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

Tue Aug 21 03:31:21 UTC 2012

Thanks for this Justin. I do understand the complexities very much! But 
there's definitely not enough in the budget to build something like this 
from the ground up, so starting with a project that already exists is 
the only way forward.  From my research, I think if it can't be done in 
OpenSim at this stage, then it can't really be done yet, and I might 
have to put the idea away for a few more years :)

This is all that's left of the MMO I worked on, by the way - 
http://www.onlinesoccerchampions.com/ . I helped to script tools in 3DS 
Max to streamline content creation, integrated all the clothing (there 
was a lot of it), created the crowds in the stadiums, made the roads in 
the virtual world look as seamless as possible, and did lots of other 
odd jobs. Plus wrote a huge amount of documentation about our art 
pipelines. I'd love to get stuck into doing something like that again, 
especially for an educational project that I would care about far more 
than a sport game :P

On 08/21/2012 04:31 AM, Justin Clark-Casey wrote:
> 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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