Learning about Game Development from the Nook Team

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Have you ever wanted to bring to life your artistic or training project to make ut more interesting and informative? There are various techniques, usually involving single elements but it can be a huge challenge to come up with a way to synchronize all the moving parts of your build. The Nook Team from Nara’s Nook grid have achieved this with the use of NPCs, and their presentation, called “Game Development in Opensim: Leveling up” will show how the NPC feature of Open Simulator can dramatically enhance the interactivity of a build. Not just people, but whole scenes can appear and disappear, making for a memorable and unique experience that educators and artists of all kinds could use to their benefit.


“We wanted to share what we are doing with NPCs,“ explains Nara, “because we’ve developed a tool that lets creators tell animated stories or build in-world adventure games all running from a single script a visitor can activate. “


Group members Nara Malone, Dorena Bree, and Siobhan Muir have been working together for over a decade at digital storytelling, and have been enthusiastic participants at the OSCC for almost as long. They will be demonstrating their techniques with an appropriately seasonal story that will involve and delight the audience and hopefully inspire us all to have more interactive and animated builds.


Game Development in opensim Sunday 10 December at 10.30am SLT

Marcel Mosswood & a Safe Metaverse for Youth

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Marcel Mosswood discovered Second Life and Open Simulator in the same year, 2009. She was looking for a way to use the metaverse for education and collaboration. Her goal was to create a safe space in the metaverse for teaching children, from first grade to high school level. Public grids were not the ideal place for this. “I postponed using them as a place for children to study until one day I met a friend who was equally passionate about using the metaverse as a place to study,” says Marcel Mosswood, known in RL as Maria Magdalena.

“Together with that friend and my husband, we developed our own metaverse that is safe for children. The advantage of using opensim is that I can create it on a private, closed server so it is suitable for use as a school.”

Marcel has a booth (number 16) on Expo Zone 3 and the OSCC. She is a staunch supporter of the event. “OSCC is a gathering place for experts in using the metaverse for research and education, this really interests me because I can learn many things from these experts, especially those who can develop the way we educate in our metaverse school.”

Marcel’s Metaverse school, based in Indonesia, is called Suluh Bangsa Mulia. “It is just a regular school, the only exception is that learning activities are carried out in the metaverse, not in physical buildings,” Marcel explains, “In our school, there are various types of students. Some tend to be critical of others, some bully their companions, and there are also those who easily get emotional. This causes various emotional conflicts. So far, when we talk about emotional conflict in the metaverse, we are talking about adults, what about children in school interactions? This is what made me interested in studying it and presenting it to the OSCC 2023 audience.”

See more about Marcel’s presentation here: https://conference.opensimulator.org/events/managing-student-emotions-in-the-metaverse

Smooth Moves from Kelso Uxlay

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Kelso Uxlay will be speaking at the OSCC this year. His presentation is titled ‘The art of smoothly moving objects in Opensim’. The subject matter will be both entertaining and very useful if you enjoy animating your builds in opensim.

“Although the talk is about the power of a particular scripting function, the presentation itself is definitively intended for a non-technical audience,” Kelso explains. “Its most interesting portion consists in a showcase demonstration of scripted moving objects, some of them exhibiting spectacular effects. “Ordinary people” will benefit from learning and seeing what is possible. Perhaps some of them will be encouraged to develop their own scripting skills.”

Kelso first started to be active in SL in 2010, and in OpenSimulator two years later. “From the beginning I had an interest in scripting,” he reports, “but it was only after Dabici Straulino and I established our own grid Creanovale in 2014 that I seriously began to develop my proficiency in LSL scripting. From my previous professional life, I was already thoroughly familiar with SQL scripting in large online biodiversity database systems. Learning LSL was therefore a relatively easy move for me.”

Kelso participated in the foreign language event Hypergrid International Expo in October, and where he gave a version of this presentation in French. Says Kelso, “I saw OSCC as a nice opportunity to improve it based on comments received, and to reach a different audience. I think that people who saw the previous presentation will note the enhancements.” We will all learn a lot from this talk no doubt.

The art of smoothly moving objects in Opensim – Saturday 9 December at 8:30am PST

Nyx Breen Featured at this year’s OSCC

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The Sky’s the Limit ! Photographer and virtual builder Nyx Breen will be participating in this year’s Open Simulator Community Conference.


The theme of his talk will have you looking up! Titled “Expanding Virtual Experiences with EEP creations”, the focus of his presentation will be the use of EEPs. ‘EEP’ stands for Environmental Enhancement Project, the next step on from the old Windlight settings.


Nyx Breen: “EEP is a great creative tool because it’s one of the last unexplored artistic possibilities for creators in Virtual Worlds. Individuals can create an environment that enhances the theme or mood of their creation or stand alone as the arbitrator of their desired perception of what the effect can be. Half of what you see on your screen is sky and water; leaving this massive creative possibility unutilized in artistic ways seems like a waste of developing a fully immersive virtual experience.”


Known for his giant builds, with spectacular abstract visuals, Nyx Breen will be explaining how manipulating the Environment on a region can dramatically change the appearance of a build. It can also become an integral and customizable part of the artist’s palette. Working with EEP settings may at first seem challenging, but with guidance from Nyx, the audience will see how this feature can enrich their world, without adding lag or prims.


This is the second year that Nyx has participated at the OSCC. What motivated him to sign up?
Nyx Breen: “OSCC allows an individual to interact, inform, and learn about many subjects that are unique to virtual experiences. With far-reaching talents, professionalism, and multi-subject knowledge, the group is unique in Virtual Worlds. The ability to collaborate and disseminate techniques and skills is greatly enhanced when participating with the group. The likelihood of the lessons learned at the OSCC being understood, applied, and developed across virtual worlds is greater than the effect it would have if just an individual or single grid were messaging it.”

Grid Management Techniques with Lone Wolf

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This is the first time Lone Wolf has presented at the OSCC, and his talk “OpenSim on a Bigger Scale” will explore important issues for all grid owners – size and reliability. Wolf Territories grid is a relative newcomer in Opensim, but it is fast becoming one of the largest, and has a reputation for reliability and flexibility. The Wolf Territories website https://www.wolf-grid.com/ puts many controls in the hands of its residents, from automatic terraforming to region name change.

With the equivalent of 1.7 million kilometers of land on his grid, Lone Wolf has had to face numerous challenges, and come up with innovative techniques to keep his grid running smoothly. He shares his experience with us in this talk. “I’m going to be giving a little bit of the history of the grid, some tech talk, and also some hints about things to watch out for when building an opensim grid,” he says.

Lone Wolf Saturday 09 December at 1.30pm SLT