A Year of Thanks to Ener
It has been quite the year and Ener not only has chronicled the move from Second Life to OpenSim with over 500 posts in 2010, but also has built many wonderful field trip locations on our grid. Along the path, Ener has provided some great tips for making a move as easy as possible and has strongly voiced opinions on OpenSim options such as “sim on a stick”.
To say I am grateful for all the work Ener has done for us in Enclave Harbour would be a gross understatement. While Ener hates to sit still (I mean there is never a moment where she just sits down and kicks back), the amount of “things” she built this year go above any simple hobby. To keep from gushing and prevent a humble one’s embarrassment, I thought it would be most fitting to simply list some the things that Enclave Harbour has come to life with. These are all things that are 95-100% built by Ener with very little outside direction.
Thanks little one for shedding more light on OpenSim for many people and for making Enclave Harbour an exciting resource for kids to explore science concepts.
Namaste Ener!
In no particular order (because I had to start somewhere and fly around to try to catch most things):
- Ener’s home – architectural principles incorporating the environment for aesthetics and energy concerns
- footbridge to the weather station – to help n00bs with in-world movement
- scale relief maps of the estate (terrain sculpty creation)
- space station with gigantic solar array
- airport and terminal building
- spaceship – to spark talks about the future or travel, energy, and beyond this world policies
- hovercraft (silly video indeed but nice use of beacons and nice pan at 3:06)
- segway-like personal transport
- helicopter (I particularly like this one)
- solar powered cargo zeppelin
- supersonic passenger jet
- desalination plant (very nicely laid out)
- skid steer loader
- forested camp fire meeting spot
- floating pod homes
- rocket junk yard
- deep sea oil platform
- “forgotten” tropical shack meeting spot with suspended footbridge
- weather station
- glacier with cave
- hydroelectric power plant
- water coolers & bottled water vendor
- harbour overlook meeting spot
- automotive suspended bridge
- automotive lift truss bridge
- solar farm (thank you DreamWalker for scripting these, they work great!)
- land-based wind turbines
- deep water floating wind turbines
- in-stream water turbine
- lighthouse
- suspended beehive building
- carbon atom classroom
- drive in diner (complete with dumpsters to discuss biofuels)
- Sunny’s shop
- 901 metre tall building with toilet power!
- “corporate” building (secretely housing Club l’Energie)
- Ener-gy Hotel
- l’Ascenseur inspired by Quebec City’s angled elevator (thanks to Micheil for scripting it)
- “hat box” building
- DNA building
- landfill (recycling centre in the works)
- speedboat & Harbour patrol boat
- Megamall (now gone but it was a nice build)
- Energon – post-apocalyptic settlement (gone as well, but a great idea)
- Haxor Lunar Lounge Remixed (lots of work on the old SL one)
- water tower (complete with secret pool inside!)
- 1905 Espresso machine (one of my favourites of Ener’s work)
- a dozen chair types & tables
- Ener’s one tree! =p
Wow! That is quite a list! Thank you Ener!
I am certain that I have missed many things, especially so many small details like bouys, conservation signs, and so much more, and I am also thankful for the wonderful terraforming. Terraforming in OpenSim is one area that is not as smooth as in Second Life, particularly region borders – but Ener’s persistence is matched with equal patience!
Not only has Ener built a ton of stuff, but she has also made sure our grid stays up and is running in tip top condition. Details like making OAR backup stations with a steampunk feel that make it easy (even for me) to make on the spot and in-world region backups. The OAR backup script is written by James Stallings II who setup and maintains our server and has done a fabulous job for us, far exceeeding my expectations and redefining what an OpenSim experience can be.
It’s been a heck of a year and 2011 will prove to be an excellent one as well!
Happy New Year Ener and a very Happy New Year to all those in both virtual and real worlds!
reposted from the iliveisl blog
Real-time rendering – the power of OpenSim
One of the things I covered in eLearning presentations about the use of Second Life, and now OpenSim, is that video captured from this type of virtual world is “real-time”. There is no rendering time as found in “real” 3D programs.
Those of you reading this on the iliveisl blog take this fully for granted and rightfully so. My use of virtual worlds before starting the Enclave Harbour project was as a 3D animation tool. I had been using Flash in conjunction with Swift 3D and Blender 3D to create 3D video assets but the amount of time before you even get to creating video could be impractically long. Especially for the use in corporate eLearning.
Enter Second Life – avatars already exist, there joints are setup, physics exist, and it is very fast to build “sets”. Rather than creating a person, wiring up their armature so their elbows and knees bend properly, and making everything from a mesh – you could just make an office, get a few people to login in, and video right then and there. The downside is that you don’t have the detail and you don’t have the lighting control. However, what would take at least two weeks to create outside of a virtual world platform now only took one day. Far faster and well worth the trade off for training videos.
OpenSim now gives you the same option but for a fraction of the cost or even for free! Ener on the iliveisl blog has done a wonderful job exploring OpenSim installed on a USB drive – even covering USB read times (I would have not thought of that) – and has gathered those links onto a master post (even a zipped OpenSim installation that will run on most PCs).
I now use “sim on a stick” for my work endeavors. I no longer need a special port through the firewall and I don’t need to install anything onto my workstation. OpenSim on the USB drive works better than Second Life. I am able to maintain much higher frame rates for using Fraps with a higher anti-alias setting in the viewer (54 FPS at 4x anti-alias).
Here is an example of an OpenSim “build” that took me about 6 hours to make at a relaxed pace that I made for Enclave Harbour, our middle school science project, of a nightclub in an abandoned building. I used some furniture from Ener Hax and Sunnygirl Whitfield (thank you) and look forward to streaming video over the club’s “plasmas” that are placed in the space. This should make for a neat place to explore and possibly even hold a science activity or two!
If you have yet to add virtual worlds to your eLearning toobox, OpenSim on a USB drive might be the way to try it out. You can also place those zipped files into a folder on your PC and run it from there, no need to use an actual thumb drive.
reposted on the iliveisl blog