By Avatar JayR Cela :
When it became apparent that 3rd Rock grid was going to be shutting down, and several weeks before, when we were thinking the grid was still in a salvageable state. I had reached out into the Open Sim community. I was surprised at first to the response I got. So many people ( grid owners ) offered to help out, actually to many too list here, and believe me when I say thank you to everyone that did offer support. This brings me my meeting Lone Wolf, the owner of WolfGrid Territories Grid, ( WTG ) we ended up having several chats and a couple of voice discussions and I was impressed, adding to this, I had already met and was friends with one of the Admins, she had been telling about this grid for a few months, I was impressed. This grid was cutting edge, and I wanted to check it out.
So far the experience has been really positive. Not to mention the incredible 2 regions for the cost of 1 deal that had already been negotiated between 3rd Rock and Wolf, and was turned down, so I lucked out. I now have 2 joined 4x4 regions devoted as a parks & recreation area all for the price of one.
I'll be honest with you. There have been some glitches along the way, and and my regions disappearing unexpectedly, this is a cutting edge grid, but I have to tell ya, and this is no bull-crap, this grid "self heals" itself, at least most of the time, and that is the only simple explanation I can come up with. If one of my regions acts up, I just log off for a bit and come back, and everything is fine. The few times my regions have totally crashed, it was taken care of promptly.
Also the server load balancing technology Lone Wolf ( I will refer to him as "Wolf" from here on ) has been employing and continuously fine tweaking recently is amazing.
There are other things I am amazed by since I became a resident here. Once I settled in, I had originally thought that the grid wise "Tidal System" or the rising and lowering of the water levels as the natural tide shifts would be an amazing thing to work with, and boy I was wrong, I did not like it, at least in my particular use case. After 2 months of testing my boats and attempting to landscape the water front, I determined that the,"Tidal System" was not going to work for my purposes. I expressed this observation while attending one of my first monthly meetings in Wolf Territories Grid ("WTG") and a few days later Wolf had set up an entire area of his grid devoted to non-tidal regions. I have to say that this was mindbogglingly to me, the rapid response time was amazing, and it does not stop there. It seems to me that if you make a reasonable request for a feature or anything to Wolf, he investigates it and if a solution is possible he implements it and requests feedback. The more I got to know Wolf, he began asking me for more feedback on how things were working out. I do have a basic ,working knowledge of computer networks from years past and. Wolf knows this and he actually asks me for opinions or feedback, so I keep giving it to him. In my mind this is a really good reason to be a part of this grid. This man actually listens to you, and is really into tweaking the system. Be forewarned "Cutting Edge" technology can or sometimes break unexpectedly, but the grid self heals. This in itself just blows my mind.
My OpenSim hobby is high performance power sports, until recently I have focused on speed boat racers, I am also now working with land based vehicles and the ubODE physics engine. There are several things that interest me the most, the #1 is high speed region crossing, #2 is entering the next region graphics draw in distance lag time ( how long does it take to draw the new region into your viewer ) this is in my mind is extremely important for multi region crossings. ( a lot of this also has to do with your hardware ) I will make a long story short here, after a visit to one my of my regions regions and a conversation with Wolf about my thoughts. In a mater of days he had made some adjustments to the grid and was asking for my feedback. After several back and forth chats, it's amazing. I have no hard statistics or hard numbers to back up my perceived difference in the overall performance of my vehicles. It is defiantly noticeable, depending on what needs to be rendered in the background I have seen FPS response up to 109 FPS best and a bare minimum of 27 FPS.
The goal is to provide the best possible working environment for anyone to be able to enjoy, and also very importantly full perm vehicles to share and pass around for future modifications to anyone interested. So I was expressing to him my observations related to region crossings and draw distance. I'll be dam if a few days later he was telling me about some adjustments he was currently testing on the grids most recent load balancing adjustments he was experimenting with. I don't know about you, but for me this is fantastic. Wolf actually cares about what I or "YOU" or anyone is trying to accomplish here on WTG, this goes back to his "Facilitate not Dictate" philosophy for running the grid.
I really like this approach, I also like the constant tweaking or fine tuning going on in the background and being asked for my feedback. A few crashes here and there is OK, when you consider the reasonable amount of region tools available via your web browser. This is a new to me concept, I am unaware of other grids currently offering this ease of use option to managing your regions. I am sure there are others.
Coming up the next time I am able to post, I will have some pictures to show off.
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