Impact is my private virtual-reality space. It currently lives on a local instance of an OpenSim server, so you can't visit for now. This is actually the central pinnacle of a much larger space. I will eventually implement the full map with about 45 - mostly empty - 256x256 regions, but the little single region I have now is enough to play in while the OpenSim system grows and stabilises. I did try a version on a 3x3 grid but the crater walls were far too close to the centre island for my liking. I like wide-open spaces with little in them!
My VR space will probably always run off my home system (hopefully a publicly-accessible home server soon) but never support more than half-a-dozen-or-so simultaneous visitors, both because I never intend getting that sort of upstream bandwidth from my home and also because crowds (even virtual crowds) give me panic attacks (enochlophobia). It is a hobby, not intended to be a commercial proposition any more than this web site is.
In the unlikely event that you want to support Impact financially, buy a T-shirt. Or just buy one anyway because they are funny ;-D
| Random Impact Stats (as measured within crater bounds) | |
| Map (dimmed areas not yet present) |  |
| Map Area (256m2 regions) | 1 (eventually 45) |
| Max Terrain Height (from sealevel) | 64m |
| Lowest Terrain Height (from sealevel) | -96m |
| Day length | 6 hours |
| Gravity | 0.9G |
| Air Temp range | 16°C - 31°C |
| Sea Temp range | 20°C - 21°C |
| Primitive Count (approx so far) | 240 |
| Resident Population | 1 (ME!!) |
| Outbound Bandwidth (Mbps) | N/A (expected to be 1 - ADSL2+) |
| Guest Concurrency | 0 (expected to be around 6) |
| Bot-AV Residency | 0 (6 when I learn how to make such things) |
| LaeMi Stats (stats represent my online avatar, not necessarily my real life) | |
| Name | LaeMi Qian |
| Age | 25 (Sol-3 orbital time) |
| Gender | Female |
| Race | Asian stock profile 5 |
| Height | 15.5dm (5'2") |
| Occupational Specialisation | Mechanical Engineer |
Out-of-story comments are in this smaller font!
WARNING: NON-SERIAL UPDATES - I will be slipping extra parts of the story in wherever they fit, not necessarily the at the end-so-far, and re-arranging and re-writing stuff to suit as I go. Dates, order-of-events and details of already recorded events may change without notice ;-D.
FURTHER WARNING: This page is very long with lots of pictures!
FINAL WARNING: This page looks crap in IE6 - get a proper web browser! ;-)
Many hundreds of thousand years ago, humanity left the confines of their local cluster of stars in vast ships running on a drive system that increases range and speed with increased mass. A technique of 'ballasting' whereby a small neutron star was grav-locked to the ship increasing its mass and hence its range allowed intra-galactic travel at a speed acceptable to humanity and for a cost acceptable to large colonial conglomerates. One such ship, that of my forebares, collided with a black hole, but instead of being annihilated, took the black hole on as ballast mass, flinging it out of the Milky Way and across empty intergalactic space to the Large Magellanic Cloud. The journey took almost 170,000 years Earth time, though to the survivors of the collision, time dilation ensured only 35 years apparent journey time. As the gravity-wrecked colonial ship sped through the LMC, it started to shed habitation modules. Survivors were strewn along a path through the LMC, achieving variable levels of civilisation depending on the skill-sets to survive from each habitation unit.
I am the sole survivor of my habitation unit to arrive at the planet I have designated 'Impact' due to its prominent impact crater making the only land mass. Most of the habitation module was scattered across the ocean-bed a few kilometers away. My escape pod had already locked on to the landmass and taken me half way there before splash-down. The rest was a trial - the capsule was badly damaged and taking on water, I am lucky to get to land at all! And the emergency food cultures got contaminated with salty water and are probably ruined.
Water - more than imaginable! Having to paddle my capsule across several kilometres of it in the dark with bruised ribs was not much fun, though. An odd current dragged me past the outer rim of the crater and strait to the center island. Weird, but I have no direct experience of oceans or their currents. Some useful things washed up with me, which is even odder considering some are rather heavy items and I can't see how they could have washed up the side of the sea-floor rather than sinking to the depths of this crater! I am most grateful for this flotsam including a food-grade nano-fabricator module with enough memory intact to produce something akin to survival rations. Without that I would already be eating the local jellyfish and probably dying of it!
Also some retail crates of clothes. Not all my size, but adaptable down. I won't be running out of clean knickers any time soon! Ooh!, I have always wanted a swimming bikini like that one!
I was able to scale a natural chimney in the cliff-wall to a sheltered crevice and use some salvaged rope and an improvised winch to pull the stuff up behind me before another strange current decided to take it away again. There are still dribs and drabs of useful materials washed up on the 'beach' every morning-or-so and I am up and down that cleft until my hands are raw from the climbing.
Home Sweet Home. I have been spending the nights (or at least the nights and day I am asleep) in a natural tunnel through part of the side of the rock pinnacle. There is a sizable natural bubble in here which makes a good living space now I have chemically dissolved and re-set some piles of loose rock into a flat floor. I have set up a salvaged ICE (Information Communication Entertainment) unit and have the escape pod crash-seat as a reclining chair/bed. A few other odds and sods salvaged for decoration too. The screen will hold my AV library: I intend that the contents will be viewable by visitors in my virtual home, but copyrighted materials not to be taken from there.
Cave balcony. The tunnel that leads to the bubble-cave continues out the other side to a blind ledge with a nice view of the ocean and the crater-edge beyond. I strung a curtain across this as it is a little exposed at night.
Stone is an interesting surface. I have seen stones before of course, some as big as my head. Mostly chunks of asteroid, though a few from actual planets. One reputed to be from Earth itself in the habitation museum (now at the bottom of the sea). But a planet-sized stone!! (After all, that is what a planet is as I have always known at an intellectual level.) Walking on stone!
The sky is like a really really high ceiling. And a horizon!!! A real one - not just pictures of one. Atmosphere held in place by gravity, rather than a physical barrier. I shudder as I recall the loss of that barrier on the habitation ring still hours out from planetfall. Most likely everyone else was dead long before crashdown. The size of the open space is sometimes overwhelming and I have to get back inside my cave where I can touch walls!
The six-hour days are surprisingly easy to deal with - I end up going to sleep an hour after dark, sleep through the next day and night, wake up around the next dawn. Then three days and two nights awake. The sunrises are lovely!
Got a camera drone working for some areal pics:
The terrain actually has a >30m-deep hole in the middle of it capped with a terrain-textured block, allowing some large caverns inside the pinnacle. That flat top will get roughed up a bit once I get around to making a suitable sculptie to use instead of the cylinder that is there now. I cheated for the crater-edge and rendered it in PovRay and pasted the image on the inside of a huge hollow cylinder.
Set up a timed-pulse distress beacon narrow-beaming approximately back along the path of the mothership once a planetary revolution (6 hours) - there could well be more successfully landed colonies back there that can send help. Radio waves, though, so it will likely be several years.
The wading shelf, is a little shallow-water area on the north side of the central island. The water here is a little brackish, very mineral-rich and always around 20°C. The high-mineral levels are particular to the crater basin, the brackishness is the Impact ocean in general.
Avatar appearance isn't persisting across world-server restarts yet, but re-wearing a pre-filled folder of clothes/shapefiles is not so hard.
I posted this sign, to warn of some of the local fauna that I found at one end of the wading shelf (yes, it's down there just in front of me, but very hard to see until you are actually on its mouth!). The sign also plays an 8-second sound loop constructed from appropriate bits of "Dirty Creature" by Split Enz (I am showing my true age there! ;-). The anemone-like creature is rather voracious but also not really suited to capturing my alien (to this planet) species. No point walking strait into the mouth though!
(Why am I posting signs when I am the only one here? It makes me feel like there are other people about!)
Another sign, the text too small to see reads "Also, there is a steep drop". Ahhh... It's a classic. (I have far too much time on my hands!)
Got a camera probe fairly deep, just to see what was down there. Out in the crater proper, at 95m below sea-level, the rock is slimed with purple algae living off the nutrients and heat of thermal vents. I am able to harvest this to top up the nano-fabricator with organic matter to work with. Food constructed from purple slime might not sound very appetising, but the alternative is recycling my own body-waste (not that the nano-fabber doesn't break everything down to constituent molecules - and even atoms if necessary - first, but the thought has an effect on the perceived flavor!).
It is amazing how entertaining cloud formations can be. This is a warm, wet planet and so is quite cloudy. I wonder if it ever rains on Impact? Or do the clouds just blow around and around? I lie on my back on the roof of my cave all of the the (3-hour-long) day watching the clouds sometimes.
Stars winkling through an atmosphere is funny too.
I used the air-foils of my escape-pod and some other parts to make a catamaran. It is moored in an irregular but well-sheltered sea-eroded cave below my bubble-cave. Then I have to learn to sail it so I can see what is over on the crater rim. You can see I have called it "CAT 5" (Geek joke).
Speaking of geek jokes, these damned things show up everywhere back in the Milky Way and apparently out here in the LMC too! What the hell are they?
I have had to shut down the distress beacon as it resulted in my recent discovery by some free-roaming humans that have enough technology to build or salvage inter-stellar ships. Not very nice people - classical pirates (right down to painting skull-and-crossbones on the sides of their ship! - bit of a give-away, really, otherwise I would have been waiting for them at their hatch instead of running away!!). They made camp overnight and stole some gear I had left out, though they didn't find my cave. They didn't look too hard - I think they wanted to leave me alive, which is even scarier than them trying to kill me! (This image is from a grounded camera drone before they found and smashed it.)
I have recently discovered that I am not the first alien to live on Impact - there is a large, long-abandoned underground room inside the pinnacle accessible via another obscured fissure. Built by a roughly human-sized species but definitely not human (of course - humans only just arrived in the LMC). Whoever and whatever they were, they left no traces of their organic selves that I could see, just obscure equipment I am not game to touch, despite some appearing to still have power.
Interesting note: so far every texture used in the alien room is greyscale (the colours you see are prim-colours tinting the greyscale textures). The idea here is that greyscale textures should be a good deal less bandwidth- and graphics-memory-consuming than unnecessary full colour.
Some bits of pipes I salvaged from the alien room.
(For now)
Here is a ray-traced version rendered in PovRay. The click on the image to see it in all its 1920x1200 glory! (this is my desktop image at home ;-). You can see the entire main meteor crater, and a smaller crater full of fresh water. In the interests of not thrashing your bandwidth I have dropped the JPEG quality of this version to 75% so excuse the compression artefacts.
The galaxy you see in the sky represents the Milky Way - this planet is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy close neighbour of the Milky Way. Hopefully we will be well-away by the time Andromeda 'hits' the Milky Way in 3 billion years time!! ;-D
The transparent blue ring is a pneumatic transport link (presently SecondLife™ does not support tunneling into terrain). Inside the rock there will be six (at 60° spacings) room complexes with tunnels to the surface, garden, fresh water pool, beach, dock, etc. The sea will be full of jellyfish-like and squid-like animals, some friendly, some predatory.
Probably eventually I will mess with some very basic A-life. No evolution - this is a static snapshot. Mainly to add a bit of variation and interest beyond the day/night cycle and occasional freak weather. :-D
Life is naturally most focused around the impact crater as the lowest level nutrient source is strongest there where there is a lot of crustal fracturing spreading out from ground zero.
All squidies communicate visually (think cuttlefish) at varying levels of complexity from fight/feed/fright to...
Large squidies display very primitive intelligence and language (I might create an option for visitors to be top-level squidies themselves).
OpenSim is an open-source simulator server that can serve 3D-worlds data to the standard SecondLife™ Client from your own machine. It supports standalone and grid-mode services. It is at version 0.6 and is quite usable but still missing a few features.