OpenSim – Page 5 – Ciaran Laval

November 11, 2014

Radegast Viewer Parked At End Of The Road

Inara Pey recently blogged some sad news regarding the Radegast viewer for Second Life and Opensim. Inara linked to a post from the main developer behind Radegast, Latif Khalifa, in which Latif typed :

It saddens me to have to inform you that I won’t be able to continue work on Radegast or my other opensource projects. My health has been deteriorating over the past few years to this point where my use of computers is down to just a few minutes daily. Not being able to work for several years bring its own set of problems.

Radegast is opensource so if there is interest people could continue improving it.

It’s been a great pleasure working with the Radegast and the wider Second Life communities.

The Radegast viewer won’t be as familiar to people as some of the more popular third party viewers for virtual worlds. That is largely because Radegast is a lightweight client that contains some enhanced accessibility features such as text to speech, which makes it a client that people with visual difficulties may embrace and therefore join virtual world communities.

There’s certainly room in virtual worlds for lightweight clients, even if they don’t come with accessibility features. People may just want to check in when they are on the go, so I don’t think this means the end of the road for lightweight clients and it certainly won’t be the end of the road for clients built with accessibility in mind.

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November 6, 2014November 7, 2014

The Verge Asks : Can we build a virtual world?

An interesting post on The Verge : The Big Future: Can we build a virtual world? The question may initially seem odd to those who have experienced virtual worlds such as Second Life, Kitely, OpenSim and are keeping their eyes on future virtual worlds such as High Fidelity and Linden Lab’s next generation platform. However the question is one that goes beyond the current generation of virtual worlds :

The web is fine, but how do we get the internet we always wanted — a “real” space you can walk around in, like the Metaverse from Snow Crash? It’s not a new question, but it’s one that’s being taken a little more seriously now that a huge company like Facebook is putting its weight (and its money) behind virtual reality. In this week’s Big Future, we look at what it takes to build a convincing virtual world, why we’re not there yet, and what we might do if we got one.

The Metaverse that exists in Snow Crash has long been the inspiration and dream of many a virtual world enthusiast, but will we ever get there? Indeed do we really want to get there? That level of immersion may well read well in a novel but can it ever really be a place that will happily co-exist with the physical world?

There will be no real answers to this until we have an answer to the question “Are we there yet?” As The Verge article states, it’s easy to trick the eyes, it’s a lot more difficult to trick our other senses and natural motion. For example The Verge talks about walking in a virtual world and how that’s far more of a challenge than tricking our eyes. I remain sceptical because of the sheer number of peripherals required at the moment to achieve greater immersion. However over time those peripherals will become less intrusive and more intuitive.

Obviously the full on immersion that some crave may not be the route to go. Whereas I fully expect greater immersion to open many a great door, I do feel that some doors may be better if they remain locked. The Verge article does mention the current virtual world scene :

We already have examples of “virtual worlds” like Second Life, and they’ll only get cooler with immersion. But some of the most exciting possibilities involve blending the physical world with VR. Sharing experiences will become more intense, and online research takes on a whole new meaning.

However one area that The Verge article doesn’t touch upon is who will be running the bold new worlds.

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September 12, 2014

Nara Malone On OpenSim, NPC’s, Exhibitions And OpenSimulator Conference

Nara Malone isn’t happy; “It’s like being caught in your curlers” she purrs as I whip out my camera, but there’s a glint in her eye as she stands amidst the scene of an in progress exhibit from Fuscia Nightfire.

Nara is showing me around the build which is an interactive exhibit featuring machinima, which is playing on the floor and surrounding walls. The finished exhibit will feature the use of Non Player Characters (NPC’s) and Nara has been demonstrating to me just how easy they are to create in OpenSim.

Nara rezes a poseball and then explains the process to me : “I click the ball once it records my appearance, it runs the animation I put in the poseball. I can change those out or run a string. This is our simplest character maker.”

With that said Nara clicks the ball and few second later another Nara is in my view, this one sitting down tying her lace, which is the animation inside the pose ball. However how resource hungry are they? Nara explains that they are not that resource hungry at all : “Its just an animation running…very easy resource. We can have 20 or so at a time with 10 users online. We have more complex versions but this is the starter one. We can make them talk, Program them to interact so they are very helpful with storytelling and with the immersion. The characters draw readers in.”

Nara is a storyteller and of course her stories must be told. However she’s not alone and the exhibit she’s giving me a sneak preview of is part of her group’s work for the OpenSimulator Conference in November. Whereas the big names are keynote speakers such as High Fidelity’s Philip Rosedale and Oculus Rift’s Steve LaValle, many from the general OpenSim community will be there too and exhibiting their wares.

Nara explains to me that her group will have a total of eight examples of their work running at the conference. Whereas there’s a lot of storytelling, there’s also a lot of scripting involved and Nara tells me that scripting guru Fred Beckhusen is on their team.

So just what are Nara and her team working on? Nara passes me a note with some preliminary but rather ambitious details.

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July 25, 2014

Buy Your SysAdmin A Beer, Even If It’s Virtual

The first rule of SysAdmin club is that nobody talks about SysAdmin club. The second rule of SysAdmin club is “How can I perform this boring bulk task with a script?” Today, the last Friday in July is the fourteenth Systems Administrator Appreciation Day. Generally people outside of SysAdmin groups aren’t aware this day exists, indeed plenty of people inside SysAdmin groups aren’t aware this day exists.

xkcd have a comic explaining the devotion to duty that goes into being a SysAdmin :

A comic should be here — Devotion To Duty

SysAdmins are the people who make it possible to login to your systems, be it at work, Second Life, Kitely, Inworldz, OpenSim, World Of Warcraft yadda yadda yadda. They help you recover that data you didn’t backup, they help you connect to the wireless network despite the instructions on how to do so being on the wall above their head.

They ask you “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” and really mean it as a helpful suggestion and have scorn poured upon them for doing so. No really, it’s a good tip, trust me I’m a Sys… umm blogger.

Plenty of SysAdmins you don’t see very often, they are mysterious, they may well spend most of their time in what is known as “The Server Room“, a place that is air conditioned to an absurd level to stop the servers from overheating, it’s cold in there and often dark, but these are the sort of conditions in which a SysAdmin can thrive. When you see them at an office function you ask someone else who they are, and the other person reveals their name, a name you’ve heard of, a name you’ve cursed, the name of the person who put a limit on your mailbox and refused to even consider raising said limit until you’d deleted those funny cat videos.

SysAdmins can in many cases be easy to spot, they are usually the people with their heads in their hands after yet another wonderful idea from senior management undid all the good work they carried out after the last wonderful idea from senior management.

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July 23, 2014

RezMela Contest In Kitely Offers Prizes Of Up To $250

RezMela are running a competition in Kitely with prizes on offer of up to USD$250.00. Now you may be wondering what the bloody hell RezMela is, we’ll get to that later, for now here are the details of the competition :

Category A – Photography Contest

You need to submit:

An in-world photograph taken using a RezMela scene
Text (maximum 100 words) to describe the scenario depicted by the photograph

Prizes:

Gold: $50
Silver: $30
Bronze: $20

Category B – Machinima Contest

You need to submit:

A link to an video (maximum 5 minutes) using a RezMela scene, uploaded to YouTube
Text (maximum 100 words) to describe the scenario that the machinima presents

Prizes:

Gold: $250
Silver: $110
Bronze: $40

Note that YouTube videos must be set to Public or Unlisted, and must allow embedding.

To enter the competition you will need to visit RezMela Competition or RezMela Competition 2 in Kitely. Please note that the contest deadline is Thursday July 31st 2014, 11 pm EDT. All submissions need to be made on or before that time.

For further details please go to : http://rezmelacomp.wordpress.com/

Ok so what on earth is RezMela? At a very basic level it’s a way of building and saving scenes for your sim in OpenSim. This way you can quickly load scenes for different scenarios, it’s an excellent idea for many use cases but it seems to be particularly useful for educational usage and education is the sector that the product blurb is aimed at with talk of virtual learning environments and such like.

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