Testing times at castle Bromlestein

As part of my teaching here at the College for 08-09, one of the new courses will be in ‘Games Design’ and not surprisingly Second life came to mind as one of a number of possible platforms that I could be making use of. Unlike the other games design packages at my disposal though, I realised SL would have to be adapted for the task of an action type adventure, so that while being able to extract a certain amount of adrenalin, would also be able to get my students to either learn or have their current knowledge in some way tested. I decided to go for the latter, and as a first attempt the result is Castle Bromlestein.

Having read ‘Exodus to the Virtual World’ by Edward Castronova, an excellent book, I became suitably convinced that my game should feature a mythology, and so I put together ‘The Illumni Chronicles’; if you feel in the mood for a short read you can take a look here.

http://cd.bromley.ac.uk/bteccourses/sl/castle/Illumnichronicles.htm

The game takes place in a medieval castle, whose stonework has embedded into it a knowledge base of the Illumni. As players move around, scanners are able to detect an avatar and at random times rez either a spinning golden question ring or a defender of the knowledge; Kbot (growler). In the case of a ring, when touched by an avatar it will present a multiple-choice question, at the moment these are all based on html. The avatar responds by entering the correct option number through chat. In the event that a Kbot appears, it will attempt to home in on the nearest avatar, and if it engages, points are lost. There are two ways of dealing with these Kbots, try to outrun them, or use a hand held weapon like a sword to repel it. As I have only allowed Kbots to persist for a short while, avatars have a reasonable chance of keeping their score; I did manage to get guns and bullets working, but they required my students to have full edit rights, not a good idea on my own private land really.

I have a database logging all the scores and that seems to work well at the present time.

You can find a short a short video on YouTube: -


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAoERnzJcHg

In the video clip one of my Alts is seen answering a question, and then shortly after finds himself getting attacked with pretty poor performance I must say, by a couple of random Kbots; not an easy task recording and defending at the same time, at least that’s my excuse and I am sticking to it. If anyone would like to come along to Shimmer Island and take the teleport for a try, then you are more than welcome, though you will have to maintain your own score for now. The whole thing is just about out of proof of concept I feel, though still in development, and so naturally any feedback would be appreciated.

And in keeping with the game theme, access to the castle is through a disguised teleport, located on the top floor of the beech house

Bye for now, good luck Skipper Abel

Cyber Masonry

I was in SL recently and generally tidying up some of my LS code, when it occurred to me that given the rise of scripting communities in SL and the way in which scripters can move around cyber space plying their trade, we may soon witness the arrival of a new guild, the Cyber Mason. Since that first revelation, I often find myself using the term in conversation and so I decided to promote the idea by having an RL tea-shirt logo. I may even post a picture of myself wearing it.

Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

Object-Name: SIBlog
Region: Daydream SE Islands (232960, 246272)
Local-Position: (18, 92, 24)

Hi Skipper, I'm from Orpington College and I'm currently doing a Foundation degree in Education & Training at Greenwich University. One of my lecturers, Simon Walker, told me that Bromley College had been experimenting in SL and I was interested to see what you've been doing here. Together with my ebuddies, we been using SL to collaborate on tasks for our Celtt course. I'm looking forward to learning more about SL and hope to get the chance to have a chat here in the future, particularly as our two colleges are merging.

Floydette Albatros

Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

Object-Name: SIBlog
Region: Daydream SE Islands (232960, 246272)
Local-Position: (18, 92, 24)

fhgfhfghfghfg

mvashistha Agrawal

What is immersive

I managed to get alonf to a meet the day on the 'Immersive experience' held at the ischool sim. The discussion was centred on the theme Is Second Life experience automatically immersive, simply because it is a virtual world? If not, what makes the experience immersive (or not)?
Some of the commensts at the meeting such as the lure of surrealistic environments and the ability or not to capture emotions in immersive worlds made for a good start.
Whether an experience is immersive or not or say the degree of immersoveness has much to do with the willingness of participants, and as someone pointed out; everyone finds this more immersive than say IM systems like MSN? So are good immersive experiences purely voluntary, which maybe you counter with tha fact that there are involuntary ones also, where you just have to join in. Do we compare the immersive with IM's .
Then comes the one we are all aware of in that with regard to students who are already interested in computing becoming immersed especially if they are already gamers. As you can see the meet was well attended and the chat was typed live I felt. This in itself added to the immersive experience, copy n paste text can be a little off putting I feel, and can reduce the awareness you have of the environment, so immersive reduces as you focus on keeping up with the reading, which of course is not restricted to just SL and the like. Anyway a good meet ischool, I will certainly try to get along some more

Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

Object-Name: SIBlog
Region: Daydream SE Islands (232960, 246272)
Local-Position: (18, 92, 24)

I am just a visitoy

Taken Takaaki

In-World Planisphere

A while ago when I was making my first HUD, which is now available for free on in my Astro-Park Sky-platform. As part of the HUD features, I wanted to include an SL version of a Planisphere. So what is a Planisphere? Well it’s a tool for showing you what stars are visible at a given time from a particular Latitude, and as such is a good tool for improving your understanding and appreciation of the daily and annual motion of the stars. Anyway, I did come across some design issues, trying to make a HUD version as well as discovering a superb web based Flash version, that you can find at http://www.open2.net/science/finalfrontier/planisphere/frames.html and I decided to include this into the HUD instead.



I still felt however that it would be good idea though to have an SL version, and so last evening I had another go. I found suitable free star chart and cover templates on the net and after making a few modifications mainly for accessibility and readability, I uploaded them to SL. It was then simply a case of rezzing shaping and texturizing two cylinders. Once in place and scaled, I set about putting together a rotation script. At the moment you will find that by touching the outer white ring, the chart rotates in 5 degree jumps, so about five days each time. The latitude setting for the original star chart is 50o North, which on the face plate I have stated is Northern Europe, but of course that includes all countries around the globe that fall within that particular celestial co-ordinate. I have checked the Planisphere against one of the handheld variety of my own, and it seems to work pretty well. So next time you are passing Shimmer Island, why not Teleport up to the Astro-Park and give it a try, feedback welcome

Bye for now, Skipper

Swivelling Information

Following the completion of the Interactive star chart at my Astro-park skyplatform, I decided to add some information content for the Solar System display. I had considered placing a notecard in each planet, but decided it would be more interesting, for me at least to try and utilise a screen of some kind. In the end I got down to some scripting and settled on a clickable slide board combined with an avatar scanner. Now depending where you stand, avatar wise, the board will point in you direction to be read. In the screen shot left standing at the Planet Saturn.


In the screenshot here, you can see that I, Skipper Abel, am positioned by the planet Pluto, and the board has swivelled right. There is of course the situation of how I get the system to deal with more than one avatar, making this an ongoing project.

Bringing the sky down to SL Earth

Continuing to look for ways of using Second Life as part of my teaching, not so long ago I decided to put a new skybox above my place at Shimmer Island that would act as a meeting place and resource center for an astronomy venture that I am moving forward as part of a more general enrichment programme. The Skybox I called the Astro-Park, and went about gathering and producing some suitable features to install, like a small observatory and the planets of the Solar System. I experimented with making a simple holodeck for the Milky Way, and a deep sky projector that casts images of nebula and galaxies into the dark night sky.

My latest addition to all this is an interactive star chart. If like myself you have occasion to look at the night sky on charts, you may have become aware that a lot more attention is being paid these days, particularly so with those appearing in popular magazines, by the inclusion of colour and images. And so my thought was, can I use SL to make them both 3D and animated?

Well this is the project so far.


At particular points on the chart you will find small 3D models of stars, planets etc. Just touch on any one of these to open and close the object. In the case of planets and stars, (not to scale), they will expand and rotate, as this happens the adjacent screen fills with an accompanying information slide. Guessing what the surface of a distant yellow orange star looks like has I must admit required some imaginative license.


For meteor showers I decided to develop a particle emitter, which I think looks reasonably convincing. I am still thinking about using short introductory voice-overs. If you feel like teleporting over for a browse around please feel free and drop me an IM by way of any feedback and if you would like to join the Shimmer Island group.

Bye for now Skipper

Polling Second Life Style

I recently had the chance to run a live session in SL with a class of candidates. Up until this point I had either delivered walk through type presentations of the virtual world, so having people seated at machines and being able to give them some actual tasks and activates was something that I had been looking forward to. The event was a Continuing Professional Development session, and candidates were either completely new or newish to SL. One activity I was particular keen to tryout was my idea for a poll. Normally this would be a case of selecting some kind of option from a form, but as this was SL, and I wanted to cash in those particular aspects and unique social opportunities that the environment affords us. I carried out the exercise by first getting everyone to teleport up to a skybox, where I showed them a series of slides on one of my boards. Each of the slides would present a particular scenario on which that had to respond by indicating a level of agreement or confidence.


Now rather than clicking a panel or button of some kind, I had made a simple two prim scale from 1 to 10. To vote, each person simply stood next to the number they felt related to their measure i.e. 1 low confidence in the statement and 10 high confidence; there were five questions in all. When everyone was in place I took a screen shot, after which avatars made their way back to the board for another question.

I posted the results, by uploading the images onto a series of boards and used the llsettext to display each question. The exercise proved worthwhile I think. There was one moment of amusement and amusement though, when one new avatars keen to get in place ran to the high confidence end of the scale, failed to stop in time and plunged over the edge of the skybox 351 meters into the watery surroundings of Shimmer island.

SpeakyEasy at Shimmer Island

If I were to be asked "what is the main advantage of using Second Life over say using one of the more traditional delivery platforms for learning materails and resources such as a vle?". Well of course there are many, but I think my first reaction would be to simply recite what I consider to be the top three and they are "Social, Social, Social". And to put my committment where my opinions are, I have setup the SpeakEasy. While retaining the theme of my sub-tropical island, I used a Skyrock to house three breakout huts, where small groups can get together and either text or voice chat in the relative seclusion of the skies above Second Life. Given the seperation of the huts, you should find that conversations in one will not be overheard in the other two. To aid the sense of privacy, and introduce some sense of ambience, I have included the sounds of running water and random bird song.

So if you are looking for a venue with difference to hold those meetings, feel free to teleport over and up.

Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

Object-Name: SIBlog
Region: Daydream SE Islands (232960, 246272)
Local-Position: (18, 92, 24)

he kev brace here

gl00b0y Grut

Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

Object-Name: SIBlog
Region: Daydream SE Islands (232960, 246272)
Local-Position: (18, 92, 24)

hello to all

igo Cioc

Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

Object-Name: SIBlog
Region: Daydream SE Islands (232960, 246272)
Local-Position: (18, 92, 24)

Great day for blogging at Shimmer Island!

Lorri Momiji

Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

Object-Name: SIBlog
Region: Daydream SE Islands (232960, 246272)
Local-Position: (18, 92, 24)

hi

rad Zabibha

Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

Object-Name: SIBlog
Region: Daydream SE Islands (232960, 246272)
Local-Position: (18, 92, 24)

Hi, interesting blogging project!

Lorri Momiji

Making a WiKi in Second Life

Following the previous post describing my attempt at producing a Forum in Second Life. I decided to complete the circle by making this post showing a similar project at making a WiKi. I regularly get my students to make use of Moodles WiKi for their project work, and every time given the unpredictable and organic way in which the pages of a WiKi are likely to link and grow, I find that the job of trawling through the project can seem to result an exercise of diminishing returns for me. And so my thoughts turned to the far more visual and semi-immersive world of Second Life.

You can see from the screen shot that the project has three main areas of Design, Coding and Testing; a specific example using the WiKi for Software Design. The intention here is to have submissions placed onto the appropriate surface starting on the vertical scale at day 1. Of course in a normal WiKi, pages would be hyperlinked, but here I am suggesting that relationships are formed by association, where related postings are placed next to each other on the same day or above on subsequent days.

Each posting takes the form of a prim cube, whose texture and text will have been generated and uploaded from a Word template.

Once in place, a posting can be touched producing a dialogue menu, with options allowing Notecard text to be emailed, or the full Notecard given. The third option is a feature that I encourage, whereby a screen shot of the topic, say a design diagram, code section or test strategy, can also be uploaded into the prim to be displayed on the surface of a 3D screen.

The screen is rezzed each time with sides in both landscape and portrait for ease of viewing. This last feature I included to encourage the social dimension of Second Life, now the group can arrange to meet at the WiKi and review posting together.

Even from a superficial look, you can see how easy it becomes to form an overview of the projects development and activity. I must admit here to also having an almost intuitive sense of anticipation that the sheer physical forms that will come to emerge will in themselves provide a new and valuable insight, though of course this remains to be seen.

If you would like to see the project in action then just follow the link here to YouTube.

Please feel free to post any comments and of course drop into my place at Shimmer Island in Second Life anytime.

Thoughts on Second Life Rollout

I have been having some serious thoughts lately, regarding the necessary rollout of Second Life to the much wider community of users, not least after reading the outcome of a survey posted on Wagnet Joneses New World Notes blog in May this year of current residents. Mainly we appear to fall into the groups of innovators, capitalists, fasnionistas, role-players and social gamers.

It would seem then that in order to promote the adoption of SL we are likely to be drawing upon a population that would fall within the larger three groups or from other possibly larger though as of yet unclassified groups.

For those of us already in and enthusing about Second Life, its all to easy to forget that we are in the view of Stephen Downes, who I heard speaking at this years Eduserve Second Life conference 'the rounding error'! A touch cynical maybe, but compared to the desktop user-base, there is some ground to be made up here.

Essentially Second Life will I suspect to all intents and purposes be a product that we have to sell, sitting as it does for most outside the mainstream of the more familiar Office type applications.

I decided to look into the possibility of making an SL application that could be seen to draw upon some of the standard desktop software, though here I am coming from a Windows perspective, equivalents are readily available.

The outcome has been a Forum. Like all forums you can post, reply, open and email users, features I readillyachieved through some Linden Scripting. More importantly though, because why reinvent the wheel when there are plenty of good forums out there already, there has to be some advantage, and this is where the attributes of working in a virtual world such as Second Life can pay off, because now a forum can be visual, almost tactile and sociable. Basically each post is a prim, whose texture is generated from a Word template, saved in Paint and whose main content it dropped into the finished prim as a notecard.

Once completed a user, in Edit Mode, a cunning plot to get them involved, simply positions the new posting onto, rather than into the forum. There is going to be an opportunity here to witness the emergence of some interesting forum patterns I feel.

Sound interesting? Well you can take a look, because I posted a video up to YouTube

If you have any feedback just drop me an IM, email or teleport over to Shimmer Island for a chat.

EL4A

Had a meeting with some of the team from EL4A (E-learning For Africa) recently, where we discussed working in partnership with team on their project. An opportunity we look forward to as a team here at Bromley.

Currently EL4A are developing a African centre that will host all African educational, health and development institutions. If all goes according to plan, then this will lead hopefully to a complete Africa Island in Second Life, sounds impressive.


The principle focus at the moment is on the development of e learning using Second Life in bridging the African digital divide.

The EL4A project currently has a presence at EduNation (224, 48, 22), which you can see here, where each country will soon contribute by placing content on their regional map. So why not teleport over when you get the chance and see what’s happening?

Blog from a Shimmer Island visitor

Object-Name: SIBlog
Region: Daydream SE Islands (232960, 246272)
Local-Position: (18, 92, 24)

Hi I`m Firefox Stransky

Firefox Stransky