The Troppo Yacht Cub is slowly growing prim by prim. The marina part is mostly finished, we have plenty of space for further expansion if we need to. The outside of the Club building is partly finished the bar area and interior decorations still to come
Troppo Yacht Club
More photos here
I have been using Imprudence and Kirstens viewer in opensim for some time. Kirstens viewer is what I use for video and photos. I use the S19 viewers with shadows enabled. The latest build is a little shack in Troppo Club a 3×3 Diva distro grid. Shadows and the way a viewer handles light is fun and challenging and way different to photography in RL. The ability to control the time of day and East angle of sun and moon light is handy, in Opensim this works really well. Add that light (lets call it natural light) together with projected light (works in Kirstens but not in imprudence yet )and you have a big say in how your video or photo will look. Projected light is light from a prim but unlike “a prim like a light” only projects light from one face of the prim (my understanding of it) you can give that face a texture say a circle and that will then become a spotlight. I will show some photos from the project I am working on right now in the next post to explain more.
Here are some photos of the latest build to show what Kirstens and Imprudence can do. The photos with fake shadows (shadows on a prim still hanging around ) are Imprudence the others are Kirstens no projected light was used in the photos this time.
Troppo Club Radio shack
This is is a cool way to drive a ball round the office. The phone of cause has all the goodies inside it to send the message to the ball to turn and change direction and so on….
Is this a way to control our Opensim and SL Avatars. Could the phone act like a mouse, it’s already on the network via wifi ?? Could it mimic my movements and relay it to my Avatar mmmmm…
2nd Birthday Party at Osgrid opensim has come a long way in a short time.
This is Opensim, Divadistro 11766, Kirsten’s viewer S19 (381) in Troppo Grid
3 shadows cast from my avatar one from the “natural light” at 5.30pm the other two from projected light from two different prims and different intensity setting. Lots and lots of tools to play with, building 3D environments is becoming more fun and more complex by the day.
My HTC magic phone had an OTA update today from Android 1.5 to 1.6 I have only had the phone for less than a week and it obviously had the older version of Android installed when I got it. I did try to force an update but no luck, then asked the friendly people at Vodafone to look in to it, the update come automatically today. It downloaded over 3G. Why? I don’t know The Wi Fi was on and it would have been my preferred way to download but no big deal.
I downloaded Google Goggles and started to play with visual search. It is impressive, I know it is only the beginning but still I can’t help but marvel at it all. I took a photo of my camera and in Google search it picked it 100% right. The barcode scanner also works well, even my tiny qr code on my Skype contact list scans in perfect, then with a tap on the screen the details are in “my contacts” just wonderful. GPS, Maps, Google Latitude, Gmail, Picasa and the rest all perform just like on my PC. Now I want to take some of the 3D homes we built in Opensim and place them on vacant lots of land, show them on the phone camera via a marker or GPS position, merge them in to the picture as some form of AR ? This might be possible with some help from 3DI in the browser plugin anyone have some ideas please ?? I think an interesting and fun way to demo new ideas in home designs, town planning and wot not……
Photosynth of a project from Opensim Troppo Grid. A 1 bedroom house soon to be built
Is Exporting, Importing objects from or to Secondlife and Opensim possible.
Yes a few applications work either way, how useful that is, is depending on what you are exporting or importing.
SecondInventory will import and export (backup)most items, a few 3rd party viewers will attempt to do the same in some sort of a fashion.
The flow of content as expected is from SL in to other grids, mainly because SL “has it” and the the other grids are new and looking of content. This is changing with lot of content being made in opensim based grids right now.
When we first started in Opensim our aim was to take what we had in SL and transfer it to Opensim. This was painful, lots of imports got screwed up and lots of time was lost in cleaning up. That was more than 1 year ago and things have improved. With hindsight we should have rebuilt and made a fresh start.
Using Opensim as your workshop (developing platform)) and exporting your product in to SL sounds like a good idea and it can work.
However if you use lots of large building blocks (prims larger than 10x10x10) as you do in large buildings it gets hard if not impossible to export to SL (max prim size in Sl is 10 x10 x10).
This stops a lot of design flowing from Opensim to SL . On the other hand importing a build from Sl containing lots of prims that could be built with far less in opensim is also not a good idea.
Conclusion: As a first step SL should change and allow building with larger prims!
SL has far more users and content. Removing the wall and have free trade will benefit all ( free trade removing trade barriers I have heard this before…). The platform is sound it is inexpensive and relatively easy to learn, that can benefit everyone from large cooperations, governments to individuals.
OpenSim supports: Large prims, Hypergrid, Megaregions and Oar backups that alone makes it an advanced and professional 3D simulator.
Yesterday I tested the new “Oar merge” by Justin Opensim.
Working in a new 2×2 Diva Distro, it worked fine for most of the bits I wanted to do. I loaded Oar’s in to the 4 regions, starting in Sw region no problem as expected. I deleted a few prims and added a few, did a save Oar, re started the simulator and “load Oar merge” and every thing fine. I did the same with the other 3 regions and all worked just great. When I first load the oar’s I of cause change to the region I want to load the Oar in to.
I only save the Oar in the Sw region and load the “new” oar from SW also. Amazing to see 4 regions grow and develop before your eyes.
As a final step I dropped the new database all together. Started a new fresh 2×2 Diva then loaded my final Oar file the one with the 4 regions from the first Diva 2×2. All worked except the terrain had only persisted in the root region SW. No big deal I loaded the terrain files for the other 3 regions and all is sweet.
The final step was not needed but I wanted to see how it was going to work exporting a megaregion and that worked to 99%.
The Dev’s at opensim keep on doing amazing things Oar’s, megaregions and hypergrid wonderful stuff. Thank you thank you thank you…………
On the wish list:
Would be great if the terrain did persist ( it might I might just have screwed up)
It would be good to be able to save an Oar from a specific region not just as a whole megaregion.
Say if you change “CombineContiguousRegions=true” to false and that acted like a switch reverting the position of prims back to a position in a 256 x256 region.( I am dreaming mmmm )
Over all all this is mighty impressive stuff . It is possible to have a team working in a megaregion. save an Oar every now and then and when things go wrong it is easy to pick up the pieces.
Now what more?? ahh yes “The Mercedes-Benz” no prob I pick it up, thank you , thank you ……..
OpenSim in the Cloud?
On the Horizon is this cloud and it is getting larger, is it a storm cloud or will it as the day progresses turn out to be a fluffy white summer’s day cloud?
How will The Google Chrome OS affect this cloud?
I look at what is my workstation today, my view is one laptop and two tower’s one acting as a server and my N95 phone. My view in a few years from now will change. My workstation will be less cluttered more and more of my work will be done on smaller and more mobile devices.
Will this be the end of the pc as we now know it?
What about a photorealistic view of 3D environment’s the Nvidia’s Reality Server 3.0 will help to do just that. Running OpenSimulator on a Reality Server sounds like a good idea why not do all the crunching and hard work in the cloud and display it all in the browser (viewer 3DI?).
Building with prims somehow pardon the pun feels a bit primitive but how do we make new designs without first building them? Recreating existing objects is one thing but new design and future buildings needs to be created in some way. As it stands right now I am very comfortable to do that in opensim for me it works well.
Building and designing in the cloud could be done with an extension, add on in the viewer like a builders tool no need for everyone to carry a toolbox.
If most if not all crunching is done in the cloud augmented reality looks like an amazing world where we could interact with objects and complex buildings on the hop. I cast my eye outside it is early in the morning a clear sky, again a hot day but wait there is a small cloud on the horizon 
Have a good day all……..
