[Opensim-users] Some questions about recreating history in OpenSim

[Maria Korolov]

Sarge -- Thanks for the kind words!

Lisa --

Here are my recommendations, in order of difficulty:

1. Easiest and cheapest: go to http://www.kitely.com and sign up for the
free six-hour introductory month, which comes with a free region. You will
be asked to download a small plugin, then it will automatically install a
viewer for you, create your region, and take you in-world. Easy, peasy. You
can practice building, or upload any of the OARs available free to
educators to start with.
Check out:
http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2011/06/where-to-get-content-for-opensim/

If you like it, $35 a month gives you unlimited use of Kitely, plus 20
(twenty!) regions. You can add extra regions for just $1 a month each. Each
region can hold up to 100,000 prims and up to 100 simultaneous visitors.
(No kidding! They run it in the Amazon cloud and the scaling is excellent.)
For educators, it's the single best deal out there. Here's the downside:
your visitors will get two hours a month free (six hours the first month)
but after that they either have to sign up for a plan or pay 20 cents an
hour for usage. Or you can opt to pay for their usage.

Let's compare this to the Second Life deal, with $300 a month per region,
and a $1,000 setup fee. For the $300 you can have something like eight
users with unlimited use accounts (you, a couple of fellow teachers, the
students doing the heavy building) and 8x20=160 regions and you can put the
$1,000 you'd otherwise spend for a setup fee towards 300,000 minutes worth
of access time for visitors.

If you ever want to leave Kitely for any reason, you can export your entire
regions (terrains, objects, scripts, everything on them that you have
rights to) with a single click, and import them to anywhere else you want
in a couple of minutes. They have Vivox voice (the same as Second Life),
mesh, media-on-a-prim (to put interactive Web pages and videos on in-world
surfaces) and megaregions. The only thing that's missing is hypergrid, and
that's coming with the next hypergrid security update. They also have bots
-- aka NPCs (non-player characters) -- which you can use to create robots
that simulate historical characters and interact with your visitors.

2. Easy, a bit less cheap, but more options: go to Dreamland Metaverse (
http://www.dreamlandmetaverse.com/) or one of the other vendors in our
hosting directory:
http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/opensim-hosting-providers/  I particularly
mention Dreamland because they have an excellent reputation with educators,
all the latest OpenSim features, and are currently running the grids for a
school district in suburban Atlanta. They can set you up with a private
grid, or land on any of the open grids out there, including OSGrid. They
can set it up so your teachers can hypergrid teleport to other grids, and
your students can't. They can automatically create user accounts for all
your students and teachers at once -- and there's lot of other custom stuff
they can do, as well. They have moderate prices -- they're not the most
expensive by far, nor the cheapest, but have a good reputation for
reliability and service. And whle Kitely regions are only up when people
are on them, and are put to sleep otherwise, Dreamland regions are up 24-7.
While this means higher prices, it also means that visitors don't have to
wait for a region to boot up when they first teleport to a sleeping region,
which can take a minute.

3. Not easy at all, but free. You can run your own grids on your own
servers. You will have to set up a MySQL database, and an Apache server,
and the OpenSim server, and keep all of those patched and updated and
regularly backed up. The easiest way to do that is to use New World Studio
-- http://nws.virrea.fr/ --  which installs all of those for you
automatically. You will still have to learn how to use the OpenSim
management console, however, and, unless you hire a consultant, if you want
to manage users or inventories or terrains or OAR files you will often have
to go to the server console and type in server commands. The commands are
here, to give you a taste: http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Server_Commands

If all your visitors are local -- behind your school firewall -- then this
will give you the fastest possible connections, since the OpenSim grid will
be hosted right where the visitors are. Some of the OpenSim hosting
companies will do by-the-hour consulting for you, helping you set up your
first grid and installing and configuring routers and viewers and all that
other messy stuff. And you can have as many regions, prims and simultaneous
visitors as your network can bear -- which could be quite a lot, depending
on your infrastructure. And if you want to allow remote logins, or
hypergrid travel to and from other grids, you will need to configure it for
hypergrid connectivity, and punch a hole in your network's firewall to
allow the traffic to go through.

Feel free to contact me directly if you have any additional questions!

Best,

-- Maria

____________________________________________________
Maria Korolov •  508-443-1130 • maria at hypergridbusiness.com
<http://www.china-speakers-bureau.com/>Editor & Publisher, *Hypergrid
Business* <http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/>
*The magazine for enterprise users of virtual worlds. *
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://opensimulator.org/pipermail/opensim-users/attachments/20120819/868bdaa6/attachment.html>