One racetrack, a little over 4 square kilometers of space (or 4,194,304sqm). This is my first attempt to build something with a bit of scale to it, now that we’ve got mega-regions working in OpenSim. (and vehicles.)

To start with, I need a terrain large enough to encompass the entire area (there’s no way in hell I’m manually terraforming this one) – courtesy of DeepThink, I have a license to World Machine Professional, a commercial terrain editing package that absolutely kicks ass. World Machine builds terrains in a semi-layered manner, then allows you to combine those through a railroad-style filter scheme.

Grabbing one of the World Machine samples as a base (since it had road layers already setup), I modified them and redrew the paths to build a 16×4 sim (4096×1024) terrain and rendered it. You can see the output in World Machine below, of course from this scale it doesn’t really do it justice.

Travelling at 55.5m/sec (200kph, 124mph) – you will cross into another region-sized space every 5 seconds; but the total racetrack length means that even at this speed it will take over a minute to complete, encompassing a minimum of 16 region-sized areas, which in turn is only a small subset of the entire space availible. Taking a picture of the terrain loaded into the mega region, you can see just how insignificant an avatar is at this scale.

This is compounded by the fact that the viewer refuses to put it’s “farclip” beyond about 4 sims distance, so at best you can see 1/4 of the track at once. The ringworld walls are each about 150m tall at this scale; and geographical features are quite recognisable as geographical features.

Of course, we can’t just leave it at that – to quote Mythbusters, “if it is worth doing, it is worth overdoing”, so I pulled up the terrain in world machine again, and decided to go a little bigger. I originally made it at 48×4 sims, however had to crop back to 32×4 due to my machine needing more memory to do the resulting 12,288 x 1024 terrain without swapping on disk constantly (resulting in a multi-hour render). For scale reference, the smaller of the two circles is about the dimensions of a single normal region.

Part 2 will cover texturing and detailing this race track, followed by some first impressions of how it behaves with Kitto’s new vehicle patches. Once I’m done with it, it will go up live on the Hypergrid (and probably OSgrid) for public perusal.