tx Oh’s LightShare™ Panel
A few days ago I received an invite from our programmer tx Oh to his personal Opensim grid. After logging in, I got a first-hand demonstration of the new LightShare™ environment, and had the opportunity to play around with the Lightshare panel he has scripted.
What it Lightshare? If you have been into Second Life in the last few years, you have probably heard of WindLight. Back in 2007, Linden Lab acquired the new technology to render more realistic Sky, Clouds and Water from Windward Mark Interactive. The problem with WinLight is, that it is strictly playing on the client-side, like all rendering features. While all of the alternative viewers have been implementing WindLight, and it’s extensively used by Macchinima Makers, sharing the settings you have found with another resident is quite complicated: You have to save your current settings in an file, send it to the other person, make him or her install it in the deep space of their Client configuration settings, and then – after a restart, you can share the experience. Not quite so Fast-Easy-Fun, it seems, and certainly no RealTime collaborational experience. This is where LightShare comes on the plan: Invented by Meta 7, a virtual worlds hosting company, Lightshare allows you to do what the name says – share your WindLight settings with all visitors of the Sim, instantaneously, with no download required. This is done by some newly introduced Scripting commands and a compatible client/viewer, that receives the settings sent from the Sim it’s logged in, whenever anything is changing.
What tx is doing here, and the reason why he invited me to come over and play with the new stuff he made: He made a handy panel containing all the knobs and buttons for setting up a windlight theme, only he did it in-world! So we could just stand there (me in a pyjama, the inofficial Opensim standard outfit^^), fiddle on the knobs and change the blueness of the water, time of day, brighness and color of the sun and ambient light, all that – together , simultaneously. Just like anything you know from Second Life and Opensim, sharing the experience we create in realtime.
tx is making the panel available as a IAR archive on gridhop.net, so grab a copy, and check out the nearest OpenSim! 
“Can I use that in Second Life too?” one might ask. No, not yet. They just need to hire (or re-hire) some developers to get that running. ;p
Cheers,
Torrid
• Science thrives in virtual worlds
• 3DLES and virtyou join forces
Very very cool. Yet another reason to upgrade to 0.7 as soon as possible. LightShare. HG 1.5. Media-on-a-prim. The goodies just keep rolling in!
– Maria
Hi Maria,
Lightshare is available in Opensim 0.7 (Release) and Imprudence since 1.3 beta5. It was originally introduced into the Meta7 Viewer and Sims in March 2010. I don’t know if other viewer already support it.
EDIT: Currently, tx is programming a system that allows Opensim LightShare to reproduce actual sun angles and daylight timings depending on the season and given earth coordinates. This will make Opensim an even more serious tool to simulate real life surroundings and is useful for commercial applications like Architectural simulations. It will be working for Imprudence/Opensim0.7 as soon as the http://redmine.imprudenceviewer.org/issues/415 is fixed.
Torrid –
Do you need to be running a particular version of the OpenSim server software or a particular viewer to be able to use this?
And is this something of interest to machinimators, or are there enterprise applications for this?
Thanks!
- Maria