Tips to improve your DigiWorldz Experience – Part 1

Here are a few considerations to help make your experience a bit more enjoyable while visiting Digiworldz, or any other OpenSim based grid.
This is part 1 in this series of tips.
We’ll add more, so stay tuned!

With a bit of knowledge under your belt, a few tweaks here and there, and the few steps you can take yourself, could prove the difference between a great experience, a good experience, and a poor experience.

Let’s first start by making sure we all understand what is going on when you are using a viewer to connect to DigiWorldz, or any other OpenSim based world.
Sorry veterans, I know this is redundant, but we may have a few new users reading this.

When you initially startup your viewer, the viewer is waiting for you to choose the world you want to connect to, allows you to specify an avatar first and last name, a password, and a starting location. Once you provide the requested information and click the login button, your viewer will attempt to connect to the specified world and will attempt to authenticate your provided avatar information. If everything proceeds as it should, your viewer will connect to the server, send the data you’ve entered and will wait for a response. If a response is received, the viewer will check to see if you’ve been successfully authenticated, and if so, will attempt to log you into the specified location.
If this location is not found, or, if this location is offline for any reason, you may be transferred to another location, then you will appear in world and your journey can begin.

Here’s where we talk about potential issues which may keep you from connecting to the world.

This ability relies on an internet connection which allows data to travel to and from your computer and the virtual world’s servers.
When you connect to the internet, you, meaning your “computer”, becomes a “node”, or location on a huge network.  In order to transfer data across this network, your data must travel to other nodes, which relay your data to other nodes, and so on, and so on, until your data reaches it’s intended target.

It’s important to know your path to a specific destination may be quite different than another user’s path to the same destination, much in the same way the path you take to the local store may be different than that of someone living across town. You both eventually get there, but you each travel along different routes, encounter different slowdowns, etc. along the way. Even if both of you are the exact same distance from the store, due to differences in your routes, you will likely arrive at different times.
So it is with transferring data across the internet.

In the store scenario, what happens if say, a water main has broken along your route? You would be re-routed around this break, likely delaying your arrival at you desired location.
So it is with the internet. Sometimes, your data is re-routed around slowdowns. In extreme cases, you may not be able to continue your travel at all until the trouble has been resolved.
The point here is that just as in real life, there are possibilities for your travel to be delayed.

So, if you are trying to login, but are not able to, the problem could be caused by many different things such as:
– Incorrect user name.
– Incorrect Password.
– Incorrect “Grid” information in your viewer settings.
– The server you are trying to connect to could be down for maintenance, or another reason.
– The route your data is trying to take will not allow it to reach the server.
– The route the server is trying to use to send data is not allowing the data to reach your machine.

Ok great! Now what do I do?

Well, the first thing to check is your user name. Are you sure it is correct? Sometimes a space can be forgotten between first and last names, or sometimes too many spaces. Spaces added to the end of your last name?

If that’s fine, next check your password. Maybe you’ve simply made an error typing your password.

If you’re sure the password is correct, make sure you have chosen the correct world. Maybe you have errantly chosen the wrong virtual world to login to?

If all looks good there and you are still having issues, go into this specific world’s (grid) settings and verify you have the correct information there.

If everything so far has been correct, maybe the server is down. To check this, visit the web page of this world and see if there have been any notices posted about any work being done or trouble being worked on. Don’t forget to check any social media pages for the world such as Facebook, or Google+, etc.

If there is no indication of trouble or work being performed, if you feel like being a bit “Techy”, you could try to “Ping” the world’s login server.
This “Ping” test will tell you if your computer is able to reach the destination server.

Go into the viewer settings and retrieve the grid’s login URI information. For DigiWorldz that address is login.digiworldz.com:8002.
The first part of this (login.digiworldz.com) represents the domain name we are trying to reach and is essentially the “Name” of the server you are trying to reach. This first part is what we will need to perform a “Ping” test.
If you are on windows, Open a command prompt and type:
ping login.digiworldz.com

and then press enter.

You should see your computer sending out packets of data to the server and waiting for the server to respond.
If you see you are getting responses back from the server and none are showing as timed out, then your computer is essentially “Talking” to the grid’s server just fine.

If you do not see responses, there could be something wrong somewhere. It’s important to note not all servers are set to respond to a ping request from computers outside of their network, so simply not receiving a response does not “Always” mean there is a problem, but it is a clue for you to use later.

If you discover your ping test is not receiving a response, this means the server is not responding, or the path your computer is trying to use to communicate with the server is not working, or the server is set to not respond to a ping request.

This could be caused by you having internet problems, but if you can load web pages on many different sites, this is not likely the case.
If you can’t load popular pages such as google.com, msn.com, yahoo.com, etc.. then more than likely you are having internet issues and you will need to get these corrected.

If you are finding you can load other websites, etc.. then the only thing left to do is to contact the support channel of the world you are trying to connect to.
They then, will ask a few questions to try to help you troubleshoot your issues and will provide information on how to fix them, or if the problems are on their side, they then can take the steps to correct them.

We’ll continue on with this series adding further tips, etc. you can use to help make your virtual world experiences as good as they can be.