Introduction
Recently, the page about performance in the Opensim wiki has been extensively updated, and this prompted me to gather some data for Condensation Land, a mini virtual world powered by Opensim which I administer, to be able to add this data to the page. Condensation Land is special in the sense that while it’s a quite small, home-based, world, at the same time it hosts a relatively big number of prims and scripts, and I thought that adding that data to the page might end up being useful to somebody.
Temple, an island by Omurtag Milev in Condensation Land
When collecting the data I had to visit all the islands, one by one, and this made me remember the story of Condensation Land, how it all started, the things we did there, the people who have contributed wonderful stuff to be displayed, and I thought I’d write a blog post listing and commenting detailedly the technical data I had gathered, and at the same time giving an account of the history of the mini-world.
History
Condensation Land started as an experiment in looking for alternatives to Second Life after the OpenSpace fiasco. The initial six months of this process are explained in detail here. Shortly after writing this article, the company I was working for decided that virtual world technology was not adequate for their needs and started using WebEx. The initial founders of Condensation Land (Ludmilla Writer, Favio Piek and myself) decided to keep Condensation Land as an experiment and a playground, and to invite people to show their content in the mini-world.
Technical status
Condensation Land is a mini virtual world powered by Opensim. We are using r13558 of the Diva distribution (D2); the Wifi page can be accessed here. Condensation Land has a WordPress blog, used mainly to keep users informed of new releases and content additions, and a Flickr group.
The physical machine
The whole Condensation Land virtual world runs on a non-dedicated home machine with Windows XP SP3, 3 GB of RAM, and two SATA ST3400620AS HD’s of 372 GB each. The first HD (C:) hosts the operating system and the swapfile, while the second HD (D:) is dedicated to Opensim and MySQL. Apart from keeping the system updated and running the disk defragmenter every so often, the machine requires almost no maintenance.
Networking is provided by JazzTel (a spanish ISP) in the form of a symmetrical 2 Mb SDSL line; the machine has an external IP address and can thus be used for HyperGrid teleports, accesed from anywhere, etc. This line costs around € 200/mo, which is more or less US$ 250/mo.
World setup
Condensation Land (loginuri: http://condensationland.com:9000) comprises 11 regions, of which 10 are public. The region with most prims is Condensation Land, with 10,278 prims, and the region with more active scripts is Angelico Miguelis, with 706 active scripts. The whole world uses 38,065 prims and 1,934 active scripts, as detailed in the following table.
+---------------------------+--------+---------+
| Region | Prims | Scripts |
+---------------------------+--------+---------+
| Angelico Miguelis | 10,024 | 706 |
| Conceptior | 6,280 | 531 |
| Condensation Beach | 2,455 | 46 |
| Condensation Land | 10,278 | 97 |
| Condensation North | 1,610 | 122 |
| Condensation South | 1,908 | 7 |
| Condensation SouthWest | 992 | 77 |
| Shoshisn | 555 | 163 |
| Temple | 3,239 | 139 |
| Tralfamadore | 427 | 29 |
| (private region) | 297 | 17 |
+---------------------------+--------+---------+
| Total | 38,065 | 1,934 |
+---------------------------+--------+---------+
MyWorld.ini sets CombineContiguousRegions to false to avoid the use of megaregions. The bin\library directory contains the default IARs shipped with D2, plus the large objects library downloadable from the D2 downloads page, plus some small animation IARs created by myself with freebie anims found elsewhere. I’ve not had time to set up default avatars for male, female and neutral preferences.
Performance
Opensim.exe is pretty stable. and oscilates between 0% and 10% of CPU usage (even when idle, there are a lot of scripted objects, and object status has to be saved frequently), and uses between 167 MB when idle to 512 MB with one avatar and 1 GB of RAM with some few avatars. MySQL.exe consistently uses 250-300MB of RAM, and MySQL backups (in .sql format) occupy 3.51 GB, 1.32 GB when zipped.
The following video shows a party with four avatars in the Condensation Land region:
Content evolution
After 20090430, I added a 2,889-prims Klein bottle,
and an exhibition called Mirror Worlds featuring pictures from Florence Babenco, Ludmilla Writer, Mikil Tiki, Monika Finchy, Senna (SennaSpirit Coronet), Shoshisn Shilova and myself, and sculptures by Shoshisn Shilova.
After that, a very nice thing happened: people started to contribute their own stuff to be shown at Condensation Land! :-)
Breen Whitman donated a fantastic building called “Eastern Gaswork”, which I placed in Condensation South;
Breen Whitman's 'Eastern Gasworks'
Shoshisn Shilova got an island (called “Shoshisn”) and Mikil Tiki got another island (called “Tralfamadore – La Mikilina”);
Condensation Land world map after adding "Shoshisn" and "Tralfamadore"
and finally Omurtag Milev added three awesome islands called Temple, Conceptior and AngelicoMiguelis,
which you should absolutely visit (or, at least, look at the videos and pictures here).
Condensation Land world map after the addition of Omurtag's islands
Condensation Land now has ten regions, instead of the initial five, and a lot of new wonderful places to visit! :-)
Conclusion
Condensation Land is a non-for-profit, home-based, virtual world maintained in my free time (and in the free time of the respective region owners). Obviously, since we don’t get any money from it, it’s a work of love. It’s also a proof-of-concept: of what can be done with simply some free time, a lot of passion for the technology, and some very talented friends :-) I won’t say that caring for Condensation is always nice and easy — being the administrator of even such a small world as Condensation takes quite a lot of work: users forget their passwords; upgrades don’t always work; we had a serious case of inventory messup, where tons of spurious folders were created and which I had to clean manually using SQL; sometimes electricity fails for so long that the UPS dies (yes, this happens in Barcelona in 2010) and the machine has to be physically restarted; and so on. But the feeling of having all this wonderful stuff in a machine of yours, and of being able to share it with the world, is more than enough to compensate for all of it :-)
Hello everybody. This is a summary of the last week of development in OpenSimulator. Except where otherwise specified, the changes described here appear only in OpenSim’s cutting edge Git ‘master’ branch. Please do not attempt to use code taken directly from ‘master’ in any production environment. Sometimes this in-development code may not work or may even cause data corruption. If you are not a developer or tester, please treat this summary instead as a preview of what will be coming up in the next release. The latest official release is OpenSim 0.7.0.1 (released on Tuesday 10th August 2010).
