It has been officially announced today by IDCAS that they have created the worlds first ever public “OpenSim Grid Association”. The Association was formed in June 2010 as a partnership between several grids, for the purpose of achieving common goals, in terms of developing stable 3D technologies.
All member grids of the association run on the same software versions and a number of them operate using a shared user base. Individually each grid would be unable to provide their users with 24/7 maintenance although as part of the association it is now possible to provide both around the clock maintenance and support.
Several of the grids, which have similar themes to each other, operate using a hyper grid policy. Due to this they share assets on a daily basis and provide seamless baked terrains to cover their entire grids so as to prevent duplication on neighbouring regions.
Development of avatar meshes is a major project for the association members and as such the association supports the objectives of the opensim custom avatar programme. It is continually the associations aim to provide the opensim development team with improvement ideas and bugs reports so as to ensure core system development. A wide variety of grid themes are present in the association, these include commercial, non-profit and scifi gaming.
Association Partners:
1. AtMeeting Grid (grid.atmeeting.com)
2. Virtual 3D IHRI (virtual.ihri.org)
3. Education 3D Grid/Edu3DGrid (www.edu3dgrid.com)
4. IDCAS 3D Services
Useful Resources:
1. What is OpenSimulator?
2. Public Grid Associations
3. Technical Reference and Common Terms
4. Brief Description of Files
5. Coding Conventions for Developers
6. OpenSim Release Cycle
7. Database: Documentation
8. LSL Status/Functions