[Opensim-users] I Have a Few Questions About Megaregions and Terrain Files

[Len W. Brown]

Greetings everyone!

    I'd like some opinions on this...

I mentioned a while back that I was working on a mega-region island.  
Well, I would appreciate a little advice here.  On my servers I'm 
setting up an island that has a land mass of four regions West to East 
and three regions North to South.  This makes up a whole land area of 
twelve regions altogether, a grid of 4X3.

I would like to set this up as a single instance using Diva's 
Distribution and my test runs have been very successful - namely, I got 
the 12 regions set up as a single mega-region.

My questions:

1. When I added the additional regions I now notice that all "open 
space" in the map is shaded red and indicates each non-existing region 
that goes on forever in all directions is "offline."  Why is this so and 
how do I stop it?  I simply edited the Regions/RegionConfig.ini file to 
add and align the additional regions to make the 4X3 grid for the island.

2. Will this megaregion "play nice" with other single regular regions 
later on if I decide to add single floater islands around my big island 
using additional instances of OpenSim.  I'm imagining it would so long 
as the single region coordinates are proper, but would appreciate a 
second opinion on this.

3.  I've been trying out L3DT and I think I have it understood well 
enough to use for doing the terrain.  I created a new heightmap that is 
1,024 by 768 pixels since each region requires 256X256 pixels.  It 
generated well enough but I need to know a couple things on this one:

    3a.  Can I use a single 1024X768 on the 4X3 megaregion I created or 
does it need to be split up into 12 squares?
    3b.  What is the best L3DT output format for OpenSim at this time.  
I am thinking .r32 like the Diva 2X2 terrain examples.  Is this right?

Thank you for suggestions and tips.

-- 
- Len W. Brown 
     lenwbrown at gmail.com 
     http://www.lenfocenter.com