Not to ever underestimate the value of a good location, I’m happily Linden$ed-out and set free of tier starting next month. Somehow the word got out:
Large parcels help to market themselves
After a 32-month run of parcel ownership in Gualala, Vitersonus, Amida, and finally Stanford, I’m keeping a postage stamp in Gualala, a boat ramp in Amida, and a tiny refuge in beautiful Stanford. A few of my favorite prims remain here and there, granted clemency for the moment by Governor Linden.
Sometime, it just isn’t worth it. Such is my new view of tier, in the context of what matters to me with immersive 3D and GIS. For about six months I’ve continued my hold on some land in the classic Stanford sim of Second Life, without quite being able to work out the boundary changes to just barely squeeze in a 1:1 scale model of a single large building. Even if I had been able to get the parcel into the shape that I needed, I still would not be able to model the structure’s dome with a prim that naturally had the large radius required. Not everyone is trying to model a Frank Lloyd Wright public building; perhaps the land can be better used by someone else with an architectural focus.
I’m scaling back ownership this week to the tier-free 512 square meter level in Second Life. I’m also building up a freshly configured Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope 32-bit server (dual 3.4 GHz Xeon – 4 GB, HP DL360 G4) to do some more serious sort of work with OpenSim. In the past five months I’ve developed some terrain data that can handily provide 1-meter postings over more than 500 square miles. With that much to publish, I really need much, much more than 1/8 of a sim, even a suberbly cool sim like Stanford.
View of beautiful Stanford sim with pond features
The orange area is available at L$20/square meter
So if anyone reading this has use for a great 7520 (< 1/8 sim) mainland location in Second Life with over 40 meters of terrain sculptability, it’s available for L$20/square meter. Discount available for OpenSim community members or known GIS people. With the world’s economy as challenged as it seems to be, I’ve decided that it’s time to focus on where things matter most, and for me now that’s OpenSim more exclusively.
As my patience with Second Life wanes, and I wait for more architectural input for my next SL build project, I have a dark OpenSim server with no fixed IP. I’m having stability issues with the Linux SL client, but have upgraded the workstation to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. Google Earth client there is more stable, the NVidia drivers install themselves (sans Envy), and everything Ubuntu-wise seems to be getting incrementally better by the quarter.
I’m grinding some large images that have taught me that one very special difference between Windows XP variants and Windows Server 2003 is the latter’s ability to open files on the high side of 80 GB. I’d never quite realized it before but the moderately massive mosaics that I have created in years past (edging toward 250 GB single files) actually depended on Server 2003 to get created. Once the destination file exists, then XP can take it from there, and in all cases Windows Explorer can copy the monster files. But in that tenuous moment when a mosaic first grabs its space on disk for a huge output—one can’t seem to do that with XP.
So while I’m enjoying Google Earth on Ubuntu, there is something cool that I go back to Windows for, and that’s the new Google Earth browser plug-in. Since I’m gaining a bit of facility with the keyboard shortcuts in the full-stop Earth client, these all carry over to the plugin. My first test page has been stood up here and I’ve been deep into four continents with it so far. I understand that the plugin is only available for Windows and Mac systems at this time. If you can, Enjoy!
Also, as I get even faster with my keyboard navigation of G-Earth, I’ve actually seen some artifacts that are quite familiar from OpenSim. While zipping about between the Gulf of Yakutat and Canada’s Mount Logan, at certain viewing elevations I can accelerate the point of view forward quite fast. Doing so in this very mountainous terrain, I saw blocks of terrain standing up along what look like sim edges, resolving in a few seconds as more (sculpty?) bumpmap arrives. This is the same sort of artifact I’ve seen with terrain sculpties and sometimes, with region crossings in OpenSim. Also, I’ve found a couple of wild terrain grid errors in G-Earth. In one, a quarry dug hundreds of feet below sea level, right next to the sea, is displayed as positive elevation (absolute-value terrain, anyone?). In another, a boundary between US and Canadian terrain has a glacier flowing uphill onto a plateau. Go figure. Blame Canada! ;^)
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:
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")
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.
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?
Only the four-story Administration building (wing), not the two-story Hall of Justice. I’m tired so I’ll let the shot speak for me.
photo from 2009 01 30
To me, it’s mildly amazing to realize that F.Ll.Wright’s design fits so snugly in 1/8 of a Second Life region at 1:1.00 scale. The Civic Center Administration building is a Real-Life building that can be visited, providing an easy way to get a true RL immersive sense of its scale. Building at 1:1 scale in Second Life for the first time, this has been my first experience of transferring that awareness into the multi-region contigous space of the very beautiful Second Life. Sure, I’ve built large areas at 1:1 using draped LiDAR data, but to have a rather large single building (or at least its footprint for now) in context with existing builds that I’ve seen for months, well, at the moment SL seems larger than I’d thought. That shift in my perception of SL scale may be the contrast between flying (quite fast as it turns out) around 40 to 100 OpenSim regions versus walking around the site and knowing how long it takes to traverse the RL building.
Anyway, check out the build’s progress at secondlife://Stanford/100/235/30
Today the (San Francisco) Bay Area Automated Mapping Association hosted a wonderful URISA Certified Workshop given by Tim Case, describing Best Practices and Project Implementation Methods for 3D Geospatial work. The all-day event provided a very broad and even-handed overview of many 3D technologies that hold promise for the near future.
With this presentation as an extra boost for my focus on a new build, I’m gearing up with even more enthusiasm for a new build in the Agni grid Mainland. I’ve also tuned the Berkeley parcel for sale. Its price amounts to about US$382.00, and that price is set to help cover purchase costs for the next build’s likely parcel. The tuning involved reducing the parcel size by 64 square meters, so that the three Gualala parcels total 4608 square meters, or exactly the maximum amount allowed for Linden Lab’s US$25/month tier rate. With that size, it would be possible for an interested party to purcahse the Berkeley BART station and maintain it for $300/year in tier (the Linden land property tax).
Also, based on today’s Geospatial tag, I’ve noted just this morning two mentions of the Berkeley BART build. The New World Notes item by Wagner James Au 2009 01 19 was wonderful to find after our in-world messages last month. For clarification, while true at the time of that conversation, no longer do I work for City of Berkeley. The TidalBlog item by Peter Miller mentions interesting developments in the overlap between simulators and geospatial models, as well as some shots from his visit to the Berkeley BART model. Thanks to both authors for their posts!
The iconic Berkeley BART station has been listed for sale (all build objects included) in Second Life. In-world, simply visit the region Gualala 192 / 50 / 24 to take a look. Under the covers, there are three parcels that are augmented by ample protected Linden land, including a picturesque road and bridge, a boat channel, and a canal. The land took two years to consolidate, and involved about eight parcel purchases into the three now joined for sale. Two of the contiguous areas separated by the canal have been bridged using meticulous construction methods.
But the best part about this site is the 1000-prim Level 3 build. It’s a precise model about 1/3 scale, so that most Tiny avatars can walk around inside it. Surface details, building exteriors and station interiors were shot in 2007, but look as good as new despite Gualala’s drizzly climate!
The station is on offer starting 2009 01 14 for L$116,800. Proceeds will be used to support a non-Berkeley build in a nearby region.
Green areas show the three areas joined to make the parcel for sale
Parcel areas with trees and transluscent prims for some scale context
Steep view of Berkeley BART station build
Shallow view (westerly) of project site from boat channel
