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

Mon Aug 20 20:31:49 UTC 2012

Hi Lisa.  I see a lot of folks have already given some great advice on this and there's not much more I can add!

I just want to make sure that you're aware that OpenSimulator is still a platform in its infancy (as is the whole area 
of educating via shared environments, I think).  Therefore, there are still a large number of unexploded bugs, missing 
features and performance issues around, though OpenSimulator continues to improve over time.

I'm also sure as a previous MMO developer that you're aware of just how complicated these platforms can get and the 
aspects of ongoing maintenance costs, cost of content creation, etc., though I would say that aspects of these are 
vastly cheaper on OpenSimulator than on other exclusively commercial-oriented platforms, both self-hosted and with 
third-party providers.

Having said all that, I think we're just at the point where some very interesting things can be done and there are many 
educational institutions already involved/experimenting with OpenSimulator (e.g. PLANE [1], New Worlds run by the 
Chester County Intermediate Unit [2], ScienceSim from Intel [3] and lots of others).

I would also urge that anybody considering funding viewer development talk to the existing viewer projects first before 
forking.  These are produced by people who have already shown a long term passion for exploring the virtual world/shared 
environment space and it would be great to see sustainable projects catering to OpenSimulator in this area).

[1] http://plane.edu.au/tag/opensim/
[2] http://newworlds.paiunet.org/
[3] http://sciencesim.com/wiki/doku.php/start

On 20/08/12 03:03, Lisa Evans wrote:
> Hi Maria,
>
> Thanks for all this information. I should have written more about the scheme I am writing a proposal for, rather than
> just link to it.
>
> If this proposal is successful, the project will be funded up to $400,000 AU over three years, (and hopefully more
> funding after that, but otherwise we would have to find another source). Also, projects funded under this scheme have to
> be free for educational use within Australia, and they have to make use of the National Broadband Network, which is the
> very high speed broadband network our government is building Australia wide. Part of the reason for the education portal
> is to show it off and justify the expense!
>
> So the only hosting solution that would fit all the requirements would be to build our own servers locally, so we get
> the highest speed possible under the NBN. And we could afford to pay the programmers/tech heads needed to set the
> hosting up, and run it for at least three years.
>
> The project I have in mind is a bit bigger than just what OpenSim can provide under normal circumstances, and we would
> want to maybe fork one of the viewers out there and add some new features to it, using part of the budget. Hopefully
> what I'm intending would be useful to other educators and if the project wasn't funded beyond the three years, the
> development of the new viewer would continue (of course it would all be open source). The features we would add would be
> specific to teaching history through virtual worlds, and teaching in general.
>
> So I would love to talk to someone about my original questions regarding structuring historical sims that exist not just
> in three dimensional space but also back and forth along a timeline. I've studied a fair bit of general relativity back
> when I was doing my physics degree, so I can kind of handle thinking in four dimensions, but this is still a bit tricky,
> lol.
>
> On 08/20/2012 08:47 AM, Maria Korolov wrote:
>> 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 <mailto: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. /
>>
>
>
>
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