Ramblemuse Touch Points

I’ve been playing with uploading simulator (sim) terrain from Second Life and displaying it with Python and Matplotlib. The figure displays two snapshots of a sim taken a year apart. The major difference is that a deep hole has been “nuked” into the ridge near the northwest corner to make room to create caverns, caves, dungeons, and the like in the right-hand figure.

The basic terrain is of two ridges with a river valley between them. The western ridge angles slightly from NW to SE, leaving room for a beach in the SW corner. The eastern ridge eases into a flat plateau in the south. In the figure, just the terrain is shown (hence the post title), without the standard water level at 20 meters. I used the Matplotlib ‘copper’ color-table for both plots. The data for the left figure came from a Second Life raw file. The data for the right figure was obtained by scripting a surveyor prim to upload data via HTTP to a PHP script. Both plots are of a full sim of 256m by 256m at 2m by 2m resolution.

Given all that technical detail, the result captures an almost Rubenesque sense of the terrain.