Sim on a desktop

Just the other evening I was sitting at home working on our test OpenSim platform, safely away from the gaze of students, when I began to think about the likely future of the project at our college. Certainly there are departments that have expressed an interest in having their own island to experiment on, which means an expansion of the facility, which in turn could mean us having to give up the test sim for deployment. Then I began to think about people who maybe do not have the luxury of a test sim to play around and experiment on, what to do then? It was at this point that I decided to have a go at downloading OpenSim and loading it onto my Windows XP machine to run it standalone; at college its installed under Linux.


The outcome was really good. Having downloaded the latest version from OpenSim.org, I ran a DOS session, went through the install procedure and after answering a few prompts arrived at the region name # prompt. From there I loaded Meerkat, created a new profile and suddenly, I am the owner of a very small island in a very large ocean.






After this I went on a web search for some free terrain raw files, found a nice zip file of 10 that I downloaded from Tomorrow Glares Into Beyond and tried them out for size.
Finally in need of a building, I logged into my SL account and using Meerkat took a backup of a small Solar Home downloaded to the desktop, and then uploaded it into my new standalone simulator.

So if you need a private place to experiment with scripting, and from recent experience I do recommend experimenting on a platform other than your live server with scripts in OpenSim, or maybe just testing out the latest release, then I can certainly recommend a desktop solution.

Comments welcome, kind regards Vega

eLearning conference

The conference this year proved to have some particularly interesting parallel presentations for me as they included two on the use of Second Life and one on collaborative distance learning. For our own part I felt the Bromley session ‘Virtual Landscapes’ went down well, as we tried to leverage out the clear success of the four trials that we had conducted with student groups, against the clear and obvious problems that we ran into while driving OpenSim to its limits with multiple physics objects in a mega region. On balance though, I felt it was all received very positively, given that we were able to produce some good student feedback and evaluation of the platform, after all lets remember the software is still in Alpha release and given that fact , its actually amazingly robust. I was going to include links to my resources on the day in this blog but decided instead to give a single link to the presentation where you will find them on a links page toward the end. Apart from the three student feedback reports, you may like to have a listen to the mp3 file. I decided that the standard feedback forms did not really support a few questions that I had in mind, and so collared three of my group who seemed to be hanging around with not very much to do and asked them, not much of an approach to random systematic sampling I agree. Anyway apart from the very rewarding responses that they gave, a surprise was that they felt the thing that made a virtual world a real benefit could also be its downfall, so see what you think on that one. The final link on the page is to an swf movie that I captured using CamStudio of the Maze game; the file is big so will take a while before it starts to play. As always it was good to network and meet up with old friends, which leaves me looking forward to next year. If you have any comments then please feel free to post.

Kind regards Vega

Good signs of growing pains in the Metaverse

Some very encouraging news for both OpenSim and Second Life as OpenSim as the framework begins to show signs of expansion into mobile and web applications. All good news for the metaverse roadmap.

Getting ready for conference

Just putting the finishing touches to the presentation for the Greenwich University e-Learning conference on July 7. The OpenSim project, despite still being in Alpha release, has proved to be a useful development tool for our students and equally worthwhile experience for us in running a virtual world platform. We shall be including details of four separate projects that have been run this year, including feedback. The conference will also provide a good platform for us to advise others wishing to deploy the simulator, as we now have a not inconsiderable amount of experience in dealing with the daily running issues that come about when you decide to deploy mega regions or make use of functions that have at this stage remain not fully supported. Having said, this I feel that as the platform moves into Beta and then finally to stable release, most of our current advice is likely to simply become negated as a matter of course. I you are unable to make it along to the conference yourself; I shall be posting our presentation and student survey reports to this blog.

Regards Vega