30 second skyscraper and 5 minute city

Hi,

I am looking for some help to beta test a free tool I am developing for the SecondLife community called TelienceBuilder. I've had a couple of people help me test it so far, but I am ready to extend it to a greater audience.

The tool is based on the works of Christopher Alexander and pattern languages for architecture.

With it, you can pretty much build anything (given a good dictionary of patterns) in minutes, for example a skyscraper will rez up in 30 seconds and by repeating the pattern you can build a city in 5 minutes.

The tool basically facilitates the creation of a vocabularly in a hierarchical format. Once you have a sufficient dictionary, you can reuse your patterns, changing the offsets and the rotations. Your vocabularly is saved for any future use and any new pattern of patterns you utilize further extends your vocabularly.

The advantage of this tool is when you're outfitting a sim with a common theme. Because the pattern language you develop is infinitely configurable and extensible, you can use it to quickly build out a sim with an unlimited amount of different configurations of your patterns but at the same time give it a very consistent feel.

It also lets you build infinitely large structures as if they were linked (hierarchically) with the only limitation that they need to be in one SIM (going to fix this soon, though).

It controls the building process via RPC, however I will be adding a notecard and compiled LSL scripts soon for performance. It's written in dot net, so it is currently for Windows only.

I've attached a screenshot of the software and of basic usage of patterns someone did in a sandbox with the tool.


I'll be posting further updates to the tool and information on this thread, so watch this space for news if you are interested.

Release Notes
--------------------

v 0.03 - 11/23/2004

multithreaded requests (3-10 creation threads)
trim all before sending
scaling factor (grow / shrink prims)
now accepts setprimitiveparams statements over the wire
eg: 1, 18, -1, <0.5,0.25,0>,1.0,!, 13, 18, -1, <0,1,0>,1.0,!,12, 18, -1, <0,1,0>,1.0, !, 6, 18, -1, <0,1,0>,1.0, !, 7, 18, -1, <0,1,0>,1.0,! Sets the color on various faces.
clear message to clear all prims for remake
sends current node
ack messages for retransmit of xml-rpc

v 0.02 - 11/13/2004

Added Image snapshots for Patterns (see attached jpg)
Added threaded request / stop button
Added pattern library recovery and auto-save

Current Task List
-------------------
- disable send button until finished or stopped
- error checking - (skip on exception, stop sending requests on wrong channel)
- need to script the channel to avoid intteruption from shouts
- edit node
- set random channel
- add find / replace by path
- auto upgrading
- notecard exporting
- notecard importing (via email)
- reset to default
- find / repalce by
- resize window
- undo

christopher alexanders skyscraper would have moldings and cornices

i'm interested in testing it

That's cool. In the final Matrix film of the trilogy, they used the same method to 'grow' the machine city used in the film. Their reasoning was to generate something quickly, but to have a style that wouldn't look like conventional building methods.

I'd say it worked really well. I'd love to see a L-system done in SL, but I don't have the skills to do so.

I would be interested in testing this. I would need some instruction on how to use it tho. This sounds very intriguing.

I am interested in both the end results and watching the actual skyscrapers "grow". There is a sort of organic beauty to watching what would be, in the real world, spires of concrete and steel stalk upwards towards the heaven like a magic beanstock.

Maxx, sounds like you're ready for a collaboration of some sort.

Blaze, very interesting idea.

Alexander gave a moving and heartfelt address before the OO community at OOPSLA 96. Unfortunately, I think it mostly fell on deaf ears. But for me it was a kind of epiphany. He talked about creating "living structure" and challenged the software community to succeed where he had failed. I have an audio tape of the talk if anyone is interested.

Obviously, a tool like this will appeal to different people for different reasons. To me, the ability to create a skyscraper in 30 seconds is not very compelling by itself. However, if it became possible to create unique and engaging archtecture using this tool, I'd be extremely interested.

I'm a little worried, however, that a tool like this would mostly be used to litter SL with junk. I hope I'm wrong.

those pics remind me of the old "Girder and Panel" building systems, or building with panes of glass in Activeworlds :: sigh ::

interesting concept though!

Arti

Kinda looks like the MegaTower

But, those were built by hand and copying.

That looks like a lot of work. Very cool Blaze.

A pattern-based building tool could have a lot of applications outside of architecture.

Just a few random ideas:

1) prim-based wigs
2) jewelry
3) heavy prim trees
4) cave building

Several of these ideas imply some degree of randomness and probably an algorithmic component as well.

Also, it would be nice if a tool would make it easy to build scale models and then recreate them in the large. Maybe allowing the model to be tweaked before it is deployed in the large.

Would be cool to have a model of a house and be able to tell it to enlarge to a desired size. Of course, this isn't straightforward given max and min prim sizes.

Seems like there needs to be a way to take into account the geography of the land.

We need tools to make it easier to work with "exotic" prims such as torus and ring. Lots of potential here.

Anyway, we need tools like this. Good job, Blaze!

How is testing going on this project? If you are still looking for testers, I would love to help out.

Patrick Playfair

Beta testers, I sent you an email regarding the new upgrade (check the release notes above). I got a couple of bounce backs so if I missed you please let me know via IM.

I have a few pictures I took of some of the testing I was doing with some japanese style castles and houses I have attached below. They are a 100 metre high spiral staircase with walkways attached to single story houses, 4 japanese castles above oak grove, and a small japanese village on the plains behind oak grove.

Everything is automatically built via the builder object and 3 objects - a story, a walkway, and a single stair. My avatar is just watching and taking pictures

If you want to see a demo or be a beta tester, contact me in world.

The spiral staircase below is simply one stair pattern repeated over and over again, and every 8 steps I do the walkway / house pattern. Basically, it took 10 minutes to build this with objects I had already created for other things.

These are 4 castles above oak grove. The latest upgrade will set the scale, color, texture, and dimensions of objects it tells the builder to build via RPC. It's basically just using prim params as described above in the release notes.

The tops of the castles are simply stories which have been scaled down and rotated 90 degrees. I have 4 different patterns here, 5 including the granite and stone bases. I repeat the patterns and change the color. Walkways and stair patterns are added afterwards.

This is a small village outside of oak grove.

It's one pattern of a walkway and a house, with the pattern again, but rotated 90 degree and I change the color of the house.

That collective pattern is then rotated four times.

The last slide is after the clear button is pressed.

wow... I'm speechless... great work on this!

If you can grow buildings like bamboo...

It's very organic, yet very mechanical in a way. Me likey.

another upgrade available, open beta should be ready soon as we've got the last couple of serious bugs squashed. latest upgrade has full scaling functionality- thanks to strife for inspiring the workaround.

here's a couple of pictures of something a tester did, one pattern repeated 4 times I believe.

the first image is the scaled version of his 'apartment building', and the second is the life sized model, and the third is another apartment with a scaled version of the japanese village.

How's it coming along, blaze?

I am curious, cause I may find this to come in handy really soon.

(top secret neato build idea)

Well, I have a stable beta version that everyone is using and you can use. IM me, it should be suitable for whatever you are trying to do.

If you are looking for a space to test these in we could try it in Ravenglass, there isn't much filling it yet, it's under construction.

I would be interested to see how it generated small scale models.