Traveller Empress Marava complete in #opensim - and whole sim rezzing

Finally completed my Empress Marava (not Minerva!) Far Trader build in OpenSim. The Far Trader is one of the work-horses of the Traveller role-playing game.

The really neat thing is not so much the spacecraft (which I could go on detailing for ages) but what can happen outside it.

So you start on a barren planet:

You close the loading ramp on the empty landscape and head for the bridge.

You then head off into space. A touch of a button on the pilots console de-rezzes the world and rezzes the starscape in a 256m diameter sphere (ought to work on a suitable brown-out transition for take-off and landing). So the view out the window changes but more importantly if you don your EVA suit and walk out the airlock you now find:

(need to do a nice jump transition too!)

Then you head down to the starport. Again a touch of a button derezzes the stars and rezzes a whole spaceport ready for you.

I'll work up a few other environments but you get the drift. Quite apart from the role-playing side of this it also begins to make a nice vehicle for STEM based education.

Full image set at http://www.flickr.com/photos/burdenshaw/sets/72157626207815093/

***Imported from old blog***

Plans for 2011

With the iPad to hand there really is no excuse for not updating this blog more often! (scratch that - using the Movable Type screens on an iPad are a real pain)

Back in September I put together a list of 5 big projects to occupy my spare time (such as it is) alongside growing Daden. They were:

• Creating environment spaces on OpenSim - with no more limits on number of sims then nice spacious builds in an SL like space are possible
• Working more on Halo's AI - I'm disappointed that 2 years after the Machine Intelligence competition I've spent hardly any time pushing Halo forward. Particular areas of interest are increasing her situatedness in SL, making more use of semantic triples, and working on the next generation chat engine
• Widening the scope of my wargaming, and in particular finishing off my MechWar and Napoleonic rules
• Doing something with my Future History ideas - wiki, novel, book?
• Growing a second "pocket money" income stream - possibly around selling PDF copies of rules or my old Traveller writings

So 3 months later where am I?

• OpenSim - go off to a good start with porting the Tranquility Base sim we did in SL to OpenSim, and started work on a Mars base. Then an afternoon out to Packwood House had me start on a model of that C17 building and its grounds. That then got overtaken by events but I did work out how to get island/continent outlines into OpenSim, and am currently looking at terrain data import. Hopefully progress Packwood House, Mars and the terrain import over the next few months.
• Halo's AI - Read a load about adjacency pairs and spruced up some of Halo's open smalltalk stubs. Working slowly through some semantic triples databases and just started a triples editor to make the whole triples thing easier. Still not as much time on this as I'd like.
• Wargaming - into the closing stretch of the ECW army, photo's coming, and then can concentrate on rules set. Also found the Napoleon200 project - and will hopefully get my first game in March, and the Wargame Developments Group and their annual Conference of Wargamers which I'll hopefully get to.
• Future History ideas - bottom of the pile, no progress
• Second Stream - real progress. Had been playing around with some ideas to solve an on-going problem I have related to one of the above when I not only found a workable solution, but also a real business opportunity. Teamed up with my mate Nick (the last joint venture we had was a short-wave fanzine in school!) and we're now working to develop the project - codenamed C60 for now (and nothing to do with home-taping).

I'll try and post on developments on each of these as they happen.

Promise.

***Imported from old blog***