Getting ready to meet up with our two staff members that requested an Open Sim instance for their groups, I realised this week that it would be a good idea to actually put together a small portfolio of terrains for them to choose from. So far I have managed assemble or create fourteen, and these range from equally sized small flat plots for individual projects too much larger equally sized plots for group project work. The others fall into a much wider range of island groups, coves, hilly, and mountainous. I am thinking about actual content, but for now leaning more in the direction of letting people create their own, it would be a good way getting building skills for our students.
I have also been continuing with my submissions to OpenSim Creations with a working wind turbine. One of the aspects about working in a virtual world that I really like is being able to create a real world simulation. The wind turbine, as you can see from the image here, is basically of the type that you would typically find installed in a solar home style of project. Given the fact that the wind, though be it virtual, does actually blow in the virtual world, then its really only a case of using the correct function to get the value that you need and use it in a straight forward basic formula for a wind turbine. Of course one of the more challenging sides to a project like this is getting the blades to rotate in the correct plane irrespective of rezzed position. I must confess to getting around this tricky though not insoluble problem, as you are equally likely to find that the issues can more often be those of lag, and so my solution was to use a turbine blade texture and simply animate it. While I have not put too much detail in this post, you can if you are interested grab a copy of my wind turbine from here, it comes with fully commented code and tutorial.Have fun Vega
