim. You invoke ODE with the command line option -physics=OpenDynamicsEngine (can be added to opensim.ini under [Startup] as physics = OpenDynamicsEngine)

As installed from svn, ODE does not work on all platforms. If you get an ODE-related crash, and/or an ode.dll not found type of error, try using the debug version of the dll. The release version appears to crash on some CPU's (the error is usually "ode.dll not found", but it's misleading because the dll may still be there, but crashing.) The debug version is available here:

http://www.squiggle.com/opensim/ode-debug.dll

Rename it ode.dll and put it in .\bin, replacing the stock ode.dll. You can also try building ode.dll from souce (ode.org, version 0.8)

Building ODE from source

Remove libode.so (unix) or ode.dll (windows) from the ./bin folder. Do NOT remove ode.net.dll! Download ode 0.8 source packages from ode.org. When compiling, make sure to use the following configure options:

--with-trimesh=gimpact --enable-shared

make sure the configure script confirms these choices (on unix). I forget exactly how to do this in visual studio, but there are copious docs in the source tree. I believe I'm using OPCODE instead of GIMPACT on windows, and no, I don't remember why I did that. Always compile with single precision.

On Windows, you have to copy lib\releasedll\ode.dll to your .\bin folder, replacing the original file.
On UNIX, make install should put libode.so in the proper place (ie /usr/local/lib), and it should be seen by opensim (ode.net.dll)

Running

Double-click on the OpenSim.exe executable file in the 'bin' directory. This will start up OpenSim in standalone mode.

The debugger in VS2005 C# may be used to step through the code. For those that use a Cygwin shell, you may find that one or more dll's have permissions that cause problems running. Most find that a "chmod 777 *" from the bin directory solves this.

Linux/Mac OS X

Subversion Repository

To check out the latest revision:

svn co svn://opensecondlife.org/opensim/trunk opensim.new/trunk

Note: The libopenjpeg-libsl-...so is not really working. For this reason you should download the newest libsecondlife from http://www.libsecondlife.org, and build your own libopenjpeg library. If you use this instead of the SVN version, your sim will work fine.

Note to Mac OS X users: OS X does not come packaged with subversion, so you will need to either install it or access the repository from a computer that does have subversion

Building (Mono)

cd opensim.new/trunk

mono bin/Prebuild.exe /target nant
nant -buildfile:OpenSim.build

mono bin/Prebuild.exe /target nant
nant -buildfile:OpenSim.build

(Yes, you must rerun the prebuild again after the first build, and then build again!)

Later revisions(1657 and above) no longer require you to build twice. Thus the procedure is simply as follows:

cd opensim.new/trunk

mono bin/Prebuild.exe /target nant
nant -buildfile:OpenSim.build

Running (Mono)

cd bin
mono OpenSim.exe

Binary releases

Some recent pre-compiled releases are available at OpenSim binaries. These are usually a few revs out-of-date.

There are some older versions of the binaries here