Yay, Maps!

So Inara Pey writes about this very nice Maps of SL exhibit.

Here I am at it, in the distance:

It’s a lovely little gallery build, very subtly steampunk-feeling, on a pleasant sim that I didn’t have time to wander around as much as I’d have liked. The exhibit itself has sections (as you can see in the pitcher) on Magellan Linden, the early grid, the Steamlands, Nautilus and the Blake Sea, and so on. The other wall has things about transport, the railroad lines, the Zindra monorail, and all like that.

Well worth a visit if your at all a fan of maps, as I certainly am. :)

(And for good measure here’s a reminder about the Continent Detector, so you can tell where you yourself are!)

Continent Detector

The continental structure of the Grid is so cool, and so many people have no idea.

What can we do to help Raise Awareness?

Of course! We can write a script!

The script, stylishly installed in a subtly-glowing purple cube over my head, informs me that Hughes Rise is in Jeogeot. Which it is!

And my place in Zindra is… in Zindra! (Which you can also tell because of the Racy Pictures in the background.)

And Pteron (like many many other estate islands) is in the Western Ocean (so named by me, in the script).

Another blow struck for Geographical Awareness! :)

Region Mapper Update

My last post on this subject caused a bit of confusion and amusement, of the “what the heck are all those numbers and things?” and “upside down and sideways hahaha” variety. So here is an update!

As will be obvious, I have switched from the nontraditional “as seen from below, with north to the right” view to the more familiar “as seen from above, with north upward” view.


00: Hughes Rise (25,224) Mature 1600m:
01: Protected Land: Protected Land
02: Hughes Rise :
03: Workshop Prim Farm: Workshop Prim Farm
04: Heavenly Bodies Tattoos & Shapes: Tattoo, Tattoos, Shapes, Shape,
05: AI WorkShop: AI Skybox Workshop
06: Ad-Vatar and The Question Center: Dr. Destiny
07: Jilly and om's Japanese tryst:
08: Sweetwater Retreat (240,232) Mature 1536m:
09: Sadie's Dyke Bar & Butch Store: Quiet hangout. Dressing room, butch
10: Hughes Rise - First Land: Land For The Landless
11: Hughes Rise: Hughes Rise
12: Galaxy Design real estate - Hughes Rise 6: Flat green land available for
13: Galaxy Design: Primland
14: Himmis Kleines Eckchen ;):
15: Abandoned Land: Land abandoned by Cricket Zipper on 31-Dec-2008
16: My Secret Hideaway: Sometimes you want to go, where nobody knows
17: DAT LAND:
18: Workshop Annex: Workshop Annex
19: A Garden : Murasaki Suisei
20: : My first house
21: The Camel's Prim Farm:
22: Abandoned Land: Land abandoned by Errol Bazar on 09-Oct-2008
23: oms studio 2:
24: Abandoned Land: Land abandoned by Ash Alecto on 14-Dec-2008
25: La's Tipi: Keep Out
26: oms studio 1:
27: Gray Estates Part Deux:
28: Hughes Rise (216,145) Mature 512m:
29: Marqs Gettaway:
30: Abandoned Land: Land abandoned by bWhittl Kips on 08-Jan-2009
31: Microparadise: Some Land! Woooot!
32: Dale Inis random Hughes Rise land:
33: Computer Land:
34: Land ID:21089 (B.O.S) Hughes Rise, Green grassy flat land: Rent land
35: Hughes Rise Park, upper section:
36: Workshop More Prim Farm:
37: Land ID:21085 (B.O.S) Hughes Rise, Green grassy flat land: Rent land
38: Land ID:21088 (B.O.S) Hughes Rise, Green grassy flat land: Rent land
39: Land ID:21086 (B.O.S) Hughes Rise, Green grassy flat land: Rent land
40: Bippie's Home: Bippie and Halo's home. Friends welcome. IM one of us
41: AVATARS AVATARS,Batman,Pooh Bear,Star Wars,Betty Boop,Lalinda:
42: Workshop: Wherever you go etc.
43: Land ID:21087 (B.O.S) Hughes Rise, Green grassy flat land: Rent land
44: free resell freebie store full perm: somethings are free , such as shoes ,
45: Abandoned Land: Land abandoned by My World! (group) on 28-Jan-2009
46: MeadowSide: Portal to Happiness
47: Scott's Seat: Land in the Mist
48: =Hughes Rise=: objects included
49: Julie's Place: Julie's Place
50: Scott's Seat lowlands:


(I’ve put up the map itself as an image even though it’s ASCII-art, because I gave up on getting WordPress to display it from text in a way that looked decent. The script just says it in chat for one to copy-and-paste elsewhere.)

Much more maplike, eh? The Park is obvious (heh heh) in the center, there, as parcels numbered 31, 32, and 35.

A couple of notes on the map:

You may notice a few un-numbered areas (like the big one just south of 31). They are unnumbered because they have the same name and description as some numbered area that they aren’t contiguous with (the big one just south of 31 has the same name and description, and may actually be part of the same parcel as, the area numbered 36, I think it is). I may update the program to be more liberal in its number-displaying, so as to pick up these at the cost of the occasional unneeded second number on a contiguous, but oddly-shaped, parcel.

The algorithm only looks at, and therefore the map only reflects, the center point of each aligned 16-by-16 meter piece of the region. This usually gives a pretty accurate picture of what’s going on, but in fact parcels can have boundaries at a finer granularity than that (4-by-4 maybe I think?), and so the map will not reflect the entire truth, and may in some cases have significant errors. I don’t know of any significant errors on this Hughes Rise map, but for instance the situation in the region of Sadie’s (parcel 09) is considerably more split up and complex in reality than it appears on this map.

I hope this one makes a bit more sense to those readers who are not me. :)

New random project: Region Mapper

So on a complete whim and for no reason that I know of (possibly related to the whole mainland aesthetics discussion), I decided to write a little script that would list all the parcels in a region, in some sort of map-like form.

I had all sorts of techie ideas in my head about little survey ‘bots that would fly around 200m above the ground, communicating to a central controller using llRegionSay() and all, but I was disappointed. :) Turns out llGetParcelDetails() has no range-limit (within the current sim), so a script just sitting under a tree in the Park can see the name and description of every parcel in the Rise.

Here’s the output from my current script (with the longer strings trimmed to fit on the page):

Hughes Rise:
000 000 000 000 001 001 001 001 002 002 003 004 005 005 006 006
000 000 000 000 001 001 001 001 002 002 003 007 007 005 006 006
000 000 000 000 001 001 001 001 008 008 009 007 007 005 005 006
000 000 000 000 001 001 001 001 008 008 009 010 010 010 005 006
011 011 011 011 012 012 013 013 014 014 015 016 010 010 005 005
011 011 011 011 017 018 019 020 014 014 015 016 010 010 021 005
011 011 011 011 017 018 019 020 009 009 022 022 010 010 021 005
011 011 023 023 023 023 020 020 020 024 024 024 024 025 024 002
026 026 023 023 023 023 020 020 020 024 024 024 024 025 024 002
026 026 023 023 023 023 020 020 027 027 024 024 024 024 024 024
028 028 023 023 023 023 029 029 030 031 024 024 024 032 032 024
028 028 033 033 033 033 029 029 030 031 024 024 024 032 032 024
028 028 033 033 023 023 029 029 034 034 035 035 036 037 038 038
039 039 033 040 040 040 023 023 041 041 042 042 036 037 038 038
043 043 044 044 045 045 023 023 046 046 047 047 036 036 036 048
043 043 043 043 045 045 023 023 049 049 050 050 036 036 036 048

000: free resell freebie store full perm: somethings are free , …
001: Computer Land:
002: Hughes Rise :
003: : My first house
004: Galaxy Design: Primland
005: Protected Land: Protected Land
006: Hughes Rise (25,224) Mature 1600m:
007: Galaxy Design real estate – Hughes Rise 6: Flat green land …
008: oms studio 2:
009: The Camel’s Prim Farm:
010: Sadie’s Dyke Bar & Butch Store: Quiet hangout. Dressing room, …
011: Abandoned Land: Land abandoned by My World! (group) on 28-Jan-2009
012: Land ID:21088 (B.O.S) Hughes Rise, Green grassy flat land: Rent …
013: Land ID:21089 (B.O.S) Hughes Rise, Green grassy flat land: Rent …
014: Abandoned Land: Land abandoned by Ash Alecto on 14-Dec-2008
015: Abandoned Land: Land abandoned by Errol Bazar on 09-Oct-2008
016: Himmis Kleines Eckchen ;):
017: Land ID:21087 (B.O.S) Hughes Rise, Green grassy flat land: Rent …
018: Land ID:21086 (B.O.S) Hughes Rise, Green grassy flat land: Rent …
019: Land ID:21085 (B.O.S) Hughes Rise, Green grassy flat land: Rent …
020: Microparadise: Some Land! Woooot!
021: Ad-Vatar and The Question Center: Dr. Destiny
022: Abandoned Land: Land abandoned by Cricket Zipper on 31-Dec-2008
023: Workshop More Prim Farm:
024: Workshop Prim Farm: Workshop Prim Farm
025: Hughes Rise – First Land: Land For The Landless
026: =Hughes Rise=: objects included
027: La’s Tipi: Keep Out
028: Julie’s Place: Julie’s Place
029: Hughes Rise Park, upper section:
030: Dale Inis random Hughes Rise land:
031: oms studio 1:
032: Jilly and om’s Japanese tryst:
033: Bippie’s Home: Bippie and Halo’s home. Friends welcome. IM one …
034: Gray Estates Part Deux:
035: My Secret Hideaway: Sometimes you want to go, where nobody …
036: Sweetwater Retreat (240,232) Mature 1536m:
037: Hughes Rise: Hughes Rise
038: Heavenly Bodies Tattoos & Shapes: Tattoo, Tattoos, Shapes, …
039: Scott’s Seat lowlands:
040: AVATARS AVATARS,Batman,Pooh Bear,Star Wars,Betty Boop, …
041: Hughes Rise (216,145) Mature 512m:
042: DAT LAND:
043: Scott’s Seat: Land in the Mist
044: MeadowSide: Portal to Happiness
045: Workshop: Wherever you go etc.
046: Marqs Gettaway:
047: Workshop Annex: Workshop Annex
048: AI WorkShop: AI Skybox Workshop
049: Abandoned Land: Land abandoned by bWhittl Kips on 08-Jan-2009
050: A Garden : Murasaki Suisei

The map is upside-down, I think, and possibly backwards. And/or sideways. Also it’s numbers instead of some nice visual.

The next thing I’m thinking of is learning enough SVG to produce a more map-like map, with boundaries drawn as lines and all, from the same data (a strictly inworld prim-based version would also be possible, but would probably require quite a few prims). I may or may not ever get around to doing that. :) I might also throw the script into the Wiki at some point, if I think it’s reached the point of non-triviality.

It would also be fun to overlay the parcel map on top of the visual maps that the Second Life API makes available (like the one at the top of the posting there; click through for the API version). Clever SVG might be able to do that also. If anyone knows of anyone else doing anything like any of this, send email or post a comment!

And then I’m still planning a posting about inworld Profile Displayers, which I have a picture all taken for and more or less know what the words will say, but have just not gotten around to. Busy, busy…

Meanwhile, back in Second Life…

I’ve put up a couple of new signs in the Hughes Rise park (click through to flickr for access to larger sizes). On the right is the very nice (and magically self-updating) New Citizens Incorporated map of the Linden-owned continents of the Grid (available free, along with maps of I think the first two continents, at their Fisherman’s Wharf build (and likely elsewhere)). On the left is a lovely freebie region-map device, which can be set to display a map of whatever region you like (mine is of course set to Hughes Rise). I’ve stuck little “You are Here” prims on each one (the red arrow and green diamond), so people can see where they are.

Due in large part to early mentoring from the amazing Veronica Quackenbush, I’m a great believer in educating residents about the shape and geography of the world. We TP around so much that it’s all too easy to forget that the world has an underlying structure, and therefore to miss out on all the fun involved in, say, going from your house to a favorite club via road or helicopter rather than just zapping direct, and potentially seeing interesting things and meeting interesting people and having noteworthy adventures along the way.

Take a walk along a road today! You never know what you might run into. :)