Friday, October 02, 2009

OpenSim in the Classroom: Just Avoid Wireless

An app like this just needs more solid throughput than a wireless connection with at least a dozen clients over a single AP can provide. It just works so much better with wired computers. Today voice was crisp and clear--loud, even--without wireless and 13 clients. And I didn't let them edit appearance during the voice testing so voice stayed strong. I did confirm that FreeSWITCH is not spatial, unfortunately. Everyone is audible to everyone else at the same level no matter their relative grid position. We (the drama teacher and I) though we might be able to get small groups rehearsing simultaneously in different parts of the region, but that won't work.

The only problems were two accounts getting repeated failed logins, alternating between a "session crashed" message and a message that were already logged in when trying to log in. Turns out this resulted from their data not saving properly during an earlier session using wireless. This drove me nuts until I figured out a fix. Log in to the MySQL opensim database (using Toad or whatever MySQL GUI you were able to get, or MySQL admin if you can), go to the users table and find the user in question's UUID. Then go to the agents table and you'll find that that UUID has a few field values that the rest don't. AgentOnline will be 1 (true) instead of 0 (false), so change it to 0. LogoutTime will say 0 so you can just insert another user's value there. Then the currentPos will have some null value codes so just insert another user's values there, too. The user should be able to log in again, no problem. Since it's clear the crappy session data resulted from a poor connection, this type of thing is one more headache that can be avoided if you stick with wires.

2 comments :

Anonymous said...

Interesting would love to hear what your config was and how many users you had connect.

If you use 802.11n and a single region in standalone mode connect every user 1 at a time until the environment is rendered in each so this should be adequate bandwith for 20 users as long as your not streaming video's through the client.

Also lots of RAM and set ReliableIsImportant=true in OpenSim.ini

Erik N. said...

My school uses 802.11g and the computer it's running on is 5 or 6 years old with I imagine 1 Gb of RAM if that, haven't even checked. The bandwidth LED on the AP is lit solid with 12 users logging in so I think these conditions are strikes against us using wireless reliably. I'll try setting ReliableIsImportant=true. If it's not true by default then I have it set false. I did rolling logins with 13 and that helped but I didn't wait for everything to be fully rendered with class time so limited. After seven or so logins they were having quite a lag just getting their clothing downloaded. So I'm probably better off wiring the computers, but thanks for the tips!