TXSTATE OpenSim Virtual Campus Opening Soon

Monday, February 21, 2011
This is what I have been working on for the last couple of months: A new version of the old TXSTATE Bobcat Village campus in SL built in opensim on our own grid at TXSTATE.

The challenge really has been downloading all the buildings despite all the insane TOS requirements that ruined such great apps as Second Inventory.

The hurdles I speak of are:

  • Huge Prims: Creator name does not match mine, and the new TOS forbids the download of blended creator objects.
  • Sculpt Textures: Depending on the whims of the download software these too can be a problem as I did not create them and that makes the object a blended creator object.
  • Door / Window / Sit Scripts: Paskis Doors and Windows and Piero Padar's Perfect sitter are scripts I use every day to make my SL easier as a content creator. Who would have thought that relying on the smarts of these two great coders would come back and bite me in the you know where down the line. Any item that has these scripts needs to be first stripped off of scripts, exported, imported and somehow scripted from scratch using my own scripts or some open source scripts I found on the net.
  • Animations: As I do not create any animations, all the animations I used in my chairs are not impossible to download and re-use.


Don't get me wrong, the things I am trying to download, I own full permission to. I guess the full permission only covers the grid they're in and nothing beyond.

I wish there was a way to invite these builders to the grid we are working on so that they can come in under their own name, be paid, and make their scripts and assets so that their work can keep serving the public.

Clearly TXSTATE grid will not be in the business of selling furniture, but it would be nice if our furniture could have the nice animations my SL furniture has.

In terms of tools I used to export things: I used Second Inventory heavily but it was klugedy to go back and forth between the SL client and SI interfaces. Imprudence offers a much better export function however I noticed that it does a VERY sloppy job of exporting textures --- even those I made myself.

I honestly think LL came up with this new TOS edit just to sabotage the steady migration of SL generated content to other opensim based grids.

But either way, difficult or not, it is happening and here are some snapshots to prove it:


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