Adventures with Mesh

Today I want to talk a bit about some metaverse experiences and the convoluted ways we come to arrive at doing the things we do :D

Recently, as I have likely mentioned, I revived my SL account and went back there to attempt locating some script authors I've known, to insure they were fine with me porting their scripts to opensim and osgrid. While there, it became patently obvious to me that most people are not building things with prims anymore, unless they are rapid prototyping or fooling around challenging themselves; most polished, finished builds and assemblies these days end up if not entirely composed of one or more meshes, at least incorporating some into the build.

So, I decided to undertake once again the study of blender. I once used to be reasonably proficient with it, back in the version 2.0-2.4 days (and prior), but mostly these skills went unused as I had no venue in which they might be consumed. Things Change.

So, now with 2.6 I'm revisiting it, with a purpose of producing boat hulls. It's going reasonably well, all things considered, though I am told the software drives even the experts nuts.

Another thing that I have been impressed with in SL is the environmental upgrades. A submarine cruise through the waters of Blake Sea reveals all sorts of sea life I had never encountered; stingrays, sharks, jellies, and others; new plants and such too. Well done, LL :)

Back home out in the country at OSgrid, things were looking a little plain by comparison; particularly wanting were the seabirds that now populate Dex in SL. Idk if these are linden provided or not, but they are one of those fine details that yield a particular degree of immersive leverage, and so I began to think about where to obtain resources for that when my friend Vegaslon Plutonian gave me this link:

https://github.com/JakDaniels/OpenSimBirds

This is a link to a github repository containing an OpenSimulator 'addon module'.

This module implements a flock of birds, per the supplied configuration, that flies around the region with minimal impact on sim resources. You may substitute your own prims. In any case, the real thing I wanted to talk about here is region modules. Given github as a service vector for storing and deploying region modules, adding them to your sim just got hella easy:

simply unpack your opensim source, cd into it at addon-modules, and git clone the repo for the module like so:

cd addon-modules/ && git clone https://github.com/JakDaniels/OpenSimBirds

then go back to the top level of the opensim tree and sh runprebuild.sh && xbuild as usual. At least, that's how we do it on linux; doing it on windows won't differ significantly provided you use something sane like git bash.

No doubt there are many other useful OpenSimulator modules out there; I am also running Jak's OpenSim Tide module. Look for a survey of such modules in an upcoming post, I'll be out looking for some interesting and useful ones in the coming days.

Cheers
James/Hiro