BC OpenSim

Playing Media

2012-02-10T07:20:00.001-08:00

I have been both acquiring a creating some help mkaterials for the new users of our Comenious project, generally in the form of help panels that have been placed into a small tutorial building on the sim. While these are fine, I did particularly want to get some video tutorials together. If you have yet on try this approach then let me recommend CamStudio as an easy to use screen capture desktop application, it comes with a number really useful and uncluttered features. The output files from CamStudio can be either avi of swf format, I used the avi format and then converted them into mov format, which you will need for OpenSim using the convertfiles.com websites, easy to use and did the job no problem.
The process of playing media in OpenSim is described on this page and it includes a Freeview script.
The script makes use of a notecard called bookmarks. It was when I was running the script for the first time that I recognised the dialog from a media viewer I had downloaded some time ago in Second Life. The thing is that the content of the bookmark notecard does have to be in a particular format namely: -

video descriptionurl

Examples
Prim Basicshttp://cd.bromley.ac.uk/bteccourses/video/build1.mov
Editing Clotheshttp://cd.bromley.ac.uk/bteccourses/video/editclothes.mov

Please feel free to copy the url's into a web browser if you would like to see the content.

The vertical bar if you have difficulty finding it, can be produced by holding down the Alt key and typing 124 on the numeric keypad then releasing.

From the screen shot you can see that the actual image is sandwiched between two signs saying Touch for Menu. In fact these are two surface of a cube that has been tapered, and between them the surface that plays the video. I did this because when I tried the video player with a viewer that supported Shared Media, I seemed to loose the Script Touch event for the dialog on the screen surface, it seems to work though.

I have a new student project underway, and will be posting on that shortly so please stay in touch for something a little different.

Vega

VW in HE report

2012-02-09T01:46:00.000-08:00

The ascilite 2011 'Changing Demands Changing Directions' survey report into use of Virtual World in HE entitled 'How are Australian higher education institutions contributing to change through innovative teaching and learning in virtual worlds' is available here

The report provides a nice background and current snapshot of activities taking place in the various Universities that contributed to the report, including key drivers and the perceived advantages and some difficulties experienced in using a range of Virtual worlds platforms, well worth a read.

Vega

Comenious island good to go

2012-01-31T07:03:00.001-08:00

The Comenious virtual world is finally at the point where we have begun to create avatars for our members of staff here at Bromley and so far one from our partner in the Netherlands. The screen shot here shows the main island with its gallery display area, along with central meeting and tutorial hall. While I did create many of the builds here, including the little canal boat, others have been downloaded from OpenVCE project, Linda Kellie Creations and OpenSim Creations.
There an number of really nice builds available from OpenSim Creations, and of those two in particular caught my eye for this project. The first was this light house with keepers cottage. I did have to script the door and light beam but the rest rezzed just fine.
Having introduced the Keepers cottage, I could not resist the temptation to introduce a few furnishings, again some downloaded and others home brewed. One of the project team on seeing this suggested that the place could be used as a display area for student work also and why not, sounds good to me.
The second build from OpenSim Creations was a windmill complete with Millers cottage, and just off to the right out to sea you can just make out my clipper ship that sails around the island group.
As with the Light house keepers home, the Millers is also furnished along with bags of flour. This in fact was just to good an opportunity not to include a virtual mill effect, so you will find a rotating grinding stone accompanied by grinding sounds, just for a touch of realism.
The tutorial area has a number of screen shot and OpenVce panels and I will include some movies for things like, changing avatar appearance, building and texturing.
Well thats about all for now, but please stay in touch as the sim comes into use. regards Vega

New Freebie Store

2011-11-17T05:34:00.001-08:00

While the work continues to progress with the commeneios project here a Bromley, I came across a really useful website just the other day http://opensim-creations.com/
The site features resources for opensim under the following categories Animations, Attachments, Buildings, Clothes, Objects, Scripts, Textures and Tutorials.

I downloaded a copy of the light house and installed it onto own Comenious project region. So if you looking for a good collection of freebies and even considering contribution then opensin-creations looks likely to become a one-stop-shop on the list.

Vega

New World Grid

2011-09-23T11:22:00.000-07:00

If you have not come across the New World Grid yet in your travels of the virtual worlds, then I can recommend a visit, there certainly seems to be a lot going on. Based on Open Simulator this is non-profit French based service is open to all for avatar registrations.

I went along yesterday a registered myself an avatar, then responded to my confirmation email opened my Imprudence viewer and loggoed in using.

login URI :
http://grid.newworldgrid.com:8002

login page :
http://account.newworldgrid.com/loginscreen.php

The web site offers forums, live chat and of course a link to their Twitter feed,
I logged in, very nice indeed.

You can rent land and a full region land rental is available at

Price:30€ / month + 25 € setup
Primitives : 15000
VoIP included (vocal conference)
Dedicated simulator : the region is hosted on an independent “simulator” in order to optimize performances and minimize crashes impact.
Script usage and user traffic reasonable.
installed takes some 24 to 72 hours after payment.

Alternatively you can host your own and connect to New World Grid by downloading their free Diva Distro, that seems to come with some very comprehensive set-up processes and procedures. To add even more icing to the cake it seems that they have managed to implement a currency system.

Well worth the trip, Vega

Comenius Project Starting

2011-09-17T05:16:00.000-07:00

After long long delays getting this one under way the projects has started to run with the uploading of student content to a display stand. the materials are ComicLife presentations that have been produced by our students. This particular display is for our own college and will eventually be joined by similar exhibits from schools in Holland. We plan to inlcude a meeting area for real time conversations and a free building platform probably an small island for development work.

Please stay in touch for upldates

Vega

Collection of freebies

2011-08-10T05:35:00.001-07:00

Given that the resources for Opensim are still a little thin on the ground when compared to those of Second Life, I feel that this collection made available from Linda Kellie is really worth a visit. Do take a look at the license for their use, and thank you Linda

regards Vega

Getting ready for LSIS

2011-06-13T08:10:00.001-07:00

I am looking forward to presenting at the Technology for Efficiency conference at the Hallam Conference Centre in London, where I shall be proposing the use of virtual worlds, in this case OpenSim. I did consider using one of our own college sims for the task, as would have the advantage that delegates could get the feel of social engagement, but given port issues I thought it would be wise to find a safer route, namely sim on a stick; Port Pen . The advantage I guess will be that at least delegates can take away their own version and plug it in most anywhere. The specific area’s of efficiency that I am going to talk about are Meeting spaces, Timetabling and resource management. The inclusion of resource management is going to focus on rooming, we planned a room some time ago, and feel sure that had we produced a virtual version in the first place then the final outcome would have been very different and much more conducive to a teaching environment.

regards Vega

OpenSim an Educators Perspective

2011-05-09T03:28:00.001-07:00

I came across this posting from Peter Miller from University of Liverpool on Open Sim entitled 'an Educators perspective'. This is really worth a read as it covers so many aspects of Open Sim in particular show casing some really excellent examples of sim builds. Well worth a look and keeping in touch with.

Vega

Comenious Island Arrives

2011-03-10T11:16:00.000-08:00

I am pleased to say that our Comenious project came to life today with arrival of the virtual island in OpenSim that is hosted on our servers, thanks to the efforts of Clive Pro. I logged myself in and planted a cerimonial flag, though come tomorrow we should have a new terrain installed and it will all start to look very different. I raised a request for the installation of the Imprudence browser into staff room in a another part of the college and hopefully that will all go well and things will start to move along at more of a pace. So please stay in touch for what I am hoping will be some very intersteing screen grabs and comments in the coming weeks.

regards Vega

Comenious and OpenSim

2011-02-10T04:14:00.000-08:00

Since the end of academic year 2009-10 our OpenSim work has very much on the back burner, but that is all about to change. As part of my role here at the College I work as eLearning project co-ordinator, and a recent project request has been made for Open-Simulator. The comenious project; named after Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670), often considered the father of modern education. Aimed at schools, colleges and local authorities across Europe, our proposal is to work in collaboration with a College in Holland. The requirement is for a collaborative working environment where students can have face-to-face real time communication, or in this case avatar-to-avatar. Please stay in touch for future posts.

Vega

Taking the plunge with osgrid

2010-12-11T11:23:00.001-08:00

When you join Second Life and become a resident, you are connected literally by defualt to a vast network of regions that are only a simple search and teleport away. With OpenSim though, like myself and I suspect many others, you are likely for various reasons to remain disconnected, which is certainly the case for the college projects that we have run and for my own desktop and USB regions. And so the other day I decided to take the plunge and register an avatar with a grid. As I was not sure which of the grids to join, I first went over to the Hypergrid Business website and read through the latest statistics on region counts. With some 3440 connected regions osgrid easily came out on top, size of course isn’t everything in these things, but I felt that it would give me the chance to simply have access to plenty of regions to explore.

So over I go to the osgrid website and create my self a login, in fact I then discover, and this shows how much attention I pay these things, that the necessary addresses for osgrid are already loaded into the Imprudence browser, great. I log in and arrive at a plaza area, all a bit dark really but OK I guess. There were a few friendly avatars around and I quickly strike conversations, all very nice.

One of the boards on display gave me the option to download an avatar appearance and clothes, so I took advantage of this and proceeded to find myself a small-secluded corner and set about the process of adjusting my new appearance. I immediately noticed that unlike Second Life where stripped down avatars have a certain androgynous body form, here gender becomes immediately obvious, a fact that I was made aware of by receiving a picture of myself snapped by a wander voyeur and I suspect female, good laughs all round, but I am assured not grounds for exclusion, not this time anyway.

I do recommend that you keep the note-card offered on arrival as it does contains some useful hints and tips plus teleports to popular locations. I travelled around the various places on offer for some time, and all in all I enjoyed myself, so I can recommend it. If you have any stories or impressions of OpenSim grids then please feel free to comment.

Kind regards Vega

Looking for a Forest, then look no further

2010-12-05T06:13:00.001-08:00

If you are looking for some free

OpenSim resources, in particualr trees, then let me recommend the download from Diva. Objects_Library__large_.iar — IAR with assorted objects Very large.

The accompanying screenshot here is from a sim that I am running on a USB drive featuring 60 hi-res trees, really useful if you are in need of some instant foliage.

regards Vega

A Storks Story

2010-12-02T02:50:00.001-08:00

I have been posting less than usual of recent, principally I suspect as result of a good dose of seasonal flu. I am starting so feel much better now however and standing on one of my islands just the other day, I began to recall the comment that I had once read in a blog or posting someplace about there not being much actual life in Second Life. Sure there are plenty of buildings and avatars, waving flags and swaying trees, but actual life, not so much. In the light of this comment I started to have a good look around and thought the criticism not so un-justified, where indeed is the life? at which point I began purchasing some roaming creatures from different places for my sim, it does produce a different feel and perception without doubt. Now that I am working more and more in OpenSim, I have once again started to sense the need for some background life features, but these are not so readily acquired at the moment in OS as they are in SL. Back in my early days of SL I had made a simple flying Parrot, so decided to start with that, except this time the parrot would become a seagull. The animation is simply a llTargetOmega() function placed in a central transparent hub that connects to the bird through an equally transparent rod, the whole thing just rotates. To make it a litle more interesting, I used some loops with random iterations within the main hub to drive it in x,y and z axis using llSetPos(). As a final touch I included a random script to play suitable bird sounds, and altogether not bad. Anyway I dropped my new creation in place, made a half dozen copies around the region set everything in motion, once again not bad, or so I thought.

Next, I decided to go for something a little different, something that I had not tried before, a walking bird, a stork. I put the prims together and after a suitable amount of stretching and trashing, I had something that looked OK, well from a short distance anyway. To begin, I decide that all I need was a preset rectangular path for testing and then use llSetPos() to get the thing going. I also rummaged and hacked around to produce a function to have the prim always face forward, for obvious reasons. Next I attached two thin poles for the legs, with profile cut to the center axis and made use of a variation to a door script to make them run from messages sent out from the main body, not the most elegant of solutions and one prone to lag dysfunction over long periods, but this was only a testing stage anyway and I can soon put a rotation reset function in later to keep things tidy. Ready to go, I touch the body and after a few surprising and physically impossible contortions for the poor stork, I finally make a few script changes and it runs, brilliant, or so I thought. Back it comes to the start point, I click again and touch_start sets it off once more around its small 12 by 12 metre circuit, marvellous, or so I thought. Then the moment comes, that would lead to the best part of a wasted afternoon. I decide to put the whole sequence into a loop, and get ready to sit back watching my new creation walking around with the occasional small departures from what could be otherwise described as synchronised marching to the sound of stork calls. Indeed everything went very well until just before completion of the third circuit, the bird stopped ! Not moving standing motionless, one leg pointing straight down, the other pointing out at an unexpectedly high angle reminiscent of a Nazi salute, curses. Whenever these things happen in programming, I find despite experience, I am always overcome by the optimism of the two minute fix phase, where I find things that while not strictly correct, actually have no baring on the problem whatsoever, and after numerous mods and tests, the problem all to often remains. At such times, trust me, always go for the manual, but no, no, hack on regardless, changing and testing changing and testing. I’m not sure now if was someone turning the lights on for me as I was by this point sitting in the dark, anyway, eventually I turn to Google and before long discover that there is a bug report in for llSetPos(). Apparently llSetPos() bombs out of loops at somewhere between 100 and 200 iterations, magic. But hey-ho we are made of sterner stuff, so what’s the fix, well obviously make sure that the number of calls to llSetPos() is well within limits. I setup a simple prim in a loop that moves and reports to me, and after 50 tests I had bomb outs at 146 as the lowest and 188 as the highest, worth baring in mind. This gave me some optimism as my stork only consumed 128, but such small test samples are just misleading and sure enough it failed, at 104, but 96 seems to be OK at the moment, but do read on.

So what do you do, set it running for the two small circuits and place a sign around its neck saying please touch me to witness a short walk, no not really. I just need to find a way to reset the script, and llScriptReset was not it, instead I devised this fiendish little approach, which seems to runs OK

default{
state_entry() {
}

link_message(integer sender_number, integer number, string message, key id){
if(message=="start") {
state back;
}
}
}

state back{
state_entry(){
//call movement function
state forward;
}
}

state forward{
state_entry(){
//call movement function
state back;
}
}

At the moment I am still testing the solution, though I must say that since starting to publish this blog posting I have just looked in on old storky and it has actually failed at 96, so onward and downward in the search for a stable number. Of course I could be missing the whole point somewhere here, so if you have experienced any problems with llSetPos() in OpenSim and found a work-around then please feel free to post you comments. Otherwise I at least hope that my experience will be of some help to you.

Kind regards Vega

USB OpenSim tests

2010-10-12T06:33:00.001-07:00

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

Run Standalone OpenSim on a USB

2010-10-06T05:08:00.000-07:00

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

Virtual World Roundtable

2010-10-05T02:36:00.000-07:00

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

Railway train project

2010-10-02T01:25:00.000-07:00

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.

A Hovercraft project in OpenSim

2010-09-28T15:14:00.001-07:00

Its usual at around the summer break for me to set myself a project of some kind. This year there have in fact been a couple of little projects but for this post its about my decision to get a vehicle to work reliably enough in OpenSim that is stable enough on the one hand and use-ably fun on the other. It was during the students projects of the summer term that I first really became aware of the issues here, as one group tried it seems very much in vain to get vehicles running around without aircraft zooming of to some distant a horizon, cars flipping over onto a front bumper or boats turning turtle and plunging to the depths of the virtual ocean . Initially my approach had been to supply them with some basic SL scripts and get them to try them out, make a few changes and see which worked the best, but clearly it was not going to be as simple as that.
For my own project I decided upon a hovercraft, a bit of an easy one maybe, because it would only be running across a flat sea. I decided to use one of the scripts that my students had been playing around with and found the first thing that I needed to do was make sure that the vehicle was only going to run on water

llSetVehicleFlags(VEHICLE_FLAG_HOVER_WATER_ONLY);

In fact this very small adjustment did seem to make a difference.

I did seem to have some difficulty with the buoyancy setting, but eventually got it to settle down between session OK with a suitable value.

To have a hovercraft of course, I needed a rotor and that caused some difficulty in that the craft would be running around all over the place, so I basically copt-out of this one by using rotating textures (sneaky) but to reasonable effect.

I then installed a particle script for the spray and a suitable wav file that I found on the net, I think it was the sound of a piston engine biplane. And the results of all this you can see in the two accompanying screen shots. Not much by way of banking at the moment, so motion is a little wooden, but I am working on that.

The whole project went really well really and I am putting together a video that I will post to this blog later. If you have had any experience with vehicles in OpenSim then please feel free to comment.

regards Vega

OpenSim student projects july 2010

2010-08-05T12:57:00.001-07:00

The virtual world student feedback reports for the projects that I ran for my Level 3 BTEC National students following their final year in the Software Development course are now available in-world. The reports are in pdf format and if you would like to take a look them please follow the slurl to my Second Life Shimmer Island sim http://slurl.com/secondlife/Star%20Beach%20Island/209/222/23

regards Vega

Sim on a desktop

2010-07-17T06:18:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-08T15:36:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-07T13:10:00.001-07:00

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

2010-07-04T05:54:00.001-07:00

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

Is Open Source like an Ant hill?

2010-06-05T03:25:00.000-07:00

The answer to this is almost certainly no, as you will come to agree I am sure if you follow this link to a recent podcast from the BBC. The podcast features a series of enlightening interviews from both within and beyond the software community that include, Mozilla Firefox Foundation, Linux Foundation, IBM, Microsoft and a Canadian mining company. As an educator now making real use the Open Source virtual world environment OpenSim, which lets face it looks and feels very much like Linden Labs Second Life, I found the podcast well worth a listen and recommend it. If you have any views then please feel free to comment to this posting.

regards Vega

Solar Cell Project Student Feedback

2010-05-15T12:50:00.000-07:00

The feedback report from my BTEC National students who took part in the OpenSim Solar Cell project is now available from this link. Please feel free to take a look, If you have any comments, then by all means drop a reply to this posting.

Kind regards Vega

Web Services Project

2010-05-05T16:12:00.000-07:00

The Web Services project for the second year FdEng Software Development students involves using http get and xml-rpc techniques for two way communication between an in-world avatar scanner and php/mysql on an external Web server.

This project has been underway for over two weeks and student response
has been enthusiastic. Most students now have a prototype avatar
scanner working. Several students have been spending a lot of time
outside college in-world. When many of the college PC's were
inaccessible for three days due to the worldwide fiasco caused by the
bug in McAfee anti-virus software, students were encouraged to work
from home and remote in-world support was provided.

The FdEng students have required relatively little support in learning
to use OpenSim. One of the main questions on starting out referred to
customising the gender of the default avatar. Some students spent a
considerable amount of time getting their appearance right, despite
the fact that the projects are individual and do not require social
interaction in-world.

The main problems encountered so far have been:

1) Students editing the terrain on their own initiative, necessitating
a reload of the terrain map from the simulator console.
2) OpenSim crashing every 24-48 hours, which necessitated a simulator
restart. This has been traced to one particular remote client, which
has been causing the simulator to spiral out of control by opening
more and more connections. Investigations are still underway to
determine the exact cause of the problem. The short term solution has
been to ask the student involved to refrain from logging in to OpenSim
from their home PC!

An end of project questionnaire for the students to complete has been
posted on the college VLE and the results of this will be posted to
this blog in due course. In addition a presentation on our use of
OpenSim will be made at the University of Greenwich eLearning
conference on July 7th 2010.
(http://web-dev-csc.gre.ac.uk/conference/conf62/index.php)

Clive Pro

Solar Panel project and beyond

2010-04-12T04:15:00.001-07:00

With the work in Bromsim for my level 3 students completed, I have been spending some time during this end of term marking the project. The images that I have posted along with this entry are in fact some examples from the finished work. The activity that took place in-world was certainly encouraging for me and had some interesting and I must say unexpected surprises from time to time. In particular there was the case of one avatar, who shall remain nameless, who seemed to decide that rather than just spend the necessary time to orientate, would simply ask everyone and anyone else that happened to be in-world at the time for solutions. Clearly this became just too much for one group, with the result that one of its members, who shall also retain anonymity, created a large empty cylinder with linked top plate and placed the structure over their inquisitive companion. Finding themselves encapsulated in a rather small confined space, from which there seemed to be no immediate means of escape, did result in some frantic calls to the Estate Manager at the time, me. I guess at best this has been our first example here at Bromsim of what could be described as virtual world social exclusion, fascinating how quickly and imaginatively these new world skills come to be applied!

Next for me will be the new unit starting in the summer term, Designing Computer Games. In the last academic year I made use of Second Life for the project, which if you are interested has details including the results of a student feedback survey posted on my Shimmer Island blog

http://shimmer-island.blogspot.com/

When I suggested that we could continue with a similar scenario for this year there was enthusiastic agreement, “as long as we get to use guns”, someone said, yet more agreement. So it appears that the legend of the Illumni will enter yet another chapter. In fact staying with Bromsim for this could be a very useful outcome for engagement as one group had already started work on a large space station, just because they can, placed at high altitude above the sim, and I think this would form a realistic development area for them.

On return to the college in the new term, I shall be handing out a questionnaire as a means of gathering feedback from the students on their views of using Bromsim, and will be posting the results of that on this blog, so you may like to stay in touch for this as well as seeing how we progress with games design.

Bye for now, Vega

Distance working

2010-03-28T06:27:00.001-07:00

Just last week when I was thinking I had gotten away with being visited by the flu bug making its seasonal rounds, I found myself displaying all the usual anti-social symptoms and decided to give up the struggle and take a few days off. Such things will inevitably leave any plans you may have for classes most definitely suspended. This does not have to be the case at all with virtual worlds however. Here you can see a few of the screen images that I captured with my group during the day, while I was safely quarantined at home and they were in college.

There were a whole raft of questions that I found myself able to deal with from building to scripting that went way beyond the project that I set, a very enthusiastic group.

In answer to the most obvious objection of course about still working while officially off and not feeling so good either, I agree, but once you have caught up with all those programs on your Sky planner, it beats watching day time TV hands down.

regards, and fully recovered, Vega

Solar Panel up for grabs

2010-03-22T02:53:00.001-07:00

To assist my students with getting to grips with scripting in OpenSim, they have come at this from C and Java, I have installed a basic solar panel. The panel, which is 1m square is as you can see from the screen shot producing 150 Watts of power. I have not completed the coding for the example and the task of my group will be to see if they can tidy up the script and include features for time of day etc. For their own projects, and I have now given them all individual energy requirements, they will have to re-size the panel and modify the script so that enough power is generated.

Once in place they should begin to get an idea of the physical impact that production of electricity from solar energy will have upon a living environment, not something we think about when all we normally see is a light switch or power socket. What will happen at night, when there will be no Sun and so no power? Speculate about a storage system, which means being able to produce a lot more power than you actually need during the day, hence a much larger panel! such arguments will form the basis of the final evaluation.

If you would like to see how it all turns out then please stay in touch.

kind regards Vega

Scanner project from Clive Pro

2010-03-17T04:57:00.000-07:00

Clive Pro is about to run his HE project on our OpenSim. Below you will find a copy of the assignment scenario and requirement for the HE group, we actually ran a similar project last year, but then it was in Second life!

Scenario

You are working for a Web development company. A colleague, who has just left the organisation, was working on an avatar scanner system to interface one or more scanner objects in either of the MUVEs, Second Life or OpenSim, with scripts and a database on an external Web server. Your supervisor has asked you to take up the project and complete it.

Requirement

An avatar scanning system is required for the Multi User Virtual Environment, OpenSim . You are to undertake development on a standalone simulator called bromsim. The system is to consist of two parts, a scanner object that can be rezzed on any land in-world where the owner has create rights and a LAMP Environment where scanner data is held in a database on an external Web server. Multiple scanner objects can be rezzed at different locations in-world, but these all report back to the same central external Web server.

When a scanner object is rezzed, or reset, it is to automatically report back its communications channel id, object id, region and exact co-ordinates to the Web server, which is to store this data in the database. If there is already data for this particular scanner object in the database, this existing data is to be erased before the new data is stored. At regular intervals the scanner object is to automatically scan its environment for avatars and temporarily store their names and the total number of avatar’s detected.

An administration Web page allows the user to list the active scanner objects in the database and contact individual scanner objects. The user can then choose either to ask the scanner object for the names and total numbers of avatars detected during most recent scan, or instruct the scanner object to self-destruct, in which case its details are also to be removed from the database.

You have access to the following uncommented scripts that your
ex-colleague developed:

i) scanner - written in Linden Scripting Language and designed to run
within a scanner object in-world.
ii) register.php - Designed to run on the external Web server
ii) scanner.php - Designed to run on the external Web server
iv) scan.php – Designed to run on the external Web server

We shall be posting feedback on this project so please stay in touch for that.

regards Vega

Work starts on the project builds

2010-03-10T05:09:00.000-08:00

The National Software Development group have started on their OpenSim builds for the Solar Panel project as part of their course work for this term. Most of the students in the group had already enrolled with our OpenSim, but for those first timers, I sat and demonstrated the building tools; probably about 20 minutes of instruction seem to be OK.

This years project

2010-02-27T08:47:00.000-08:00

My project for the virtual world this year will be based around an assignment for my BTEC National students in Software Development. Each will select a build from the four shown here, which they will have to power from an array of solar voltaic cells. To each I shall then assign a combination of energy requirements such as lights and appliances. While the initial exercise for this has already been written in Java, I have found from previous years that the conversion to Linden Script (oops), given their exposure to structured C also, presents no great difficulty beyond the idea of working in a state driven environment.

I feel the advantage of being able to make use of a dynamic virtual world environment such as OpenSim, allow students to experience their applications running more as a simulation rather than static desktop application, for instance:

•Make use of sun angle in relation to power output
•For sun angles below the horizon then power output will drop to zero
•Factor in virtual world cloud cover
•The impact on the size of an array to a property, they may not all fit onto the roof
•Use excess day power for night storage

Once the project is complete, I shall be posting views and feedback, so you may like to stay in touch for that.

regards Vega

Time to start scripting

2010-02-10T00:46:00.000-08:00

Using our OpenSim as a means of encouraging students to explore virtual worlds continues to be increasingly popular. Beyond the building that has been taking place, the next stage is to get them all familiar with scripting. I have been working with Second Life and using it as part of my main stream course delivery for the last couple years now, and that has certainly proved to also be popular. The question is, just how much scripting functionality does OpenSim have by comparison to SL. The way have I decided to approach this is to simply give my students access to the simpler SL scripts and see how they get on, not that I am suggesting for one minute that OpenSim should be a carbon copy of SL, but the approach seems a reasonable way to start. The script library that I am using is at

http://freescriptlibrarysl.co.uk/Main/index.php?title=Main_Page

Once each of the students have run through a series of scripts for testing, I will get them to post their findings to this blog.

Civil order in a virtual world

2010-02-02T15:15:00.000-08:00

I am really pleased to see that student building efforts in our new OpenSim is continuing at some pace, and still with little direct help from us Second Lifers, all very encouraging I must say.

From the post title though, you can rightly guess that I am going to blog about something different, so here's a little anecdote, you may find amusing and possibly useful. Given the stage of development that OpenSim is currently at with regard to any restrictions you would otherwise find easy to apply with respect to building in other similar worlds, some students have soon come to realise the ease with which they can construct things anywhere, everywhere, anytime, much to the annoyance of other residents!

What to do? There is always the weapon of first choice of course, verbal warning then next time account suspended, but maybe not the best approach here, instead:-

In this Monday’s class, I knew the group would be more than keen to know the results of a test from the previous week, so the conversation went something like this.

Let me apologise to you all regarding the test results, which I had set time aside for marking on Saturday. The thing is, when I looked out of my window on Saturday morning, I discovered that someone had actually parked a large van on my drive. It took me all the rest of that morning attempting to discover the owner and eventually having to contact the Police to get the vehicle removed, after which I had other more pressing things to do, so you will all have to hang on for a few more days for those results.

With this the whole group began informing me, as to what I should have done to get the vehicle off my drive. Some suggestions I must say were very original, while others clearly illegal and some damn right impossible. Anyway I eventually told them this was just fiction, but given their clear and strong views with regard to the sovereign nature of private property, should we not be prepared to extend such considerations into the virtual world?

The approach-elicited firm nods all round, particularly from one somewhat embarrassed looking individual sitting at the back, typical.

If you are just on the verge of engaging with virtual worlds, please let me encourage you without hesitation, but do be prepared for virtual civil society, its waiting just around the next prim.

In fact I can actually recommend some good reading on the subject:

My Tiny Life by Julien Dibble (a really worthwhile read, you may be surprised by the dates)

Exodus to the Virtual World by Edward Castronova (explores policy and constitution in a virtual world)

I Avatar by Mark Stephen Meadows (takes a more cultural perspective)

Good luck to all, and please stay in touch as we continue out virtual journey here at Bromley, and please feel free to reply with your own experiences.

regards Vega

Rezzing the exhibition

2010-01-31T04:01:00.000-08:00

If you're feeling really brave and have an empty region to spare:

http://vleinternal.bromley.ac.uk/Exhibition.oar

To be on the safe side to avoid segmentation errors you may need to use OpenSim 0.6.8 with mono 2.4.2.3.

Also you may need to use the --merge option when loading the oar.

From the point of view of moving it into position, the exhibition comes in four parts:

1) Pavilion LHS
2) Pavilion RHS
3) Steps LHS
4) Posters

The exhibition will rez in the very center of the region. You will need to set the terrain level to 21 to keep the exhibition floors intact. Before unlinking the posters reset the scripts within the linked set. Once you have unlinked the posters, relink the chair components. If you link the back of the chair (containing the script) last of all, it becomes the root prim and the scripts seem to work just fine. You will also have to play around with the teleport script destination locations. The GF TP is supposed to take you up to the far end of the FF to where you placed Slide # 28. The FF teleport is supposed to take you to the GF directly below. The only problems I encountered with the TP scripts was the orientation of the poster/arrow containing the scripts which had to be 0 in all three planes before the TP would work correctly.

Good Luck - feedback appreciated ;)

Note from the OAR Pavilion source
The OAR pavilion is from the OpenVCE community

http://openvce.net/vwassets

the version used here is 1.3 13-Aug-2009, these assets are likely to be under constant development.

Prof. Austin Tate
AIAI, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh,
Appleton Tower, Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9LE, UK
Tel: +44 131 650 2732 Fax: +44 131 650 6513 Avatar: Ai Austin

lsl exhibition

2010-01-31T02:45:00.001-08:00

While our students seem to be getting on well with the building work, they will certainly be in need of some tuition with regard to the scripting, and for that, Clive Pro has imported his established and very popular Linden Script exhibition. The tutorials in the exhibition are based around a series of interactive posters. The code for each poster is made available through note-cards. The whole approach here demonstrates the unique value of individual or collaborative learning spaces in virtual worlds.

Open to students

2010-01-30T05:37:00.000-08:00

This week we opened the simulator to wider student access . The groups had about twelve in each and all came from level three Software Development courses here at Bromley. As you can see from the screen shot, they have been really busy and with surprisingly little in the way of tuition from ourselves. The simulator is available to them both within and from outside the college and there has certainly been a good deal in the way of out of hours activity going on. At the present time the main purpose is in testing the system, how many avatars will it support, what is the performance like, are there any access issues. So far the answer to all these questions seems to be that OpenSim, which is still in Alpha by the way, is holding up really well. Please stay in touch for further postings as we take the project forward.