Ener Hax has mentioned that I use OpenSim on a USB drive for “real work” and asked me to write a post about this. I will dovetail into Ener’s post last night and frame this with a similar Blender 3D perspective.

I have been using Blender 3D since it went open source in 2002. It’s a great program and once you move beyond its steep learning curve it can be a fairly rapid tool to use.

My primary task in my day job is to create multimedia assets for eLearning that is distributed to 90,000 annual users in over 110 countries. This varies from software simulations to static graphics to scenario-based video. In addition, and like many corporate eLearning developers, I often am tasked with non-eLearning multimedia work that can range from creating conference videos and product demos to large-scale printed exhibit graphics for clients. For some presentation work I use Blender 3D and it is well received but the downside is in its rendering time. It can take hours to weeks to render out video from Blender 3D.

For our corporate eLearning the rendering time is simply too long to be cost effective and the hardware requirements are sometimes too great (i.e., render farms for large projects).

When Second Life was all the hype in the media a few years ago it seemed like an easy answer to my need to do “3D” animation faster and cheaper. At first it was challenging to accept the “poor” graphics quality of Second Life prims and I confess to a certain elitist attitude I had regarding this. However, stepping back I realised that Second Life could get me 80% of the way there and that it was worth sacrificing the remaining 20% for something that was many orders of magnitude faster. As a bonus, avatars had built in joints and adequate walk cycles and gravity even existed.

After a short time, a freedom to concentrate more on the overall interactions and less on the details developed and was a pleasant benefit. It was liberating and it opened doors to share this with eLearning colleagues. I could teach the use of Second Life as a 3D animation studio to colleagues in a manner of hours and not months!

I left my elitist mindset behind and embraced a tool that ended up being just as well received by learners. People just get it and I often compare my use Second Life (now OpenSim) to YouTube content. YouTube is considered the largest eLearning repository out there and it works because of the content and not the production quality. People understand that they are not going to always have Steven Spielberg quality productions on YouTube but they also know they can find virtually any topic covered in a video tutorial.

Using OpenSim as a 3D animation studio for eLearning is fast and inexpensive. I add the needed interactivity for eLearning by importing the videos into Flash and have been doing this technique for four years now.

I have also been using OpenSim, particularly the USB stick version, for doing space and product visualization. It does not have the polished look of a Blender 3D video but clients don’t have an issue with that because it also means a significantly lower project cost for them and a project delivered in a shorter time. It’s also easy to make edits because there is no rendering time. If I don’t do a camera fly-through in the way the client wants, it is easy to redo it in a matter of minutes.

The images below show an exhibit booth that can be textured with a client’s graphics, placed in an exhibit hall, and have videos showing how it will look to their customers (I don’t need to bring them in-world – I simply shoot video for them). OpenSim on a USB stick has been ideal for doing this and lots of fun as well.

Interested in giving it a try on a shoestring budget? Get yours at Ener’s very handy http://simonastick.com!

this post also appears on the subQuark blog

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!

OpenSim land options just keep on coming! i read a post about New Voice on Maria’s Hypergrid Business blog and you can get a full OpenSim region for $9.90 USD a month from New Voice. in OpenSim, a full region typically means 45,000 prims from most providers. i say “typical” because that is an arbitrary number that can be changed on the server

prims use hardware resources and complicated ones, such as a torus that is cut and hollowed, will use more than a solid cube. the only numbers i have on usage are from SimHost and it is likely these numbers are now lower as OpenSim continues to gain efficiency (and hardware becomes better). for the sake of comparison i am listing these numbers to show the relative difference – a simple box uses a max of 50 megs of RAM per 1,000 and a complicated shape can use 150 megs per 1,000 prims. there may even be differences in the material you use, but i bet 99% of virtual world things are built of wood (french canadian lumberjacks thank you for your continued patronage & Enclave Harbour TOS no. 1 – no smoking!) =)

don’t think that you CAN use triple the prims that you did in Second Life – in OpenSim, this is completely dependent on your hardware resources. i make a big deal out of this because it was the biggest stumbling block for me when i migrated from Second Life to OpenSim. hardware affects the stability you experience

in the above article, Maria talks with someone about her experience with using New Voice. she mentions crashing “quite often” and goes on to make this statement: “When you’re in OpenSim, you just realize it’s different than Second Life, and you deal with it.”

three months ago i would have agreed with that . . . but today, and for that last two months, i say -

OpenSim is different than Second Life and it’s better

it is better performance-wise as measured in crashes, freezing up, and frame rates. i can run at over 30 frames per second with 4 – 16X antialias on and all my sliders set to maximum quality.  i did my first sim reset a few days ago on our new grid because DreamWalker had some crazy loop in some educational thing she was making that kept her OpenSim command window just reeling away with code (lots of red code, so i assume that is bad). compare that to doing at least one reset nightly the last few months i was on Reaction Grid! =(

DreamWalker had successfully griefed her own sim (silly bean), but the other 15 sims were cruising along just great

so why does the lady in Maria’s story see OpenSim as “bearable” and why did i accept that OpenSim just isn’t as good as Second Life when i was on our previous host? well, i can’t speak for her, but i did not know any better

why does OpenSim now run, for me, better than Second Life ever did?

hardware and configuration, hardware and configuration, and hardware and configuration =)

first we have adequate hardware. secondly we have our server very well architected. instead of four regions to an OpenSim process, each region runs on its own (yes, that does use RAM). so when DreamWalker maxes out scripts we only lose her sim and i have to smack her as a griefer! *files AR report* actually, i have no issue with her, Micheil, or Nikki knocking out their sims – if they don’t, then i know they are not doing anything new. it’s the first time she has done this, but i anticipate more . . .  DreamWalker tears her scripts down to find faults and make them more efficient – when DreamWalker passes a script over to me, i never doubt it. we have worked together for three years and her scripting continues to amaze me (and she makes me laugh too) =D

back to OpenSim performance - it’s really simple, or at least i make it very simple for me

if you are relying on a host (you are not running it on your own machine or USB drive) then you have $$$ and they have OpenSim

more $$$ = more performance – and i don’t know about you, but the money tree out back doesn’t bloom enough!

the lady mentioned above and me on our previous host paid money and received resources. those resources are what determine what you can do and how well you will experience OpenSim. one sim for $9.90 is a great deal and her performance actually sounds better than i would have anticipated at that price (in other words, New Voice sounds like a good host). seeing what we pay and knowing the actually server we are on (right down to having been in that very building) i fully do believe that Enrico (New Voice) is profitable since he owns his own servers and does so with dedicated servers as he claims

today, OpenSim runs better than Second Life ever did and i can build more and enjoy smooth in-world everything and no crashes

we pay about the same per sim as she does and we pay $15 less than when we were with Reaction Grid but our regions now run awesomely! i have continued to build and have about double the prims i had before

we have 5.33 times (!!!) the RAM (8 vs 1.5 gig), double the cores (we were running at like 55% the CPU but now run under 10%), and 20 times the hard disk space – this is why we run so well (plus we have James Stallings II and Adam Frisby keeping our server humming – talk about being into OpenSim holy cow, those guys ARE OpenSim!) ;)

so i don’t accept that OpenSim is almost as good as Second Life – the core developers deserve better than that because they have coded a better platform that is more efficient than Second Life. if you experience any thing other than full-blown awesomeness, don’t blame OpenSim (hint – it’s your hardware)

my very general rule of thumb after fussing with this for a year is 1+ gig RAM and 1+ core equals about one SL sim. i say one plus because you store everything including things that SL stored elsewhere like accounts, messaging, inventory, groups, and so on

it’s your money. understanding what you need will help you get what you want

the stumbling block is much smaller than i remember

for those wanting to know what we have – we have the dedicated server package from SimHost with loads of extra server configuration for later use including the server being home to our registered domain (later use includes the easy addition of more RAM should we need the mongo concurrency possible with say 32 gig of RAM!). when shopping around, once you determine the reputation of your possible hosts, it boils down to what you get for the money. community is also a factor for many people depending on their focus, however, being able to hypergrid means the best of all worlds, imo

breaking it down – Intel quad core Q9400 2.66 ghz, 8 gig RAM, 64-bit windows server, 500 gig sata2, & 3000 gb bandwidth – it runs absolutely flawlessly (thanks James) =)

i read a post the other day and found it an interesting use of virtual worlds. i had seen other studies where your brain has a hard time differentiating between the real world and the virtual

one study had avatars being hit in the head with a hammer! o_O

when you saw your own avatar get whacked in the head (ouch), your brain waves anticipated the hit and responded (i dunno what that response was – mine would be like “oh crap, wtf?” – then i’d make a megaprim hammer . . . ) =p

real versus imagined responses are not new to life science research – psychologist determined years ago that our brains don’t differentiate between the real and the perceived (ha, take that! imaginary Ener is real and so are you!)

this particular post talks about a meth apartment being setup by UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute in Second Life (smart alert – use OpenSim and protect all of your data and save tax payer dollars too!) ;)

Ener is sooo emo

they set up a control apartment and a “meth apartment” (lol, i’d say there are many meth-like apartments inSL!) =D

i used to have my bunker ”home” in Enercity Park with a soiled mattress on the floor, cardboard walls, and a trash can fire (yes, i was Emo-Ener then) =p

UCLA accesses their meth apartment with a 32 inch monitor and surround sound for this experiment (sounds like a sweet setup and something to sell if you get hooked on virtual meth!) *w00t*

these types of scientific studies can sound silly (particularly during US political campaigns – *deep voice* “your tax dollars paid for virtual people to get stoned in a game”) but they do offer great insight into the behavioral and neurologic pathways of addiction (not that anyone here, in Second Life or OpenSim, has an addictive personality!) =D

it’s a neat use of virtual worlds (and it must have been fun to make a meth apartment)

if you researchers over at UCLA need to add heavy equipment into the research, i’ll send over a skid steer loader i made this week! (note: never operate heavy equipment under the influence of drugs or alcohol)

Get LOADED! *ener snorts too many pixels*

if you do a map search for a sim and then teleport to it, you will land on its terrain surface right in the centre of the sim. if you have a structure there, people will arrive inside the structure and this could have poor consequences. i first learned of this in Second Life, five of my city sims had catacombs under the city streets. the streets crossed in the centre of each sim. i had an offline IM from a person at the eLearning Guild that stated they had TP’d to the central park sim to find themselves under water, squished beneath a prim, and hearing moaning from above!

lol, moaning in Second Life? what could that be?

wow, 471 pics of the park!

no – not cybersex but zombies! phew, this guy is a big shot with the Guild and i would have really been embarrassed had it not been the zombies! i had zombies in the tunnels of the park and he had done a map TP and landed on the sims land surface which was a metre under the floor of the catacomb! the zombies rezzed above him when he appeared! =D

now this is to be expected if you have an open water region but something to consider elsewhere

what i did in Second Life was to raise as narrow a column of land as i could and hide it with a cement pillar, which seemed like something you might find in catacombs

in our OpenSim Enclave Harbour, these are the types of details i tend to do as tidying up work. i have a airport runway that goes into the water with a turntable at the centre of the sim. it’s a big structure so it was easy to raise the ground to within half a metre or so. now when you map TP you end up on the turntable rather than in it!

these details are specific but help round you out with your builds (just like you can place a landing spot for ejecting people of your region! a dumpster could work for that!) =)

did someone run over a pink squirrel?

oh no, it's Ener, trapped in the asphalt! =p

ha! hide the water and prims & remedy this dealio!

raise, flatten, and lower a bit . .

tada, no more landing inside! but cripes! lookout! =D

there seems to be a “race to the bottom” with OpenSim hosting. some plans will get you a “sim” for $10 USD a month! wow what a price!

for some reason, people expect to pay peanuts for sims in OpenSim. yes, i am the first to say OpenSim is far less expensive. in that post the other night i did my best to put resources on even footings for a cost comparison between Second Life and SimHost. in that comparison, it came out that OpenSim (from SimHost) was 17% the cost of Second Life! (just toss double the RAM and the $950 diff in setup fees into your xmas fund) =)

17% is a heck of a lot cheaper for sure! but there is a real cost for the hardware and at the end of the day, you are buying mainly hardware. you do need good support, but when a system runs very well then you don’t need that too much (that said, our James is worth his weight in gold and has done lots of extras from setting up Apache on our server, to making custom scripted time savers, to giving me the coolest sailing sloop ever) =D

our grid runs so well. i have yet to find a crashed or locked up sim (it’s only been 7 or 8 weeks but how refreshing!) and i am as happy with its performance for building as i was in Second Life. anyway . . .

how does someone offer 45,000 prims and an entire sim for $10?

first off, that is not so crazy cheap, but what you get is a sim on a virtual host running with several other sims. so don’t expect rock star performance but it may be a great way to explore OpenSim. do keep in mind that virtual server hosting and low resources will, without a doubt, result in mediocre performance

so before you jump in, try out the hosting company, they should have a sandbox for you to play in before you pay anyone a single penny (here’s an awesome list of providers). but also be warned that their sandbox may have extra resources and not be exactly the same performance-wise as what they sell you. i don’t know if this was the case with our former host, but their support told me to TP to their welcome sim when i had inventory issues. many inventory things get “fixed” when changing servers (just like in Second Life, changing sims means you go to another server). ideally, you shouldn’t have to muck about like that (imo)

when you go try out different grids, devise some sort of benchmark for yourself. i am not all that techy so what i do is fly up to like 50 metres, set all my graphics to max, set draw distance to 512, and anti-alias to 4x. once that is set and a minute or so has passed so that all the stuff in view is fully loaded, i open the status panel (ctrl shift 1), and then simply spin around for 20 seconds keeping an eye on frame rate. it’s not terribly scientific, but as long as i do the same thing and the sims have a similar numbers of prims, then i can judge a bit more objectionably. you could go nuts and screenshot your stats panel so that you could also compare total prims and scripts

this discussion has been from mainly a performance point of view for people doing their own thing. like educators, government groups, corporate users, and so on

if you are looking for a more social experience with shopping, events, and clubs, then add that to your criteria as well (those factors may outweigh performance - like being a store merchant in Inworldz makes more sense than many cheaper options)

don’t be fooled by thinking that $10 has to mean only cheap and poor performance. it typically does when looking to get only one sim. but if you had a sim in Second Life for $295 a month, you would be blown away with the performance we have for nearly half that amount (incidentally, our dedicated server with it’s 4 cores and 8 gigs of RAM comes out to close to $10 per month per sim)

now that i have seen what a true dedicated server can do and have the resources that meet my needs, i can’t see why anyone doing educational, municipal, or private work would ever use Second Life. but people over pay for stuff all the time . . .

caveat emptor and caveat venditor! =)

will it go round it circles, will it fly high like a bird up in the sky . . .

when i went to San Fran almost two years ago, i met with two Lindens and had my first ever fish tacos. i toured the lab (but did not meet Torley, bah). the Lab is in about the most prime location imaginable in San Fran. one of the Lindens that took us out (subQ too, he was the big shot then, no one knew who i was – boo) is the one that published the Second Life Economy Stable in Q2 2010 post. i’m not saying this to name drop (incidentally, what i remember best are the fish tacos) but i value what he says. and you can be certain that any post like this goes through a bunch of people and meetings before it gets put online

so what do the new numbers from Linden Lab mean?

well, growth seems to have pretty much plateaued, despite the internal changes in the last year. but those kinds of changes won’t impact much as far as growth. i would think that some dip in growth would have occurred as a result of the firing of so many Lindens (i downgraded my now cancelled account and closed two alts i had and subQuark downgraded his account and cancelled one alt as a direct result of the firings). i imagine there will be a tiny dip from the teen grid fallout, but over so many users, the drop of a few thousand accounts is small

the numbers show that money stayed close to the same (i guess our $3k a month was chump change – not that i am scorned by that *hell hath no furry like an Ener scorned* – except i can’t be a furry any more, my tiny beaver is gone forever) =(

has Second Life hit its full potential?

with news of some of the Emerald team going over to Utherverse (my post on them) even the cyber stuff may dribble out of SL (ewww). cyber stuff is not that huge inSL but it’s just fun to make reference to it =D

the number i saw in the SL stats that would have me overreacting were the total user hours

what’s better – 100 million people listening to your two minute hit single or 1 million? seems like a very simple measure of your overall health to me (i like simple things) =)

maybe a drop from 126 million hours to 109 million is not a big deal, but that is over a 13% drop

to put that in Ener time (30 hours a week inSL over 52 weeks) that is like having

10,897 fewer Eners this year!

© Linden Research, Inc.

poutine rocks and with Labour Day having just passed, summer is winding down. that means the poutine carts will be gone in a month or so (of course, Montreal’s mayor is a dork and outlawed food carts!)

poutine carts are a distinctively french canadian summertime thing

when i departed Second Life, the iliveisl residents threw a big party for me (or was it because they thought i had already left?) =p

someone had a custom hat made that said Ener and Nikki had poutine made! poutine in Second Life!

maybe that’s what Linden Lab needs to include in the base inventory if they want to increase retention! =D

the poutine she had made was awesome and she even got permission for it to be brought into OpenSim (i won’t sell it, it will be unique to Enclave Harbour and might be the only thing on the Enclave Harbour Diner’s menu!) =)

it imported just fine and i only need to add an eating animation and it will be GO TIME! (can you tell that this excites me?)

so what the heck is poutine? well, it is french fries covered in brown (meat) gravy and topped with cheese curds, YUM!

cheese curds are created during the cheese making process and are made before rennet is added to the cheese. rennet helps cheese have a longer shelf life. cheese without rennet spoils quickly so traditionally, poutine was only found near cheese factories. but what makes cheese curds special is that they squeak in your teeth when eaten

so how is this for a light blog post? (poutine is anything but light in the tummy!)

happy friday everyone! have a great weekend and dream of poutine! yummy yum yum! =D

yay! finally, after 4 years in virtual worlds, i get my own home! it’s like that saying about a cobbler’s kids having no shoes. while i have built several home-like places, none were just my home. the iliveisl estate inSL had several social places that were open to the public that were meant to be homes and lounges, but none were built just for me. that was fine, i stayed busy enough and never had time to hang out in any of them regularly anyway

i’m not sure what i am going to do with my home. i know i need to build furniture! all i have is office chairs and that is hardly homelike. i also need to make a stove and fridge plus a bedroom and bathroom. i’ll make everything with normal prims, no sculpties

sculpties intimidate me, i don’t know why. i can build in blender and do boolean intersections, subdivide meshes, path a camera, set motion blur, and all that baloney but i have never even tried to make a sculptie

i think it’s also a snobby thing in my head. i kind of feel like i should be able to make what i need to do with what i have in-world

i also think it’s important to show that many things can be built with normal prims – both because they are pretty easy to work with and highly accessible. as i focus more on education, i think of new students (and teachers) that come in-world and that building with normal prims is a great start =)

if you had to teach someone new about Second Life or OpenSim, you’d stay busy enough without tossing sculpties into the mix. i have seen students get the hang of it and be building in 15 minutes, i like that aspect of normal prims very much. nothing is there to stop them from learning blender but i figure it is better to let them get going with building and worry about this stuff later on

maybe one day i’ll do sculpties and knowing me, i’ll get all ocd over them! =p

in a volcanic caldera (actually it's too small so it's really a crater) =)

the entry is curved to prevent Qi (C'hi) from running out too quickly

it’s funny, but up until today, i never felt like i had my own home in virtual worlds. in Second Life i had bunkers but they were always set as public places too

and for the 10 months in Reaction Grid, i also did not feel like any parcel was mine

but today i took a part of a sim next to Dream Walker and planted my flag. well, i built a photobox that i did not delete after being done. when i need a pic for the blog, i rezz out some white prims and make them full bright, then delete them when am finished, but no more! =) i

it’s a different feeling having a place that i can call my own. the entire estate in OpenSim has been subQuark’s and while i have carte blanche, none of it felt like it was mine. now i have my little part of a sim and am gonna leave prims out and make a big mess =)

a photobox is really easy to make and works very well. make the colour full brite and add some lights and voila! can be made in any colour you need and if you want a soft edge, apart from doing anti-alias in preferences, you can turn on a bit of glow on the lightbox walls

super simple, super effective

big prim holds me at proper height, little ones are lights

monkey bars!!! =) (and lots of starch on my skirt!)

fully free to use in any way you see fit =) click for originals in flickr

i have gotten a few comments, emails, and tweets wishing us well from people thinking we are no longer in-world

what’s the matter with you? can’t you read my mind?

lol – i guess i have not actually written a post saying what we are doing, just a few mentions within other posts (with all the tangents i go off on, it’s no wonder that some peeps wondered what was up)

well, Ener Hax is no longer in Second Life – Linden Lab cancelled my account over $5 (which i put in 4 tickets about). i guess my $50,000 USD revenue stream over a few years did not warrant anyone actually reading my tickets – the last of which was asking them to unlock my account so that i could pay the stupid $5!

anyway . . . *sigh* . . . subQuark got into OpenSim last November with Reaction Grid and i started poking around on his estate in January, then started building in earnest mid-february

i maxed out our resources in Reaction Grid and was trying to be careful in telling the world (or at least the people reading this blog) that we moved. i respect the people at Reaction Grid and did not want to make it sound like we moved because of them (i am a big sap worried about other people’s feelings – probably more than i should)

but i looked at the stats and in the last quarter there have been 198 clicks from this blog to Reaction Grid’s website. in my day job, a click leading to us is worth $4.16! with Google AdWords, depending on the time of day, some words cost quite a bit (the words “real estate” can get $21 per click or more! every time someone clicks those ads in google search results, that cost the advertiser real money!) and i know of six sims sold because i took the time to blab to people in-world and to be fair, those people may not have mentioned talking to me. so i don’t need to be all delicate! =) *an empowered Ener is a mighty wiener*

so where the hell are you Ener?!?! good God, get to the point!

well me (and maybe Carmen Sandiego, but i have no idea about Waldo) moved to another OpenSim host. i maxed out our resources with Reaction Grid and building has been a tough go because of that. so we started looking at what we need to continue this project (Enclave Harbour)

of course, we looked at what Reaction Grid had first and liked a package that has 4 cores, 8 gig RAM, 500 gig disk, 10 Mbs transfer. but the cost for that in their outpost store is $1075 per month! yikes and ouch!

long story short – subQuark and James Stallings II started talking and James (SimHost) set us up with those specs for less than we had been paying! even i know that is a good deal! plus i have groups now! =)

Enclave Harbour and Ener Hax are still in-world with a private grid setup by SimHost =)

also with us are Dream Walker, Nickola Martynov, Micheil Merlin, and subQuark (who does not count cuz he is still a Ruth and never logs in). i have Sunny’s store in place  (it links out to her online store) and we have Krissy’s house in Enerville (she is a budding furniture maker and long time friend)

right now we are on the bleeding edge with a dev version of OpenSim 0.7.1 and still getting server stuff setup and will be hypergrid enabled to the rest of the OSGrid soon. a private grid is becoming the trend for education grids like ours and for business use too. one reason is that you can make one account on OSGrid rather than accounts on private grids. OSGrid is kind of like the internet of virtual worlds

so apart from my tangent on CPC, Google AdWords, Carmen Sandiego, and Waldo, i hope this clears it up for anyone losing sleep over it (if you lose sleep over Ener Hax, either see a doctor or drink more martinis) =)

moving from Second Life to OpenSim was a HUGE pain. i mean a drag and a half! i was so lost and fully expected the exact same experience. even though i knew it was buggy, i still had the same yardstick (which then smacked me upside the head for a while)

plus without much more than my larger builds, like the Enaxia art gallery and the 50 photographs on exhibit, and my terrain files – i felt like i was starting all over again

BUT . . . once you make that move, subsequent moves are easy. you can fully export your sim including all media settings and upload them safely (OAR files). and you can do the same with your inventory =)

we just tested that fully tonight with one of our scripters, Micheil. we saved his IAR file and then placed it online. then we were able to load it into another grid from that URL! that was pretty cool and all his stuff came in without any problems at all

what a difference from Second Life!

so any educators looking for an alternative to Second Life should look at OpenSim – once your content is in there, you have full control of it. you could even save all of your students’ inventory files and give it to them so that if they decide to pursue OpenSim later, they can with what they learned and made while with you

that is pretty cool all in, and of, itself  =)

Micheil as Ruth and then as his old self, in just a few minutes =)

how it’s done: Inventory Archives from OpenSim.org – if Ener can do it, anyone can! =p

i like to share information. of course it is from my perspective (i can’t actually see anything from anyone else’s perspective, neither can anyone else)

sharing accurate information so that you can make a decision is also important to me. sure, i rant and ramble about some silly things, but when i present information that might be used to make a decision, i do my best to remove myself from it and just put it out there

it’s important that people make up their own mind (imo). the word “pushy” and Ener simply don’t go together =)

however, i do get very enthusiastic! when i find something that works very well for me, i figure it might work for others and will barf out as much info as i can about it. you can always choose what applies to you and discard the rest, that’s the way i see it anyway

that’s an awesome thing about the web – so much information. some people say it is too much but i see it the other way – i would rather have way too much information than to be left with just a few tidbits by a few people (the so called experts)

information, and the preponderance of it, is a very good thing if you are truly researching anything

some sources of information are looked at as “more” professional than others. that’s why when i saw a post yesterday on the Discovery Educator Network about OpenSim i had to raise my hand

this article stated that OpenSim does not support web-on-a-prim. i posted a comment right away because some people will take that article and make decisions based on it. these can be very expensive decisions (setup fees, first month’s fees, etc)

OpenSim 0.7.1 does support web-on-a-prim with the Second Life 2.0 viewer

thanks to Justin Clark-Casey =)

however, the 0.7.1 version won’t be out for a week or so, but some of us “might” have it and it works fine  =) (Ener <– more connected than that pink-haired exterior might reveal)

so don’t cross OpenSim off your list just over media-on-a-prim – it’ll be here sooner than you know  ;)

dang, that's a lot of blogging! and soooo interesting =p

guess it’s pretty official. i can’t login in to sl.com, i reset my password and it still won’t let me login. i also submitted tickets

even if i wanted to pay the $5 for the 512 sm of land  from having a linden home, i can’t hit my account page! (even though i went from premium to basic before my premium expired)

amazing – after dropping something like $12k in setup fess, $3k a month for two years, and Lord knows how much i spent on in-world stuff for the estate and me

probably an easy $50k went to LL

but treat me like the plague and totally remove me? lol, even a cancelled account still shows up in subQuark’s friends list!

even though i have not used SL since the end of feb/start of march i still think Second Life is good for some people - dorky me eh?

when i left SL, it was under stressful conditions (awwww, poor ener) and it’s really funky to go from a dozen sims to a crappy Linden home =(

plus i had a new and exciting project where all i “had” to do was just build. i love building and did not miss all the issues associated with running an estate (it is so nice not to worry about paying for sims, i could get use to this life of luxury) *crud – knocked over my caviar, dang it* =p

at that same time as i departed from SL, Viewer 2.0 came out and people went bonkers! but then, anytime Linden Lab does anything, people tend to go off on them (and often, for good reason!)

so i thought “forget that, i don’t wanna get aggravated by some dumb viewer” and went on my merry way with Hippo and Imprudence. now that OpenSim supports web-on-a-prim i figured i should just suck it up and give it a shot (what a pioneer eh? pffft!)  =D

while Viewer 2.0 is really dark (it looks very much like Adobe CS5 products imo), i have to say i like it! i’m not crazy about some things being buried a click deeper and maybe it’s because i have been using CS5 flash, illustrator, dreamweaver, and fireworks for a few months now, but i did not find it so bad. i actually like that sliding in and out menu action on the right (of course, i wish you could undock the palettes like you can in CS5 products). there is not much benefit to having dual monitors for Second Life or OpenSim until palettes can get undocked *waves at Justin – hint, hint* =p

and web-on-a-prim?

i can see possibilities – but for now it’s another emo way to see yourself with a webcam! =D

i guess it could be fun to do chat roulette with it using your avatar! (if you do, for sure video it and post it!!!) =D

if i come up with anything clever, i’ll be sure to video it, but until then, it’s back to Imprudence for me (my fave viewer and solid as a rock in the last few releases)

do you do any neat things with web-on-a-prim? or know of any neat uses?

if so, drop a quick note about it – thanks! =)

facelights are all over the place in Second Life and are also in widespread use in OpenSim. one reason they exists is because virtual world lighting is pretty harsh. it makes harsh contrasts in the shading of your face and people don’t like seeing themselves that way. i don’t know if this is still true but i think you can only see 8 lights at any one time with two of those being the sun and the moon (which are always out)

this means you only see six lights that people have control over. so street lights, room lamps, and facelights make up these kind of lights. therefore (hereto with forth  =p), any facelight setup with more than six lights is kind of dumb since you can’t see more than six (edit: thanks Zauber on the number of lights update)

and besides, ever see someone that from even far away, lights up the place like a nuclear plant gone bad!

i can see why people like facelights and well made ones are useful in photography (just like in real life – lighting makes a huge difference). if you have your own sim then wear all the facelights you want but here is where the issue comes in . . .

lighting and shadows make a big hit on the viewer side as far as performance goes. rendering shadows has always been CPU intensive and that is true outside of virtual worlds too

if you do 3D animation or even static 3D builds, then you know the rendering cost involved with lighting. in Blender, a standard practice is to use a sky dome to create realistic ambient lighting. skydomes can have 60 lights in them! i once did a 30 second Blender sequence that took a week to render out on 4 computers (called a render farm) but when i turned off some of the lights, it only took one computer 10 hours! it’s a fine balance for sure. for the movie Cars, some single frames took 8 hours to render! yikes eh?

so if you have facelights on you are imparting a cost to other viewers out there plus taking away some of the other lighting. say you are in a parking lot at midnight and there are street lights. ideally you would see the four closest to you. but if Johnny Narcissy comest strolling up with his EnerMax 3000 on, you might only see his lights, thus killing the “midnight parking lot lighting, where’s my pimp” effect someone worked hard to make

on  your own sim, wear facelights till the cows come home, but when you are visiting other sims, consider the experience others are looking for. while your face is incredible stunning, it may not be what people really wanted to focus on (right eh? why wouldn’t anyone just want to look at me all night?)  =D

in Second Life, you can’t do much about facelights except to ask people to turn them off. your likely response (even if it is your sim) is probably “go eff yourself” o_O  at which point, you eject them from your parcel!

in OpenSim though, Melanie T (CEO of 3D Hosting) has added code that could disable facelights!

facelight code has been approached by many OpenSim developers but i like her rationale. she does not like facelights messing up role playing sims and i fully agree that the sim owner should have the freedom to do pretty much anything they see fit. if you don’t like it, don’t go to that sim! and get your own sim  =)

Ener's RPG - waiting for John =p

last week we broke 10,000 pics for our flickr account. we’ll never catch up to Torley though!

obviously, i like flickr! but so far it’s mainly been just pics of builds and not all that useful to me except for use in the blog (and for my OCD about SEO)

but finally, i have something that will be of occasional use! with all the grids popping up, it’s easy to create accounts and be a born again Ruth

typically, i pull up myself on another grid and jot down the zillion numbers for all the sliders that make me who i am

those days are over!

why not screen shot all the sliders and just post them on flickr? so i did =)

make sure to grab your colours too =)

mondays kind of suck in the morning and i look forward all day long to getting home and logging in. it helps bring sanity back to me and start fresh all over again

i love building in-world and sometimes just mindless tree planting is a great escape (although some rabid beavers must have logged in a few weeks ago – a dozen or so trees were all mangled near a sim border – ahh, the joy of alpha software)

i don’t know about you, but when everything is working smoothly, it’s easy for hours to pass =)

but then, sometimes monday evenings are like monday mornings . . .

could be worse. it could be raining! =D