OpenSim – Page 2 – Ciaran Laval

October 30, 2015October 30, 2015

OpenSim Storytellers Are Developing Some Impressive Storytelling Techniques

I’ve spoken to Nara Malone a few times now. Nara is an author, a storyteller and storytelling is something I’m somewhat passionate about. Back in June Nara showed me around OpenSim and gave me some insight into how they were using NPC’s. Things have progressed since then.

On November 7th – 8th An Adventure Game in Open Sim will be launched. Nara informed me that the team behind this immersive storytelling projects includes 25 creators from various grids, including Second Life. They will be exploring stories told with NPCs. Here’s a trailer :

The key thing to note with a project like this is how much collaboration there is between different people. Coders, designers, storytellers are all working on this project, adding their expertise to create the whole and it looks absolutely fascinating.

One of the tools used is The Story Sequencer, Nara talks about it more here.

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September 2, 2015

Bright Canopy Get The Notion That Customers Might Tip The Boat Over

Bright Canopy, the company behind running Second Life (and OpenSim) in a web browser, recently announced that they were ready for launch. An inital price of $17.00 a month was announced, with an advisory that this may change if demand exceeded expectations.

Linden Lab then blogged about the service :

This weekend, an exciting new service is launching: Bright Canopy. With Bright Canopy, you can use either the official Second Life Viewer or the Firestorm Viewer to access Second Life in your web browser, and you can enjoy great performance and graphics, without a high-spec PC.

Customers flocked to the ship on the ocean, sailing with an inventory of love and devotion for the bold new product. Alas, it quickly became apparent to the Bright Canopy that customers weren’t just going to rock the boat, they were going to tip the boat over. This was of course not the desired outcome, forcing the Bright Canopy team to blog; We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Boat :

We’ve had so much response that we are going to have to make a change and offer a different plan to make sure we are sustainable and can be around long enough to take advantage of much more affordable hosting options from Frame in a few months.

New signups were put on hold and Bright Canopy were transparent about what had happened :

We burned through our contingency in a few hours. We tried modifying some things, but it just wasn’t something that could be fixed with a knob. We talked over our options and looked at the numbers. In order to be able to offer a service of any sort, we knew we would have to make changes.

There will be a limited time offer of a $10 credit for the first month, meaning the first month will be $7. This is our way of thanking you for bearing with us. This offer expires 12AM SLT on Sunday, September 6th. After that, each month will be $17. The plan comes with 20 hours, and additional time is available for $0.013 per minute.

This isn’t what we planned, and making the change is hard, but we believe it is the only way to keep this service available for the people who need it.

One thing was very clear, there was a larger demand for this service than had been anticipated.

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August 18, 2015

Bright Canopy To Launch August 29th With Experimental Pricing Plan

Bright Canopy, seen by many as the successor to the SL Go from Onlive, have announced that they will be officially launching on August 29th :

After much work and preparation and tremendous help from the community testing our offering, we are proud to announce the launch of the full Bright Canopy service.

LAUNCH DATE: August 29th

EARLY BIRD PRICE: $17 per month*

BRING A FRIEND: Sign-up a friend and both you, and your friend, earn free time.

EAST COAST CLOUD: We will also be adding a brand-new, US. East Coast cloud, for faster ping times!

The asterisk next to the price is important, because the pricing will initially be experimental.

In the blog post, Bill Glover explains :

Our early bird price is going to be an experiment for 90 days. If you’ve been following the blog, you know we’ve seen price fluctuations on the back end, and we still need to watch actual usage of the service. $17 is a sustainable price if the instance costs return to their typical, historical values. It is not a sustainable price with the current spike in instance price. We may need to get creative with how we split instances, or we may need to raise prices. We intend to remain transparent as always and will keep you posted. Our goal is to continue to maintain a sustainable, affordable service.

The transparency here regarding the pricing is something to be admired. Pricing has been seen as the big barrier to streaming services such as Second Life. Pricing was something that SL Go from OnLive struggled with and it’s something that even the Lindens have admitted is tricky when it comes to offering streaming services.

At SL12B Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg was asked about Linden Lab providing a streaming service, his reply put the issue of pricing firmly at the heart of the discussion :

Streaming (render on the server) is interesting but the issue is cost. The day will come but we’re not there yet. Between nVidia, Amazon, Microsoft etc. hopefully the competition will drive pricing down soon to make it something we can offer at a price that users are willing to pay to make it worthwhile.

Therefore the approach from Bright Canopy is most definitely a sensible one.

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August 6, 2015

Virtual World Interoperability Is Still One Giant Step Away For VR

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes recently posted : Cross-Platform Virtual Reality is Here: Watch High Fidelity Unite Vive, Oculus, and PC Users in the Same Metaverse. The post was regarding the High Fidelity post regarding users with different interfaces interacting in High Fidelity. I covered this in my last post. The development is an impressive one.

Hamlet’s headline was a tad misleading and some folk thought the post was going to be about people from different virtual worlds being able to interact in a single virtual world. This has been done before, but the potential was never fulfilled. I have talked about this before.

Just over seven years ago Hamilton Linden blogged IBM and Linden Lab Interoperability Announcement :

This is a historic day for Second Life, and for virtual worlds in general. IBM and Linden Lab have announced that research teams from the two companies successfully teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid into a virtual world running on an OpenSim server, marking the first time an avatar has moved from one virtual world to another. It’s an important first step toward enabling avatars to pass freely between virtual worlds, something we’ve been working toward publicly since the formation of the Architecture Working Group in September 2007.

This was quite big news, Linden Lab issued a press release. The news was covered by Antone Gonsalves at Information Week and Erick Sconfeld at TechCrunch. I will embed a video of the epic moment at the end of the post.

Alas things didn’t work out and the project seems to be dead and yet, as demonstrated in the comments on Hamlet’s post, there’s still a lot of interest in interoperability between different virtual worlds.

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July 24, 2015

Microsoft Tech Evangelist Deploys OpenSim To Microsoft Azure But Pricing Is Confusing

Over on Gamasutra there’s a sponsored blog post from Microsoft, the post is from Amanda Lange, Technical Evangelist, Microsoft : Sponsored: How to simulate a tiny universe in Azure.

Microsoft Azure is open to all kinds of open source code projects, so I thought it might be neat to try running my own OpenSim on an Azure server.

OpenSim is a bit like Second Life, but open source. Anyone can create their own shard worlds to manipulate however they wish. It allows for a very private virtual world for use in role play gaming, education, or just to build out your own environment however you like and play with some 3D construction tools.

This sounds interesting and the blog post gives very detailed instructions on how to deploy OpenSim to Microsoft Azure. I’m not going to detail the instructions here, if you’re interested read the linked post near the start of this post, but it’s not a plug and play process, you will need to use the likes of Visual Studio. However these days Visual Studio comes in decent form for free in many cases.

Now if you’re wondering what Microsoft Azure is, here’s some of the blurb :

Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, a growing collection of integrated services – analytics, computing, database, mobile, networking, storage and web – for moving faster, achieving more and saving money.

Now if you’re still unsure, you can read more here : http://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/overview/what-is-azure/

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