Questions for Grid Mappers

I have recently started mulling over the specifics of a Second Life project which will benefit from an offworld database of map data (I'm mostly concerned with the mainland) with a moderate level of granularity.

While I have the capacity to retreive, store, process, and serve the necessary data I realize there are already many mapping projects at various levels of completion and operational capacity at this time.

What I don't know is the specifics of these mapping projects. Perhaps some of you who are involved in these projects or know more about them than I do could answer a few questions?

1. What data are you collecting? (region name, region corner, height maps, land owners, etc.)
   
2. How often are you updating your data? (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly)
   
3. Are you freely sharing your data?
   

My guess is that the few out there that are freely sharing their data aren't collecting highly detailed information and/or aren't updating their data frequently, and those who are collecting detailed information regularly are keeping it to themselves (or at least aren't sharing it for free). I could be way off here though.

Any enlightening information on this subject would be appreciated!

Ushuaia,

I'm collecting: sim name, location, water level, rating, ownership type (Public, Private, Linden), function (Open, Sandbox, etx), material (textures) and assigning sims to geographic regions. I'm also collecting height data for the sims every 2 meters to a precision of 1 tenth of a meter.

I'm collecting the height data in person and I'm not updating it regularly. I've been thinking of some ways in which other people could contribute to the mapping to keep it updated, but not too hard.

I'm planning on making the data freely available, as well as a .NET library I wrote for manipulating it. I'd like to make a nice web interface to the data.

I think you're probably right about the most desirable data not being freely available I'd guess there are probably a few very impressive and valuable databases out there.

The data I have for SLMaps currently includes region x and y coordinates, sim name, rating (PG or M), whether or not there is a telehub, and a continent designation similar to Cadroe's geographic regions, but more akin to the sim release groups as per LL. I also keep track of the date the sim came online.

I stopped keeping track of private sims because they were too numerous and always changing visibility and position. As for mainland sims I keep track of those, usually daily but if not every few days.

I am interested in making most of my data freely available; it had been at one point but I had some issues and removed that feature. However I think that my data would be at best a subset of the larger sets of information available from others such as Cadroe.

This looked like the right thread to revive and ask on...

Is there any way for a script to learn the global coordinates for a Region/sim by name?

(I'd like to program a flyer to take a destination like "/1 destination Lusk 22,22".)

I notice that Landmarks show the global distance and general direction to their targets, but the landmark is generated while in-Region, so it can get the current global location.

Thanks for any advice! --> dc

edit: sorry. didnt realize this was in general forum -- reasking in script forum.

To answer the scripting question first, yes, llRequestSimulatorData will return the simulator's global coordinates for a named location request, this will however be returned in the dataserver event due to latency in the data server's design (could take an abnormal ammount of time if the data server's having issues. (note that simulator rating is a 1.7 item and will actually create errors if attempted before the 1.7 release, it does work in preview.)

As to the rest of this thread, since it's re-awakened (and none of the fellow mappers here told me about it *pokes Bino and Cadroe* my map data currently is incomplete due to old design issues, however my intended data includes:

1. sim name
   
2. sim location
   
3. sim water height
   
4. sim server info
   
5. sim height map
   
6. sim owner map
   
7. sim rating
   
8. grid sim is attached to (working with Alpha Zaius of TG over allowed 3rd party communications to organize that, as well as Anshe's island group and Azure Islands, among other island groups, who knows, maybe even Stagecoach if I can manage somehow.)
   

Heh, I forgot all about this thread, Ice.

For anyone who might want it, here is the data I have for the mainland sims and telehubs at the moment (plus Cayman and Oceana).

http://www.spinmass.com/2life/docs/MainlandSims9_16_05.txt

The sim data is comma-delimited, one sim per line:

Name,X,Y,Water Level,Rating,Material,Ownership,Function,Region
Example:
Abbotts,256000,255232,20,PG,Green1,Public,Open,Serpentine

I'd ignore material and region, which are my own stuff and in flux anyway. The ratings should be mostly right. Ownership and function are fairly accurate but I wouldn't count on it for newer sims.

The hub data contains the sim name and x y z coords.

I'm working on my Grid Chart app and I'll release my elevation data with that. Updates on that at http://www.spinmass.blogspot.com/. Busy busy busy.

My physics homework is done, my pizza is imminent.

Good things *do* come to those who wait!

( Thanks Cadroe )

I'm not a mapper really, but I do like to stay up to date with what's going on, so yay!

I've been postponing making my topograpgical data available because I knew I'd be releasing it as part of the Grid Chart application I've been working on. Since I've now put up a demo version with the data, I thought I'd mention it here. There is a link on the Grid Chart site to a download page were you can get the elevation data and application seperately.

http://www.spinmass.com/2life/GridChart/

The elevation data is stored in comma-delimited text files named "SIMNAME_Terrain.txt". The elevations were collected every 2 meters at .1 precision, including the north and east edges of each sim. The first value in each row is the y coordinate of the data in that row, followed by the values at x = 0, 2, 4....256. Missing values are stored as -99, and rows are allowed to be absent. It's really only going to be useful to geeks.

It didn't occur to me to put the grid data in that zip (sim location, rating, etc). It's in a file named MainlandAdult.grd in the application zip, and has the same format I described above in this thread.

Cadroe are you still working on the Second Life 3D grid viewer? I likes it.

Ingrid - I'm not working on it now but I'm planning too. I decided to finally get this 2D viewer into shape first, in part because it's such a useful tool for any other mapping stuff I do including the 3D stuff. Also this semester I'm taking physics and learning 3D vector math, so I thought I'd make it easier on myself and wait until I've got more of that in my noggin

[Edited to add] I do still mess around with renders in Max, though. When I get texture generation working for Grid Chart I should be doing more.

http://www.spinmass.com/2life/gridchart/pics/SLGridMaxSE1.jpg

Thanks for all the work you folks do. It's very interesting.