I am looking into connecting Dankoville to Atek Grid for testing. Will post news here once we are online.
Tech issues have been resolved and I'm ready to move forward but in the interim, the grid I had connected Dankoville to, Tangle OS, has been replaced by a new grid called Atek Grid.
I am looking into connecting Dankoville to Atek Grid for testing. Will post news here once we are online.
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Unfortunately, computer issues have hit me again. Dankoville has been offline for several days as efforts to resolve the trouble have been going on.
All of my other virtual world projects and related writing projects are on hold until we get things fixed. I'm working on my backup machine in the meantime but my virtual activities are limited. On Thursday, I'll be testing one last possible fix. If that one fails, I'll have to send it out to the fix-it shop. Of course, my Kitely regions are online as is the Storytellers Pub in Winterfell Laudanum on SL, where you will find me throwing them back and swearing off technology forever. Yup, I'm with ya. I'm lookin' at that headline and I'm saying, "What the hell is that?"
When we last left our hero - that would be me - it was the end of August and he was shutting down Dankoville grid to tend to a very busy RL in the month of September and a tad beyond. He was leaving all thoughts of how to proceed with his little piece of the Metaverse until after this busy period. Well, dear friends, about a week ago he...err, me...I finally had time to sit down and think about my options. In fact, a couple of new options came into the picture during my hiatus. A couple nights ago, with appropriate beverages assembled, I reviewed the notes I had made in thinking through and researching the various options over the past week. And this was the conclusion I came to: I dunno. (Yes, as regular readers know, this is a familiar place for me to be.) The sheer number of options and their various pros and cons are rather overwhelming. And so I pushed aside thoughts of solving the big puzzle, finding the long-term answers and decided to focus on this one chunk: What do I have to do in order to have fun right now? This limited the options to just a few. I randomly grabbed one and pursued it very briefly. I saw a potential dead end ahead - maybe not, I could return to this at a later date - but I was not in the mood for any roadblocks. I was in the mood for fun. I could easily have just put the matter of Dankoville's future aside for awhile - well, maybe not so easily...but I could if I had to - and just pursued other projects for now. I have my hands full with projects, in fact. But there was one more option to consider before I did that. I took a shot at it without a lot of preparation just to see if it would work. It did. I have uploaded Dankoville to the new Tangle OS grid. Not to be confused with Tangle grid. Which is run by the same people. Confused? I had not thought about connecting my mini-grid to an actual grid until very recently. It's interesting. I run the regions from home and Tangle OS handles the rest - accounts, groups, inventory, etc. As I'm in the mood to deal with less business and more art right now, that kinda fits. Nothing new about this type of operation, just that I hadn't tried it and Tangle OS is new at it too. So I've set up operations there and run a day of tests. And now I'm inviting my friends over. That would be you. :) Before you go, as they say, there is one known issue so far that I should mention -- sometimes it takes a minute to TP. I mean that literally. One minute. A little over a minute actually. About 1:10 or so. You expect it to time out and you're gonna crash but you never do! Well, almost never. You just have to wait. Go get a refill and when you're back, you're there! It's amazing really. LOL. Again, this is only sometimes. Other times you're whippin' around there instantaneously. That wicked fast VarRegion flavor of TP. Really. I don't have any answers yet, still gathering info about this and taking notes. I wouldn't normally mention it before mentioning it to the grid owners - if that becomes necessary - but since I'm asking you to visit, I thought I should warn you. But seriously, the TP goes through almost every time! Just be patient. I have three regions on Tangle OS. One is DankoLand Sandbox. Don't go there! It's open to group members only and trying to TP there will just get you all messed up. Then you may very well crash. Your own damn fault, I warned ya! Whippersnapper. Lemme see here...lemme fish out some HG addresses so you can do a fly-by... The main region, sort of my Mainland is Dankoville. It's a 1024x1024 VarRegion. That's like a 4x4 or 16 standard-size regions. It should be as easy as jumping here: http://tanglegrid.net:8102/ dankoville Should be that's it, you're there. No reason to read further. Or not. If you can't get here from there - wherever "there" may be, you can try jumping to the nearby Dankoville Transfer Station (I stole the name from Kitely!) to get yourself into the neighborhood. http://tanglegrid.net:8102/ dankoville transfer station When you get to the Dankoville Transfer Station, there's a sign with a Landmark Giver. You can use that LM or type Dankoville into your World Map or double click on the World Map or make up your own way. Some work better than others. Yes the above addresses are written correctly. I just can't get wordpress to display them properly. Yes, there's a space after the slash. No, you don't click on them here silly, you copy & paste the entire address whether wordpress lights it up or not and you put that in your World Map's search box in your virtual world viewer. Now if you strike out on both of those, you could try the main Welcome Area of Tangle OS grid and then type Dankoville into your World Map search box and come over that way. http://tanglegrid.net:8102 Tangle OS is located way down in the 1000,1000 locale of a hypergrid near you, so some of you might hit the old 4096 bug. That means you don't get a non-stop flight. You might try going first to Shaun Emerald's gift to the Metaverse, the Sanctuary Eld hyperport, and then jumping to Dankoville from there. http://sanctuary.homelinux.org:8012 But try to remember you're on the way to Dankoville and don't be stoppin' off, looking all around Shaun's excellent grid. No, get on over to Dankoville. Pronto! You can always go back to Shaun's grid later. You'd better! cross-posted from Journey To The Center Of the Metaverse posted this today on the Kitely forms...
My OpenSim mini-grid Dankoville has "Closed for Renovations." I hope to be self-hosting it again when a new and expanded version of the grid is ready. I'm working on the new grid in SoaS and will be for a few weeks. During that time, I'm holding an Open House here on Kitely - a preview version of the new Dankoville is now open to all Kitely accounts and HG visitors. I use Dankoville as a story setting in my writing. It's meant to be a depiction of a small town somewhere in the Corn Belt of the United States. The Chamber of Commerce brags that Dankoville is "the third largest town in Strange County" after the small cities of New Teasdale and Stevenson. Most of the rest of the area is farmland. It's really a quiet town, off the beaten path, really not notable for much of anything. Well, other than that family of time travellers that lives on a farm a few miles outside of town. The sim is 16 regions and it's very obviously "under construction" but there is plenty there to make it a good stop for explorers or anyone who wants to hang out or RP in a "small town life" setting. Here's the world page for Dankoville on Kitely... http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world/Danko-Whitfield/Dankoville (Cross-posted from my blog, Journey To The Center Of The Metaverse)
At the end of July and again in early August, I spent a few days running tests related to my personal mini-grid, Dankoville. It currently runs on OpenSim 0.7.5, powered by New World Studio. My license to use the NWS software runs out early next month and I'm not inclined to renew it. I had previously tried to upgrade to OpenSim 0.8 with the Diva Distro package. However, I remain stuck on Step 1 - configure MySQL. I can't. End of story. Then along came something called ArribaSim, another distribution of the OpenSimulator program. I was able to use Arriba offline a la Sim-on-a-Stick. This was helpful in testing other aspects of upgrading to 0.8. I did not make an attempt to connect Arriba to the hypergrid because the one set of instructions I found (in German) appeared to have a mistake in them. I know Arriba works as I have been inworld on both OSgrid and Metropolis on regions powered by Arriba. If I read German or had more tech knowledge, I could figure it out. But trying and failing would result in new problems for the grid, and I had no interest in that. As I said a couple months back to a relative - I'm weird enough to be a geek, I'm just not smart enough. He had a laugh at that partly because it was meant as a compliment to his intelligence. He works in the software industry. Some sort of whiz kid. And he's offered to help me out with my software problems. Problem is, he lives in another state. We may still do this in person or maybe by phone but for now, he's going to try and do the setup on his own machine so he can then advise me. So probably in the next few weeks, as RL allows, we'll get this done. I have been giving thought to setting up Dankoville both in 0.8 and in 0.7.6 so I can fallback one version if that seems to be the better way to go for now. However, the latest release, 0.8.0.1 has fixes, including for one of the biggest complaints I've seen about 0.8 - "the attachments bug" - the one where your shoes or belt or hair might not show up where you do. Or they might show up twice. In addition to trying to figure out exactly what to do next - once I'm able - I've also had a lot of creative questions to deal with regarding Dankoville. The biggest one was "fitting" Dankoville into a varregion. Varregions - variable sized regions - have to be square (kinda makes the name sound contradictory). My 12-region Mainland on Dankoville is not a square. It could fit into a 1024x1024 varregion - the size of an old 4x4 or 16 standard regions - but obviously there would be additional space on the new grid. There was also the consideration that the southwest corner is the default arrival point in a varregion just as it is in a mega-region. But the Dankoville grid is not run as a mega and the main arrival point, the town of Dankoville, is not in the southwest corner. Although, it is supposed to be easy to change the arrival point, I know firsthand that it doesn't always work the way it's supposed to. Rather than continue to swim against the tide on this question, I made a major creative decision. Even though I did not want to do it, it seemed a good idea in the long run and also better to do it now than later. So, I changed my map, the layout of my regions. I put the town of Dankoville in the southwest corner so no matter what I do with it now - varregion, mega-region, individual standard regions, hosting it on someone else's grid...whatever...a visitor will land in the middle of the southwest corner and the town is now set around that idea. And yet, I did this without changing the town. Instead, I just turned it to face the opposite way. No rebuilding required. Just one command line in the console. This is a cool new OpenSim feature. In OpenSim 0.8 varregion mode, I could take the town of Dankoville and rotate it 180 degrees. And do the same with some adjoining towns. I even took a mountain that I liked from a region I was going to eliminate and put that mountain in the southern part of the Dankoville region...so that the view from the middle of town was exactly the same as before, though when you looked at the mountains you were now looking south instead of north. But now it felt a bit different, a feeling I liked very much. It reminded me of an RL place I've visited, a small city in the shadow of a mountain. So then I did make a couple changes, inspired by this new element in "the atmosphere." Then the new version of SoaS came out with 0.8 and varregions. Since then I've done all inworld work on Dankoville in SoaS. However, none of these changes have been uploaded to the live grid. It's still humming along with the old map configuration in 0.7.5. But with that New World Studio license about to expire, I have to do something if I want to keep Dankoville open while I'm trying to complete the upgrade to 0.8 ...or even the fallback position, 0.7.6. So, although this is not definite yet, here's my thinking for the short term... Sometime this week or next, I'll be turning off the current Dankoville grid, most likely for all time. Before the end of September, I hope to bring the new version of Dankoville online - whatever OpenSim version and distro I decide to go with but definitely with the new map and layout. In the interim, I will be doing the inworld creative work in SoaS. There are four new regions on the grid and seven of the twelve old regions now face the opposite direction. So there is all kinds of work to do. Just one example of work made necessary by these changes - once I turned regions around, all of the road signs were wrong - the ones that said Route 22 West had to say Route 22 East and vice versa. And with new regions and some old regions turned or even moved, I had to create an almost entirely new road system. Dankoville grid was already a work in progress but now there is more work to do than before. But that's great! And it leads to more (and new) story possibilities. But all this does mean that Dankoville would not be online at all for awhile. Except that I don't like the idea. So I am seriously considering moving it to Kitely for the interim period until I'm ready to power up the new setup on my own. In fact, I have just loaded it to Kitely as a 16-region non-mega. I need to check it out thoroughly and see how much work would be involved in opening it to the public on Kitely. I already know, for example, that I will have to redo all my Landmarks, Notecards and Givers in the Dankoville Information Center - which is now your arrival point. The question is: do I want to do that - and do other updates around the 16 regions - just to optimize it for Kitely for a few weeks use...before I move it to its own new place on the grid and then have to update all those same things again. So it's not open on Kitely right now and I'm not sure if it will be but I will certainly announce it widely if I do open it up there. If so, it will be open to all types of accounts as well as HG visitors. I definitely see promotional value in having it open on Kitely for awhile before moving it to its new home on the grid...so that might be a consideration in whether it's worth it to do the customization work I mentioned. And, if I may borrow a phrase, that's the news from Dankoville, my home town. Stay tuned to this page for updates. In order to bring about the changes discussed here previously, I have to do some testing that requires me to take the grid offline. As you can see in the Trouble Report on the Grid Status page, I recently took the grid down to test the new ArribaSim distro. That testing was sucessful but there are a few more tests to run and so, over the next several days, the grid may be down at times. These outages will likely last a few hours each.
You can always check the Grid Status page on this site. I also announce planned outages on my Google+ page. Changes are coming to Dankoville grid. Both the layout and the purpose of the grid will be affected.
The layout aspect has to do with the recent release of OpenSim 0.8. I would like to upgrade but have had trouble configuring the software. I may be receiving some expert help soon. If we get it running, I plan to do some testing with variable regions. That may lead to changes to the World Map. If I decide after testing, not to go with variable regions, there still may be changes to the World Map. I have been working on a few new regions in SoaS that I may upload to Dankoville regardless of the outcome of my tests with 0.8 and var regions. As a writer, the purpose of the grid originally was as a setting for some of my stories. However, others became interested in Dankoville as a setting for story as well and we are at the early stages of building a roleplay community here. This is something that evolved unexpectedly and recently we've been taking steps to bring that altogether and actively seek others to join us. So a re-purposing of the grid is in order. There are other changes too that are unrelated to the above - new buildings, new areas. I'll keep you posted here and elsewhere on our progress. In the meantime, we're open to visitors via the hypergrid. Please accept this invitation to visit Dankoville. 198.255.235.132:9000:Dankoville The main purpose of the Dankoville grid is to serve as locations or scenes for my character's stories. As he is a time traveller, some of the regions represented time periods and styles such as Medieval or Victorian or the Old West.
When the grid started last fall, it had 17 regions. Then it was offline for three months. When it came back in February, I experimented with adding more regions and settled on 25. The grid has been operating smoothly but I've known all along that 25 regions was pushing it - this is not actually a grid, it's a standalone. I was curious to see how OpenSim would handle things as more prims and scripts, etc. were added to the mix. And I was ready to resize the grid if necessary, no bother really. However, my need for 25 regions or for multiple time period themes actually vanished on January 1st when I upgraded my plan on the Kitely grid to take advantage of a special grandfathered offer they had at the time. I went from having four regions on Kitely last year, to having thirty now. With 30 regions on Kitely and 25 on Dankoville, I'm a regular OpenSim land baron! But I don't really NEED all that land. As my story writing and story building has continued, I've been making some new places on Kitely using my new regions. I have several projects underway there and enough regions for more. And I am able to expand on some of the themes that were represented on the Dankoville grid. Because of this - and because Kitely is soon to enable Hypergrid - I've decided to reduce the size of my grid and focus it exclusively on the main theme - a 21st century farming area with a couple of central towns...that also lends itself to stories that take place in the late 20th century. All other time periods/themes have been moved to Kitely. (Those regions will open to the public over the course of this year.) That leaves my standalone mini-grid with 14 regions for now. Twelve of these regions are open to the public for exploring, roleplay or just hanging out. These regions form the mainland while two sandboxes regions are offshore for group members only. The position of the regions on the map have not been changed, other regions were simply removed. I'll be updating other pages on this website to reflect the new line-up. No longer am I alone in telling stories from Dankoville.
An unexpected and wonderful thing has happened on my grid. A friend, virtual world enthusiast and fellow writer whom I regularly talk writing with and have RP'd with, has created an avatar in my little world and started a whole new story. And therefore, become part of my story as well. My friend is Jamie Wright, who among other things is the leader and host for a long-running and vibrant Harry Potter-inspired roleplay group on the Metropolis grid in the Augurey Peak regions. Now Jamie has set up shop in Dankoville. Literally. She has brought her writing (and building) talent to town in the form of Audrey Moore, the new owner of The Dreaming Tree book store. Audrey's story starts here... The Dreaming Tree: The Story of Audrey Moore Things have been running well since Dankoville was returned to the grid and re-opened to HG two-and-a-half weeks ago.
There have been a few crashes. About four, depending how you count them. The longest was a few hours as it happened during my night. Others were about 30 minutes and 90 minutes in length. And the fourth, a period of about five hours in which the grid acted funky in several ways, including a couple of crashes (which only lasted a couple minutes each time as I was inworld when they happened). The causes? No common or apparent or repeat theme/problem. Which is good news and bad, lol. With the above exceptions, the grid has been running 24/7. The only problems I know of are the ones I have encountered firsthand. I would love to hear from visitors who have any trouble. You can reach me via Google+ or Facebook or at: danko AT usa DOT com Or by commenting on this or any of my various blogs around the web. Last fall, I had the grid online for several weeks before my PC had unrelated troubles. Again,. "the grid" is actually a standalone. At that time, I was running 17 regions on a five-year old PC. Now I am running 25 regions on a brand new PC. Otherwise, there is little difference in the operation. It seems to be running smoothly now with the above noted exceptions...but last fall, it ran completely without incident. I would say it ran better then, than now. Is that because of the additional eight regions? Maybe. Maybe not. I did try in my testing last month to increase the grid to 38 regions. It crashed three times in one day during the uploading of large OARs. I could have investigated and tested further to see if a standalone on this PC can work at that size...but my reasons for considering that many regions had actually become moot, I was just trying it for the heck of it! So I just lopped off a bunch of regions and tried again at 25. It's running fine so I'm going to stay with that number for now. If things change, I will simply eliminate a few more regions as 25 is still more than I need. But again, what the heck? I know 17 regions worked well, I'm just testing it at 25 for now. :) Last fall I had four regions on Kitely, now I have 30. So the final number of regions on Dankoville doesn't matter to me. I just want as many as I can get without causing poor performance. |
AuthorDanko Whitfield, writer - explorer of virtual worlds, has his own little world now. Archives
August 2021
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