Posted by on January 31, 2009 under howto | 
If you want more land in SL, it is going to cost you more. A lot more. With realXtend, you can add more land mass with a few clicks. For free (actually you need to have necessary machinery and bandwidth available, so it is not so free).
Test User found a huge carbon footprint when he was checking his world: “No wonder that we are getting climate change - I am going to do only virtual meetings to cut my travel - and I don’t want to meet the guy who did that.”
rexServer 0.4 comes with the default fish world, which is only one region. Download blank server from CTN files before trying the instructions here (Thanks to Peter Quirk for the original instructions).
Copy the default.xml to myregion_east.xml. Edit myregion_east.xml in the following ways:
- change the sim_name to something else, preferably without spaces. Let’s call it myregion_east for this example.
- get a new GUID from http://www.guidgenerator.com/online-guid-generator.aspx and plug it into the sim_UUID field.
- set the sim_location_x value to 1001 so the new region appears directly to the right of the default region on the map.
- set the internal_ip_port value to 9001 (the port needs to be different for every xml file)
- start the rexserver processes
When the opensim.exe process reports that the server is up and serving two regions, type the following in the opensim DOS window (Opensim console):
change-region myregion_east
terrain fill 21
terrain bake
It is especially exciting to have your rexviewer connected as you get to see terrain changes in real time. It may give you a god-like feeling (or goddess-like depending on your preferences). Use command “terrain help” at the console to get some useful commands to make further experiments. Download the terrain file used in the screenshot - you need to adjust the height with terrain commands to get some water to the footprint.
Posted by on January 25, 2009 under Ideas, howto |
Collaborative web browsing plays an important role in meetings. Meeting rooms have usually data projectors so that people can plug in their laptops and show slides, documents and web pages to support their message in a meeting.
In realXtend 0.4 it is possible to show web pages with live flash content, like a Youtube video (see CTN article about that). The web page to show is defined in the texture properties as a media URL.
However, it is a bit clumsy to use texture properties to change the web page when there are lot of people attending a meeting and possibly wanting to share something.
CTN built a server side solution to the problem using PHP and javascript.
Follow these steps to test the solution:
- download php and html files (unzip webscreen.zip) and upload them to your web server (if you don’t have a web server, get a free hosting from http://www.000webhost.com/. For professional use CTN recommends http://www.hosting24.com.)
- set texture’s media URL to http://www.cybertechnews.org/webscreen/webscreen.html (use your own server name here!) and apply the texture to a cube
- open a browser window to http://www.cybertechnews.org/webscreen/seturl.php (use your own server name here)
- write a URL (e.g. http://www.realxtend.org) to the text input field and press enter, after a few seconds, the web page shows in realXtend viewer, and the same web page is shown to all participants in the virtual world at the same time.
Extra benefit of this approach is that people who do not have realXtend can also follow the presentation from the same URL using a standard browser (you can test it by using the CTN URLs in the steps above).
If you wish to have several webscreens showing different content, it is easy to copy the same web files to another folder at the web server to separate URLs. To develop the solution further, learn the tricks from this book.
The next topic will be about how to share your Powerpoint slides in realXtend - stay tuned!
Posted by on January 1, 2009 under Uncategorized |
realXtend offers beautiful “Beneath the vawes” world as a default with their server download. It requires some work to clean it up so that you can start to build your own world. Now it is done and CyberTech News offers you a blank rexserver 0.4 download in two flavors:
- Without assets (55M): http://www.cybertechnews.org/downloads/rexserverblank0.4.zip
- With assets (69M): http://www.cybertechnews.org/downloads/rexserverblankwithassets0.4.zip
CTN web page shown at almost empty rexserver 0.4
For the with-asset-version, you can find a CyberTech News page on a TV set at the middle of the empty island… Testuser is also a bit modified and looks like Samuel J. Enjoy!
