[Opensim-users] Hypergrid Things, Jumps, SLurls, Hop URLs and Maps

[Ai Austin]

Folks... I have a bunch of things I keep coming across when 
hypergridding about  and when trying to explain to new users and less 
experienced visitors how to set up an avatar and how to get between grids.

My experience here is mostly between OSGrid and Openvue grid with 
very recent updates to the server side code (all on latest versions 
of 0.7.6 dev master) and using an up to date viewer such as Firestorm 
4.4.0 OS version.  I believe (!) they are all configured correctly 
but you never know. And I see the same issues on all grids I visit 
and with multiple viewers.

I have not made sense of these so just make some notes here in the 
hope that someone can weigh in who might have seen some systematic 
thing that is easily corrected via correction or improvements to 
various .ini settings, on the OpenSim dev side, or that we can give 
good OpenSim related suggestions to the TPV code developers to 
improve matters.  So in no particular order...

Since the way of specifying HG links changed to the form 
http://gridname:port region_name rather than 
http://gridname:port:region_name with a : connector it seems that 
some places where this string worked have been lost.. such as in 
local chat (which automatically added a clickable link that worked as 
a way to jump about.

There used to be a way to create a "local name" on one grid when a 
"link-region" was done and that local name could be fouinf directly 
in the map search...  and the "help hypergrid" help text still refers 
to such a "local name" in the context of unlink-region command.  But 
I think such a local link is not available now?  And  when the link 
is created you have to give the full http://gridname:port/ 
region_name in the map search to find the region, rather than being 
able to use just region_name.  Is that right?  Could be get a "local 
name" mapping back that would work as a lookup string in maps?

I am not seeing the map tile for hypergid regions until I actually do 
the jump and arrive.  In map view I can find a hypergrid region and 
the map zooms to that region cell but it just shows as blank blue. It 
often shows as "offline" whe its actually online and you can click 
and jump to it, and it shows its rating as "unknown" even though its 
set to "Moderate".  I do see my OpenSim.exe console saying it has 
sent the map jumped, but nothing shows in the viewer map tool.

I see a range of linked regions presumably from all hypergrid 
visitors who make a jump back to their home grid. they all show as 
mapped to a (very large) X location like 29539) and a y location of 
0.  Is this working as it should?  I only noticed this when I tried 
to make a "real" link-region and found it was already in place with 
this X, 0 mapping - presumably from a earlier hypergrid jump.

As you can see this is a bumnch of notes and I did not feel it was 
suitable for  a mantis issue yet... but I would appreciate any 
feedback if there is something going on that I may have missed.. or 
suggestions on how to get this all in better shape especially for 
less experienced users to navigate and understand.