News from the Race Track

Work has been going particularly well down at the virtual Formula 1 track in OpenSim this week. To begin with I decided to build a light rack system for the race start than runs through the Red, Amber Orange sequence and of course logs the lap time for the avatar, this particular version as I mentioned in my last post is just for Pole Position at the moment.

While the OpenSim Formula 1 racing experience will I am certain represent a valuable and popular aspect of the project, this will not be where the grades are to be found, they require my students to develop a desktop application designed in OO and implemented using Java. If anyone out there has tried to get Java to connect to a MySql database then you will know it either works first time or requires just a little attention to detail in getting the right drivers and permissions. Well I got them to work OK in the end, and if you are looking for a tutorial this is a very useful link  that you may like to follow. I have included a small screen shot here of my test Java app running in command line mode that my students will develop into a GUI version capable of processing the final collection of logged data.

The next stage for the OpenSim part of the project will be to develop a means of capturing the various lap counts and times, so please stay in touch for updates. Do feel free to comment on your own experiences with using OpenSim

Vega