This sprint was again about working on a couple of more venues for DJ and Dance Events in my Music Oasis. The two main maps I worked on were the Oasis Recording Studio and Oasis Park. Also, continued to work on some Proxi models which while not directly related to myMO it is something that the team is contributing to.
A few sprints ago, Bluebell handed off the Oasis Plaza which had an extra building in it compared to the Oasis Plaza build she had done for Sansar. The main building she added was the Oasis Recording Studio which we have a stand alone build of in Sansar. The thought initially had been that it would be just a building in the Plaza instead of a an independent build. During this sprint I quickly came to the conclusion that it had to be a separate build since the Studio’s interior detail build would have a lot of detailed models of music and recording equipment in it. Also, the plan has been for the Studio to be the experimental map associated with adding audio and music related blueprinting and C++ coding. It was going to be the home to a looper, riffer, playable synths and some other music related technologies that I wanted to try and build. In fact this type of programming is why I got into working on virtual worlds in the first place. Therefore, I decided to break it out as an independent build. The exterior of the building is still in the Plaza and we can repurpose it if we would like. Maybe it will turn into a radio studio which I had in a different building in Sansar.
So, the first step was to duplicate the Oasis Plaza level and delete everything but the Studio building, it’s interior contents and a portion of the landscape. Then I added my music instrument models, some professional looking recording equipment I had bought off the Marketplace and spent a couple of days relighting the entire interior. I deleted the Ultra sky and weather systems as you are teleported into the studio and I disabled the exterior doors so you couldn’t go outside in this stand alone Studio build. Right now it is just the static models in the interior. In a future sprint, I will add some DJ equipment, lights and media screen to the back room for events. Also, a lot of effort will be spent when I get to doing the experimental music equipment in the future. Here is a video of a quick walk through of the interior of the Oasis Recording Studio:
During this build I discovered that my random multispawn player start was not appropriate as it is a very confined space to spawn into. So, I reworked those parts of the Game State Blueprint that handles the spawning of avatars. There is now a boolean variable on the AWS MOOSMaps table for whether to use or not use random spawn points. If it is set to false (like it is now in the Oasis Recording Studio) all avatars will spawn to the same point causing some initial congestion, but, is doable. At some point, I may rewrite this to go to one of X predefined spawn points instead of a single point, but, not at this point.
The second major effort was to start working on Oasis Park. Long ago, Aurrie had identified the City Park collection as a good starting point for doing a park. Rhino XR studios has used the entire park as a main build for their software. It is huge and great fun to run around it although it is so big it often get’s confusing finding where you want to be. One time RAG, Bluebell, Aurrie and I went to the park in Megaverus and got lost and couldn’t find it each other again … lol. I decided since myMO is essentially an event based game rather than a exploring a big Megaverus type world, that I would bound the size of the park to contain it for the dance events at the park. I wanted it to be significantly bigger than the Sansar Oasis Park, but, much smaller than the whole City Park Collection build.
This being the goal, meant that the first few days were spent deleting stuff. Lots of stuff. I deleted about 80 to 90% of the park and kept a portion that was centered around a grand staircase and little pond with a path that circled the pond. I also left in some roads and things to give the impression that this little park was basically a beach side park against some hills like you would find in California. I deleted hundreds if not thousands of static meshes, landscaping, roads (splines), etc. Then I built some hills to bound in the map and provide a defined space. I basically blocked in the landscape of the hills. I would like some help with terraforming and landscaping these “barrier” hills if someone has some time to help in a future sprint. It looks okay for now as the first incarnation of this park is built for night time events and you really don’t notice the hills as anything but a barrier.
To make this more flexible, I deleted the city park skybox and atmosphere and replaced it with the Ultra Sky and Weather System. I am using this as the standard for outdoor builds going forward because I plan on building a HUD and blueprint for it, so that event hosts can set the weather and time of day. I set the initial time of day to be midnight and left the weather to be random just for fun until I build that HUD. Like all repurposing of maps we utilize from a template map (like City Park or Top of the Town), I then spent the majority of rest of the time, cleaning up static meshes and redoing all the lighting. Since the City Park was a daytime outdoor scene with just a skylight and skybox there basically was no lighting in the build. I made the decision to add the lights based on existing static meshes that were already in the City Park build. There were cool lamp posts along pathways and stairs and city street lights throughout the build. So, I made a blueprint of the lamp post and one of the street lights and added point lights and blueprinting to be able to change the color and intensity of those lights as “house lights” from my DJ control panel. There were dozens and dozens of these static meshes that had to be replaced by the new blueprinted lights, so that took a couple of mind numbing days. It was a deja vu, “Script the Doors in Harvest” experience for me.
Now that I had lit the system with street lights and lamp posts in the park, I moved on to incorporating the DJ lighting system into the Park. I have been planning to do a number of things with a park build and DJing for a long time now, so, it was fun trying to fulfill my vision I have had for the last couple of years. I build a circular DJ stage out in the pond and added scaffolding. Then I add a number of my DJ Lights, lasers, fog, etc. I added some DJ equipment and a media screen as well. Then I hooked this all up to the DJ Control Panel to this DJ light equipment. In addition I added a new DMX light type to the build that I have been itching to try. Water Fountains were added that are much like the Water Fountains at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I put these water effects between the stage and where the crowd will be. I added a level sequencer show that was part of the original DMX demo that had the Water Fountains in it. I currently just hooked up this show to the DJ control panel so that you could start and stop the water show from the Control Panel. In a future sprint, I will build a manual control of the Water Fountains that will operate like the other DJ light manual controls work, so that people can build their own versions of Water Fountain effects for their own shows. Here is a video of Oasis Park and a quick light show demo:
Again this was a lot of progress over a two week period. We are taking a bit of a break from our sprints to enjoy the holidays. I hope everyone has a great time enjoying this time of year.
