SL Map timelapse of an estate!

This was so good I simply had to share it ~ an SL Map timelapse, made possible by Philip's more frequent map updates and a very clever coder friend of mine.

I've never seen anything like it, anywhere.

What this links to is a 7Mb page that shows roughly every day for three months ~ it's an animated GIF. Once it loads, it loops and plays a bit more smoothly.

http://timelapse.caledonwiki.com/



You'll notice a few things if you look closely.

~ the northern mountain range snowmelt in early spring,

~ the large, purple, region sized "RFL 2009" banner we kept up after RFL's "purple" day,

~ just to the west of that, you'll see a nearly region sized storm.

~ thousands and thousands of map changes as people go about their daily building, across 45 regions. Some of it is obscured by trees in the forest regions but most you can see.

~ for a really detailed view, once it loads save it to your desktop and "Preview" the image and zoom in.


Perhaps this might be seen as 'advertising' by some, but if so, look at the map again... Caledon is essentially booked up. So go rent from someone else!!!!

Excalibur Longstaff did all the coding and so forth for fun and just showed me this as a 'cool thing' ~ I was utterly gobsmacked to see it.

Enjoy!

That is really amazing to watch..
It does give you a rather odd feeling, like you are gazing down from space.

Thanks Desmond..

I always said you were a god in SL. This proves it.

It's as if we're looking at a satellite time lapse of a real world. Wish the snapshots started when Caledon did for a more complete picture of the growth of the empire.

Honestly I wish I had one that had nothing to do with my estate, but... it is what it is.

Maybe someone could talk Excalibur into doing something for the entire grid, but that may be too technically challenging, or bandwidth expensive or something. I don't know, I didn't code it.

How big is the grid? How many sims by how many sims? How many total sims?

Okay I did some more thinking and a bit of research after posting that question.

According to http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Webmap_API#About_coordinates sim coordinates are positive numbers 0 through 1,048,576, allowing for a grid of up to a trillion sims.

As a practical matter I wouldn't want to try to create an image larger than the dimensions of a 1024 x 1024 pixel.

Based on one pixel per sim, this would give us a one mega-sim (1,048,576 sim) composite map, and it would take 1,048,576 of these composite maps to represent the entire grid (1024 x 1024 composite maps). These could be thumbnailed further to create a 1024 pixel by 1024 pixel map of the grid, with each pixel representing a million sims worth of space (1,048,576).

Just creating the composite map showing 1024 x 1024 sims exceeds the time a browser is willing to wait for a reply from my hosting account so it is necessary to have the script composite the image in stages, with a browser refresh launching each successive step. I currently have a script doing just that in another tab, doing chunks of 256 sims per refresh. It looks like it's going to be a while.

Since the time lapse would require a daily snapshot of the area of interest this means running this script at least once a day for each 1024 x 1024 sim section of the grid. I rather doubt a single computer/hosting account combo could accomplish this. Even running the script locally on a PHP server running on my machine I doubt I could produce more than 100 of these 1024x1024 sim composites per day.

This means to create a map of the entire grid each day I would either need to launch a distributed computing effort, or write code to perform the image knitting on a local machine (which would be more practical). I am not sure what kind of time it would take to comb through the entire grid map each day and fetch each sim image from SecondLife.com.

Granted much of the grid is empty ocean (many estates like to maintain buffer between themselves and neighbors). Let's see how many actual sims are being used. According to SLBuzz.com, there are at least 13543 sim images to be fetched. It looks like it might be more practical to find an accurate list, and spool through that rather than the check-each-grid-point approach I've taken. Still 13543 jpg images of 256K to 512K+ represents at least 3 - 6GB of data which will be accessed in 13543 fetches, and whatever processing time to scale them and knit them into composite images.

So it is an interesting exercise, and one I will continue to look into, but something not likely to be completed any time soon. It seems like it would be quite a feat to simply produce a composite image of the whole grid for one day, let alone enough to do a meaningful time lapse. And that is assuming 1 pixel = 1 sim or 1 pixel = a million sims will be useful.

very VERY cool. and i think i saw my land changes!

Neat!

http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/business-land-economy/8523-new-second-life-sims-past-17.html#post746636

Breakdown of current regions by Ownership and Classification:

* Estate - Adult: 257
* Estate - Mature: 19596
* Estate - Offline: 5
* Estate - PG: 3321
* Linden - Adult: 289
* Linden - Mature: 3827
* Linden - PG: 1431


total: 28726

she updates it every week

hth

Great link, thank you. What would be ideal for me would be a list I could electronically read and use to guide my sim cruncher to the active parts of the grid and cut down on calls to URLs with no sim images (most of them...since apparently fewer than 30K of a trillion+ slots are occupied on the grid).