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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Hi Maria,<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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!<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
On 08/20/2012 08:47 AM, Maria Korolov wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CALg2gL09LOMfT509nnrUU=mV-Oj9V1wJdzhHKAsjqoo3pPTDcQ@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">Sarge -- Thanks for the kind words!
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Lisa -- </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Here are my recommendations, in order of difficulty:</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>1. Easiest and cheapest: go to <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.kitely.com">http://www.kitely.com</a> 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. </div>
<div>Check out: <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2011/06/where-to-get-content-for-opensim/">http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2011/06/where-to-get-content-for-opensim/</a></div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>2. Easy, a bit less cheap, but more options: go to Dreamland
Metaverse (<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.dreamlandmetaverse.com/">http://www.dreamlandmetaverse.com/</a>)
or one of the other vendors in our hosting directory: <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/opensim-hosting-providers/">http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/opensim-hosting-providers/</a>
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.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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 -- <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://nws.virrea.fr/">http://nws.virrea.fr/</a> -- 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: <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Server_Commands">http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Server_Commands</a></div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Feel free to contact me directly if you have any additional
questions!</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Best,</div>
<div><br clear="all">
<div><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">-- Maria</font></div>
<div><font color="#003366" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica,
sans-serif"><br>
</font></div>
<font color="#003366" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica,
sans-serif">____________________________________________________</font><font
face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br>
Maria Korolov • 508-443-1130 • <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:maria@hypergridbusiness.com" target="_blank"><font
color="#003366">maria@hypergridbusiness.com</font></a><a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.china-speakers-bureau.com/" target="_blank"><br>
</a>Editor & Publisher, <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/" target="_blank"><b><font
color="#cc0000">Hypergrid Business</font></b></a></font>
<div><span
style="font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><i><font
color="#666666">The magazine for enterprise users of
virtual worlds. </font></i></span>
</div>
<br>
</div>
</blockquote>
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