Why You Should Watch WhiteCore-Sim

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A couple months ago, the old Aurora-Sim branch of OpenSimulator was forked due to the slow development and a few other small reasons. Then WhiteCore-Sim was born, it has been gaining a bit of attraction from Aurora-Sim enthusiasts, however recently some larger individuals are seeing this as a cause to re-evaluate the use of the old Aurora-Sim code base.

OpenVCE OAR on WhiteCoreSim. (Image courtesy OpenVCE.)
OpenVCE OAR on WhiteCoreSim. (Image courtesy OpenVCE.)

It should be noted that Aurora-Sim and WhiteCore-Sim are both out-of-the-box solutions. You can simply download, and just run and be in either a full grid setup with groups, profiles, partnering, search, abuse reports, and much-much more. Or a standalone with all those features as well. It even comes with its own built-in website front-end for your users.

While WhiteCore-Sim is still mostly bug fixes from the last version of Aurora-Sim, we have noted that the biggest reason people refused to use Aurora, wasn’t because it wasn’t stable, but was due to the slow development and lack thereof.

It should be noted that Aurora and WhiteCore both have ODE physics that work far more realistically than that of the opensim ODE, but they both also have support for Bullet as well. Also Aurora has its own scripting engine which supports more scripts from SecondLife than that of OpenSimulator.

WhiteCore's built-in Web interface. (Image courtesy Timothy Rogers.)
WhiteCore’s built-in Web interface. (Image courtesy Timothy Rogers.)

In fact, you should not use OpenSim Vehicle scripts, but use SecondLife vehicle scripts in Aurora and WhiteCore for better performance of your vehicles.

With the recent introduction of Variable Region in OpenSim code, it shouldn’t be forgotten that Variable Region code has been in Aurora and WhiteCore for years now. Aurora and WhiteCore also support regions smaller than normal, however  not all viewers support smaller than normal regions.

With all of this said, perhaps WhiteCore will finally give the old Aurora code the fame that it deserves. As WhiteCore, being a fork of Aurora, is a true out-of-the box solution.

Hypergrid connectivity has been addressed and it should be implemented within the next three versions.

While there are still a few bugs here and there, I definitely think that people should be sitting down and watching where WhiteCore is headed.

WhiteCore has also had its first release which you can download from their website either in the form of a Sim-on-a-Stick style installer, or as source code.

(Article reprinted with permission from Grid-Press.)

timothy.f.rogers@gmail.com'
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