A Day At The Races

Well it’s coming to that time of year again when I need to start thinking about the project for my Foundation Degree students who are studying Object Oriented Design. As a supplement their actual project, that will be written in Java, I like to make use of our OpenSim Virtual World Platform here at the College. If you have been following this blog, then you will know that last year we had a Mars sim, were students could experience a virtual field trip to the red planet and gather data on temperatures, atmospheric pressure, wind and solar energy for their Mars base environment control application. Earlier this week I had a discussion with my new group and they expressed a particular reference for a gaming element in their use OpenSim, and in the end we decided upon a motor racing theme. The core project will be to create a desktop application that will store and allocate pole positions, calculate race points along with various driver, team and vehicle details. The simulator part will be in the form of designing and creating racetracks for the various events, where they will get be become the actual drivers, sounds fun enough to me. As a bare minimum, I thought it would be reasonable for me to at least provide the group with some basic components and from the screen shot you can see a quarter circle and straight section of track that I made. The cars, I actually acquired from OpenSim Creations by Garry Beaumont, I though I have decided to include my own version of wheels for the vehicles. As anyone that has tried the physics engine in SecondLife and then attempted to apply the scripting solution to OpenSim will know, its not that straightforward, but having said this, I have downloaded a script from OpenSim.org by Kitto Flora and it runs OK, and I am working on some small modifications over the coming weeks. My next task is to clear down and prepare the simulator some time this week ready for the project, I will for sure be posting more updates as we move along, so please stay in touch


Bye for now Vega