…in the ‘burbs
So we are heading to the part in the project where cybernauts apply what they have learned and build a sustainable eco-friendly building, then film a guided tour of it, explaining what they have decided, and why.
Obscura is the building planet, and I spent the weekend carving up the eastern districts into sections:
Plan of attack
I decided on “cul-de-sacs” instead of carving it up into tiny boxes – having cybernauts building beside each other is deliberate – negotiating space and collaborating is a mandatory and significant aspect of this experience so making them build adjacent to each should be fun. Residents will eventually be listed as hot-spots on this map for easier navigation.
Sign-posts show the way
Finding your way around this huge area is a nightmare. I am devising a nomenclature for naming roads and arterials, I think the actual cul-de-sacs will be named after the actual builders – we shall see.
I had to expand the ‘thopter bay so cybernauts could use personal transport devices to get places without the hassle of all that walking or flying
Thopters for getting around
So we have the beginnings of a place to bild, large scale – cybernauts have to submit their designs first. The theory is that if they have to plan and justify their decisions before they construct, the buildings will be better thought out … well that is the theory at least.
Roads, areas and empty space
…oh give me land, lots of land under starry skies above – don’t fence me in. Looking forward to see how it shapes up, we have some talented builders so it should be interesting.
The Show Must Go On …
…Sci Prime Science Mountain needed a presentation/conference centre.
Theater Entrance
Given it was a yukky weekend, I decided time was right to make it: enter The Double-Helix Theater.
Auditorium from stage
…so there is this big underground cavern, right? Well, now it dips below the existing floor level (some 8m or so) with raked seating (had to leave enough room to sit and have legs dangle) and stairways up/down strategically located. The stage is a full size stage, with wings, flies and a cyclorama
Stage, proscenium, wings, flys, cyclorama
Like all large venues I also have large screens to display stuff, will see if I can get a camera to feed to it so the audience can see 3 separate views of the stage action.
Waiting nervously in the wings
After talking with Caff, I got a picture of a proposed (fait accompli?) development at her asylum that would be useful as a theater space (only to learn that them knobbled it through poor decision making long before someone who knew what they wanted got involved) – this is a vision of what that space could have been.
I added a lighting grid (well, actually just one bar), attached some coloured spotlights to it and focussed them on stage:
Lighting Grid and Lectern
A few hidden objects as light sources, and presto – a stage space created, a star is born. The sight lines here are actually not too bad – so long as punters sit in designated seats, then action on stage is visible in a controlled way:
Seats, house lights go down ...
I made a squashed spherical seat cushion, positioned them to face the stage and turned them into immobile movers (remember the trick to making seats) so every seat in the house is a good one. We now have a conference venue, large space for guest speakers, dance hall … whatever.
There is plenty of floor space for static displays and a suitably flexible stage for virtual dramas – fairly happy with it all up – nice when a vision in your head matches the final product almost exactly – I hope that is because I am getting better at making things, and not that I dumb down my ideas to suit the tools I know how to use.
MOOving on up…
…so I was starting this unit on Virtual Worlds with my year 9 ICTE kids, and we will be investigating all sorts of worlds. One of my favourite is a browser world called a MOO
A Virtual World HQ
Multi-user Object Orientated VWs are fairly old-school, but none the less relevent in my opinion. In building the HQ for what will be nearly a Term worth of work, I realised how elegant and RAPID the development of a sense of space is in a MOO
An alterniverse...
With pictures and words, the sense of place is easily created and added to, we do not need to access object yards, install memory hungry clients, yet we have engaging worlds full of things for kids to do.
Narrative Crossroads - where will they set their scenario?
With some simple geographical navigation, students travel to a crossroads, make a decision (they are telling a story by establishing a narrative-based scenario) on time period, they they start to plan … I like it that good virtual worlds give you a sense of travelling, that you move from place to place – our MOO is HUGE – tens of thousands of rooms – most made by students, you can literally explore for days.
making things is easy
…there are LOTS of building tools in a MOO – I prefer the command line approach, but there are menu-driven alternatives also, for those that like to click on stuff. Once they have made a thing, they customise it:
editing via menu choices or command line
Simple menu choices that are consistent across all sorts of objects (there are some differences, depending on the capabilities of an object), and command-line equivalents that are faster – I tend to script most things – with a single paste of a chunk of text, I can make, describe and populate an entire suburb (cluster of interconnected rooms) in a MOO.
I like it that a MOO is built for collaborating, synchronous chat, tools for mediating that are central, tools that work with many using them, implicit sharing or resources amongst teams so they all can contribute
share and share alike
We will be going even “nerdier” in this unit, exposing kids to pure text-based MUDs and some work in an OpenSIM (a second life clone) – few of them can compare with the elegant effective simplicity of a MOO in my considered … it is a pity most people have abandoned them for stuff that is 3D, thinking that if it looks better, it must be better.
I have said this in other forums, but I think it is worth repeating: The amount fo time invested per unit of believable detail is LOWEST in a MOO, HIGHEST in a 3D world.
Do we have the time? – no, that is why we contract others to do the work.
Is it MORE effective? – I am yet to be convinced
say hi to your mum for me 😛
Pass the Particle …
…now I have been putting off experimenting with particle systems because … well, no sensioble reasone really, I had just convinced myself they MUST be hard, and love a good self-fulfilling prophesy, dont you?
So, in the script lab, I thought – we need a shower – a cloud of objects that are dynamically spawned (I happen to have already made a drop shape, they will do), they should be effected by gravity, they should “rain” down from a point (I happen to have already made a tap – will modify it so the handle is separate from the tappy bit, that’ll do).
a particle generator - click link below for properties
So I spawned an object, changed it into a “particle emitter” which makes it an invisible system object, customizing it was fairly intuitive (thanks activeworld help), I used the “drip” as the actual thing that made up the generated cloud – a MODEL, and got it to scale and twist it as it fell, making the effect a lot like a water-efficient shower head (you know, the ones you have to run around under to even get wet); I positioned it just under the nozzle of the tap, placed a tap handle above, then went to the scripting of the “off” and “on” buttons.
create color blue; activate tag tap on, rotate 0 5 0 name=handle time=6 reset
…for the “on” button, it starts BLUE, when you click on it (activate) it, the TAP particle emitter turns on; and the handle begins rotating at a speed of 5 in the Y axis, for 6 seconds and then resets itself (I got the rotation to go a full 180 degrees, that way the reset does not appear to effect it, and the handle looks like it does a half turn). The Off button is RED and rotates in the opposite direction, turning the TAP particle emitter off as it does this – nice
remember to turn off the tap
The emitter also has a “lifespan”, I set this to 60000 milliseconds (or 1 minute to normal people) meaning that once the emitter/shower is turned on, it automatically turns itself off after a minute – cannot have us wasting water (even virtual water) now can we?
A few things can be used as particles, the next experiment used “SPRITE” – a graphic – I used c_sun ) – the nice thing about this is the image self-masks, making the image a fuzzy-edged soft floaty thing, perfect for a firework.
a flash in the pan?
I generated 3 particle emitters – told each to colour the sprites in shades of red, green and blue, made ON switches for each, an OFF switch that did all 3 and *presto*, a fireworks display is born. I gave each particle emitter a lifespan of 1 minute so you could not accidentally leave it on, nice.
The only effect particle emitters have is to slow down the frame rate for the immediate area – it takes processor hits to generate, move and render from various viewpoints I guess. The effect is lovely, fairly easy to control and useful for creating things like flames, smoke plumes, things that move around in semi-organised clumps.
By widening the “create zone” volume, you can have spawned particles coming from all directions, going in all directions, or by tweaking velocities, acceleration and so on, you can direct the stream, turn on and off gravitational effects etc … very useful indeed.
Just follow the script …
A tutorial that seems to be taking time is one involving object scripting … what to showcase?
I thought providing practical applications of scripts were a plan, so set about to put in things that are controlled by scripts that do stuff that might be useful.
remember to close the door
Doors, using a controlled, rotation, triggered by a click (or activate)
activate rotate 0 20 0 nosync time=1 wait=2 global
meaning, when you click on it, rotate about the Y axis at a speed of 20 (-20 to open in the reverse direction) for 1 second, wait open for 2 seconds then close; global means all can see it, not just the clickee.
transport portals
A cute set of “stargates” – one warps to the other, the other teleports – both use the “bump” event (ie. when you run into the non-solid blue twirly thing the action is applied)
create rotate 0 0 -6, solid off; bump warp 3.51N 9.06E 0.03a 14
…meaning when the blue swirly thing first appears, it is rotating around the Z axis, making a nice whirlpool thingy; it can be walked through; when someone bumps into it you warp (walk in fast motion) to the named coordinate – easy. The only real difference between point A and point B is the warp/teleport command word and the coordinates.
a little rock and roll
I recycled the rockshop sample lab (from Q2 – made a looooong time ago) into a percussion lab using activated noises
create light color=blue brightness=1 fx=fire; activate noise http://myworld.eq.edu.au/media/biggestbassdrumopen.wav overlap
…meaning, when the rock is first rezzed, it sheds blue firelight; when you click on it it triggers a sample that allows other samples to play over it. nice.
dancing dave
Next a little free-play pitch, roll and yaw, with some uppey-downey motion thrown in – the aim here – I name the lego dude and then the scripts inside each clickable sign reach out and effect that named object:
activate move 0 1 0 name=bob loop wait=0
which means move in the Y axis a thing called bob, do not wait but keep moving it back and forth – bob bobs up and down, the others apply a rotation in the named axes.
next … a particle lab I think.
