Features

We’ve worked *very* hard, and always continue to do so, to produce and offer you a decent grid to call home.

Here are some of the features that set us apart from the majority of other grids.

Management

CandM are Candice and Mattt.

Candice has been in virtual worlds – predominantly Second Life and OpenSimulator – for around 20 years. She is an experienced and skilled creator and builder with a passion for producing high quality, beautiful objects, structures and scenes. She’s also quite adept at keeping Mattt “in check” :p

Mattt is basically a hard-core, passionate and highly experienced software and IT systems engineer. He has been developing computer software since 1983 (at age 12), and doing so professionally – exclusively for businesses from small to enterprise scale – since 1991. He’s worked with GNU / Linux and server / network infrastructure since about 1993. He has *never* run or managed Microsoft / Windows servers (or public-facing services running on them), and refuses to do so – in fact, aside from an iPhone and an under-utilised iPad (he values quality, privacy and security and thus won’t touch Alphabet (Google, etc) “powered” devices), all of his devices and computers run GNU/Linux.

Candice and Matt are both extremely pragmatic and meticulous about the way they approach their projects and work – and their results speak for themselves 😉

Server infrastructure

We run the grid and all of our other services on dedicated (not VPS) server machines in high-end data centres. Currently, our servers are hosted in Brisbane and Sydney (Australia), but preparations are underway to extend our infrastructure into Florida (USA). We do intend to also extend our systems into Europe, but are yet to find a server provider and data center there we can trust.

All of our servers run on Intel Xeon processors with plenty of physical cores, ample high-speed ECC memory and NVME storage. All are connected by multiple, redundant / failover ultra high speed Internet links.

All servers are backed up daily to off-site storage.

OpenSimulator / grid platform

The CandM World grid runs on a slightly modified / customised version of “core” OpenSimulator code, largely controlled and overseen by a Python based API and management system – thousands (and constantly growing) of lines of completely custom, in-house developed code.

Third party services used

The web payment gateway (Stripe), used for land rental payments.

Inworld (in other words, with the virtual world itself), PayPal is available for some payments, and the grid offers Podex (by default) and Gloebit currency systems.

Vivox is currently used for voice support, but will be replaced with an in-house solution once OpenSimulator completes it’s support for the new WebRTC system.

*All* other services, etc, are completely hosted “in house”.

Grid features

Core

  • Split, distributed and load balanced ROBUST services.
  • Dynamic simulator / region creation and startup configuration.
  • One region per simulator.
  • Complete PBR support.
  • Active prim limit enforcement for both regions and parcels.
  • Split / duplicated, distributed, load balanced and redundant asset services, backed up daily to off-site storage.
  • The grid has been running since 1st November 2022. During this time, it has *never* experienced downtime owing to technical issues. It’s been briefly down a few (like, literally three, at the time of this writing) times for operating system or major OpenSimulator software updates (followed by machine reboots), but only while nobody was logged into or visiting the grid. In other words, it’s *utterly* reliable 🙂

Simulators / regions

  • All regions are “power of 2” sizings (1×1, 2×2, 4×4, 8×8, 16×16) to eliminate several OpenSimulator and viewer bugs which affect other region sizes.
  • All regions are run on a dedicated simulator – one region per simulator.
  • Simulators / regions are constantly monitored by our management system “watchdog” – if it discovers a sim / region which should be running, but is not, it will attempt to restart it several times, then alert both the land owner and grid management to the event and the outcome.
  • The management system backs up each region weekly. Backups files are stored off-site.
  • The management system restarts each region weekly – however, if agents (avatars) are found on the region, the system will instead re-check every 6 hours for another week before forcing a restart.
  • Ability to change chat (whisper, say, shout) distances.
  • Ability to restrict copy of objects – so that nobody can copy even objects set with the copy permission.

Web site

Our web site is under constant – but currently somewhat slow – development. *Much* is planned for it’s future 😉

With that said, it currently offers:

  • Grid account (agent / avatar) logins, with a little (so far) profile information.
  • Password (grid + web logins) reset feature.
  • List of member’s islands (regions) with basic information about current state.
  • Individual island (region) “dashboard”, with much more state information and (currently – much more coming) the ability to restart the simulator + region (note that restarting a region inworld using viewer controls only restarts the region itself – not the simulator that runs it ;-)).
  • New land order and payment form. When you order a region, it’s created and running within seconds.
  • Ability to add “store credit” – when the system charges rental fees, the funds are taken from this credit (if sufficient) instead of a charge to the associated credit / debit card.
  • Ability to change payment (credit / debit card) method.