The Race Track is Ready

Well its end of term now and I am busily spending some of my time working on the Formula 1 OpenSim project. Having cleared down the Mars base project from last year I converted the terrain to a 1m high flat island that covers the sim just short of the boundary limits so that we can have plenty of room for those different race tracks. One reason that I chose to have a particularly flat terrain though is that although the vehicles (Formula 1 cars) will appear to be grounded on the tarmac, in reality the script will be sensing land, so keeping land at a constant height should make for a smooth ride.

Choice of materials has been an important consideration in this project. For instance, the wheels of vehicles do not actually have to turn, you simply simulate rotation through rotating textures, and so you need the wheels to be made of the lowest friction material available, and this is glass! I also found that the crash barrier are also very sensitive to material type, and after a few tests found that metal gave the best results. I have had a good numbers of test drives around the circuit, tweeking and evaluating settings of the vehicle script and am happy with performance so far, though how things will work out with all my students driving at the same time remains to be seen.

One feature of the project that I particularly wanted to implement is the ability to log data i.e. driver details etc to an external web database. I had my first attempt at this today and it seems to be working just fine; please see the screen shot from my phpMyADMIN Sql query. There is of course some ground still to cover, excuse the pun, but things are looking particularly promising for this years project right now, so please stay in touch for more updates.

Vega

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

Two new regions ready to go

The end of term came with the arrival of two requests that I had been expecting for virtual worlds. There was some possibility of giving each its own server, but in the end I decided to make use of the server running our Comenius virtual world project. My first attempt to create a new region adjacent to the Comenius build did appear to make everything just a little to crowded, and so I decided to leave a sim space between each region. This created the desired effect and also means that avatars will not simply be able to walk over, though Teleporting is still possible.
I set-up meetings to discuss such issues as terrains, builds, scripting and use with both of my colleagues and managed to deliver the sims ready to go after a couple of days, please see accompanying screen shots. More posts will follow on these as the intention is for students to be introduced to the virtual world and their facilities during Induction this coming September.




I have also been busy uploading some more of my own builds to OpenSim Creations, and this week I delivered Solarum, a two floor low prim, low footprint solar home, which at the moment I see has been downloaded thirteen times. The residence can of course be enhanced by the inclusion of the wind turbine that I mentioned in the previous post, so happy with that.

Stay in touch for more updates, have a good summer, regards Vega

Terrains and Wind Turbines

Getting ready to meet up with our two staff members that requested an Open Sim instance for their groups, I realised this week that it would be a good idea to actually put together a small portfolio of terrains for them to choose from. So far I have managed assemble or create fourteen, and these range from equally sized small flat plots for individual projects too much larger equally sized plots for group project work. The others fall into a much wider range of island groups, coves, hilly, and mountainous. I am thinking about actual content, but for now leaning more in the direction of letting people create their own, it would be a good way getting building skills for our students.


I have also been continuing with my submissions to OpenSim Creations with a working wind turbine. One of the aspects about working in a virtual world that I really like is being able to create a real world simulation. The wind turbine, as you can see from the image here, is basically of the type that you would typically find installed in a solar home style of project. Given the fact that the wind, though be it virtual, does actually blow in the virtual world, then its really only a case of using the correct function to get the value that you need and use it in a straight forward basic formula for a wind turbine. Of course one of the more challenging sides to a project like this is getting the blades to rotate in the correct plane irrespective of rezzed position. I must confess to getting around this tricky though not insoluble problem, as you are equally likely to find that the issues can more often be those of lag, and so my solution was to use a turbine blade texture and simply animate it. While I have not put too much detail in this post, you can if you are interested grab a copy of my wind turbine from here, it comes with fully commented code and tutorial.

Have fun Vega

OpenSim Is Growing

Our work here at the College with OpenSim is looking increasingly promising with our European partners in the Comenius project requesting that we maintain the project for the coming year, which is very encouraging indeed. As part of out Teaching and Learning Conference here at the College recently the Comenius OpenSim was demonstrated as part of our workshop offering and following this I received two requests for islands for next year from our own staff, brilliant and I shall be sure to blog on the outcome of those.





For my own part I decided that it was time to start making some of my own builds available to the OpenSim community, and so I have been uploading to OpenSim Creations. The builds are freely available and distributed under the Creative Commons License and they are under the avatar name Vega, so do please feel free to download and any positive comments would be welcome.

Bye for now, Vega

Life on Mars Overview and Feedback

The Overview and feedback from a 32 question student survey of the Life on Mars project is now available in the small hall of the main building here at Shimmer Island in Second Life or from this web link. The project itself was the result of work carried out by a group of level 5 Foundation Degree students here at Bromley College currently enrolled on the Network Computing course. The project was established in order to provide students with a virtual world field trip to the planet Mars. The project itself was in support of a final year assignment to produce a desktop simulation for a solar powered lighting and heating control system written in Java. In order to give student avatars a realistic experience of the planet Mars the following was carried out: - the terrain was terra-formed and suitably textured. For effect, the sound of wind was introduced, as was the arrival of random particle dust storms. Each student was allocated a unique combination of building components, which they formed into a connected accommodation unit. A small weather station was placed on the surface that relayed temperatures and wind speeds throughout the Martian day that was reasonably consistent with those found on the planet. Finally, each avatar came ready installed with spacesuit, boots, gloves, helmet and backpack life support. Please feel free to download the pdf and comment to this posting.

regards Vega

Some useful stuff

If like myself you have moved into OpenSim from Second Life, then there is no doubt that you may be finding resources particularly free ones are somewhat thin on the ground and locating them can be time consuming until you locate all those sim and web addresses. So I was really pleased to find a newsletter posting that pointed to a Google Search facility - HyperFind: OpenSim Content Custom Search Engine' At the present time searches include http://www.onikenkon.com/UCI , http://thehypergates.com/, http://www.lindakellie.com/ , http://www.avaverse.org/ ,  http://thoughtfulmonkey.com/ and I image that more will be added as they become available.

Are you using OpenSim as an education tool, then you may well be interetsed in Opensim-edu http://opensim-edu.org/blog/ the site features
How to guides, places to visit, OAR's and websites, well worth a visit

Finally, talking of using virtual worlds for education, I came across this chat log Transcript of March 23 NPC Meetup with Global Kids on "Playing 4 Peace". Apart from the obvious interest in what was was actaully being said and taking place at the meet, there are some very useful web and sim addresses that you may like to follow up on.
 
 
Bye for now and feel free to comment, Vega