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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">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 :)<br>
<br>
This is all that's left of the MMO I worked on, by the way -
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;
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<a href="http://www.onlinesoccerchampions.com/">http://www.onlinesoccerchampions.com/</a>
. 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<br>
<br>
On 08/21/2012 04:31 AM, Justin Clark-Casey wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote cite="mid:50329EB5.2060500@googlemail.com" type="cite">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!
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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).
<br>
<br>
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).
<br>
<br>
[1] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://plane.edu.au/tag/opensim/">http://plane.edu.au/tag/opensim/</a>
<br>
[2] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://newworlds.paiunet.org/">http://newworlds.paiunet.org/</a>
<br>
[3] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://sciencesim.com/wiki/doku.php/start">http://sciencesim.com/wiki/doku.php/start</a>
<br>
<br>
On 20/08/12 03:03, Lisa Evans wrote:
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">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
<br>
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
<br>
funding after that, but otherwise we would have to find another
source). Also, projects funded under this scheme have to
<br>
be free for educational use within Australia, and they have to
make use of the National Broadband Network, which is the
<br>
very high speed broadband network our government is building
Australia wide. Part of the reason for the education portal
<br>
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
<br>
the highest speed possible under the NBN. And we could afford to
pay the programmers/tech heads needed to set the
<br>
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
<br>
want to maybe fork one of the viewers out there and add some new
features to it, using part of the budget. Hopefully
<br>
what I'm intending would be useful to other educators and if the
project wasn't funded beyond the three years, the
<br>
development of the new viewer would continue (of course it would
all be open source). The features we would add would be
<br>
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
<br>
in three dimensional space but also back and forth along a
timeline. I've studied a fair bit of general relativity back
<br>
when I was doing my physics degree, so I can kind of handle
thinking in four dimensions, but this is still a bit tricky,
<br>
lol.
<br>
<br>
On 08/20/2012 08:47 AM, Maria Korolov wrote:
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">Sarge -- Thanks for the kind words!
<br>
<br>
Lisa --
<br>
<br>
Here are my recommendations, in order of difficulty:
<br>
<br>
1. Easiest and cheapest: go to <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.kitely.com">http://www.kitely.com</a> and sign
up for the free six-hour introductory month, which comes
<br>
with a free region. You will be asked to download a small
plugin, then it will automatically install a viewer for you,
<br>
create your region, and take you in-world. Easy, peasy. You
can practice building, or upload any of the OARs available
<br>
free to educators to start with.
<br>
Check out:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" 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><br>
<br>
If you like it, $35 a month gives you unlimited use of Kitely,
plus 20 (twenty!) regions. You can add extra regions
<br>
for just $1 a month each. Each region can hold up to 100,000
prims and up to 100 simultaneous visitors. (No kidding!
<br>
They run it in the Amazon cloud and the scaling is excellent.)
For educators, it's the single best deal out there.
<br>
Here's the downside: your visitors will get two hours a month
free (six hours the first month) but after that they
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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
<br>
have something like eight users with unlimited use accounts
(you, a couple of fellow teachers, the students doing the
<br>
heavy building) and 8x20=160 regions and you can put the
$1,000 you'd otherwise spend for a setup fee towards 300,000
<br>
minutes worth of access time for visitors.
<br>
<br>
If you ever want to leave Kitely for any reason, you can
export your entire regions (terrains, objects, scripts,
<br>
everything on them that you have rights to) with a single
click, and import them to anywhere else you want in a couple
<br>
of minutes. They have Vivox voice (the same as Second Life),
mesh, media-on-a-prim (to put interactive Web pages and
<br>
videos on in-world surfaces) and megaregions. The only thing
that's missing is hypergrid, and that's coming with the
<br>
next hypergrid security update. They also have bots -- aka
NPCs (non-player characters) -- which you can use to create
<br>
robots that simulate historical characters and interact with
your visitors.
<br>
<br>
2. Easy, a bit less cheap, but more options: go to Dreamland
Metaverse (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.dreamlandmetaverse.com/">http://www.dreamlandmetaverse.com/</a>) or one of
<br>
the other vendors in our hosting directory:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/opensim-hosting-providers/">http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/opensim-hosting-providers/</a> I
particularly
<br>
mention Dreamland because they have an excellent reputation
with educators, all the latest OpenSim features, and are
<br>
currently running the grids for a school district in suburban
Atlanta. They can set you up with a private grid, or
<br>
land on any of the open grids out there, including OSGrid.
They can set it up so your teachers can hypergrid teleport
<br>
to other grids, and your students can't. They can
automatically create user accounts for all your students and
<br>
teachers at once -- and there's lot of other custom stuff they
can do, as well. They have moderate prices -- they're
<br>
not the most expensive by far, nor the cheapest, but have a
good reputation for reliability and service. And whle
<br>
Kitely regions are only up when people are on them, and are
put to sleep otherwise, Dreamland regions are up 24-7.
<br>
While this means higher prices, it also means that visitors
don't have to wait for a region to boot up when they first
<br>
teleport to a sleeping region, which can take a minute.
<br>
<br>
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
<br>
database, and an Apache server, and the OpenSim server, and
keep all of those patched and updated and regularly backed
<br>
up. The easiest way to do that is to use New World Studio --
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://nws.virrea.fr/">http://nws.virrea.fr/</a> -- which installs all of those for
<br>
you automatically. You will still have to learn how to use the
OpenSim management console, however, and, unless you
<br>
hire a consultant, if you want to manage users or inventories
or terrains or OAR files you will often have to go to
<br>
the server console and type in server commands. The commands
are here, to give you a taste:
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Server_Commands">http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Server_Commands</a>
<br>
<br>
If all your visitors are local -- behind your school firewall
-- then this will give you the fastest possible
<br>
connections, since the OpenSim grid will be hosted right where
the visitors are. Some of the OpenSim hosting companies
<br>
will do by-the-hour consulting for you, helping you set up
your first grid and installing and configuring routers and
<br>
viewers and all that other messy stuff. And you can have as
many regions, prims and simultaneous visitors as your
<br>
network can bear -- which could be quite a lot, depending on
your infrastructure. And if you want to allow remote
<br>
logins, or hypergrid travel to and from other grids, you will
need to configure it for hypergrid connectivity, and
<br>
punch a hole in your network's firewall to allow the traffic
to go through.
<br>
<br>
Feel free to contact me directly if you have any additional
questions!
<br>
<br>
Best,
<br>
<br>
-- Maria
<br>
<br>
____________________________________________________
<br>
Maria Korolov • 508-443-1130 • <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:maria@hypergridbusiness.com">maria@hypergridbusiness.com</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:maria@hypergridbusiness.com"><mailto:maria@hypergridbusiness.com></a>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="http://www.china-speakers-bureau.com/"><http://www.china-speakers-bureau.com/></a>Editor &
Publisher, *Hypergrid Business*
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/"><http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/></a>
<br>
/The magazine for enterprise users of virtual worlds. /
<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
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