i’m guilty of saying that two things that OpenSim lacks when compared to Second Life are good physics and good content. the physics is still not that great *holds breath for bulletX physics* and the quantity of content isn’t nearly that of Second Life. however, neither of those two things are enough to keep people from thriving in OpenSim and making great sims (regions, grids, whatever - the sim concept kind of falls apart in OpenSim because you simply don’t have that same costly limiting factor and you can export your work and have 20 different projects saved as OARs if desired)
while content may not be what it is in Second Life (you don’t have the choice of 2,000 pair of stilettos or 400 furry fun animations), imagination is not lacking in OpenSim (i’d go further and say that imagination is unbridled with OpenSim since you can install on your own machine, or stick, and build without regard to expense)
an article exemplifying that content is no longer a limiting factor is written by Justin K. Reeve about a marine biology build he is nearly done with – Undersea Observatory for OpenSim
he has created this build to help teach marine biology and used freebies out there like bubble city from OpenSim-Creations, work from the ever amazing (and humble) Linda Kellie, and parts from Nebadon Izumi‘s awesome universal campus
a big difference with OpenSim is that you can grab entire OARs and select what you would like to use from them, so rather than only getting individual items, you can grab entire 4 sim builds!
when Justin completes his marine biology build, he will release it as an OAR for others to use and build from. the concept of building upon entire OARs is one unique to OpenSim
nice work Justin, i can’t wait to see a video of your work and am certain your students will find it a pretty neat way to learn marine biology!
© Justin K. Reeve
© Justin K. Reeve
I thing that one of the only way to have a lot of content in opensim is to encourage more builders to come to opensim. But how knows, as opensim is becoming popular at the schools and university may be some students and university students would be attracted collaborate with the opensim platform!. When I know more about building tools I might collaborate too but at this time I am still learning how to build. Anyway there are out there so much prims, stuff and lsl scripts that can be used without problem in opensim!.
Xpontaneus
20 Feb 12 at 3:50 pm
Sorry I think, a little mistake XP
Xpontaneus
20 Feb 12 at 3:51 pm
As I commented on Linda’s blog
I’d be up the proverbial creek without OARs!! :-D
Sarge Misfit
20 Feb 12 at 4:11 pm
Perhaps, Ener, you are guilty to say the truth because Opensim was a tabula rasa in the past. But the content is raising for Opensim. A great idea is enhance the security of the perms, the problem is that you can change all the objects’s properties in a data base. Beating this enormous impediment, perhaps a lot of people could be interested to share these secret mountain of things placed in private lands. Like my personal case (that is not a hard rule, of course I think share selected contents, but not all).
Kind regards.
Montnegre
20 Feb 12 at 4:13 pm
Opensim with mesh enabled brings even more content previously unavailable. It’s more universal and widely found across the internet. I think the coming year or so is going to drastically change the way we as creators see and distribute our own content.
The more people start creating in it, the more worlds like Reaction Grid’s Jibe and Unity based worlds are going to take off too. Options are good!
Johnny Night
20 Feb 12 at 7:36 pm
But the sharks…does it have sharks?
I miss my attack sharks! And attack eels and attack stingrays. Need some of those…
Oh, and zombies. Need zombies!
Virtual Clover
20 Feb 12 at 8:56 pm
The lack of content hurts though with Kitely…no clue where to go for scripts and such so doing this kitely beach thing I’ve basically had to go about it bit by bit, and before I bother building anything I’m forced to stay up for days googling crap to find a script to make it functional, and even that’s been a nightmare. Even wrote to lovely Sarge to get help – I’m desperate. Still, it’s coming along okay and while it’s irritating, each time I find a script that makes something happen that I want to happen (minus the warped things that clearly aren’t supposed to happen), it makes me miss my SL stuff a little less.
But I’m about to bust out a copybot on my sharks unless somebody awesome comes to my rescue ;-p
Virtual Clover
20 Feb 12 at 8:59 pm
*waves at Virtual* I’ve been emailing Ilan today with questions about Kitely. They don’t allow IARs, though they plan on doing so in the future. So, at this time, its copy&paste each one individually. I put together a Cahracter Creator for an RP system. 3 dozen scripts and 60 notecards. 4 hours to copy&paste them into my SoaS here at home.
A shout out to the viewers devs: bulk upload of notecards and scripts! PLEASE!!!
Sarge Misfit
20 Feb 12 at 10:41 pm
Hmmm, Sarge what are the scripts that people most need in OpenSim? (besides a good vehicle script, hee hee)
DreamWalker
21 Feb 12 at 4:00 am
Hard to tell, DreamWalker, it depends on what they are doing. For me, it was a RP-combat system, but I’ve found one. And posted those on my wikidot site (which I have to finish doing, and will, I promise) Virtual needs scripts for theme park rides (and killer sharks and zombies). Ener would list others.
I’ve gathered my scripts over time, most from the SLWiki and Phaze Demesnes. (another To Do, update my list of content providers) To be honest, the biggest draw back to scripts is the internal documentation. Or lack thereof. The best ones have things like
//change string to what you want the bunny to say
added to the script line, which makes it much easier for non-scripting people to edit the script to do what they want.
ON another note, a work around for the lack of importing IARs into Kitely is to rez boxes, put your things (anims, scripts, sounds, etc) in the boxes, then save the region s an OAR. Use that OAR to update your Kitely region/world and those things will be there.
Sarge Misfit
21 Feb 12 at 5:22 am
agreed about boxes – putting your inventory in a range of boxes in world is a solution to the no IAR problem, so they upload with the oar and they’re all waitng there when your Kitely persona needs them. It’s not such a bad thing, it’s making me organize myself.
Keith Selmes
21 Feb 12 at 7:19 am
That looks more like my Tube City than my Bubble city. Great to see it being used for such amazing things.
Paul
21 Feb 12 at 7:52 am
Thanks for the nod to my project, Ener. And thanks for making such an amazing build, Paul (it is Tube City — had that wrong in my post).
I’m sure I’m not the only one who likes grabbing copies of everything he sees whenever he loads up a new OAR. I try to organize them all together meaningfully in inventory, then back them up as IARs. I hope downloadable IAR collections will become more prominent in the future than they are now.
Also, I’d love to have attack sharks (maybe a shark cage the students can go into!). VC: If you have a shark you’d let me import, I’d be happy to take a crack at scripting it to swim around and chase the avatars. I have my squid chasing anyone who approaches (there’s still just a few bugs in making it rotate properly to face the avatar).
Justin Reeve
21 Feb 12 at 9:41 am
Caveat about putting your inventory items into boxes to upload as an OAR to Kitely. I just received an email response from Ilan about this. At this time, Kitely doesn’t allow replacing current OARs. However, Ilan suggests doing one of two things. Include those inventory boxes before you upload an OAR for the first time, or, create one region/world, upload the OAR, remove your boxes of items, then delete the region/world. That means keeping one region unused. There’s a bonus to that. You won’t inadvertently go over the world limit of your payment plan.
Sarge Misfit
21 Feb 12 at 9:57 am
I’ve been spending more and more time on OSGrid than SL lately. I’ve seen it grow quite a bit in the last two years since I started there. I’ve also seen a lot of organizations, including the one I was in, in SL move there for obvious reasons. Won’t surprise me a bit if it continues to grow into more of a social network like SL is.
Serious Starsider
21 Feb 12 at 11:18 am
With Kitely regions costing just 10 cents a month or so, I’ve added a little cash to my account there so that I can load up any OAR I feel like.
For example, I was updating my “where to find stuff for OpenSim” page this weekend, and came across a bunch of OARs I haven’t seen before, and not all of them had images available.
Like the GreenSim OAR.
So I just loaded it up into Kitely, took some pictures, and then took it down again. Or will take it down now — I forgot and left it up. At 10 cents a month, like I said, it’s no big deal if you have a few extra regions running around. It’s not like it’s costing you $300 each and a $1,000 setup fee to get them up!
And here’s the updated article:
http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2011/06/where-to-get-content-for-opensim/
Maria Korolov
21 Feb 12 at 10:13 pm
I’ve seen the available opensim content simply explode in the last two years. I always sigh when people say they can’t get what they want/need now because there are so many more choices than when I made my initial exploration from SL to opensim. I would say it’s become wonderfully overwhelming:)
For scripting help, I always look to the OSGrid forum. I swear those folks know EVERYTHING and they’re always helpful and kind.
Jamie Wright
22 Feb 12 at 11:44 am
@Maria – if you get time and could do an article specific to content creators who supply products that can expressly be taken to other grids, full perm, etc. that would be really helpful. I know I’d certainly appreciate it and others would too.
I like the suggestion to shop in OSG and there’s lots of places, but from someone vaguely familiar with OSG it sounds like, “shop in Canada” and then you’re on your own ;-)
Virtual Clover
23 Feb 12 at 6:12 am
never a need to apologise Xpontaneus! i am the queen of typos! =)
i love that pun Sarge, it’s those types of things that make me giggle =D
exactly Montnegre, the perms issue, as it improves, will help accelerate content contribution
mesh does open up a lot Johnny, i suppose even non-traditional channels for us like TurboSquid – options are indeed very good =)
dang Virtual, that is a massive pain! i’m old school with googling for scripts and using notepad for the ones i do find – that said – i have very little scripted in Enclave Harbour. i suck at LSL and seem to suck even more in finding scripts i can figure out! (only has sit and rotation scripts, maybe a few doors!
hi Serious Starsider – the last two years have been good and OpenSim is so much better than it was then!
great strategy and thanks for the link as well =)
i agree Jamie, it’s no longer a barren wasteland!
hey, what’s wrong with shopping in Canada? where else are you going to get real poutine! =D
Ener Hax
23 Feb 12 at 8:26 am
hi Justin, i am so sorry that your comment got caught in spam =(
your project is really very cool and exactly the type of use i think OpenSim is so well suited to
organisation is a huge thing i struggle with and i wish you the best with that aspect (which can become overwhelming!)
your project is not only nicely targeted but it’s also a beautiful build – did you raise the default sea level for your work?
Ener Hax
23 Feb 12 at 9:42 am
It’s no problem. :) Yes, I did raise the sea level to 40. Otherwise the facility poked out of the water surface. Although that might look cool, too … then the students could just take an elevator down to ground level.
Justin Reeve
23 Feb 12 at 12:18 pm
Justin
I don’t have a shark outside SL….that’s my problem. I found a good profile pic of a great white I was attempting to sculpt in the useless crapware archipelis but that’s not happening. It’s going to be a sad day for sculpties when slplopp ends up doing a better job than that one! But I hope you will let me know about any script work you come up with on that. I gots to have my pets!
Virtual Clover
26 Feb 12 at 9:56 pm
@Ener
Nothing’s wrong with shopping in Canada – if you live there. Tell that to someone who’s never been there and it’s overwhelming ;
Virtual Clover
26 Feb 12 at 9:58 pm