[Opensim-users] some questions

[Lúthien Athariel]

Hi,

I've been working on a standalone sim for some time. It is a very  
mountainous terrain; I have a specific landscape in mind that I want  
to model.
I created a height map in an external tool, exported it as a 7 by 7  
region, and worked on it a bit more from within Hippo, and altogether  
it works rather well.
I must say I am impressed by the level of realism. The water in  
particularly is lovely!

Im running the server on a Virtualbox'ed Arch Linux installation with  
PostgreSQL as storage for all.
The opensim is version  0.6.4 / interface3; It's got 1.5 Mb memory  
assigned so far, and that runs well. I am using the opensim-ode.sh  
start script which sets the Mono threads per cpu at 50; and ulimit is  
set to 50000.

There are a couple of things that I wondered about and could not find  
an answer to yet - I am still rather new to all this. If you would  
know some answers, that would be very helpful :)

- The first is - I would like to have some other trees than the ones  
that are available now. Is it possible to create one in, say, Blender,  
and import that (b/c I know how to make trees in Blender)? So far, I  
have found no repository of objects to use in Opensim (apart from the  
discussions about importing SL stuff - but I have never been in SL).

- Another, similar one .. did any of you ever create rocks or  
boulders? Would a "sculpted prim" be the way to go here?
I find building more or less geometric forms very easy with the Build  
tool - including more complex things. But it is indeed hard to create  
anything naturally - looking, irregular.

- is there a way to use larger region texture files than 512 x 512? I  
find these smaller ones to make mountains look not that natural. Most  
textures give a rather unnatural repetitive effect.

- is it possible to create another global light source, other than the  
Sun or Moon? Like a large beacon with a bright light, illuminating one  
or more regions?
The light-emitting prims don't reach very far.

- there are sometimes cracks or tears in the ground; even outside of  
the region seams (which are indeed sometimes hard to match up). You  
can see through these cracks to the water behind them, and it is  
possible to fly your avatar through it; in which case I seem to get  
stuck in some infinite loop and have to login again. This does not  
happen often though and I understand that all this is still alpha  
software; but I wondered if it is known what causes it and if I can  
"cure" that.
Here's a screenshot of what I meant - the green line is a region  
border (made visible in the menu with View Property Lines); but the  
crack in the foreground with the terraform tool arrows on it, is not a  
border http://img.skitch.com/20090509-xa56mn59rax164ji3qfbf9t3h8.jpg
And the strangest thing is - these cracks can vanish all of a sudden.

.
- I understood that the total possible size of the sim (nr of regions)  
depends on available memory, number of prims, number of users walking  
around and / or building things in it.
Would it be possible to give a rough estimate what kind of hardware  
would  be necessary to build a very large sim of - say - 200 regions,  
but most just empty terrain ... on average not more than 10 prims per  
region.  Never more than 8 concurrent users, and max 2 users building  
at the same time.

- and the last one - is it possible *in principle* to see further than  
the current "max viewing distance" setting of 512 meters in Hippo?

thanks!

- luthien