Hmm.. A free sim? Help please!

OK well i got asked if I wanted a free sim, so i did - we went thru all the details etc and blah blah blah and i logged in as a female on my own circle sim of land.. I asked him how and he said goto www.secondlifegrid.net so i did but i cant find anything else about it, he also said something about "opensim"...

How do I get it so i can host my own server and set some stuff up on it?

Thanks.

ahh this is outside of SL, thought you meant a openspace sim in SL, so this is a edited post.

No no you dont get what I mean.

It was like a private server.

Ah

I fully understand, check this thread out it should help.

/327/f0/274825/1.html

Further to the above link:

What you get from OpenSim is a free, empty standalone sim on your own computer, not connected to any grid. You get all the basic tools the same as SL although some are disabled or don't work as well. You can have several sims joined together if you like.
I got my standalone from OpenLife, who let you download it easily. OL also has an online grid, but that's a different thing.

You need to download a standalone and modify a copy of the SL viewer shortcut, as instructed, to log in to your standalone.
Once installed, logging in to a standalone is a 2 stage process
1) Open and launch the standalone
2) log in to it.

Can I add you in game and speak please?

Certainly - you're welcome! But there's not much more I say really, you need to visit one of the OpenSim websites, like OpenSim itself or Open Life, which had a simpler download when I did it.

But you don't have the sense of community on a standalone that you get in SL. It's lonely - just yourself, or possibly one or two other people in the same RL houshold if you can get logins to work on a local network (which I couldn't!).

The only way I can think of to get a free island within Second Life is if someone gives it to you and pays all the monthly tier payments for you as well!

that's called a "sugar daddy"

You have the wrong URL in your first post. "www.secondlifegrid.net" is an LL site for developers, service providers, and educators. There are no free sims to be had there. "openlifegrid.com" is one of several URL's offering some sort of free standalone simulator, using open source and reverse-engineered code to create something sort of like SL, but either as a stand-alone sim on your PC (the free version), or as a sim connected to an independant grid that is completely unconnected to the SL grid (Monthly fee and setup fee required, but lower than LL, because you get less for your money).

The non-LL grids are all start-up efforts to create competition to SL, and none of them, so far, operate even as well as SL's buggy performance level. Most don't yet have asset servers or LSL scripting that are fully functional. Attachments don't work in most, if not all, of them. None that I know of as yet has a viable in-world economy - nothing like L$ that can be bought or cashed out - though they all probably plan to implement a money system eventually. They are cheaper, however. If you like being a bleeding edge pioneer, you may like them. If you are expecting something that is just like SL, and that you can connect seamlessly to the rest fo SL, that isn't going to happen for a long, long time, if ever.

Will some of these alternative grids prove someday to be as good as SL, or even better? Maybe, but not at any time soon. Certainly some of them aspire to greatness.

Will some of them be rampant with IP theft, fraud, and illegal activities? Most likely, though it is hard to say which ones, and I would hope such grids would not survive very long. "Buyer Beware": At least one of these independant grids appear to largely be controled by one or more individals who were kicked out of SL for fradulent "banking" scams. So tread cautiously, and keep a tight grip on your virtual wallet.

A few words of explanation are in order here:

You can get a standalone sim on your own PC. It costs nothing, and you are not limited to 15,000 prims either. You can get it from the OpenSimulator website, at

http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Download

Basically it a reverse-engineered server, from the open-source client that LL released a while back. Not all functions that you take for granted in SL are available yet, but they are catching up mighty fast. To get a standalone sim, you just connect your SL viewer to the Opensim server. Full step-by-step instructions are here:

http://rock-vacirca.blogspot.com/

So, is it a lonely existance in your Standalone sim? Not a bit of it, you can invite friends to join you in your sim, or you can connect it to other free grids, such as OSGrid, 3rd Rock, etc. Again, details are in the links above.

It is a great place to build, or terraform, or practice body shaping, without interruptions, and mine has NEVER gone down, for any reason. All textures can be uploaded into your standalone for free, and prims and other assets can be transferred from SL to your standalone, using Second Inventory for items you have permissions for, (and there is other dubious software for prims and textures you do not have permissions for, already talked to death elsewhere).

Megaprims come as standard, and there are other nice touches too that you do not get in SL (but I won't spoil it for you, I will leave you to discover these for yourself)

Rock

OK, I stand corrected. I'd read that it there were ways to connect to grids but it was complex and unreliable. maybe things have progressed.

Attachments now seem to work properly in Open Life, even multi-prim ones. They also work on Central Grid. Whether they work properly in the latest standalone downloads I don't know. But you need to make your own attachments or anything else. All you get in the standalone are some quite good textures in your library - the rest is up to you!

Here is a view from my standalone, the causeway across to a small islet from the main island.

sign me up for one please.

/me signs and goes back to working to pay the bills

Oh sweet! I had heard about this before but forgot all about it - Gonna check it out tonight, lol.

I'd love to learn how to Terraform and all that other good stuff

Yes Conifer, there are now many grids to connect to, the biggest is OSGrid, but they all have something to offer, and once you have set up the shortcuts on your desktop you can go grid-hopping to see which grid suits you best.

A list of currently available grids can be found here:

http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Grid_List

One of the big benefits of a standalone is that if you have a few close fiends in SL, or an RP community, you can recreate your SL sim in standalone mode (and expand it to however many sims you like), then invite your friends to log in if SL ever goes down or gets too laggy to enjoy.

Rock