 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 10 o'clock to 10.30 AM session of the 2018 Open Simulator Community Conference. As a reminder to our in-world and web audience, you can view the full conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org, and tweet your questions or comments, too, at OpenSimCC with the hashtag OSCC18. This session, we are happy to introduce a terrific presentation called, How Can We Show the Passage of Time in History Builds? Our speaker today is Graham Mills. Graham Mills is a retired university academic with an amateur interest in the history of Liverpool and its railways. He uses OpenSim as an aid to better understanding issues of place and scale in historical contexts. Welcome all. Let's begin the session. Hello, everybody. It's great to be here again. I've been working. I actually have a Speak Easy card. So for those who wish to have some sort of record of what's going on, hopefully that will show up for you. I will try not to read this. I've been developing this build for the last couple of years. You can see now that it's getting quite extensive. I should hasten to add that it's actually based in part on historical evidence, but also there's a fair amount of conjecture. So as you can see here, we have an arch and a building at the front here. And there's a certain amount of storytelling as is going on in the construction of those. We know that they existed. We don't know quite how they appeared. Beyond the entrance arch there, you can see there is a station and a train shed and just probably to see a yellow carriage there. So the key thing to make clear here is that this was, in many respects, the first railway terminus anywhere. So it has a lot of historical significance. It was the Liverpool terminus of the Liverpool and Manchester railway, which was established in 1830. And bear in mind that is seven years before Queen Victoria came to the throne. It was a Georgian enterprise. And it's a fascinating topic. It's not just about trains and locomotives. It's about context. It's about economics. It's about entrepreneurship. It's about the differences between the different cities, Liverpool and Manchester, turn out to be very different. Liverpool, a seaport, Manchester, dependent upon trade through the seaport, but very much a centre of manufacturing, particularly in the textile industry. Politics comes into it as well. So for me, I'm not an expert on any of this. It's a learning opportunity more than anything else. I should make it clear I've already forgotten to press on all the buttons. So there we go. Too many buttons. So you can see there's nothing left of Crown Street. It's now a public park. There is a sort of explainer or the remains of one and this giant ventilation shaft on the right that you can see in the slide. And there's a reverse view at the bottom left. And this, in fact, is for a tunnel that runs into the distance and, in fact, takes or took freight carriages down to the docks and back up again. It wasn't there in 1830. It was added around about the late 1890s. I'll just draw your attention to the little highlighted area in the reverse view. That I think is the location of a shaft, an eye that was used in the construction of the tunnel. And that becomes significant in the story later on. So a lot of it's based on published prints, but the problem was that these published prints are really a snapshot. So it's what people wanted to convey in terms of making railway travel attractive. It wasn't necessarily what was there over time and particularly during the phase of actually constructing the station because the station operated only for six years and the station was thereafter demolished quite rapidly. So there really is nothing left to speak of anymore. So I've got a couple of thoughts on how these changes over time might be represented. It's not enough just to have a single build stuck in time, however close to the actual representation of the final station. So the station was accessed via these tunnels that you can see. In fact, one of them is missing here. It's the one in the middle of the photograph at the top. This was the large freight tunnel that went down to the docks two kilometers long. So very extensive for the time. There is also next to it a small tunnel and this tunnel actually came into that bank. Hold on, my mic is open? Ah, okay, somebody else's mic is open. Okay, that's fine. So all I can say is that there were two questions that I was interested in getting answers to. One is who was the architect for the actual station building and roughly when was the station built? We know the project started in 1826 in terms of construction and then the opening in September 1830. So sometime during that phase can we narrow in on the actual date? As far as the architect is concerned, the principal engineer for the whole line was a guy called George Stevenson who often gets credit for lots of things in particular, devising the rocket locomotive. So he gets the credit for many things but in fact, there were a lot of other people involved. Sorry, I'm way behind on all my... So these are the tunnels. So the big step forward was to recognize that there actually is a building in Liverpool, a Georgian country house called Sudley that is remarkably similar to the original station. So you can see the passenger station as it would have been in 1831 at the bottom there and the tunnel at the end there is the tunnel to the area that we saw on the previous slide and the points I would make is that somebody suddenly at the top right there, you can see a photograph of it as it was this year, was constructed in 1824. The architect was a guy called John Woodside Casson and there are remarkable similarities also with the front door. If you look at the door in the middle there you can see that it's basically very similar to the appearance in the print below. In particular, you can see that if you replace that central portion, which has now got side lights and a top light with a huge massive door then you've basically got the same situation as you see in the station. So my hypothesis is that the guide that actually designed this is Casson. So how to represent this? This is one of the attempts that I've used. This is a kind of 3D spider-gram and what you can see here is effectively a clock face. So each of the tick marks that you can see going around the circumference represents a year, 1824 from the start, the formation of the station and going around until it's closure in 1836. All I'm trying to draw your attention to here however is the green marks at the top. And this simply shows that, and if you look at it from above you can see at the top right there those green marks. And what it shows is that Casson was actually active during that period. He was actually in his 60s so he probably didn't want to participate much more in the railway revolution that came but he was active for some years after the construction of the station. So my guess is that Casson inspired if not designed the station. So in terms of the actual layout this is an 1835 map. So it's right towards the end of the lifetime of the station. And what you can see is the station in the middle there is highlighted in blue. And it actually is a very small part of the entire area. In particular, you can see at the top right the windmill and there was a windmill present and you tend to think that the mill owner must have lost out as a consequence. But in fact, he actually sold the parcel to the railway company and he pumped water for them and eventually allowed sidings to come on to his land and all sorts. So he actually did very well after the presence of the railway. But you can see there are other yards, workshops, coal yards, the place developed quite substantially beyond the actual station part. And the tunnels coming in from the top and only one of them goes out of the bottom because of course we've got the carriage coming in under that bank that we saw. So how to represent this change in time? So this is the kind of least obtrusive mechanism that I've come up with basically to put a plaque with a timeline on. And I can just give you, oops, didn't mean to do that. Let's have a try again. So you can see here the notion of the timeline. And so it was a miller's field to start with and we can basically access different pictures illustrating the phases that the station development went through. So in fact, the addition of the train shed occurred after the station had been built. So for the grand opening, there was no train shed. In fact, people would have got a much better view as a consequence from the road at the back. What I would point out though is that the sort of blocks of color, the red is the duration during which the station was actually there until 1836 from the opening in 1830. But there's a gray area before that where we really don't understand precisely when the station was built. It was built sometime in that gray area. And there's a little button as well that you could use to serve note cards from and this can give additional context, which is fascinating for me knowing quite what was going on at this time. So that's what I call timeline. And it's the simplest, it's very unobtrusive. It spoils the immersion a little bit. The next one is kind of the opposite end of the scale. It's region scale, it's called time server. And basically what the idea is you have a number of link sets, which you want to appear or disappear at particular times. You could use a resin device as well, but this is how I have demonstrated it. So here we have the station resin in front of you and you can see the windmill at the top right there and the station. And this is probably around about 1830. We've got a carriage in there and everything. I've got this under control of the HUD so I can put you back to any particular time point that I want to choose. So here we have the situation in 1827 when the purchase of the field first took place. And the first thing that happened was that they leveled the field I would assume and then they put in this eye that I mentioned at the start, the shaft that ran down to the tunnel. Obviously it was underground which is kind of a little bit difficult to model. So you'll have to imagine that it's actually under there and it's a horse engine that is actually giving access and taking the spoil from the tunnel being excavated in both directions going down to the doxy one direction and back up to that cutting that we saw in the photograph in the opposite direction. And then in about 1828 I suspect everything suddenly happened. They'd finished by that stage the tunnel. They built the small tunnel through to the cutting and then they could build the station. So what I'm saying is effectively the presence of the eye, the shaft, would have stopped them developing. So the station we can tentatively say probably late 1828, possibly 1829. But we can see that there is no train shed there at present. If we go forward to 1831 however, we see the train shed appear and as much as expected from the print that we saw earlier on. So we've got effectively an operational station. And that probably pretty much summarizes what we could do. But it's a great, lovely, immersive experience being able to modify this. But unfortunately you can't actually accommodate multiple visitors as a consequence or they'd all be doing the same sort of thing. So it has a sort of downside to it as well. So the compromise, and this is the one that I'm demonstrating on the booth, is this thing called Time Frame. Here you have a, and it's not completely finished yet, but you have a sort of minified version of that build that we just saw, going through the same cycle of events potentially under control of the avatar, displaying images, but also pictures in front of the image and also grabbing the avatar camera and taking it into particular locations if you feel so inclined. So these are the choices. If you go for simplicity, you could go with note cards, you could go with posters, or you could use something like Timeline which attempts to combine both of them. If you want to use 3D, then you have the option of using Time Server. At a regional level, the problem, as we've said, is interference. You could also use teleports between separate builds or you could swap archive files or files. You could have resing scripts and I think Ramesh is going to be talking about ResMela later on and that would be an alternative there as well. And then, if you want to get to the situation where you have low or zero interference, you could go for something like Time Frame where you're working with sub-region, model-based, booth-style interfaces. Obviously, you'd need to stick them outside the station. They would look a little bit odd inside, but they could be used as some kind of introduction to the build. I've also played around a little bit with Convoy which people were talking about earlier on to generate mesh files. That's another alternative rather than just shrinking builds and simplifying them as you've seen here. And then panoramas and cube maps, again, alternatives. There are other areas of Crown Street that I have started to model. There is the mill parcel which I talked about. This became extremely busy and complex by around about 1850. You can see that it's been absorbed into what the station then became, which was a coal yard. And beyond that, there was also a goods office much later in around about 1890. So it became effectively the location where coal was imported for the use of what became a big and thriving city of Liverpool. And basically, it was a way of taking coal to people for heating and cooking purposes in the upper reaches of the city. So what next? Well, Crown Street, as I say, closed. It became a cattle station. The replacement station was a much bigger one, much closer to the city centre. There was no need for horse omelette buses. And this was Lime Street. And again, I started to model Lime Street and the area around that as well. And although it's a much bigger station, it's still only 1836. So it's a year before the large London Termini, like Houston, actually began to be built. So it's a very early example of a mainline terminus, which would eventually go down to London. Okay, well, thank you very much. I do apologise for having overruns slightly. And I'll take any questions now. Yeah, okay, it looks like there's a question looking for the name of the app that you had mentioned. Kay was wondering, is that Condor, did you say? Convor, C-O-N-V-O-A-R. It does a good job. The problem is that it supports this format to GITF. AI Austin did a nice blog. Yes, that's right, Rhiannon. And about it, but there isn't a huge amount of support in other programmes for Convor, for that particular format, unfortunately. Okay, I think we have to wrap it up, but thank you very much, Graham, for your terrific presentation. Everyone, give them a round of applause. You can continue talking separately if you have additional questions. Thank you all so much for listening. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. Following this session, the next session will begin at 10.30 a.m. Pacific Time in this keynote region and is entitled DreamGrid Open Simulator, a simple-to-use Windows-compatible OpenSim Frontend. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC-18 poster expo in the OSCC-Expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the HyperGrid tour resources in OSCC-Expo 2 region, along with sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC-Expo regions. Thank you again to our speakers and the audience.