Tuesday 12 October 2010

USB OpenSim tests

Following my recent post on installing OpenSim on a USB drive, which I have been continuing to use around the college with real success on both 32 or 64 bit platforms. The other day I came across a posting on http://iliveisl.com/the-need-for-speed-usb-opensim/ by Ener Hax where a number of drives are assessed for performance including frame rates. If you are thinking about this approach, then I can recommend paying a visit and having a read. Comments welcome.

bye for now Vega

Wednesday 6 October 2010

Run Standalone OpenSim on a USB

Recently I posted a blog about my installation of openSim on a standalone machine, well I was reading through some new OpenSim postings yesterday when I came across an article entitled “OpenSim on a USB”. The article described the installation of Mowers, OpenSim and Imprudence, all running from the USB drive. I confess that for some reason I seem to have run into a few difficulties with Mowers with regard to getting Apache to stay running. After trying a few of the more obvious tweeks like paths in the conf files and ensuring that port 80 was not already being used by another app, I thought why not use Xampp, which was already on my PC and simply needed to be installed across onto the USB. After that I downloaded the OpenSim binary, unzipped and went through the basic setup including a new avatar; by the way I named my new region port-able, which I thought appropriate. Finally I installed Imprudence. With all that done, and it does take a fare bit longer for a USB. I started Xampp with Apache and Mysql services; you will need this if you wish to use the Mysql rather the standard SqlLite. With Xampp running I started OpenSim. The next part was to run Imprudence, and entered in the user details for my avatar for localhost. After a short delay, there I am standing on a small island, brilliant.
Given some of the difficulties that a few students had with getting access from home last year, a problem which seemed to have more to do with the availability of broadband and their local machine settings, this could be a really useful future option. While working on a standalone simulator may not have all the advantages of grid work, it does allow you to practice orientation, building and scripting, in private, which in itself has other advantages. I think my next move is going to be dropping the necessary download links onto a Moodle block along with a click-and-go set of instructions and see that works.

Bye for now please feel free to comment, regards Vega

Tuesday 5 October 2010

Virtual World Roundtable

Starting back in the days of 3DML and Flatland Rover, you may remember that yourself, I guess I have been working in and making use of Virtual Worlds now for ten years. Being able to stay in touch with developments that surround the general theme of education and training is an aspect of my virtual and real world activity that I always find interesting and often surprising, particularly true I find these days of improving functionality between the virtual world and web. So I was pleased to stumble across the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable site the other day. The name probably tells you all that you need to know about the purpose of the site and I can recommend a visit.



regards Vega

Saturday 2 October 2010

Railway train project


Following my previous posting on getting vehicles to run reliably in OpenSim, I came across the Bungang-Isip ni Matangdilis blog the other day that featured an old style railway train. If you follow the link above you will find a short video and links to the train and smoke scripts, looks good.