Over on Gamasutra there’s a sponsored blog post from Microsoft, the post is from Amanda Lange, Technical Evangelist, Microsoft : Sponsored: How to simulate a tiny universe in Azure.
Microsoft Azure is open to all kinds of open source code projects, so I thought it might be neat to try running my own OpenSim on an Azure server.
OpenSim is a bit like Second Life, but open source. Anyone can create their own shard worlds to manipulate however they wish. It allows for a very private virtual world for use in role play gaming, education, or just to build out your own environment however you like and play with some 3D construction tools.
This sounds interesting and the blog post gives very detailed instructions on how to deploy OpenSim to Microsoft Azure. I’m not going to detail the instructions here, if you’re interested read the linked post near the start of this post, but it’s not a plug and play process, you will need to use the likes of Visual Studio. However these days Visual Studio comes in decent form for free in many cases.
Now if you’re wondering what Microsoft Azure is, here’s some of the blurb :
Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, a growing collection of integrated services – analytics, computing, database, mobile, networking, storage and web – for moving faster, achieving more and saving money.
Now if you’re still unsure, you can read more here : http://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/overview/what-is-azure/