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 region which will eventually surround this with a huge crater-edge. Presently the system only supports VR spaces of 256x256m but my full map requires a (mostly empty) single 2048x2048 space, preferably with (0,0) in the middle -- I like wide-open spaces with little in them! From the Development Logs, it looks like OpenSim is already adjusting for support of non-256m regions, though the SecondLife client will also need major reworking before this is supported, so I will work on the central pinnacle for now and do the crater edges much later. I could also implement the map with 28 256x256 regions (sacrificing some empty ocean) but the inter-region communications is an inefficiency I really don't want. I did try a version on a 3x3 grid but the crater walls were far too close to the centre island for my liking.
| Random Impact Stats | |
| Map Size (m) | 256x256 (hoping for 2048x2048) |
| Max Terrain Height (m) | 192 |
| Water Level (m) | 96 |
| Lowest Terrain Height (m) | 1 |
| Primitive Count (approx so far) | 240 |
| Resident Population | 1 (ME!!) |
| Bandwidth (Mbps) | N/A (expected to be 1 - ADSL2+) |
| Guest Concurrency | 0 (expected to be around 6) |
My VR space will probably always run off my home system (hopefully a publicly-accessible home server eventually) 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 give me panic attacks (even virtual crowds). It is a hobby, not intended to be a commercial proposition any more than this web site is.
From a distance. The terrain actually has a >30m-deep hole in the middle of it capped with a terrain-textured block, allowing some large basement levels below my domes. I have also totally re-done the central island to have a cleft for bottom-to-summit access via hidden ladder, a hidden bay for my catamaran and a knee-deep wading shelf. I cheated for the crater-edge and rendered it in PovRay and pasted the image on the inside of a huge hollow cylinder.
Outside the domes. That blue roof texture on the central dome's cap is solar cells.
Hmmm.... I found Mel Brooks' Spaceballs DVD in the supermarket bargain bin recently. Any resemblance is purely coincidental. Honest!
Defensive shield up. We have a space-pirate problem around here!
Inside the living room. With a view through to the bedroom.
SHIELD BREACH!!! When the shields go flakey, there is risk of (rather phallic) pirate ships landing.
The wading shelf, is a little shallow-water play area on the north side of the central island. I finally got around to moving my shape data (by hand) across from Second Life™ and bought in some of my own-created clothing items. Avatar appearance isn't persisting across simulator restarts yet, but re-wearing a pre-filled folder of clothes/shapefiles is not so hard.
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.
Some bits of pipes lying around out the storage-side of the domes.
Some more pipes.
A catamaran awaiting the glorious day of vehicle support in the physics engine - quite a ways off yet! You can see I have called it "CAT 5" (Geek joke).
Speaking of geek jokes, these damned things show up everywhere!
Blue is a pretty standard colour background for flags of those rare planets that have so much water on them that they actually get oceans, and as planetary oceans go, Impact has a big one - the only land mass is the crater itself. Though the ocean is only 48 meters deep on average (the deepest ocean is actually inside the crater, around the central pinnacle, where depths reach down to 96m deep).
The rest of the flag graphic should be pretty self-explanatory in view of the screen grabs above and the ray-trace below :-D.
Here is a ray-traced version rendered in PovRay. The image is 1280x960, which is by no coincidence the size of my screen at present. You can see the entire main meteor crater, a smaller crater full of fresh water and a little crater with a garden in it.
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 0.5 and is quite usable but still missing many nice features.