There is a bug in OpenSim — and in Second Life — known as the “4096 bug.” Or maybe in Second Life it’s known as the “4096 feature.” It keeps you from teleporting more than 4096 regions in any direction.
Every region has a grid coordinate, similar to a longitude and latitude on a regular map. Most grids cluster their regions around the 10000, 10000 mark. These grids include OSGrid, Cyberlandia, Grid4Us, MyOpenGrid, and most other public grids.
ReactionGrid centers its grid around 1000, 1000. This means that there are 9,000 regions between the center point of OSGrid and the center point of ReactionGrid — too far to jump in one hop. Fortunately, there are plenty of regions midway between these two points, to make the jump easier.
Why hasn’t this been fixed yet? The folks working on the OpenSim server software blame the viewer. The folks working on the viewer software blame the server. The two groups aren’t allowed to talk to each other directly because the viewers and the server are under different, incompatible open-source software licenses.
If this was on the Internet, this would be the same as not being able to jump directly from Amazon.com to Yahoo.com because they are too far apart in the alphabet!
This situation may change, however, since the OpenSim developers created the Overte Foundation and began requiring its developers to sign contributors agreements — which covers OpenSim legally and allows developers to work on the viewer side, as well.
Someday, we will laugh about it, and tell our kids about the old days of the metaverse, where we had to jump in tiny hops, and half the teleports would fail, and we had to walk uphill both ways.
Meanwhile, if you feel like complaining, send a letter to the editor at [email protected] and we’ll pass it along to the developers in both camps.
In addition, you can use the Hyperica gates, which are linked in such a way as to overcome the 4,096 barrier. Simply jump to your nearest hyperport — hg.hyperica.com:8022:hyperica lower, hg.hyperica.com:8022:hyperica central or hg.hyperica.com:8022:hyperica upper. Each of the 120 gates in each hyperport is programmed to either send you to your destination directly, or via an intermeriary gate, depending on how far away it is.
