Interested in an Internship?
We are currently accepting interns in open source software development and in public relations. Contact info@pleiades.ca for details.
Pleiades offers new Sim Backup and Transfer Service Preview
If you have content hosted on Second Life or on any OpenSim grid, then this announcement is for you.
One of the disadvantages of relying on a third party to store and host your content, is that you can be at the mercy of service outages, policy changes, and price increases. A critical principle of owning your own content is the ability to back it up and transfer it whenever you like. Otherwise, it’s out of your possession.
Second Life is an excellent platform for hosting user-created virtual worlds, but it does not offer a comprehensive back-up service. Today, Pleiades is pleased to announce that we are stepping in to fill that gap.
Pleiades is dedicated to the use of virtual worlds as a learning platform, and we are working with educators to ensure that this platform meets their needs and addresses the unique challenges inherent to teaching. Our new backup service fits into this mission, helping us to ensure that learning communities are able to maintain control of the content they’ve invested countless hours of work and passion into creating.
The service
The service allows you to back up the contents of any full region at once, including all rezzed objects, buildings and terrain. These are packaged into a single download for you, using an industry-standard OAR file, directly compatible with platforms that use OpenSim. The contents of the OAR can also be transferred back into Second Life. This means that you can transfer your content to another platform, work with it offline (for example, on a LAN or desktop installation of OpenSim), or simply save and duplicate it elsewhere in Second Life. Either way, you can be sure that your property is in your control. We charge a one-time introductory fee of $80 USD per full region back-up, with discounts available for back-ups of multiple regions.
At no additional charge, we can copy the contents of your OAR file onto a dedicated OpenSim region for viewing and verification—you’ll be able to view and test your content on our pre-production Global Metaverse Campus. This is not yet guaranteed for classroom use, but we’re working hard on that, too.
Find out more
For more information about this service or to schedule a backup, you should contact us: click here.
We look forward to helping you.
A note on scripts: Many scripts will work automatically, but we cannot guarantee them yet. We will work with you to understand what problems might arise with backing up your scripts, and you can decide whether to re-implement them yourself or have us do it.
A note on ownership: Pleiades honors intellectual property. Service back-ups will only be provided for your content. You must have the right to copy the content you are asking us to back-up.
Video of Tim Maly at SLCC 2010
Pleiades Creative Director Tim Maly presented at SLCC 2010 on the topic of Literate Games. We’ve got the video here.
Literate Games at SLCC 2010
Pleiades Creative Director Tim Maly will be presenting at SLCC 2010 on the topic of Literate Games. The SLCC is coming up on the weekend of August 14th in Boston. The schedule hasn’t been finalized, but we’ll update as soon as we know exactly where and when it will be held.
One of the struggles of building good educational content is making it engaging, something books and games have been doing for ages. Join us for a light-hearted look at the narrative possibilities of an interactive medium and some of the weird hybrids (successful or otherwise) that people have tried. Can we learn from history to make better learning materials in Second Life? (Yes.)
This is a presentation that steps a little outside of Second Life to look at how other mediums deal with the kinds of challenges that Second Life creators face when they are building compelling interactive content.
This session will be about analogy building. We’ll look at how game makers and book makers have approached the kinds of problems that Second Life content creators face. You’ll come away with some new ideas about how narrative and interactivity fit together as well as ways in which they can fall utterly flat.
And you’ll have fun.
