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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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
