OSGrid has a newspaper – Woot!

Kudos to Alyvaral Aeghin on OSGrid for taking an idea and making something of it. There is now a newspaper on OSGrid and it is called “The Ruth”.

The first issue is 8 pages and is available here for viewing. There are also newstand vendors (no charge) on Teravus Plaza, Yang and others. It is absolutely terrific to see more of our community on OSGrid that has been evolving for over a year and a half as we move forward in both helping to develop OpenSim by testing the latest SVN builds each day and developing our community at the same time.

SpeedBuild on Sandbox Plaza

The second “SpeedBuild” contest was help on “Sandbox Plaza” today at 11:00AM PST (1900UTC) on OSGrid. The theme was “impossible things I would like to see fly”. Each week this SpeedBuild is occurring at the same time and place.

There were about a dozen participants including four builders creating a variety of, er, impossible things. Such as what appeared to be a stage attached to a steam-powered helicopter, a turbine powered, er, question mark, a dual-bladed watermelon helicopter and a flying tea service with horizontal stabilizers.

All objects are available to anyone after the hour is finished. This is a great chance to see, learn and teach some building techniques. While I was there, I had a chance to speak with a genie hovering nearby (in his oil lamp) and an advanced scripter with his sripting screen in mid-air in front of him. It is turning out to be very interesting to just watch what goes on each Sunday at 11:00AM PST/SLT (1900UTC) on “Sandbox Plaza”.

The sim performed well, no crashes, so the secondary goal of a small stress test while four builders were building was successful for OpenSim.

OSG Metaversity (second class meeting)

The second class for C# programming was help on OSGrid today at Teravus Plaza at 2100UTC. Ten people were there *and* use was made of Justin’s “Graffiti Board”, a white board script he kindly placed in the OpenSim library for all to use.

Most students were there an hour before the class started to discuss programming, *and* I heard some even asking about additional homework on the #osgrid-college IRC channel on FreeNode earlier. The enthusiasm is joyful, to say the least.

I hope that we can strive to use “Teravus Plaza” for various meetings around this time of the day everyday, both classes, question answer hours and other learning and sharing activities as the community using OpenSim continues to grow.

Since we are concentrating on using the SecondLife Official client, currently 1.21.6 and the Hippo also, this is a good time and place for us to get reliability and stress data for the use of a major plaza to help the OpenSim development along.

Charles Krinke
OpenSim Core Developer
Director of OSGrid

Vehicles in OpenSim

There are three types of vehicles in OpenSim. These three are:

Type 1: Non-physical vehicles moved with llSetPos().
Type 2: Physical vehicles moved with llSetForce().
Type 3: Physics vehicles moved with llSetVehicleType().

There has been significant success with Type 1, modest success with Type 2 and Type 3 is incompletely implemented at this point.

Type 1:
One can find an example of a Type 1 vehicle in the form of a tour bus and a taxi on the region ‘Port Edward’ on OSGrid. The tourbus runs a fixed route around the streets of the town and the taxi accepts commands to move around the town.

Type 2:
A couple of folks have reported success with motor cycles and boats.

Type 3:
The 10 or so llSetVehicle* functions are incompletely implemented. That is, they are missing the last connection to ODE. It turns out that ODE is a little different then Havoc in its definitions of joints and motors and this is waiting for a “zealot” to help move it forward.

In chatting with folks about Type 1 and Type 2, our current issue seems to be crossing a region with either type of vehicle. Either we loose the reference of the prim or script from the scene, we loose the physical state, or both.

It seems to me that setting up a number of copies of a simple script and run a fixed route vehicle at a region boundary while monitoring the consoles of the “from” region and the “to” region to create and add notes to Mantis is one of our best ways forward to figure this out. At this point, I would like to recommend a few folks on the various grids using OpenSim test this notion and help us get vehicles to where they can reliably cross a sim boundary and keep their state.

Charles Krinke
OpenSim Core Developer
Director of OSGrid

OSG Metaversity

The OSG College idea has now morphed into the “OSG Metaversity” on OSGrid.

Today, I attended the first meeting of a new C# programming class on “Teravus Plaza” in the small ampitheater. Normally, I am one of the most conservative members of OpenSim, but to see a teacher, SnowDrop Short gather 12 students together, form teams of three, exchange e-mails, assign a little independent study is so exhilarating that I needed to describe it tonight.

This class, partly organized by BlueWall Slade and others represents the instantiation of a dream I have had for two years now. That is, the use of OpenSim to teach others in a virtual environment useful lessons to help them grow and understand.

The class will be meeting regularly each Tuesday at 2000UTC, right after “Office Hour” on Wright Plaza. There is room for more students next week and I see C# as an extremely interesting skill to acquire. After all, we support C# scripts in OpenSim as well as LSL scripts. I see this as useful to those that might wish to create region modules also.

In fact, the admins in OSGrid discussed this after the course and we feel that we would like to dedicate the suffix “Campus” to any educational group or institute that would like to support learning on OSGrid.

This is an exciting thing to see happen, and it has the side benefit of demonstrating and perhaps stressing the sim with students on a regular basis as we work to increase the number of simultaneous avatars in a region.

Charles Krinke
OpenSim Core Developer
Director of OSGrid