How to create a Destination Guide for your grid

By:
On:
Tagged: ,
With: 25 Comments
The Openvue grid has its own destination guide, seen here with the Singularity viewer.
The Openvue grid has its own destination guide, seen here with the Singularity viewer.

The latest releases virtual world viewers, such as Firestorm, Singularity, and Kokua can provide access to a “Destination Guide” for your OpenSim grid for both local and hypergrid visitors.

And this guide can feature both local and hypergrid destinations.

2014-07-17-Openvue-Destinations
Destination guide for the Openvue grid. (Image courtesy Austin Tate.)

But the grid owner first has to enable this feature in their configuration files.

Here’s how.

Grid configuration settings

Here are the configuration instructions if you have a full-scale grid running “Robust” centralized grid services.

In your Robust.ini or Robust.HG.ini file [LoginService] section there is a “DestinationGuide” parameter which can be used to communicate a URL to use for the destination guide to “V3″ style viewers which enable this.

Uncomment the entry and provide a suitable URL to be used.

   ; For V3 destination guide
   DestinationGuide = "http://www.yourdomain.org/guide.html"

Make the content be suitable for presenting in the “in-viewer” browser, so avoid complex HTML or any viewer-side scripting. PHP should work as that is generated server-side. The viewers by default show the destination panel as a narrow strip which can be resized horizontally, but has fixed height, so you may want to tailor the display contents to that.

Here is how I set it up for the Openvue grid:

   ; For V3 destination guide
   DestinationGuide = "http://virtual.aiai.ed.ac.uk:8002/resources/guide.html"

You can have the user click on a link to open a teleport dialogue in the viewer by providing links on destination names or thumbnail images in this destination page. Use the following format — and notice that the spaces are kept as spaces:

   "secondlife:///app/teleport/Region Name/128/128/22"

If you wish to show a hypergrid destination use a form like this…

   "secondlife:///app/teleport/hg.osgrid.org:80:Wright Plaza"
If you use the Singularity viewer and teleport to the OpenSim Community Conference grid at cc.opensimulator.org:8002 and pull up the Destination Guide, you'll see some featured destinations for that grid.
If you use the Singularity viewer and teleport to the OpenSim Community Conference grid at cc.opensimulator.org:8002 and pull up the Destination Guide, you’ll see some featured destinations for that grid.

Diva Wifi configuration settings

The Openvue destinations page at http://virtual.aiai.ed.ac.uk:8002/resources/guide.html is actually served from the Diva “Wifi” web interface and its ability to provide “additionally served resources” for example as web pages which can pull in some parametric information from the OpenSim grid server. This is done by adding a “ServePath_…” entry in the [WifiService] section of WiFi.ini as follows…

    ;; Additionally served resources
    ;; Syntax: ServePath_Name = "LocalPath, ServedPath"
    ;;         (Name is any arbitrary identifier)
    ;; With the following example, the contents of folder "resources" at the same
    ;; level as the OpenSim base "bin" folder can be accessed via path /resources
    ServePath_Resources = "../resources, /resources"

This article adapted with permission from Austin Tate’s Informatics Blog.

Latest posts by Austin Tate (see all)