Thursday, October 01, 2009

OpenSim in the Classroom: LAN Party

Today I tried plugging 14 clients into the school network so they could log in to our sim and we could take the FreeSWITCH voice chat for a test drive. The network cables are bundled so they won't get horribly tangled so I couldn't quite reach cables to all of the computers, leaving 3 of them wireless, which may have had an effect. Anyway, with students really wanting to continue editing their appearance (It IS a girls' school after all.) I tried having students toggle the talk button one at a time while they were still editing. A couple (loud and clear!) utterances into it and the voice service dropped out. No one could toggle their talk switch anymore. Watching the console I could see avatar inventory flying into the server so I'm guessing my only option left to get this thing working is to avoid combining any significant editing with voice data. I'll try that tomorrow, in a room where I think everyone can be wired. One preparation I plan to make before starting the drama production with 12 eighth graders in a couple weeks is to configure and edit all of the avatars for the students so they don't have to spend our precious training and rehearsal time doing it. Maybe they can configure their avatars during study hall. That will go over well...

2 comments :

Trevor Meister said...

Judging from your past posts you have done amazingly well setting everything up. I have several Regions hosted on Reactiongrid, and have gotten to know the head "code ninja" quite well. Getting free switch running smoothly requred a bit of work and some coding tweaks. Even then, when you get 15 or so avs on a single sim (especially jr highish types) changing their appearance, maybe flying around and using voice, that will strain a typical Win 2008 hyperV sim. Given that you are running it all on XP and Lan with probably not the most sophisticated Switch, its sounds like you've squeezed out some very good results. It should be better if everyone is settled in their appearance, and keeps movement to a minimum, but still no guarantees.

Erik N. said...

Thanks, it's helpful to have some perspective. It might be good to upgrade that machine at some point. I'd be curious to know what sort of FreeSWITCH tweaks could help, though I don't know if I'd be able to do them.