When you join Second Life and become a resident, you are connected literally by defualt to a vast network of regions that are only a simple search and teleport away. With OpenSim though, like myself and I suspect many others, you are likely for various reasons to remain disconnected, which is certainly the case for the college projects that we have run and for my own desktop and USB regions. And so the other day I decided to take the plunge and register an avatar with a grid. As I was not sure which of the grids to join, I first went over to the Hypergrid Business website and read through the latest statistics on region counts. With some 3440 connected regions osgrid easily came out on top, size of course isn’t everything in these things, but I felt that it would give me the chance to simply have access to plenty of regions to explore.So over I go to the osgrid website and create my self a login, in fact I then discover, and this shows how much attention I pay these things, that the necessary addresses for osgrid are already loaded into the Imprudence browser, great. I log in and arrive at a plaza area, all a bit dark really but OK I guess. There were a few friendly avatars around and I quickly strike conversations, all very nice.
One of the boards on display gave me the option to download an avatar appearance and clothes, so I took advantage of this and proceeded to find myself a small-secluded corner and set about the process of adjusting my new appearance. I immediately noticed that unlike Second Life where stripped down avatars have a certain androgynous body form, here gender becomes immediately obvious, a fact that I was made aware of by receiving a picture of myself snapped by a wander voyeur and I suspect female, good laughs all round, but I am assured not grounds for exclusion, not this time anyway.I do recommend that you keep the note-card offered on arrival as it does contains some useful hints and tips plus teleports to popular locations. I travelled around the various places on offer for some time, and all in all I enjoyed myself, so I can recommend it. If you have any stories or impressions of OpenSim grids then please feel free to comment.
Kind regards Vega
