today i had an a-ha moment.
but, i'm running ahead of myself... let me back up.
Limkopi Davis, Derekcsy Cortes, Lim PIkajuna and myself, are building Temasek to be a showcase of the best of Singapore.
Temasek is designed primarily to be a cultural and touristic build, and a social space.
the astute among you will notice that the one critical word missing from the preceding description is 'geography'. this may (or may not) be surprising, given my academic background as a geographer, and my professional training in geography education. in fact, something i realised recently was that what i am building at Temasek, is a natural extension into three-dimensions, of something i was - and still am - very proud of back in the mid-'90s, namely No Place Like Home, which (i daresay) was in its day the definitive web-based resource on the geography of Singapore :-P
anyway, although Temasek is not designed to be explicitly for geographical education, since i am, after all, the owner of the sim, i think it should reflect at least in some ways, an authentic geography (although, not necessarily authentic to SIngapore).
so, for example, yesterday, i spent some time setting up the weather system at Temasek, using my good friend Ludvaig Lindman's Ultimate Weather. i use Ludvaig's weather system at the Raymaker Field Studies Centre at Norma, where i offer visitors an opportunity to experience (and compare) real-time weather conditions in a variety of cities across the globe. at Temasek, however, i've configured the system to reflect real-time weather only for SIngapore.
that said, there was something not satisfactory about the outcome of the weather rendering when i activated the system at Temasek, but i could not put my finger on quite what it was.
today, however, i had the a-ha moment.
i realised that what i had done wrong, was to space out the weather engines (all thirty-six of them) evenly across the sky, in a six-by-six grid, covering the entire sky at Temasek.
no wonder the weather looked artificial.
so what i did today was to re-position the weather engines, using the typical cloud-distribution across the island of Singapore as a model. unlike Singapore's north-south wind orientation, i arbitrarily dictated an east-west orientation for Temasek. i therefore positioned the engines in a tighter density across the eastern shore of Temasek.
second, bearing in mind the effect of topography on rainfall, i also positioned the weather engines closer together where Temasek has its areas of high relief.
third, i actually remembered to think in three-dimensions :-) recalling my head-knowledge that cumulonimbus clouds are anvil-shaped, and matching it with my own experience of the cloud formations one sees when flying over the Andaman Sea, it occurred to me that i could actually position some of the weather engines above others, instead of all on a singular two-dimensional planar surface in the sky. this is, in fact, exactly what i did.
and i'm pretty pleased with the result, even if i do say so myself :-)
sunset over the mudflats at Temasek
