Things that grow

I'm thinking how (more) much depth can be added to SL with the ability of things like plants and trees to actually go through stages of development, to grow before our eyes. You could have an almost living garden Reminds me of a game I used to play on Mac, Spelunx. There was a feature called The Tree Gene-orator which allowed you to pick the traits of a tree, plant it, and watch it grow over time.

Something to think about!

This is something that could be scripted. There was (or maybe still is) a group that constructed artificial life in SL. Maybe you should post this in the scripting forum. It sounds like an interesting project.

Xavier VonLeonard once made a rose that bloomed. It was pretty cool.

The Alife group works on things like this, or used too.

It's a shame that we cant script trees... or it would just be a matter of using llSetScale on a timer.

Penises grow...please don't script that.

LL needs to create a few land information access functions before it'll be truely safe to make something like this.

Where have you been Devlin? Its already been done

Not seen anyone "plant" one though... Penis Tree... hmm...

Anyway...

I could see this being done either via something like, a new object type, where you plant a "seed" of a kind of chosen tree (which tells you how big its likely to grow etc.), then the system automaticly grows it and such. Or via allowing us to script trees.

The only problem with making our own plants that do this is they don't really blow in the wind like Tree's do, but making your own is always an option.

Some guy in gibson already made grass that grew a few months ago... dunno if its still there.

Attached is my autonomous self-replicating grass script that I think people are referring to. I stopped work on it when some unknown change in LSL 1.3 broke the listens and I didn't feel like trying to figure out what changed.

Hope this helps.

Probably out of date now; but, if anyone's interested, I'm working on that exact thing right now.

As of this moment I'm roughly a quarter of the way through the script for making it actually grow. For the curious, features I have planned are:

- Every plant will be unique, defined by it's DNA and growing conditions (that means you'll have to water them )
- Plants will be affected by seasons
- Seeds/ cuttings/ cross pollination
- Pickable fruit/flowers
- Pruning!
- Options to turn individual features on/off

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Not out of date at all! LOL

We still struggle with this.

YOU! Shack Dougall!

It was YOU whose Sunrise picture I saw on the front page!

That was a GORGEOUS picture! I think they should use it for the log-in screen! (And solicit for various others to be used for the same purpose.)

I compared your photo to a painting the name of which eluded me then and I had to look it up, and the name of which eludes me now, but I'm not GONNA look it up, lol.

coco

I'm not really sure these trees are really going to help for your large scale builds Shack, they're going to be pretty high on the prim count (not through necessity but I don't think they'll look too good otherwise).

I've been thinking about trying to make some trees with particle based leaves which might help with what you're doing but haven't decided whether to integrate it into this project or save it for another yet.

just creat a seed and either do it throught particles or it can be done by a use of visual trickery useine multiple trees of diffent sizes where in a chain one rezes its self and either addos on to the tree or creates a whole new tree and deletes the origonal once its rezed.

Could do, I was thinking growing them organically treating each prim like a cell would be more fun and open up more possibilities though.

Just noticed Jesrad Seraph has already made something like this.

See /15/19/33414/1.html

An LSystem (Lindenmayer(sp?) system) would be neat. These systems are used in various industries to define the branching pattern found in organic life. Maya has a system called PaintEffects that uses these to create numerous trees and various other cool effects, Houdini uses it heavily in thier particle system and modeling system. Its a rule based system. For example....

borrowed from.... Here
"F": Move forward a step of length d. A line segment between
points (X,Y,Z) and (X',Y',Z') is drawn.
"["
and
"]": bracket - push and pop the current state, in this project
it is used to generate the tree branches
"+": Turn left by angle Delta, Using rotation matrix R_U(Delta)
"-": Turn right by angle Delta, Using rotation matrix R_U(-Delta)
"&": Pitch down by angle Delta, Using rotation matrix R_L(Delta)
"+": Pitch up by angle Delta, Using rotation matrix R_L(-Delta)
"<": Roll left by angle Delta, Using rotation matrix R_H(Delta)
">": Roll right by angle Delta, Using rotation matrix R_H(-Delta)
"|": Turn around, Using rotation matrix R_H(180)
In addition to describing how the resulting plant/object will look these values can often be animated over time allowing you to make something "grow". This effect can be seen in several movies however the one that pops in my mind first is the Oasis of Am-shere (sp?) scene in "The Mummy Returns". This scene was created using the LSystem available in PaintEffects.

This technology sadly is very hard to impliment in a real-time environment as the rules can get somewhat calculation heavy. It is possible to do this, just difficult and one can expect a decently heavy hit on the client cpu. Still, its quite cool and could be used for soooooooooooo much.....anyway, I ramble.

We should demand SpeedTree.
www.speedtree.com

It's more important to the visual environment of SL than Havok2

Oooh... combine both, and you get CABER TOSSING in SL! I'm up for that.

One very crucial aspect of "things that grow on their own" (with some Resident interaction via TLC I'm sure) is it's a parallel train to the avatar-driven creation in SL. Kind of like how we have, uh, "natural" and "man-made" lakes offline. If we can be greater affected by forces of nature in here, be it emotionally via beautiful sunsets or struck to design great builds that wrap around a mountain without terraforming flatly all the time, there comes a new appreciation for the organic... paradoxically, within the machine!

It would make a beautiful work of anime.

I can hardly wait till we can get this level of tree making and planting in SL...

Actually if you look at the speedtree website, under the "who's using speedtree" they list SL. There's a press release from March saying that LL hopes to add it in "Q4"
The direct linky is here: http://www.speedtree.com/press/PR_Second_Life_Chooses_SpeedTree_March_22_05.pdf

-Sun