Rama spaceShip

The scifi writer Author C clarke passed away this year in Shri Lanka. One of his books "Rendezvous with Rama" was one of my favorites. I would like to actually attempt to build this inverted world in SL in his honor. I'm sure it would be an extremely popular place in SL if done correctly. Reguiring many things, it would be a massive project, perferingly a shrinking down of the avatar somewhat like The Greenies did sucessfully in SL. I looking for any ideas or suggestions on how to get this awesome project to at least the drawing table. Someday I hope Rama might actually exist in Sl! A science fiction lover's dream!

If this does get built isn't it just going to go sailing on by the solar system without paying us much attention?

Have you read the book? It was part of a four part series. The ramanians sent the huge spacecraft to our solar systems to basically retrieve some intelligent humans. It was kinda like a artificial inverted world that had all the important things we needed to survive in the spacship for the long trek back to thier planet. We shared the spaceship with other intelligent creatures that were also captured....example the Avians and the Octospiders. But yes it does eventually leave our solar system only after they ( the Ramanians ) get what they wanted.

Have you read the book? It was part of a four part series. The ramanians sent the huge spacecraft to our solar systems to basically retrieve some intelligent humans. It was kinda like a artificial inverted world that had all the important things we needed to survive in the spacship for the long trek back to thier planet. We shared the spaceship with other intelligent creatures that were also captured....example the Avians and the Octospiders. But yes it does eventually leave our solar system only after they ( the Ramanians ) get what they wanted.

My comment stems from having read and having some vague memory of the first one.

I don't remember how many of them I read, I probably got the first one as soon as it hit the library or came out in paperback, which would have been 1972 or 73.

Now, sigh, even with glasses on, it's no fun reading books anymore. Stupid eyes.

Supposedly the first one was meant to stand alone, not be the start of a series. In that one, says wikipedia, the ship comes, and leaves, and the humans are ignored by the biots.

Ah, I see now, the latter three were Gentry Lee writing. It's a different spaceship.

The first one came out in 1972, Rama II came out in 89. I think I'm remembering the disappointment of finding an alien probe and watching it sail away forever experienced during the seventeen years between 1972 and 1989.

Come to visit life forms, get ignored by biots, it's perfect for SL.

I never read the books, but I played the video game. It used something akin the Myst engine, if remember correctly, and for its time, was graphically quite beautiful. If you've got an older PC lying around that can run it, you might want to grab a copy from eBay, and play through it. It could give you some great ideas for how to proceed with your build, plus it'll provide a few days worth of fun.

Arthur C. Clarke actually makes some appearances in the game. If I remember correctly, he had some interesting things to say about the story, and about how the artists brought his vision to life for the game.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Arthur-C-Clarke-Rama-Pc-Sierra-Adventure-PC-game_W0QQitemZ260314145134QQcmdZViewItemQQptZVideo_Games_Games?hash=item260314145134&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1205|66%3A2|65%3A12|39%3A1|240%3A1318

Yes! I have played the Rama cd rom game. It reguried a emulator in order to work on windows xp. A close dear friend of mine showed me where to download it and make it work.
I cant imagine how many prims it would reguire to do such a monsterous task in SL. Is there anybody out there who is willing to attempt it with me? Rama in Sl would be a fantasic tourist spot!
I'm not giving up on this dream...but I have alot to learn!

Fascinating idea, but utterly impossible in SL:

The Rama spacecraft was 50,000 Meters long and 16,000 meters in diameter on the inside.

A sim is only 256 Meters on a side. Trying to build it in one sim would be like trying to make a full-scale replica of New York City in your back yard. Not going to happen.

Trying to recreate that mega vessel full-scale in SL would be prohibitively expensive, because you would have to buy too many sims just to house it. Rama is 62.5 sims wide and just over 195 sims long.

Even if you just tried to make a small section of it, the only thing you could do would be to make a curving "floor" section, with some sort of megaprim images at the sim edges for what continues beyond the habitable area. And as you go higher up the slopes, there is no way to make gravity seem to continually point away from the axis of the cylinder. The physics of Ranma can't be duplicated in SL.

What if We shrunk the avatars down kinda like the Greenies did in Sl? They were quite sucessful in creating a massive room that appeared quite huge to the avatar. Now the gravity situation I'm not certain if that can be resolved, but I'm certain if we all put our minds together anything could be possible in SL. I'll pass a word to linden labs and see what they may have to say. I'm quite willing to finance such a venture, it would be well worth the effort! I hope you are wrong saying it is impossible. There must be way to cast a reflection in a mirror as well as build a rama ship. I dont want to give up so easily.
Love to all,
Cathy

As Ceera said, there's no way to do a full scale replica, even if you were to use tiny avs. Think about the math for a second. Let's say you were to shrink the avatars to, say, 1/4 their normal size. You'd still need to make the cylinder 12,500 meters long and 4000 meters wide. You'd need 49 x 16 sims, 784 in total. That would cost US$784,000 to set up and $231,280 per month to maintain.

If you've actually got millions of dollars at your disposal to invest into this, here's what I'd propose. Don't do it in SL. There are many, many reasons why it wouldn't be practical; size is just one of them. Instead, hire a team to create your own Rama virtual world for you. I'd love to work as an artist on something like that, if you really have the financing for it, and I could put you in touch with several people who'd be well qualified to handle other aspects of it.

But somehow I suspect you aren't really going to sink millions of dollars into this, right?

The reason I suggested the video game was because it's a good demonstration of how to create the feel of Rama without actually having to build the whole thing. Pick a few choice locations from the story, just as they did in the game, string them together with teleporters so there's easy suspension of disbelief for the layout, and surround it all with some well-made imagery to suggest the proper environment. If done well, it could be one of the coolest builds in SL, even if under the hood it's not accurate.

Keep in mind, the game was convincing, and they certainly didn't build the whole ship in that. They didn't have to. Neither do you.

Smiles i percieve humans work hard at creating solutions and realising discovery.

Its as if we really want to create and enable the method to succession.

Our succession. Our successors.

humand push the imagination of the unknown and create the known.


Ok.. its just a book i know, its someones imagination, i know. But even on this minor input in the backwater of SL, the information will be held and stored somewhere.

Information. Humans give it to machines. One day, i think, the machine will say "thank you"

The image of hundreds of thousands of dollars in my head frightened the living hell out of me! OMG! I had no idea! I was thinking a few hundred or so dollars. I have an empty credit card ready for such a venture, but those totals freaked me out! Of course I'm not rich! Maybe a miniture Rama or something like that. I dont want to give up...This is soooo unfair. Sob*
Nothing is easy in this world. All the great minds had huge bumps in the road to overcome.
This appears to be a big bump!
I shall overcome.
Love to all,
Cathy

Your av doesn't shrink when you go to Greenies...they just built everything very,very big.

Ceera's cost estimate is off...because it assumes you are building the thing in SL. Other grids have much lower prices for regions.

However...the gravity of the flat virtual world doesn't mimic the centripetal accleration seen inside a cylinder like Rama. Perhaps you could find a code monkey or two to tweak the OpenSim software to model a cylindrical world, then connect your build to something like the Open Life Grid.

Second However...This applies to using flat sims and background images to "fake" the environment...Rama, as pointed out, is HUGE. So big that many of the weird perspective issues you'd expect are minimized by distance and atmospheric haze. And in SL, most people's draw distance won't even let them see all the way across a sim (256 m), which means any fancy background painting you do will be invisible to most people most of the time.

Why not start small? Build the Space Station from 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you can pull that off, move up to an O'Neill Langrange Point colony...a cylinder about 1 - 2 km in diameter. After that, you'll have a lot better idea of how to tackle something like Rama.

Actually, in a full scale version of the ship, you would never be able to see or experience the whole thing at once. In fact, you would probably not even realize that you were "in" a ship. So why not just create as much of the ship environment as you like in a few sims and pretend that they are in something much bigger? As you become more ambitious and much richer, you can gradually add more sims until you get more of the Big Ship feeling.

Hmmm,
If you took say 10 sims and lined them up. Box them with megas the way Aley did in privateer sim. you could come real close to the right effect.
The real icing on the cake would be if lindens could link the first and last servers so you apear to be traveling in a circle if you run from one end to the other. That would really give you the feeling of being on a large ship.
How about stealing yet another idea from Aley, build in layers, but connected side to side rather than up and down. This would give you 30/40 sections of 256 X 256, for only the cost of 10 sims. Or scale it down to five and have 15/20 sections of ship, depends on the money. As always prims would be an issue, but this is where the texture gurus, and mega prim masters might save the day.
sounds like an awesome project, I wish you the best of luck with it.

This is a really exciting and challenging idea. I loved Rendezvous, although I thought the second book was pretty weak, and didn't read the later ones.

I think if you want to do this, you'd have to employ some clever tricks to make it appear that you are inside the gigantic Rama while occupying a smaller area. I saw a video of a building that appeared to loop in the x,y, and z directions by rezzing new spaces as you traveled in that direction. Maybe something like that would work. Or, you could see if the Lindens will let you use the Burning Life sims

What visual effect could you get by moving the camera independently from the avatar?

Make big sphere, move camera around with script. Build a tiny prim avatar if needed to search as a placemarker.

I appreciate all the wonderful ideas from all those great and mighty minds in SL! I'm not just a silly girl with silly ideas. I really really want this to work and you guys have helped me tremendously! Many of these concepts I didnt even know about and this has been a fantastic learning experience. So I thank you all! I still believe the Rama spaceship has potential in SL. This is so exciting and I am very determined. Theres so much to think about...I think linden labs will be interested in this too.
Love you all,
Cathy

You could also use 2d animation scripting to create false perspective increase and decrease with movement.

imagine for example a video of looking out of a train cab along the track as the train moves.. each "frame" is a picture - a still frame, increase the frame rate the view moves forward, decrease it the view moves back.

how exactly one could get that to happen as the avatar moves toward the image and moves back i`m not sure.. but ive found that depending on the complexity one can get up to 256 frames on one picture, ie one jpg image -after that the detail is lost ( not enough pixels per frame )

The script can cycle those frames at will from any point, forward and back.. or frames at will, or even randomly or objectively from a list... if the list is dependent on avatar position then as the avatar moves the image can change.


One can also use a a web based 360 degree viewer, those are neat.. one can zoom in and out and react with hotspots in an unbroken 360 view. but of course the web page is outside SL.

an example i use:

http://www.incony.org/familytree/Grantchester-Meadow.html

so one could be at a particular point and "see" something special in 360 degree without space limitation.

think of this like having a radar... ones position determines what the radar can see..

Catalina - I really hope you don't get too discouraged enough by the difficulties to give up on the project. I think this could be an awesome build to visit, and you should be able to find enough Rama-fan-residents to make a go at it.

My thoughts: Sure the scale of Rama is massive - I doubt anyone will ever replicate it in SL. But I've seen plenty USS Enterprises and Klingon Birds-of-Prey that only measure up 50m on a side. Most ppl seem happy enough with them. Plus, as has been mentioned, you need to keep the scale down enough that draw-distance doesn't become a problem.

If the outer diameter of the tube was 256m (so that you could fit its width into a single sim), I'm sure it would convey an impression of scale really well.

For the gravity issue - there are a number of invisible-vehicle-that-plays-walking-animations script out there (look for products that keep you safe from being orbitted in sandboxes, or that allow another resident to piggy-back on you). This concept could be used in a vehicle that knew the topography of the inner surface of the tube, and not only kept your feet pressed against the surface, but also adjusted its orientation (and therefore yours as well) based on your position.

Now - for the tube length - A one-sim long Rama is probably better than no Rama at all, right? But, if you can get hold of more sims, great! You could use the idea Chosen mentioned of using teleports between places of interest.


And one more crazy idea - let's say you manage to get 7 sims in a row, like this

a b c ~ d e f

"a" and "f" have the poles
"~" is the Cylindrical Sea with New York

In all the sim except "b" and "e" the vehicle script moves you just a little bit slower than walking (not enough to really notice, just enough to make the walk feel longer)
In "b" and "e", the closer you get to the center of the sim, the slower you "walk".
This effect actually works much better than you might expect, especially if you cen organise more sims. Imagine 15 sims:

a b c d e f ~ ~ ~ g h i j k l

"a", "f", "g" and "l" are normal speed
"b" and "c" slow you down as you approach the sim border between "c" and "d", and so on and so forth.
If Speed is a logarithmic function of distance to the border between "c" and "d" (or "i" and "j" then it actually becomes impossible to walk across the length of Rama. Effectively, you could almost consider it to have infinite length! The trick is to apply the slowing down subtly enough that the resi doesn't really notice it.

(OK - way too long now. Shut-up already, Ben)

Thanks Ben,
you have been great! I appreciate your input. Gosh i did not know all the reguirements for such a project! This is soooo out of my league. But I will learn and overcome. Rama will be coming to SL soon...I promise. SL is so full of brilliant minds!
Love to all,
Cat

I'm at the point now of reguesting a builder who will be interested in helping me with this venture! Lets meet in world. I will follow instructions and I am a great listener. Who out there is brave enough to take on this incredible project! I will hire anyone who is very ambitious and willing to take on this impossible task. It could be SL history in the making!
I'm not much of a scriptor nor a builder, but I will follow the right person.
Love you all!
Cathy

Hi Cat, I will be glad to lend a hand with this project. There are many great ideas here already. I do agree that the scope of the project will have to be limited, but I think much can be done with "smoke and mirrors" on something like this.

I do have a starting suggestion. That is to use either a standalone OpenSim region or see if one of the OpenSim grids will donate a sim or two to develop this project. This would allow the various builders and scriptors to work out the details "offline" until we have something that works. Then recreate the build in SL. This would keep the costs down during development and allow for the flexibility to test out various configurations and sizes without tying up a lot of funds for the buying of sims and tier. I think one of the opensim grids would be open to this idea if the Rama spaceship remained there after completion. It would make a great draw for them.

As to the more concrete design issues, I like the idea of a "vehicle" that people ride to control the gravity and make it more a guided tour than a freeform exploration.

By using a controlled guided tour the environment could be changed around the visitors and the scale of the project would be much more manageable.

In essence build this as a very large holodeck controlling the visitors motion and using object rezing and texture changes to simulate the various ship environments.

This will be an exciting project to work on, and I think you will be able to draw in many creators willing to donate their time and effort to this project.

I think your first steps will be to recruit the people, set up a group so we can all pass around ideas, then get a sim for us to work in and test out the various ideas to see what works and what does not.

I will try to set up a standalone OpenSim this week and see just what a 256x256x256 hollow cylinder looks like from the inside.


Lizzy

Love you Lizzy!
You're soooo awesome!
Love to all,
Cat

There is a Babylon 5 build in SL now. If you find your way to the tram and ride it, you will see an interesting perspective trick they used.

Since one is on the 'surface' in Rama the B-5 trick won't work as used there. But they have done a good work-around for a cylindrical space station/ship. In the mall they have a curved area that stops but looks good from a distance.

Plus one can talk to those builders and see what they ran into and how they handled it.

I could imagine breaking the cylinder into sectors. Each sector could be unfolded and its surface aligned with the SL ground. Like opening an organge and setting the pieces side by side. Each sky would be an image of the other sectors. As one walked the circumference one would need to tp from sector to sector or walk through a wall with an up curving image of the adjacent sector. Not ideal but it could provide the illusion.