By Avatar : JayR Cela :
The first of 4 seperate Grid presentations to the residents of the soon to be closed 3rd Rock Grid. : a continuation of, “My Virtual Life After 3rd Rock Grid’s Closure” : May 20 2024
On April 6 2024, we had the pleasure of a presentation by Lone Wolf of ‘Wolf Territories Grid’, and it was impressive, he explained some of the history and expansion, also some unique features and technologies used, server locations, technical staff ect...
: Lone Wolf : "Thanks so much everyone for inviting me, so let's start with a bit of history....
Wolf grid was actually started as 3 low prim sims on second life doing a wild west role play - we outgrew that, then we grid hopped getting bigger each time and eventually moved to our own grid. We went from a few servers to a full hyper-converged cluster, which is what we have now, with over 28000 second life equivalent regions, and 5400 or so visitors to our grid each month, which is growing daily.
About our tech - so this might not mean a lot...... Our servers are all based in a data center in Frankfurt in Germany. The servers and cluster was built by 2 experts in the field, who actually work with the grid - one of them works in the data center. Our grid has a lot of features you won't find on other grids, but one of our main features is how it deals with issues. On Wednesday one of our servers died and the other servers took over running the things that were running on that server, keeping us up and running - so that's what having a hyper-converged infrastructure is about for users. We have a powerful control panel, that includes everything from renaming your region, to our terrain generator that can create a random terrain for your region.
Our staff : we have 3 tech guys: Myself - I've been a programmer since I was 15, I have a high functioning autism; Busty who works in the data center in Frankfurt; and Daja who manages the day to day running of the servers - although 999% of it is completely automated. We have 3 grid admins including myself who provide oversight and 32 volunteer peacekeepers, who are always available to help someone who needs it, plus of course Bobby our AI who knows all about everything.
The grid is made up of a lot of communities, some from different countries, some based on other things. We have 2 universities using our grid, who have moved from Second Life - the University of Texas working on climate change, and the University of Colorado who are just getting things together ! We also have a number of charities, including the VWEC group - Virtual Worlds Education Consortium and a charity that helps people with disabilities access virtual worlds - so we're really busy with both of them. We have a motto on this grid "Don't dominate, facilitate" - so we're here to make people's dreams come true! We have some incredible builds as well, from Luxor through to Jimmy Olsen's Europa. I've listed 6 here but obviously the size of the grid means we have a *LOT* of things to visit.
More about the features : So we have a pretty extensive control panel for users and also regions. There is a video on my YouTube to demonstrate it, you can see the AI terrain generator, we have this live streaming facility you can stream anything on your computer in-world. So for instance, you could share a movie with some friends, demonstrate how to use blender, all in-world. We also have tidal water, so our water goes from 18.5 meters to 20 meters, you can turn this off in the control panel. It means you can build a beach and it works, the tide goes in and out, you could have a road that goes under water when the tide is in. We have a network of star-gates that you can add your regions to by using the control panel, an easy to use events system, a marketplace that can import the products from your region - you just fill in the blanks. We own our own mastodon social networking site, www.opensimsocial.com, and of course Bobby AI integrated into the grid is Bobby who knows a lot about everything, he can write scripts,write a poem, translate it into Chinese,he can tell you where the popular places are right now, etc...
In terms of what we could offer you if you feel that this is a good fit :-) We as a grid would like to gift you a 4x4 region with 1.2 million prims for you to set up a Welcome area. We want to offer you free prim bonuses, so if you rent a basic region say with 20k prims we'll boost it up to 50k to support in moving over, like we've done with a few other grids that became part of us, but maintaining their own identity. So if you wish we would create an area and put your regions there and link them with ocean regions. The whole grid is joined by ocean regions, which means you can sail from one end to another, but it takes hours.
We hope that you find the right place to move to and we just want to help in any way we can. We have something pretty unique in terms of what we are doing and becoming part of that journey is really exciting! Oh and this is a community run grid as well, so we have a once monthly community meeting (it's tomorrow @ 11am ) that anyone is welcome to, where we share ideas and some of our best developments have come from there."
It was at this point into the meeting I had a 90% chance of moving to WTG regardless, and Lone Wolf's presentation impressed me, I think the other 3RG residents attending the meeting were as well. David thanked Lone Wolf for a very interesting and informative presentation and invited questions, which Lone.Wolf answered as follows :-
Slash asked about "Prices".
Lone.Wolf : "All our regions are 1024x1024 4x4, we can do 8x8 and 12x12 on request. For 20000 prims its £20 uk about $24 a month, 50000 £40 uk about $54 a month, 1.2 million prims £60 or $74 i think a month. But as a special offer, we will upgrade you from the one you purchase, so if you buy a 20k region we'll upgrade it to 50k till the end of April :-) The grid will instantly build your region and then we can find a place for you if you would like it moved".
JayR asked "Earlier today you and I discussed your ability to migrate an existing region from 3RG even if it was smaller than a 4x4 and make it all work / can you explain this please ?"
Lone.Wolf : "if you have a region say its smaller than a 4x4 we can load the oar anywhere into the 4x4 - in fact you can use our control panel to load the oars yourself and merge them. We're here to help you with whatever you need". JayR then asked "Please explain the ability to seamlessly traverse the grid".
Lone.Wolf : "We do have region crossings like any grid, however because we own our own local network in the data centre, they are very fast, when you cross a region crossing you are moving from one server to another so 2 things are important - database latency and network speed so that's all very highly tuned".
Prim asked "Thank you for giving us your presentation, I've visited WTG a number of times and the tech is mind blowingly fantastic... However, my question is more about administration... Is there any sort of succession plan if anything were to happen to you? I ask because our previous system admin passed away, leading to this need".
Lone.Wolf : "Yes. In fact we have a full disaster recovery plan being written right now, the other 2 techs are both qualified and able to take over the tech, and as we grow we will start employing more, with the appropriate security. This is a properly run UK Limited company and our dealings with universities etc mean we have to answer questions like that all the time !"
Dolfke asked "What is your Policy concerning IAR's pls ?"
Lone.Wolf : "IARs cause a problem because they HAMMER the region they are running on, right now we are building a new IAR loading server. So the policy is we want to help with it but we need to preserve the load on the rest of the grid, although we do have 40 robust servers lol, so we will have a dedicated region server just for loading iars that will be done probably Monday/Tuesday. OARS you can load yourself".
Dolfke added "I meant more the one time import of our IAR's from here in 3RG".
Lone.Wolf : "That's fine - that's what our new server will do".
Lannorra asked "Do your residents have land rentals?"
Lone.Wolf : "When you rent land from us you can do what you like with it, including renting out land if you wish".
Lannorra then asked "Is there any capacity to have a single sim? separate from a 4x4?"
Lone.Wolf : "We don't do 256x256's because we run each sim on its own simulator so it's not really financially worthwhile".
Thoria asked " First, what's the difference between a tech and an admin?"
Lone.Wolf : "A tech is someone who deals with the tech stuff and admins are more like the day to day running on the actual grid - people who've been with us a long time, although it's actually more about being there and assisting".
Thoria then asked "Second, what version of OpenSim are you using, how often do you upgrade, and do you have significant grid-specific modifications?"
Lone.Wolf : "We are using Open NGC 9.2.2 something, so there are a lot of fixes in it. Upgrades are seamless and we do those after a new release comes out.We are working directly with the NGC devs in fact. Plus we are also working with a new viewer build called the crystal frost viewer, which will run on linux, mac, and windows"
JayR asked "What are the major differences between the official OS core being developed mainly by uBit of OSGrid and the NGC version of OS?"
Lone.Wolf : "The NGC is a fork of the OSGRID version, which basically means the osgrid version feeds into ngc. ngc's differences are a lot to do with things like we use a much faster database driver. It's like 40% faster, so its things like that. You can read on the opensim ngc github if required. (ngc is open source)"
Thoria asked "How does your "hyperconverged" fail-over work, and what is your backup model?"
Lone.Wolf : "Basically it means we don't care where things run. We have a pile of servers and a pile of processes that are replicated across all the servers. If a server fails, it fails over backups are held in two places. Our main cluster is in Frankfurt,we have backups in Dusseldorf and of course striped across international servers using cloudflare r2 storage. Every 15 minutes the whole grid is replicated across all the servers basically".
Jedburgh asked "Do you ever do a forced failover test to confirm it is working, and do you restore from backup to confirm that the backup integrity is solid?"Lone.Wolf: "Yes. In fact the backups are held on a proxmox backup server, so it verifies the backups once a day and we do restores once a week to check everything is good, although tbh we should never need to use them because of the replication going on".
Rhia asked "What is your stance on Copybotting ?"
Lone.Wolf: "I hate it. We want to encourage creators and it's a constant discussion on how to protect IP. and not something that will be solved overnight. However we do have Luna Lunarias main store on our grid and she's doing pretty well with her amazing builds".
Dolfke asked: "Do you have a download location for your viewer pls (so we could test) ?"
Lone.Wolf: "We're sponsoring the viewer at the moment, if you sign up for the crystal frost patreon there is the occasional download, but deffo worth having a look at youtube on it you'll be blown away. https://www.patreon.com/CrystalFrostViewer : This is not the only viewer we are working with but I think it's the most promising".
Slash asked "Concerning copy bots - do you prohibit exports from your grid?"
Lone.Wolf : "No, we don't prohibit exports. HOWEVER these things are always up for discussion and part of the opensim ngc discussions are around this. I think the plan is to implement the export flag so creators can lock them down on the next release of ngc"
Rhia asked "Who are the devs for NGC ?"
Lone.Wolf : "There are quite a few https://github.com/OpenSim-NGC/OpenSim-Sasquatch its here somewhere. Mike and Balpien are involved and quite a few grid owners are involved as well".
David thanked Lone.Wolf on behalf of everyone for giving a very informative presentation and answering all the questions. Allia added her thanks to Lone.Wolf and later went on to say that the owners of 3 more major OpenSim Grids would be attending our last community meetings. If your curious to find out who they were, then...
Story to continue in : My Virtual Life after 3rd Rock Grid's Closure : part 3 next week.
JayR Cela
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