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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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
