Revirtualizing

Man, I don’t even know where to begin.

Dankoville went online in September of 2013. It was a complete surprise to me that I could run my own virtual world on my PC. It was great, I was having a ball.

In October, the PC broke. It was in the middle of some very busy and difficult RL times. The laptop, a Mac, was pressed into service. But I couldn’t run Dankoville on it. Or Sim-on-a-Stick. Everything was put on hold. Getting the PC sorted was one of those, “after the holidays” things.

In late January, the new PC arrived. Dankoville was back and virtual life was good.

By April, I realized that I was going to have to figure out some other way to upgrade to OpenSim 0.8 because the system I was using to run 0.7.5, New World Studio, was apparently never going to be updated again.

In May 2014, I began jumping through various hoops to try to get OpenSim 0.8 running on my PC. But I’m not tech savvy. And when things don’t go the way the walkthrough says they’re supposed to, I’m dead.

Dankoville had started out as a very small project. One region. Then four. But I added more because I could. And now it was big enough that not running it myself was out of the question. It would be too expensive to run 12 to 14 regions with a hosting company or renting directly from the grid.

I looked at connecting Dankoville to a grid and just running the regions myself but it was bigger than what most grids allowed. In the fall, a couple new grids came along that didn’t have such restrictions. I tried Tangle OS, Atek and WestWorld. None of that worked out. In late-February 2015, I put out the word I was looking for a new home for Dankoville.

A few days later, we reopened, connected to Naras Nook. We’re almost two months in and things have worked out well. It’s been a lot of work to get moved and resettled. I also downsized the sim from the 1024 varregion it had become (the size of a standard 4×4 or 16 regions) to a 768 var (3×3, 9) and that took a lot of work. And then we had a big story project right off, that kept me busy.

So now, here I am. I have finally arrived at that, “Now, where was I?” moment. It’s the first time in almost a year I can say, “Okay, now what would I like to do next?”

During that year, some things got done, others were neglected. New ideas came along and the magic of others faded. But there are many projects in front of me, more than enough to choose from. This week, with the dust of the past year settled, I could finally see clear to make those choices.

I have several on-going writing projects related to virtual worlds and two others waiting in the wings, impatiently. And I’m about to enter the world of self-publishing ebooks. Reorganizing my blogs and websites to fit my current needs is also in order and I’ve been working on that these past few days.

The biggest change I’m making is restructuring my land holdings. Dankoville is my main inworld focus these days as well as a prime source of story material. It is my base in OpenSim and I don’t really need any other. So I have closed my worlds on Kitely and moved to a basic account. My Second Life base remains my pub in Winterfell. I have a little office and sitting room in the sky above it. And I recently acquired a little piece of Mainland for my story characters to have a place to Set Home.

One place I had on Kitely but never opened to the public, that I see as a future story setting, will be moved to Sim-on-a-Stick. I have already created two other worlds in SoaS that I have been writing about. One of them is 52 regions big (thirteen 512 varregions), too big to ever come online. But it doesn’t matter. I can go there whenever I want and I can use it for story settings.

I’m planning to use this blog to write about these projects as I go. In my next installment, I’ll give you a description of the projects I referred to here and tell you more about how I use them in my writing.