Getting over the Cost Issue

[Dave Hammers]

Hi everyone,

I am trying to get approval to start using Teen Second Life in my Middle School, as part of the curriculum. My district seems very open to trying it, but is very slow in giving me the ok because of the issue of cost. Right now I am trying to find a cheaper, or even free alternative to Second Life, that would allow us the same range of world creation tools. The project we have lined up includes the students building their own city, so having the building and design options is an absolute must. But I am having trouble finding anything that would fill in.

I found a site called OpenLife, but when I try signing up to try it out, I am not getting any kind of registration ok to allow me to actually enter the game, which worries me...

Does anyone have any other alternative suggestions? For example, I've noticed OpenSim, and to me it looks like it's an open source "Second Life" type grid that we can potentially build on our own server. If that's the case, does that mean we could build as much land as our network space allows for free? Does OpenSim have the same UI in game as Second Life? Would the kids have the same creation tools available to them?

Or can anyone help me make the argument as to why Teen Second Life is the way to go?

Any help or suggestions is greatly appreciated.
Thank you!
-Dave.

[Zeke Vermillion]

It's not full 3D, but MetaPlace is an interesting new virtual world that allows you to use resources from around the web (e.g. objects from Google Sketchup) to build your environment. You can create (limited) free accounts that should be fine for small-scale builds. A lot of the people there are also in SL, so if you like the SL community, you should also feel at home in MP.

[Larry Rosenthal]

try Reaction Grid for hosting sims....we now sell a one step virtual campus on their system as well....

cube3.com

[Dave Hammers]

Thanks Ric, I'm going to check out Project Wonderland and play around with it too. It looks like it has some cool features that might not be present in OpenSim/Second Life. Thanks for the tip!

[Ric Moore]

I'm working with the Sun Microsystem "Wonderland" project for my own project. With it you will have both the client and the server, for free. And, it's GPL'd. It'll run under Linux, Windows or MacOS. Myself, I want my content and my devel to reside on my own machines. Then I only have the cost of an intranet, and not be dependent on the Internet. My two cents, Ric

[Dave Hammers]

Yeah we used the Diva release you mentioned from the beginning. We were in the process of trying to figure out how to get it to work, when your first message came along, so we just went with it, and it loaded without a hitch.

[Erik Nauman]

Wow, you have to go with the Diva distribution I mentioned. I spent an hour today backing up my database, archiving my sim, installing Diva and loading the archive and it all came up without a hitch. Amazing. I now have my original region in 'root' position and 3 more regions tied to it in one 2x2 megaregion. Flying across boundaries is no problem. Go this route and you'll definitely have room for your project. I haven't had time to figure out how to load terrain into the 3 other regions but there is a lot of good documentation with the distribution.

[Dave Hammers]

Thank you very much for the insight Erik! I've passed it on to my network manager, and sent him a link to your post in case he wants to contact someone who's using the OpenSim system already. The more I think about it the more I like the district controlled OpenSim better too. I'm guessing it will allow us to do things like create separate islands for different age groups and or classes. Which is very appealing to us.

[Erik Nauman]

I work in a school and OpenSim is the direction I chose to go for a virtual world. Aside from cost, Teen Second Life doesn't allow adults (teachers) to co-mingle, so there's no way to develop anything ahead of time. The interface to OpenSim is the same as Second Life but you own and control everything. You start with no inventory but with students building you will have an island full of stuff in no time. You set it up yourself in your own network and students can connect from their own client computers with many different viewers, including Second Life Viewer. In the last few months the setup has become much easier, with even a recent release that has its own update function, which is worth it because upgrades were previously tricky and the developers are fixing bugs and making improvements in leaps and bounds lately. Here are a couple links to learn more, to the "Diva" release, and to the main site where a lot of things are explained, like configuring the viewer (though some info gets out of date because no one has time to keep it up). I'll have a tutorial up covering the whole process in the next week hopefully after I try upgrading my sim to the Diva setup. I just think it's really the way to go because there's no expense aside from your time, and it really works. I've started using it with my students and they love it.