Simulator GIS – Darb Dabney’s OpenSim

Such waves of goodness that it wasn’t possible to blog it all.  Here’s where things have gotten in the past 2 weeks:

Beyond the provided OpenSim command terrain load-tile,  there has been another world.  The great thing about load-tile is that it takes a single terrain binary (in IEEE f32 format) and loads it into a bunch of sims, one terrain sample per square meter.  The challenge is that it’s very Windows-like in its use of system resources, which means that little objects spawn until the cows come home, and never give back their memory.  Solution: more rigorous scripting in the ERDAS Imagine side of things, and cooking up the terrain tiles myself.  The twist, more like a flip, here is that the good folks who coded “read in the terrain” used Cartesian Y=up, X=right, while the age-old standard for raw raster drops down like NTSC fields in a TV picture, Y=down, X=right.

So when I diced up the terrain and transformed the dices into flipped binary, they would load OK.  There were some horrific moments while I figured this out on a bunch of sims, and the world looked like a tectonic Cuisinart had just passed through.  Anyway–with a load of little scripts, and code-to-make-scripts, I have reached 100 regions and have an earlier 64 sims’ worth of Mt. Tam terrain loaded.  Still on 1 GHz and basic physics for now.

-=Darb