DreamGrid offers OpenSim-wide search function

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Missing the ability to search for content across multiple OpenSim grids?

Outworldz‘ Fred Beckhusen has an answer for you.

The Diva Distro, from hypergrid inventor Crista Lopes, used to have a grid-wide search, but it’s been offline for several years., he said.

Fred Beckhusen

“I have reverse engineered it and extended it to work on any grid,” he told Hypergrid Business.

With a few tweaks to INI files, grid owners can now allow users to search for grids, events, regions, objects, and parcels. The functionality is available to any user who is currently located on a grid running the DreamGrid distribution of OpenSim.

Most people don’t know that this functionality exists, he added.

“The central database currently has only 503 items marked as ‘show in search’,” he said. “There are only 20 parcels marked as ‘show in search’ on 27 regions out of 307 DreamGrids that are online at this moment.”

Results of a search for “primitive” on Hyperica search.

Grid-Wide Search is also usable by anyone online, on the Hyperica search page.

Self-starting regions coming soon

Meanwhile, Beckhusen is working on other improvements to OpenSim.

For example, the standard distribution of OpenSim is very wasteful of resources. Regions stay up and running, even if nobody is there. Scripts continue to run, wasting computer time, bandwidth and electricity. If the region is hosted with a cloud provider that charges by the minute, this also adds up to unnecessary costs.

Kitely tackles this problem by putting regions to sleep when they’re not empty, and reactivating them when someone teleports in. That has helped Kitely offer high-performance regions at lower cost, and has made it the largest commercial grid by land area.

Soon, this technology will be available to other people running OpenSim, in version 4 of DreamGrid.

Beckhusen calls this “Smart-Start Mode.”

“When no one is in a region, OpenSim is suspended,” he said. “Upon detection of a teleport, the region almost instantly continues and the teleport completes.”

This functionality is already complete for the DreamGrid Supervisor mode of DreamGrid, he said. But the distribution has other modes, and there are five different types of teleports that can occur, he said, and he is still working on making the functionality comprehensive.

Beckhusen is currently tracking 2,171 installations of his DreamGrid software, which has seen average monthly growth of 28 percent since January.

The DreamGrid user interface is now available in 20 languages, he added, including English, Swedish, Portugese, French, Basque, Catalan, Czech, Chinese — both simplifed and traditional, Dutch, Greek, Finnish, Irish, Hebrew, Icelandic, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, German, and Spanish.

Maria Korolov
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