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 • [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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