Getting Started

Are you a noob? Well I am... Having zero experience with OpenSimulator and Second Life has presented me with a lot of challenges. As I overcome those challenges I'll share what I've learned. Hopefully it will help you get up to speed with OpenSimulator ASAP.

OK so we've seen a few web pages out there, maybe read a wiki article or two, and saw a couple YouTube videos on this virtual world stuff. Somehow we've come to the conclusion that OpenSimulator is kick ass and is a must have application for fulfilling our dreams. For me it was the luring feature set being proposed for OpenSimulator. My dream of creating a free MMORPG seems feasible with OpenSimulator and brings with it the potential to have other dungeon masters creating their own virtual worlds based on my MMORPG gaming rules. Wish me luck!

Let's start with some vocabulary so we both understand what it is that we're talking about.

• Second Life - This is a commercial product for connecting users via a 3D environment over the internet (world wide web).
• Grid - ?
• Region - ?
• Avatar - A virtual world character that you control. It's the way you will appear to other users.
• Assembly - An application library used by executable files.

Alrighty then. Step one is to download the software and get a local server up and running. Check the [Download download page] for a link to download the software. I'm running Windows 7 64-bit and downloaded the file that ended with a ".zip" extension. If your running Unix then you'll want the file with a ".gz" extension.

After you download the file and expand it, head on over to the [Configuration Configuration Page]. It's recommended that you review the "readme.txt" file in the root folder of the file you expanded. If you open the readme file in NotePad and it looks like one long continuous line of information, try opening the file in WordPad.

After reading the readme and the Configuration Page I felt I was ready to fire this puppy up.

Noob mistake number one! Somehow I got confused and managed to download the "Source Code" rather then the "Binary Packages". This was most likely caused by the fact that I'm a software developer and wanted to see the nuts and bolts behind the seen. Anyhow if you find yourself wondering why you can't find OpenSim.exe or OpenSim.32bitLauncher.exe throws a bunch of "missing assembly" errors make sure you didn't download the "Source Code" by mistake.