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 • [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
<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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