[ Welcome to Impact ]
[ 01: Planetfall ]
[ 02: Washed Up ]
[ 03: The Beach ]
[ 04: An Un-natural Cave ]
[ 05: Conjunction ]
[ 06: Contemplating the Singularity ]
- More to come
[ Appendices: Random Stats and Stuff ]
[ Some public domain OpenSim textures ]
[ My VR WishList ]
Welcome to Impact
(The 2D site about my 3D virtual world)
Impact is my personal virtual-reality space. It currently lives on a local server instance, so you can't visit for now. This VR space will probably always run off my home system (hopefully a publicly-accessible home server eventually) but never support more than half-a-dozen-or-so simultaneous visitors, both because I never intend getting that sort of upstream bandwidth from my home and also because crowds (even virtual crowds) give me panic attacks (enochlophobia). It is a hobby, not intended to be a commercial proposition any more than this web site is.
I am in the process of a major remodeling with the following goals:
- Likely moving from an OpenSimulator-based system to OpenWonderland. I looked into this environment years ago and while impressed, it was too corporate-focused at the time (may have been not entirely open-source too, I don't recall). When Oracle bought out Sun, they cut Wonderland loose and it is now a fully open-source environment. It is java-based (which has me a little skittish, probably unjustifiably) but seems to have a very high level of customisability -- if I need a new object or behaviour I can (programming skill permitting) implement it myself as a module without having to get my hands mangled in C++ or (shudder) C# code - and then trying to get my changes accepted in an upstream project if I intend others to be able to use the new features. Kokura/Aurora viewer/server (OpenSim flavour) seem to be about to drag themselves out of several months of stagnation, so that environment isn't completely off the cards, but I am leaning OpenWonderland-ward at present. A few months immersed in the system will be needed to properly judge if my hopes are justified.
- In line with the OpenWonderland move (though also usable on the latest OpenSimulator environments), I am switching to mesh objects for a lot of my modelling. Primitive-shapes are still a very powerful system for many situations, but mesh-modelling is powerful in other situations/ways. I have spent the past few months learning basic Blender modelling skills. Biggest change in this regard will be moving from height-field terrain to a big mesh for terrain. This is predominantly to allow me to drill horizontal tunnels into terrain since I tend to build down rather than up. (Hmmm, is that the female equivalent of guys building big phallic towers?? :-P ... or does it just mean I am a hobbit?)
- The impact-basin itself will be changing scale. I have been progressively making it bigger and bigger over the years in an effort to get a nice aesthetic scale with the crater rim near the horizon as seen from the central island, where I was basing my operations. Due to mesh-complexity constraints, I had to pull the size in a lot, but it turned out to be better anyway with a smaller crater. I am moving my 'base' away from the central Island (which will become a tiny pimple to swim out to) to the thick side (west) of the crater wall. The crater itself will go from a couple of kilometres wide to about 200m and instead of being a deep bowl, will be 'filled with sand' to become a shallow sandy-bottomed area suitable for snorkeling (and populating with sea-bottom a-life), with the ocean outside the crater the 'cold dangerous depths'. The sand bottom is tilted up to the west (as the world-ocean currents flow west) making a nice beach exactly where I want it at the foot of my living space. The inner-crater becomes a calm, protected swimming area, compared to the rougher deep-ocean outside.
The basic changes are presently reflected in the entry page image. That was grabbed from a RealXTend render when I was evaluating that platform. The 'story page' images likely won't get updated to match for several months as I will have to do a lot of model reconstruction (and re-learn a minimum of java) before I am ready to re-shoot them.
In the unlikely event that you want to support Impact financially, buy a T-shirt. Or just buy one anyway because they are funny ;-D
Notes on consuming the story:
Impact is presented here as a mixed-media story by way of introducing the backstory of my virtual world.
Out-of-story comments are under the pop-notes icon! 
These comments are usually about technical details of the creation of the world. Mouse-over the icon to see the pop-up notes - if they don't show, your browser sux: I'm just using the standard "title=" image attribute here!
Many of the images are actually twice the size displayed with the text - click on them to open a new window/tab with full size.
WARNING: NON-SERIAL UPDATES - I will be slipping extra parts of the story in wherever they fit, not necessarily the at the end-so-far, and re-arranging and re-writing stuff to suit as I go. Dates, order-of-events and details of already recorded events may change without notice ;-D. Best way to deal with this is to browse through looking for new images, since almost all parts of the story are based around annotated in-world screenshots.
With my recent move from OpenSim to Aurora Sim, I am rebuilding my world. New and updated chapters and accompanying pics will eventually follow.
[ Chapter 01: Planetfall ]>
