Two grid owners have successfully enabled Podex for hypergrid visitors to their grids.
Discovery Grid owner Rene Vega, also known as Balpien Hammerer in-world, and AviWorlds owner Josh Boam have allowed hypergrid visitors to buy and use Podex-based local currencies while visiting their grids.
“Thanks to Josh Boam as well as to Balpien Hammerer from Discovery Grid,” Podex CEO Jacek Shuftan told Hypergrid Business. “The new feature gives every avatar on the grid, not only the native ones, possibility to buy coins and than use them to purchase products, tip DJs, or donate to other avatars. The coins can be also cashed out to PayPal or transferred to another grid.”
And it doesn’t matter if the avatar’s home grid uses Podex or not, he added.
“The new feature is fully implemented and tested in the two grids mentioned above and first avatars made transactions with no problems so we can expect others to be hypergridded as soon as possible,” he said. “Unfortunately you can not shop on grid B with coins from grid A directly, but have to exchange coins first. We are working on this feature and hope to activate in the future.”
Previously, local grid currencies were limited to grid residents, making them unworkable for hypergrid shopping.
But the grid owners were motivating to solve this technical challenge because of recent problems with Gloebit, OpenSim’s only fully hypergrid-enabled currency.
Gloebit is something like PayPal for OpenSim. Shoppers go to the Gloebit website to create accounts and add money to their wallets, then can spend that money on any Gloebit-enabled grid or region.
Podex, by comparison, allows residents to buy, sell, and trade local grid currencies but users previously had to have a separate local account on each grid.
The new system doesn’t yet allow for a single Podex wallet that can be used on any Podex grid — users still have to buy each local currency separately. But now they can buy that currency without having to create a brand new avatar on every grid.
Now, hypergrid visitors can buy local currency just as if they were a local resident, Discovery’s Vega told Hypergrid Business.
A user walks up to a Podex terminal in-world and clicks on the Web link. That takes them to the Podex website.
Then they decide how much local currency they want to buy, hit the “buy” button, and purchase the currency using PayPal. In the example above, they are buying Discovery Grid’s local currency, DC$.
“In about 10 to 20 seconds, the DC$ purchased appear in the avatar’s balance,” said Vega.
And if they can’t find a terminal? They can use a Podex hud to buy currency wherever they go.
Vega said he plans to make the fix available to other grid owners using the DTL/NSL Money Server for OpenSim for their in-world currency.
“The latest DTL/NSL money module and server code needs a bit of chrome polishing before I share the update to the rest of OpenSim,” he said. “There are some viewer display bugs, and non-standard hypergrid UUID handling to be fixed.”
Grid owners will then need to configure their money system to recognize hypergrid visitors, he said. “There are many variants of this money system in the wild and neither the DTL nor Gloebit money systems play well together without changes to them. I have made those changes and fixes to the one I use in Discovery Grid, and I will share it soon in the OpenSim NGC github.”
Local merchants can see the transactions between themselves and their hypergrid customers when they log in to the Discovery Grid website, but hypergrid users don’t have logins there.
To enable them to see their transaction history, Vega said he’s adding an option to the in-world search page to show transactions.
“We did some testing, and it works!” said AviWorld’s Boam. He’s been looking to switch his grid from Gloebit to Podex after the latest outage. “Users can have a balance on all grids, no matter where they come from.”
When users teleport from one grid to another where they’ve bought local currency previously, that local currency balance will appear in their viewer.
So for example, someone from Discovery who teleports to AviWorlds and buys local currency, then teleports back to Discovery, will then see their DC$ in their viewer.
“When they leave AviWorlds the money stays with our grid until they come back,” said Boam. “Or they decide to transfer it.”
Boam said he will help other grid owners who want to set up Podex-based hypergrid-enabled currencies on their grids. They should feel free to contact him at joshboam@yahoo.com, he said.
On Saturday, May 15, Gasworks held a large party, Boam said.
“A few people purchased coins on their hypergrid account and were able to tip without issues,” he said. “The DJs also are able to cash out their earnings or transfer them to another grid without any issues.”
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