Horologist Needed

[Emilin Nakamori]

I have constructed a functioning unScripted Mechanical Clock that works entirely using SL Physics.  It runs, but it does not run well.  I am looking for someone who is a Horologist who may be able to advise me on ways to improve the Clock.  You can find the Clock up and, hopefully, running at RWM (211,74,4049).

[Wulfie Reanimator]

SL physics are neither accurate, reliable, nor consistent. Good luck!

[Kardargo Adamczyk]

I was about to say, its been done before, I remember an article in "New Worlds Notes", after a bit of searching i found the clock, and its.... yours..

[animats]

Oh, that's a nice piece of work.

That pin-wheel escapement is basically OK. Standard early tower clock design. But the wedges are going so far into the pins that they sometimes get jammed and push the pin wheel very slightly out of line. That's a situation with random friction, which has to be messing up the timekeeping. You can hear the different collisions as it runs. Some ticks sound different than others. You can even see the pin wheel go out of line slightly.

It's a nice problem to figure out how to make an accurate mechanical clock in SL. It may be possible. The physics engine in non-overloaded sims runs at 45Hz. If you can make things repeatable enough that your error is never more than half a physics cycle, it might lock into the rhythm of the physics engine and keep good time. At least until some avatar with too much stuff TPs in and causes "time dilation" as the server struggles to keep up by slowing the physics engine.

(I tried to build a tower clock once, for  a steampunk convention. I got the laser cutter files for a wooden clock and used them with a plasma cutter to cut the parts from steel. But TechShop's old plasma cutter was too inaccurate and the verge escapement didn't work.)