Slowly does it

Busy in RL, moving content onto the sim on New World Grid is a slow business. I liked the terraforming so much I decided to put my stuff on an esplanade for the moment. No particular order, no rationale, no signage.

Wondering what comes next. Calm before the storm, I suspect.

Click through for the big picture (Windlight setting: Fine Day).

A new day, a new world, a new protein

While I haven't done the full-on SL photographic "thing" on this one apart from tweaking Windlight settings ("Coastal afternoon" seemed appropriate), it's probably worth clicking through to play "spot the avatar". The protein is Lysin B from the mycobacteriophage D29 concocted from a combo of a rather labour-intensive multi-sculpted protein and one of Hiro Sheridan's space-fill sculpties: 75 prims total. It will be interesting to see what the mesh version looks like though I'm in no hurry until mesh reaches OpenSim.

Speaking of which, this is our new sim on the New World Grid. Thanks for having us, folks. Hello, Metaverse...

Wiki3D_Builder

I've made some very minor modifications to Salahzar Stenvaag's Wiki3D_Builder, mainly tinkering with menus. Based on earlier work by JonnyBee Cioc and Vision Raymaker, this also makes a nice mind-mapping tool though I actually want to use it as a planner. You can also, of course, use it to build silly random shapes like the one shown.

The version I used was actually the earlier particle-based one. The instructions for making the tool are on Sal's wiki page but basically you create a prim, name it nodo and add the short script from the wiki. You then place the nodo prim inside another prim, name this one Wiki3D_Builder and then add the modified script. If necessary reset the scripts and just touch the prim for a menu.

It should run in OpenSim as well as SL. There is an option to use llTextBox which in my experience requires SL Viewer 2 or similar and is only supported on more recent versions of OpenSim (set USETEXTBOX to 1 instead of 0). Otherwise you chat changes to the names displayed as hovertext.

Please bear in mind that it has not been tested in multi-avatar use.

Grid and build rezzers

I like offloading routine work onto rezzers. With the room rezzing/linking application I'm developing, the primary aim is to help novices generate structures rapidly but I don't rule out using it myself so anything that saves time and effort is welcome.

Although the students will be presented with a pre-made grid so they just have to rez and link the rooms with paths, I decided it would be useful for me to have a rezzer. In the video it generates a grid based on text in the Description field, e.g. 3x3 for a 3 by 3 grid.

This got me thinking that it would also be handy if a rezzer could subsequently record the position and rotations of the build prims so that they could be "rerezzed" from a notecard. That is what is shown in the remainder of the video.

There is a shouted command that generates the location/rotation data and this is then copy/pasted into a notecard in the red build rezzer. Touching this regenerates the build. Bear in mind when it stutters that this sim is running from a USB memory stick! Not perfect but for a student much less fiddly than using a packaging tool. Moreover, you have at least a partial archive in the event that other backups are not practicable.

In other news, I've also been trying to use the os commands to generate images dynamically and also to load images from the web. While this works fine on a hosted region, it seems not to work reliably on sim-on-a-stick. The images either fail to rez or generate an error dialog or, worst case, crash the console window.

Adding screens to rooms

I'm continuing to add features to the room rezzer and to modify a few other aspects. The overall goal is to give students a tool that they can use to construct pathways through collaborative builds with a minimum of SL skills.

Firstly I've decided I'd like more inworld menus (as opposed to dialog menus or HUDs). At the moment that's really only a demo of rezzing rooms from a prim and a panel of buttons on the screens, both shown on the video. It does make sense to me, however, to take more of the controls inworld, especially where there's a strong visual aspect as with room layout.

Secondly, I wanted to be able to add aligned screens quickly without recourse to inventory while giving students some flexibility (having screens builtin that you can hide/delete is another option). At the moment it's only a simple textured screen that can also display parcel media. However, eventually it would be good to have other display types, e.g. a whiteboard and, in due course, prim media.

At present the screens are rezzed by touching the floor of the room where you want them to go. The idea originally was to link them to the room so that they could all be rotated synchronously if you wanted to reorient the room. It turns out that this is also an easy way to rez the screens without having to rotate them, viz rez screen, link it to room, rotate room, rez screen on next wall, and so on (it's clearer in the video and might be easier for n00bs than having to rotate the screens).

The only problem has been that the ability to link seems to disappear about 7 m from the room centre. Accordingly, you can only usefully rez screens a metre or so off the wall (the rooms are 8x8 m) and then adjust the positioning later (there's a manual option for that). Occasionally that takes the screen outside the room so you can vary the room size a little too. If you want to take it to extremes, you can flatten the room as shown in the video although, of course, you lose some of the context. Nevertheless for someone with little experience of SL, it may make movement simpler (the walls are actually phantom anyway but they can still obstruct the view).

For me 8x8 m is about the smallest room in which you can see stuff without major avatar camera problems and the flattened version addresses that during the first stage of screen rezzing. Even so, I want to provide camera chairs where you can sit and flip between the screens and maybe chat with others too. But that's for another day.

All-in-all, there's still some way to go and not overly much time.

In other news, I noticed via Twitter that, in addition to OpenSim-on-a-stick, we also have OpenSim-in-a-Box, based on the Amazon EC2 service.

Physics can be fun!

On Sunday I visited the sim called Physics on the New World Grid. The creator, Aime Socrates, has some great educational builds elsewhere but this one is primarily for fun, the challenge being to find and navigate the numerous ramps leading to the top of the building. Like the Rezzable Greenies SL sim of yore (and, for that matter "The Borrowers"), the sim (a lab) is built on an epic scale such that your avatar is dwarfed by the science equipment on the bench.

Needless to say, I didn't get all the way to the top but that was somewhat beside the point. It did strike me that a simplified build of this type would make a great induction and even allow you to explore some of the modes of avatar communication and collaboration in virtual worlds.

Thanks as always to Path for organising the visit.