Power

Mr Dominic Webb has been working on a different sort of power distribution system, vaguely related to my own, and was kind enough to give me a demonstration.

My current power system works mostly on the basis of channels - each channel represents a discrete circuit, but since requests for and deliveries of power are delivered via llShout, there is no barrier as to distance as long as all are on the same channel.

Mr Webb’s power system works more on the basis of distance. Generators will give power to transmitters or batteries within ten metres, transmitters will give power that they have received to other objects within ten metres and so on. There is no restriction as to channel; items merely look for suitable targets within the correct range.

This means that “chaining” of power transmitters becomes automatically possible. A battery connected by two different power transmitters to a lightbulb allows that lightbulb to take power from it without modification, whereas under my system, this would not be the case (mind you, it would work automatically if it were within 100m of the power source).

I am aware that there are many readers who are interested in this effort of mine, and I would encourage anyone falling into such a category to visit Janus (6, 204) to see the system in action. Do get in touch with Mr Dominic Webb should you require further information.

Edit: Mr Webb has composed his own entry on the subject, elaborating on the process to a much greater degree.

As mentioned, I constructed a windmill that draws power from the movement of the wind, and was considering also building a solar panel, but then I thought: what sources of renewable energy are exclusive to Second Life? Why limit oneself to those existing in the Other World? I therefore created the latest generator, one that taps energy from the movement of frames. After all, frames mostly do nothing, there is plenty of excess power there for the taking. As long as the framerate remains high, it will continue to generate a reasonable number of Ordinal Energy Units.

One can find these items, as well as the battery, in the Engine Room at the Caledon Lighthouse. Please feel free to take a copy for your own examination. At the base of the lighthouse is a transit chair to take one directly there - one can also fly upwards, should one not have a great sensitivity to banging one’s head.

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A couple of other things of minor note: a neighbour of mine in Theretra very kindly offered to swap her plot (which was right in the middle of my other land) for a part of mine next door to it, which was advantageous for the both of us; I now have a large, continuous piece of land, and she is right next door to her friends without my firing range getting in the way.

I was not too sure as to what I was going to do with the increased area. I did have an idea concerning a ruined “steampunk cathedral”, but a problem one faces when constructing things out of geometric primitives is that it is hard to actually make rubble without it involving a vast number of them - and so in the end, I simply built a sort of non-ruined cathedral.

It doesn’t look terribly like a cathedral from the outside at the moment - I would like gargoyles and similar flim-flammery, and more rivets are clearly required - but I am running out of prims I’m afraid, and I do actually wish to put some objects inside it as well. Inside, it does, at least a little more. My plan, vague as it is at the moment, is to incorporate much in the way of gears and machinery, and also a miniature museum of computational history. (I’d like to build an Enigma machine in LSL, for a start.) It may, however, be a little blocky in appearance.

This would all be a lot easier were the land next to me not apparently Linden-owned, but set to sell to only one person. Dash it. There are several plots in that state nearby and, while on one hand I relish the peace of empty plots and dread the appearance of some appalling casino or other lag establishment, on the other, if I wish to extend myself I need to be able to actually buy these things. I could purchase random plots around Theretra simply for their prim allowance, but I would prefer to have continuous land, as stated above.

If only my prim mine did not simply distribute prims to other parts of the grid, but rather allowed me to keep them. I should really have thought of that, I now see.

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Ah. Yes. One final point. I did also speak with a gentleman on Sunday who was interested in my Touring Dirigible script, visible in Caledon at the moment. I promised to inform him when said work was publicly released, only, rather predictably, I failed to take his name down. I do most humbly apologise and would ask him, if he is reading this particular piece, to contact me forthwith. ‘Tis not actually publicly released as yet, but likely will be shortly, as soon as I decide on a price and arrangement for it. Clearly it should be copiable, as vehicles are prone to all sorts of mishaps, but on the other hand, should the smallholder wishing a brief tour of his or her land pay the same as the landowner using it for ferry tours across multiple sims?

Oh, Second Life is too short to worry about such stuff. I shall just pick a sum and sell at that.

As is so often the case, the butterfly nature of my mind has led to me completely forgetting to continue work on any of my past projects, and I have, instead, been working on something completely different today - a power distribution system. Clearly if one needs to have such large items as a lighthouse lamp working, one needs a power source, and as of the current moment, it is powered by a windmill.

The windmill itself generates electrical power which is then transmitted to, and stored in, a battery of my own design. (All power connections are safely buried underground or otherwise well insulated, do not be concerned.) The lighthouse then takes energy from the battery whilst it is lit.

Windmills do not actually generate an awful lot of power, but I take advantage of the peculiar cycle of day and night in Second Life here. Astronomers have calculated that a day lasts for three hours, whereas night lasts for only one - thus the windmill has three times the length of the nighttime when it is not required to power the lamp, and can therefore charge the battery.

For any parties interested in how this particular arrangement is scripted, it is a fairly simple three-part arrangement of shouts and listens. Only one permanent active listen is required, in the battery itself, on channel -70809.

Generator objects such as the windmill send energy to the battery by shouting a positive number on this channel. The battery then adds a number of OEUs (Ordinal Energy Units) to its store. At the moment, it is limited in capacity to 100,000 OEUs - more than this is released as a harmless shower of particles, though I would not expect it to ever get there.

The windmill’s script is more complicated as it also alters the speed of the rotation according to the current wind velocity, and produces different amounts of power depending again on wind velocity, but a simple example of this sort of object would be the Etheric Generator, a fairly simple device producing energy through ambient ether flow (unfortunately, not powerful enough to light the lamp).

Consumer objects such as the lamp request energy from the battery by shouting both a negative number and a randomised channel for a response, for example “-300,-2379845″. They then start to listen on their randomised channel for the battery’s reply, because the battery might not actually have enough energy to fulfil their request. The battery removes either the given number of OEUs from its store, or all of the remaining ones, whichever is less, and shouts back the number of OEUs provided.

Again, the lighthouse lamp itself is rather more complicated than is necessary to illustrate this point, seeing as how it must also rotate and check for sunset and sunrise, but I have constructed a simple and inefficient Flare Bulb which takes power and wastes it by merely spitting out particles.

At this point, you, the reader may or may not be curious as to the scripting of these things, and in case of the latter you may see relevant scripts in the “Power System” category of my “Ordinalpedia”.

So relatively simple, but more interesting things could perhaps be done with these basic principles. Note how the Flare Bulb only requests power once per minute usually, for efficiency, but if it does not receive its maximum, it will request more power once that has run out. On the matter of efficiency, as long as we do not have dozens of these devices or ones running at high timers, there is only one open listen, and the system should have relatively little impact on sim performance I would judge.

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What is the purpose of this, I hear the gentleman at the back ask? Yes, you, sir. You look to me like some sort of clerk or other man of business, possibly even an accountant. Where is your soul, sir? Do you have no appreciation of the joys of simple creative activity? Begone with you, and run through the park with no shoes on until you have re-united yourself with the pleasures of experience rather than commerce, or until you tread on a squirrel, at which point you may stop so as not to cause further harm.