New destination guide for grids

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There is a new destination guide available for any hypergrid-enabled grid: Hyperica Destination Guide.

Hyperica Destination Guide

To add the Hyperica Destination Guide as the default guide for your grid, simply edit your Robust.ini or Robust.HG.ini file. In the “[LoginService]” section there is a “DestinationGuide” parameter which can be used to communicate a URL to use for the destination guide for “V3″ style viewers.

Here is the code you would use:

   ; For V3 destination guide
   DestinationGuide = "http://www.hyperica.com/destination-guide"

What’s in the guide?

The Hyperica Destination Guide is actually composed of many pages. On the starting page, “Categories,” there are seven boxes.

“Most Popular Grids” takes you to another page, with the 15 hypergrid-enabled grids ranked by active monthly users.

“All Grids” takes you to a page with an alphabetical breakdown of all the major grids, and the “Hyperica Hyperport” button initiates a teleport to Hyperica.

“Events,” “Shopping,” “Free Land” and “Education” categories are grayed out because I don’t have those pages set up yet. If you would like to suggest a destination for one of these locations, email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com. If you have a snapshot of the destination that would look good in a tiny size on a dark gray background, even better.

I’m also considering adding categories for “Sandboxes,” “Hyperports,” “More Categories,” and “Adult” and “Gambling.” The last two would be hidden under “More Categories” to keep people from being shocked — shocked! — to find out that there’s this kind of activity going on in OpenSim.

The Hyperica Destination Guide in the Firestorm viewer.
The Hyperica Destination Guide in the Firestorm viewer.

The Hyperica Destination Guide is based loosely on the Second Life Destination Guide, except that the pages are fully self-contained to make them easier to copy and adapt. There are no external stylesheets or dependencies — feel free to copy and paste and adapt for your own grid.

Now that I have the guide in place, I can’t believe I’ve ever lived without it. It is so easy to use it’s ridiculous.

I prefer using the guide in the Firestorm viewer because I can easily add the Destination Guide button to the bottom of my viewer screen. All I had to do was right-click on any of the buttons at the bottom, choose “Toolbar buttons” from the pop-up menu, and then drag the Destination Guide button to where I wanted it.

This button opens the Destination Guide window.
This button opens the Destination Guide window.

I haven’t figured out how to do this in Singularity.

Coding the teleport links

While creating this guide, I spent quite a bit of time researching teleport links and testing out the various coding options.

The alternatives are as follows:

  • secondlife://http|!!seleacore.com|8002+selea%27s+world
  • secondlife:///app/teleport/hg.osgrid.org:80:Lbsa%20Plaza
  • secondlife://hg.osgrid.org:80/Wizard/169/203/17
  • hop:///app/teleport/hg.osgrid.org:80:Lbsa%20Plaza
  • hop://hg.osgrid.org:80/Wizard/169/203/17
  • hop:///hg.osgrid.org:80:Wright Plaza/
  • https://osgrid/region/Sandbox%20Area/128/57/24

Not all work in all the viewers.

Fortunately, as I recently found out, the majority of hypergrid travelers use the Firestorm viewer, with Singularity in distant second place and other viewers having only a couple of percentage points of market share or less.

That means that, as far as the Destination Guide is concerned, the only viewers worth worrying about are Firestorm and Singularity.

And what I’ve found is that it’s this format that currently works in both of these viewers, without any error messages or configuration issues:

  • secondlife:///app/teleport/hg.osgrid.org:80:lbsa plaza

Note that there are three slashes after the first colon.

I will now use the following format for all my hypergrid links:

In other words, I use the plain hypergrid address as the text, so that people can copy-and-paste into their map. And for the hyperlink, I use the “secondlife:///app/teleport/” so if they just click on it, it takes them to the destination.

If you are not currently logged into a viewer when clicking on a link, it will just take you to your default viewer’s login screen.

The default viewer, by the way, seems to be whichever one you installed last. Since, in my case, this happened to be Kokua, I had to uninstall Firestorm and then install it again before it started acting like my default viewer for browser links.

Maria Korolov
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