It’s been over a year since my last post. In that time, I built a 32 region OpenSim grid for a client, doing everything from creating the terrain in L3DT, building and obtaining content, and administering the server, including writing the PHP and Powershell scripts that ran the grid.
Sadly, just when it was ready to open for beta. my client shut it down, so no one will ever see what I put so much effort into over the last year. In retrospect I can see a number of things I could have done differently that might have avoided it, but maybe the most important is this: my client never visited the world I was building for his company! Despite my urging, he never had any interest in seeing it.
The next time I build a virtual world for a client, there are a number of things I’ll do differently, but at the top of the list will be making sure that my client sees what I’m building and has an interest in seeing it to completion. It’s extremely disappointing to put over a year into building a world only to see it vanish before it even opens to the public. I was paid for my time and gained good experience, so it wasn’t a wasted effort for me, but it is painful.