Dereos

HG Login: dereos.org:80

 

SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENT

The Dereos Grid is a leisure project without any commercial or financial background. All components of the Grid are financed by its members and operated in their spare time.

Even so, it makes sense to put a few things in writing. As nobody in the group has a legal background, there is no guarantee that this “SLA” would hold up in court.

 

Grid Server

  • The Grid Server runs on the phpGridServer software developed by Freaky Tech.
  • The Grid Server is a dedicated server rented from Hetzner. It runs the phpGridServer software as well as the content management system (CMS) concrete5, plus the necessary monitoring tools.
  • The Grid Server is maintained by Akira Sonoda. Maintaining it is a spare-time project. Should that no longer be possible, the core team is to be informed in good time so that a smooth handover to a successor can be arranged.
  • The hardware is funded on a voluntary basis. This voluntary support can be terminated with three months’ notice. Termination is done by informing the core team, either inworld, by mail or in writing.
  • The software in use is not free of defects. Naturally the aim is to fix software defects as quickly as possible. Consequential problems arising from software defects will be dealt with where possible, but without any guarantee. The Grid maintainer’s judgement of what is feasible is the measure of things.
  • The aim is availability 7x24 hours. No availability is guaranteed. Outages are fixed as quickly as possible (best effort), but this may well drag on for days, weeks or months, up to and including total failure. The same applies to partial outages, which are often caused by software defects.
  • Safeguards such as database replication are in place. No guarantee against data loss is given. Region Server administrators are themselves responsible for backing up their data, using techniques such as regular IAR/OAR backups.
  • No response times are guaranteed.
  • The operator of the Grid Server is not responsible for the content held on the inventory server and in particular on the asset server (see Copyright, Prohibited Content).
  • The operator of the Grid Server has tools to keep inventory contents consistent and to avoid problems. There is, however, no obligation to guarantee full consistency.
  • Access to the Grid is granted on recommendation and has to be granted explicitly. This applies to Region Servers and avatars alike. Access once granted can also be withdrawn again in consultation with the core team.
  • There is no age verification for access to the Grid (neither for residents nor for Hypergrid travellers).

Region Server

  • Operating the Region Servers is the responsibility of the Region Server administrators.
  • Commercial use of the Region Servers is permitted (renting out regions and parcels for a fee).
  • The Grid’s SLA must be made known to tenants.
  • For managed servers (commercial and non-commercial) the Region Server administrator is responsible for securing data by means of regular backups. The backups are to be made available to the sim owners on request.
  • Region Server administrators may be asked to provide logging information to the Grid administrator for troubleshooting. This has to happen in a secure manner, by encrypting either the files or the transport.

Copyright, Content

  • The Grid operator, and in the case of managed Region Servers the respective administrators, are not responsible for the content presented on the regions concerned.
  • German law applies.
  • Content that can be copied (made available through vendors) should be placed under a suitable free licence.
  • Responsibility for the content of a region lies with the owner or the tenant of that region.
  • The Dereos Grid is a multinational Grid and subscribes to the unspoken code of political neutrality shared by all Grids, closed or open. Extreme political statements, attacks or displays of political opinion, of whatever kind and whatever direction, are unwelcome inworld. Please simply leave political activity in real life! We appeal to all friends of virtual worlds to stay politically neutral inworld, and you are always warmly welcome.
  • Regions are to be classified according to their content. The owner of the region is responsible for the content and for classifying it correctly. Content that is not rezzed cannot and will not be checked by the Grid/Region Server administrators. The following content ratings apply:
    • General (anything that could also be shown in a primary school)
    • Moderate (shopping, bars, dancing, galleries, events)
    • Adult (sexually explicit, depictions of violence etc.)

 

 

FOR A BETTER UNDERSTANDING, SOME DEFINITIONS FOLLOW:

AVATAR

The avatar is the three-dimensional representation of a user of the viewer software. Avatars typically have a human shape, but there are no limits to the imagination – an avatar can just as well take the form of a penguin, for example. An avatar presents itself under a freely chosen name. To log into the Grid, the avatar’s name and a matching password are all that is needed. Beyond that, the user of the viewer software remains anonymous towards the Grid. An e-mail address is welcome at registration (so that we can get in touch if there are problems), but it is not mandatory.

VIEWER SOFTWARE

Logging into a Grid requires a special piece of software, referred to below as the “viewer”. The viewer implements the protocol for three-dimensional worlds released by Linden Lab, which is also used in Second Life. In addition to the Linden Lab protocol there is, among others, the Hypergrid protocol, which lets an avatar visit a wide range of different grids. Many different viewer implementations exist. In theory the application servers of the Dereos Grid support all of them.

For the best compatibility with the Arriba Sim and other sim versions in the Hypergrid, we recommend the current Cool VL Viewer. It supports up-to-date features and, unlike most other viewers, is backwards compatible, so that all features are still supported on older sim versions (EEP and Windlight, for example).

A 64 bit operating system is required, however.

Download links for the installation files:

Cool VL Viewer - Linux 64 (scroll down)

Cool VL Viewer - Windows 64 bit (scroll down)

Using other viewer versions is at your own risk. Should a viewer implementation persistently impair the operation of the Grid, the Grid Server and/or Region Server administrators are entitled to block that viewer (its connection attempts will be refused).

GRID

In the context of Arriba OpenSimulator, a grid is a collection of application servers which provide different functions and have to work together closely. Two types of application server are indispensable in a grid: the Grid Server and the Region Server.

GRID SERVER

The Grid Server has mainly the following tasks:

  • Resident management. A resident of the grid is represented in the grid by an avatar. A grid may, however, also be visited by Hypergrid travellers, who likewise appear as avatars. Those are not residents and are accordingly not managed by the Grid Servers.
  • Inventory management. Every resident of the Dereos Grid has an inventory. All manner of things (assets) are stored in an ordered fashion in that inventory. Inventory management is responsible for keeping the inventories permanently available. The inventories themselves are edited by the respective residents of the grid. The inventories of Hypergrid travellers are not managed by the inventory management of the Dereos Grid, but by that of their respective home grid.
  • Asset management. The smallest unit of an object is the asset. An asset can be a texture, a piece of clothing, a script and so on. Assets in turn may be composed of several assets. Within the grid, assets are managed centrally on the asset server. Assets have a creator, an owner and, where applicable, a group affiliation. The creator of an asset may well be a resident of another grid, and the same goes for the owner. Assets belonging to travellers can be handed over to residents of the Dereos Grid, and conversely Hypergrid travellers can acquire objects from the Dereos Grid (shopping), just as residents of the Dereos Grid typically go "shopping" in other grids as well. When inventory is exchanged between Hypergrid travellers and residents or vendors in the Dereos Grid, the objects are physically exchanged with the corresponding inventory and asset servers. The Dereos Grid has no export restrictions in place.

A wide range of Grid Server implementations exists. The most widespread is the R.O.B.U.S.T software of the OpenSimulator project. The Dereos Grid, however, uses the phpGridServer software.

REGION SERVER

The Region Server software of the Dereos Grid is largely based on the software of the Arriba project by Freaky Tech, which was further developed and brought up to date by Akira Sonoda at the end of 2022. The Grid Server software in use does allow other implementations as well. Residents and server administrators are nevertheless asked to use the Arriba software to run their Region Servers. Plain (vanilla) OpenSimulator builds may also be used in the Dereos Grid, but they are not supported. Some grids also provide their Region Server administrators with pre-built packages of the OpenSimulator software. Using such packages is not permitted in the Dereos Grid. A pre-built package of the Arriba software does not currently exist for the Dereos Grid.

One or several instances of the Region Server software can be installed on a physical or virtual computer. In Arriba/OpenSim slang one often speaks of a “sim”. A Region Server can manage one or several regions. A region is a virtual 3D scene measuring 256x256 metres. On top of that there are extensions such as “mega region” or “var region” which deviate from the Linden Lab standard. Using “mega region” technology is not forbidden in the Dereos Grid, but it is discouraged, as the technology is outdated. Using “var regions” is of course permitted in the Dereos Grid.

A region can be subdivided further into parcels. This technique is often used to “rent out” parts of a region to residents. The “tenant” of a parcel or of an entire region has extended rights on that parcel – in particular the right to build on their parcel/region (within the number of prims made available) and to restrict access to their region or parcel.

Regions can be configured in a great many ways. The most significant limit, however, is the number of prims available. In theory that number has no upper bound; by default the ceiling is set to 15,000. It is the Region Server administrator’s job to decide, taking the available hardware into account, which limits apply on their regions.

PRIM

A prim (short for primitive) is the smallest building unit in the three-dimensional world of the Arriba/OpenSimulator software. Prims consist of simple shapes such as cubes, spheres, cylinders and so on. More complex primitives such as sculpties or meshes are supported as well. The shape of a sculptie is derived from the colour information of a texture; the sculptie technique makes it possible to create extremely organic-looking forms. The term “mesh” covers objects created outside the Arriba/OpenSimulator software, for example with programs such as Blender (http://www.blender.org/). Meshes can be imported using the viewer software.

Prims can additionally contain scripts, for instance to let an avatar trigger an interaction, or to animate themselves, and so on.

Every prim in a scene consumes storage space and CPU resources, particularly when the prim contains scripts. For that reason the number of prims per region / parcel is limited on the Region Server.

ARRIBA

“Arriba” is the project name of Freaky Tech’s project to optimise and improve the OpenSimulator software. The project is entirely separate from the development of the OpenSimulator software. Compatibility at protocol level with the OpenSimulator software and the corresponding viewer software is of course maintained.

At the end of 2022 Akira Sonoda further developed ArribaSim to the current 0.9 sim version. Performance is so good that the Surabaya interface for textures and inventory structures, which the original 0.8-based ArribaSim contained, has become superfluous.

Source: https://github.com/AkiraSonoda/akisim

OPENSIMULATOR SOFTWARE

OpenSimulator (http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page) or OpenSim for short, is a multi-user 3D application server capable of simulating virtual worlds similar to virtual environments such as Second Life (http://secondlife.com). Broadly speaking, the OpenSimulator software consists of two parts: the Grid Server, which in OpenSim goes by the name R.O.B.U.S.T, and the Region Server, OpenSim.exe

PHPGRIDSERVER

The phpGridServer is an implementation of the OpenSim Grid Server protocol by Freaky Tech. The Dereos Grid is the first Grid to use this software on a larger scale.

The software is open source and the repository is here: (https://github.com/ft-/phpGridServer)