Stupid question about one of SL's "key technologies" on the website...

Quoth:



Now, pardon my severe ignorance, but how does SL make every sunrise/sunset look different? Granted, I haven't paid much attention to them in my year or so here, but... still. The sun goes up, the sun goes down. What's the difference every 4 hours?

Just wondering.

LF

Clouds maybe?

I was just wondering about that myself.

LL, please dont respond to this, im going to do some research on this. Ill stand in one place during each night/day and when the sun is above my store, I will take a pic of its location.

if it is truely authentic, the locations will be different each night.

If you want, I can drop you a device to lock the camera perfectly in posistion for you. In a cube

this device sounds interesting. c an you drop me one too? does this make is possible to script motion for this box allowing the camera to travel on a predetermined course?

I posted a bunch of reasons why cellular automata was highly unlikely in a couple of threads back; simply speaking, cellular automata implies that there is a individual element for each section which communicates with over sections to achieve a particular task; now, to me, the cloud layer for example, looks a whole lot more like an array, with random values to start, that are then shifted every second, then, the client downloads that array when they first visit the sim. (although clouds tend to deviate from the server llCloud report, and the client, I suspect that the source array is downloaded once, then the client performs it's own permutations which can slowly get 'out-of-sync'.)

Nothing special. It just locks the camera into a set position. Here is the code:

default {
    state_entry() {
        llSetCameraEyeOffset(<0, 0, 0>); // the camera is 2m behind and 1m above the object
        llSetCameraAtOffset(<1, 0, 0>);
    }
}

Put that code in and sit on the object. You camera will move to the object's center. You can set this in a prim, lock the prims posistion, and get the same photo every time. Mine just has some nice textures and a vehicle script for some keyboard camera rotation (for panoramas).

If you read what it says they don't claim that the sun and moon will be in different positions each time. But that each sunset/sunrise looks different which could mean that the sun/moon are in different positions but could also mean many other visual differences. Also they say nothing about it being different when directly over your store just sunset/rise. So while your experiment can prove through inference that if the it looks different while over your store it will look different at sunset/rise. It can not disprove the statement.

Hmmmmmm I've not looked closely enough, but to me, there is an alarming amount of beauty in each virtual sunset, and moreso for myself, when the sun rises. I'm like "AHHHHHH!"

Sometimes, I am alarmed because I seen the moon jerk roughly a few pixels -- I don't know if this is a deliberate effect or just the way the lunar satellite works on Planet SL, but it's worth mentioning the same.

Wouldn't it be cool in the future to have MoonSims on a separate-but-attached grid, and be able to, well, fly there? That would be so magical, eating moon cheese and setting up a moonbase and planting your flag. Not to mention meeting the immigratory Martians!

Adam, this isn't the technical issues thread. Lemme summarize your post for the layman. *grins*

There's a variety of things that could have randomness applied - color values, timing, placement, light/darkness, haze, etc.

From what I've been told, the clouds are nothing more than a giant game of Life with wind affecting it.

That's exactly what "cellular automata" is.

That was, btw, one of the more fun programming projects I did in high school...

... but not as fun as the 6-person "Let's Make A Deal" game / statistical test with graphics, sounds, mouse input, and even Star Wars type credits that scrolled into oblivion. Programmed in Turbo Pascal.

I think the cellular automata was a "we intend to" kinda thing. Way back someone did do measurements of the angle of the ecliptic and found that it does precess through seasons at approximately the lattitude of (surprise!) San Francisco - although the year was short in RL time. As for the moon jerking, it has to span 180 degrees (more or less) of arc in one RL hour (3 degrees per minute if I remember division) so I wouldn't be surprised if there was some jerkiness; the sun gets thrice as long. And if I recall correctly, the sun/moon positions are updated only once per minute.

/me goes off to try and figure what angle the celestial objects subtend - guesses it is larger than 0.5 degrees.

Hmmm... while we're at it, why don't we have alternate sky grids?

If we can do anything in SL, how about trounce around Mars? Fly around a planet with multiple moons and rings and suns? Drape the skies in fire and burn in fiery afterlife? Splash the sky with psychadelic swirls and flowers and shapes?

I second that! Would be pretty cool
The skybox is fugly. You can see the corners sometimes, and the graphics looks a bit pixelated. The new star system is way cool though. The stars actually twinkle now. Back in the day they were just a bunch of scattered pixels.

Gah, going from dark background to blinding light background of new post screen... anyway...

One of the things I love about SL is the sky, not sure if each sunset is different, but they are always pretty.

I do hope in the future more detail is added to the sky, such as clouds on the horizon, actual star patterns, weather habbits, etc.

Custom skyboxes for private sim's would be awsome also. Maybe something like possible texture background, and/or selective sky colors, and the ability to make your own sun/moon textures, etc. If you've ever played around with ActiveWorlds world server with all its skybox features, something like that would be awsome in SL.

Skygrid, sure, I was thinking of that. Why not call it Skynet... ha ha ha... okay, bad one. But really, the land is certain colors. We have lots of grass, mountains, recently snow -- but alluding to what you were saying, where's the really ALIEN stuff? The rocky Martian landscape, even an arid dessert climate with *cactus*, and how about a sim where the laws of physics are intentionally wacky so no one can blame it on lag?

Zooming around moons and stuff would remind me of Wing Commander and Freelancer and computer entertainments like that. I was watching Nightsky Rebus show his Star Trek and Babylon 5 stuff to me, and I wonder why he couldn't have a YUGE spacelaunch and really commandeer his fleet in space or something.

Sounds like a natural course for expansion, since we do already have aerial vehicles -- just not ones that can travel into the vast coldness of "outer space", for that example. Or even sea colonies, since if we can go so high above, why not deep into the murky depts. With lots of gurgling and actual swimming, and a James Bond theme playing in the background (streamed from land parcel, of course).

I'm reminded of a certain Asimov tale about purchasing the body of Jupiter... then again, how many L$ would that go for?

The obvious answer is to have LL auction skyplots for advertising. Just think, instead of glorious sunsets and panoramic vistas, you could be reminded that the latest 'Club Dwell' has some streaming music, and drinks! Of course, you can't *drink* the drinks, but uh...there's dancing, yeah! And strippers, and..uh...dance machines, woo!

For April Fools they should turn the skybox into plywood, just once.

Now that forum searching seems to be working again, here's a relevant thread about the SL sky:

/8/01/4434/1.html