As mentioned above by Jon, I don’t want currency, but I do want reward points. I would love to have voice for inworld presentations as well as student-teacher meetings. I’ve recently experienced a couple of chaotic days when a rock slide separated me from my classroom. I met the math classes on Eluminate and had a disasterous time trying to get the reading classes into Teleplace. (No negatives on them. They were as helpful as they could be under the circumstances by setting up quick and dirty demo accounts.) The ability to meet inworld and do math exercises or discuss readings would have saved on asperin (and a couple of shots of Sambuca).

That said, the lack of a truly functioning whiteboard and consistent streaming media (if I could get it to work at all) make me want to cry. There are display tools in SL that I could afford–heck, some of them are free–but I can’t get them to ReactionGrid.

For many reasons, cost among them, I don’t want to build in SL. I do, however, miss some of the conveniences and the pool of resources from which to pull.

Lastly, I wonder about the Web Browser viewer. I walked through the Heritage display and was impressed with the graphics. There were some problems with movement, but then I realized it didn’t like being forced before full download. This took quite a few minutes on my old, abused computer.

Are there plans to let people make connections in these widgets to other opensim grids? Here is my fantasy: medium-sized parcels that display class notes, embedded MATH.TV videos, and a couple of functioning whiteboards–all of this sweetly embedded in my moodle class pages.

To Gord,

The only way I’ve found of having a whiteboard inworld is by using something like Scribblar or Dabbleboard (I think), opening a media window to display the website, making changes to the board, saving the image file, which is already linked as a texture on the prim. Whew. Check out Kindlelab. They explain it better than I. As for media presentations, I’m still struggling with that one myself and would welcome advice from others.

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A wise person can communicate in very few words–but not at 1:30 a.m. Sorry for the babble.

Thanks!

Just two short comments. We work on developing virtual worlds for businesses and institutions. Mostly education and training.

In our approach to OpenSim, the development of a currency like the Linden Dollar is not necessary. In fact the entire system of buying and selling that works in Second Life now creates more noise than benefits for our learning orientation.

Voice, on the other hand, is a priority for us. In fact it is one of the areas where we work harder. Having fought a long time against Asterix and FreeSwitch (open source), Teamspeak and Vivoice (proprietary), our job now is to integrate Mumble (open source), which provides high quality sound, positional audio features and could arguably hacked into activating Lip Sync.

I think much of the issue itself is we all come into this with numerous years within SL. And to put it as it was told me, Opensimulator was never meant to be an SL clone. While I myself just always desired a stable and less buggy SL, many believe that Opensimulator is supposed to duplicate in it’s entirety the functionality of SL.

I’m not sure the stance still holds true of what I was told a couple years ago when discussing opensimulator and SL with developers. But at that time, it was “explicitly” stated that Opensimulator was not to become an SL clone software.

Personally, other than stability and being able to use all the LSL functionality, I wouldn’t be all that concerned with in-world currency systems etc… I think much of what we see would be better off done in modules and additions than to be part of core. I’m not a fan of voice either. I think the chat does well. The permissions system is a grey goo area in itself. Once the stance is taken that a permission system need be in place that is the equiv of what you have with SL, then the position that if it didn’t work perfectly would be of a security issue. My belief in the matter is it would be better off without any permissions system due to the technical issues involved with supplying one that “really works”.

Not even two years ago people were rezzing items into thin air, and losing whole builds under the sims in SL. 0.0.0 bug if you remember correctly. I’ve yet to have either one of these issues happen in Opensimulator.

Tracy