[sldev] Lighter weight client?

Edward Cherlin echerlin at gmail.com
Thu Feb 14 11:41:16 PST 2008


On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 9:28 AM, Dale Mahalko <dmahalko at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's probably workable on a system with no dedicated 3D, if you split
>  the user interface and chat away from the render window. Then you can
>  have the 2D UI  elements (object editor, texture picker, script
>  editor) large and full-screen, while the actual 3D world view shrinks
>  to say 320x240 to reduce the rendering load.

Good. Supposedly somebody is working on this sort of design. I need a
contact to introduce to the OLPC development community.

>  I've often wondered if the render distance could be hacked to go lower
>  than 64 meters. If you have a very small screen and a smaller FOV than
>  normal, you aren't going to be able to see the distant vistas all that
>  well anyway, so just pull it back further to say 32 meters. That's
>  still a reasonably large viewspace, and it cuts the object and texture
>  load by a quarter, vs 64 meters.
>
>  It would probably end up looking like DOOM, except with a chat window. :-)

Yes, DOOM runs on the XO.
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Doom

>  An even more interesting question is the age issue, since LL is so far
>  choosing to make K-12 educational use of Second Life almost
>  impossible. How can I set up an elementary-level educational island in
>  the teen grid, where adult staff members, mentors, and other
>  professional educators can freely come and go? Apparantly all adults
>  of any kind whatsoever are not allowed on the teen grid, so there goes
>  that plan.

That's perfect for OLPC. I'll let them know that SL has a reasonably
child-safe space.

That raises another question. Can our community localize SL into our
target languages?

http://dev.laptop.org/translate
Afrikaans, Amharic, Arabic, Aymara, Basque, Bengali, Bengali (India),
Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Hong Kong), Chinese
(Taiwan), Czech, Danish, Dari, Dutch, Dzongkha, English, English
(South African), English (US), Finnish, French, Friulian, Fula,
Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hausa, Hindi, Icelandic,
Igbo, Italian, Japanese, Kinyarwanda, Korean, Macedonian, Malayalam,
Maltese, Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Pashto, Persian, Polish,
Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Punjabi, Quechua, Romanian, Russian,
Serbian, Sinhala, Slovenian, Sotho, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu,
Templates, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Wolof, Yoruba

>  These access policies may be even more of a technical challenge than
>  the problem of trying to do 3D on a processor that doesn't need a
>  cooling fan. OLPC Second Life may have to wait until the release of
>  privately operated gridservers, so that we can overcome LL and their
>  overly protective child/adult grid access rules.

We do need a space where only students and teachers are allowed.

>  - Scalar Tardis / Dale Mahalko
>
>
>
>
>  On 2/14/08, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
>  > The XO has a 433 MHz AMD Geode LX processor, and no 3D acceleration
>  > hardware. Memory is 256 MB, and there is 1 GB of NAND flash.

-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay


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