Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Some snapshots of the TUG Personal Services build

We have been making good progress on the TUG Personal Services build.
The basic idea behind this is a large mall with two halves.
The first half the students must answer questions to 'buy' a range of products, including all they will need to make their own salon.
The second half is where the students can build their own salons.



Sitting around waiting for it all to happen.


An overview of the back half, where the students build their own salons.



Inside one of the sample stores, the Art store.


A couple of the sample stores, selling rugs and mirrors.


A view of the front half(those horrible tiles will change!)


The view from out the front, lots of shop items in the car park ready to be loaded in.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Server plans and open life/open sim

We have been playing around a bit the last couple of weeks with both Open Life and Open Sim as an alternative to Second Life.
The advantages (typed on a train on a Monday morning) for us in using this are;
- Firstly and most importantly we have an aspergers/autism project coming up(which is not the same as this but will be related in many ways) - and there is no possible way we can be taking autistic 15 and 20 year olds into either Teen Second Life or the main Second Life without breaking their terms of service. For this reason a private grid is essential.
- Considering our previous attempt at this with Second Life (which cost a lot, was very frustrating and got us nowhere until we joined Skoolaborate) open source is very very attractive.
- Power to do what we want when we want, and not stress so much! Also the power to give each school it's own island to manage as they wish, without having to stress about what a conservative school overseas thinks. Private locked off environments have so many benefits.
- Cost - we are looking at the same cost for several open source islands as one second life island.
One issue educators face is the fact that they might want a space, but only for a couple of hours per week. Second Life charges on the basis that the space is yours and can be full of people all the time, but this is not what we need. Our setup will allow half a dozen or more island to be set up, with a limit of around 40 people. What this will mean is that many classes will be able to have ongoing spaces and activities within the world, but only a limited amount of people will be able to use it(our hope is around 40-50 or two classes).
- Research - and this is the real killer. If we are running our own world, then there is little we cannot monitor, at the moment in SL we are quite restricted. The TUG Engine will be making a start on many of these tools.
I am sure there are more, I will come back and post more about this after I have worked on a new proposal.
This project also needs a name!

For the server, at the moment we are looking at ozservers.com and most likely the Core 2 Duo E8400 (2x3.0Ghz) 6.0 Ghz option.

Team update



We have a new member on board to help with the server side of things, Geoff (Fof) from Brisbane. He will also be looking into a php stats engine for us.
This now means we have a great team on board, including the uni staff it looks something like this;
Stefan - Project Manager
Dr John Martino - Researcher
Dale - Developer/Designer
Will - Head Programmer
Peter - Virtual consultant/builder/scripter
Geoff - Network/Server admin
Our one remaining need is someone to help Will out with the in world scripting, he is a very busy boy!

Construction update

It has been a while since the last blog post but things are progressing at top speed.


Meeting in world with Gumby/Peter, our virtual consultant.



Prototype for the control panel, it needs more bells and whistles. The actual build is 90% complete, it's mainly the scripting and tug engine that now needs to be installed.


Gumby/Peter making a hammer


A selection of the goods we have gathered/created to add a bit of decor to bare corners.



My avatar standing at the reception desk.