Darb Dabney's 3d GIS – OpenSim

As part of the ongoing mainland cleanup, the abandoned Berkurodam site has been restored to its natural state.   Governor Linden has packed the BART station safely into my Lost & Found folder, and she’s made an attractive -looking open space where once there was a highly urbanized build.

When notified of the demolition, we dispatched SIMGIS.com intern Rat Dawg to the site to investigate–and managed to capture the investigation on machinima:

If the video doesn’t embed, it is here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1B3CwIuElc

The terrain forge was fired up tonight, and the virtual dump truck made dozens of runs into immersive reality.  Compared with OpenSim where terrain megaprims can be fine-tuned to the precise size requirement, in Second Life I must back-calculate the scale from actual terrain sculpties.  Apparently my trusty Gene Replacement 40-meter spheres can be induced into 35.70-meter terrain blocks, using the method I developed for use in Level 2 OpenSim build of UC Berkeley.  This version 0.9 of the terrain made some mis-calculations about the ultimate size of the top sections of each sculpted prim.  Look for better scale control with version 0.91 soon!

view Sly in RL, vu Ely in SL, northerly Stanford region

closer look at drive-under location ("first arch")

view Wly in RL, view Sly in SL Stanford region

There’s some progress on a couple of project fronts.  I’ve started assembling some USGS terrain for a 1:10 scale Level 1 build that could involve more OpenSim regions than I’ve ever stood up on one machine before.  Snapshot of progress is here, with a goal of 304 OpenSim regions for the model.  I expect that the OpenSim server will be re-imaged and a new build attempted in the next couple of weeks.

Vicinity of Colorado Springs, CO - with a full mile of terrain elevation subtracted

The site design for the Marin Civic Center build in Second Life Stanford region is also moving along with its target 1/8 region (two SL acres) based on RL terrain and building at 1:1 scale Level 3 build.  Progress sketch below:

Context model data of terrain for Civic Center Administration Building

A bit more can be reviewed by looking at the PDF of the same map here.cc_topo_20090211

Finally, a sky tag has been added to the space above the build. It is visible as a streak to anyone who visits SLURL.com by a mouse roll.  The Stanford region now has a large “MARIN” visible in its upper reach, squarely in the middle of the ancient Second Life Outlands.

Stanford vicinity from SLURL.com on 15 Feb 2009

Reading more than writing these past couple of days, I have really felt both an in-world and RL sadness to know that Robin Linden is leaving the Lab.  My first use of the SL client was in 2006 10, so I’m not much of an SL oldie, although I was at Burning Man ’98 and ’99 like certain key Linden folks (who I don’t recall meeting there!)

Since my 2006 embrace of Second Life, and more recently, I have benefited from, experienced, and valued Robin’s ability to bind together for Linden Lab three organizational  traits in Silicon Valley culture into an attractive whole: 1) the heartless drive for competitive productivity, 2) shameless brilliance in relevant technical matters, and 3) a human warmth in the old-school California style.  People don’t learn to braid those strands together well without a solid education and (plural) decades of diverse work experience, IMHO.  Really.  Any appearance to the contrary I’d assert as either brief good fortune, or marketing hyperbole with short legs.

Anyway, with 650 square miles of simulator space, 80,000 concurrent users, and a willingness to explore new business directiions, some good things are happening.  Perhaps this is the dawning of the age of Linden Lab 2.0 and a wilful departure from start-up style?  It is my hope that by selecting a new executive team with less in-world experience, Linden Lab may grow more open to new applications of Second Life Grid technology, particularly applications that are disjoint from a vast, contiguous user-generated content space.  Perhaps?

Down in the “basement” a server awaits a bit of configuration to become an OpenSim lab to support the Marin Civic Center development.  How nice it would be to load terrain into a portion of a Second Life region, but alas–it seems unavailable to those of us without Estate controls.  The 1:1.00 scale terrain will need to be calculated to back the base ortho-image that has already been tiled over the site as shown in the last blog posting.  I have verified that one of the 40-meter sphere oversize prims in my inventory can be rebuilt into a massive terrain sculptie.  Placing a 32×32 sampling (30×30 at most that are usable for terrain) of 1-meter terrain samples will give me a guide, and then I’ll just need to diddle with the SL client bulldozer tool to approximate the terrain prim, before disposing of it.

Thanks to the frequent updates of the region map at SLURL.com, I can already see some of the build taking shape.  On the second image below I sketched my virtual moving van’s path from Gualala to Stanford.  To aid overview map navigation and VFR-flying avatars, I have constructed a large readable sky label in crude imitation of the long-standing skywriting by SL resident Web Page in region Da_Boom.

From that origin, the old Gualala locale was at region grid (1008,998), and the new Stanford site is at region grid (1006,1000).

The heart of the old SL Mainland

Oddly enough, Stanford appears to be the fourth-oldest region, according to this relatively ancient map.

Second Life regions 2002 11 21

On the ground, I’m still in process on some lot line adjustment I’d like to make before breaking ground. The terrain sculptie method has been proven, although I have yet to grid actual terrain values for the project site. Also, I’m trying to minimize RL dimension measurements if possible, by using best available historical information on the RL site.

Some things have changed in SL viewers in the last few months. About a year ago, it was possible to take an oversize prim and modify a single dimension, having that snap to 10 meters. Currently, any change in a dimension of an oversize prim results in all three dimensions snapping to values less than or equal to 10 meters. It’s a new challenge, but can be managed. Still, once a builder has tasted the freedom of OpenSim, it is awfully hard not to chafe at those sorts of restrictions.

I’m giving thought to a copy of Second Inventory to facilitate the use of OpenSim for dev and SL for production, but the issue of prim size shrinking will be a big issue for me.

Curiously, I have found that physical prims to not drop to the ground in Stanford.  This has never been the case in Gualala, so I’m intrigued and opened a ticket with Linden Lab.  I’ll see what they say. Meanwhile, I’ll keep my eye on the sky for the project’s mark (in the old ceneter of OUTLANDS)