Sim-OnDemand - Virtual World Abundance

 Important Notice: Due to ongoing transition in Osgrid.org website, Sim-OnDemand's screen scrapping based map coordinate locater fails. Thus Sim-OnDemand's osgrid mode does not work. Only Standalone mode works.

Sim-OnDemand is a OpenSim based Personal Virtual World Server deployed on Amazon Web Services Elastic Computing Cloud EC2 infrastructure. OpenSimulator 3D application server – popularly known as OpenSim – is a fast evolving versatile opensource software capable of mimicking(and more!) Linden Lab(TM)’s SecondLife(TM) virtual worlds. Amazon EC2 is Infrastructure as a Service by Amazon - offering unlimited bandwidth, processing, storage, etc. - on a pay-only-for-what-you-use post-pay billing model. Matching of the Bandwidth and Processing intensive nature of OpenSim with the infrastructural abundance of Amazon EC2 makes Sim-OnDemand a compelling combination.

Sim-OnDemand is a ready to use pre-configured packaging of OpenSim. Sim-OnDemand comes with a GUI based launcher that makes it easy for anyone to click-launch their own virtual world. Be it for prototyping, experimentation or just-for-fun, with Sim-OnDemand launcher, starting and suspending(pausing) your virtual world is just a few clicks. The launcher employs a simple yet powerful music-player metaphor: Play-Pause-Play. The unique Pause/Suspend feature saves the state of the virtual world server for restoration at a latter point in time. This feature is very handy for prototyping and experimentation – sims can be frozen/saved as is at a fraction of the cost associated with running them. With this feature, need to delete a build just to ‘make space’ for a new build is eliminated.

Thus with the Sim-OnDemand launcher, activating the play button launches the virtual world server. Activating the pause button freezes the virtual world server. Pressing the play button again at a future point in time restores the virtual world server where it left off(paused).

In a nutshell, you need not do all the mucking with EC2 API calls to enjoy the On-Demand abundance of EC2. Sim-OnDemand does some of the mucking for you and provides a music player(Play-Pause-Play) like interface.

Want to Use Sim-OnDemand?

 Sim-OnDemand is a paid service right from the outset. You need to subscribe to it in order to use it. Know more about the Why and How of Sim-OnDemand subscription.