Well, this one got a little out of hand!
I was recently showing a few of our engineers the Halloween experience I'd been building inside SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted when someone jokingly asked: "Could you build something like RuneScape in SolarWinds?"
Obviously, I haven't recreated RuneScape, but it did get me thinking. What if I took something as simple as a "Meet the Team" dashboard and turned it into a little open world you could actually explore?
So, welcome to The Monitoring Shire!
The idea was fairly simple. Instead of looking at a traditional dashboard with names, photos and job titles, why not have a small 3D world where you can walk around, find your colleagues and interact with them?
You can choose a character, explore the village and walk up to other team members for a bit of scripted village gossip.
The engineers started requesting their own characters and outfits. We ended up with a scuba diver, an F1 driver, a Spartan, a ninja, someone who wanted to be a literal cog in the machine... and somehow I ended up as an egg. 🥚
Then I started adding a few other things.
Fishing for packets? Why not.. 🎣
We now have Packet Loss Pond, where you can go fishing for packets.
There's something quite satisfying about recovering a lost packet with a fishing rod..
Then Halloween arrived... 👻
Since I'd already been experimenting with Halloween scenes, I thought I'd bring some of that into the village too.
There's now a little Halloween experience with a cinematic opening, glowing green water, a polling graveyard, a witch brewing alerts and three haunted packets you have to recover.
And apparently we needed flying too...🛩️
I added a little fighter you can board and fly around the world, complete with take-off, camera movement and landing.
This was actually a fun experiment in handling movement, different camera behaviors and interactions within the same environment.
the company car policy 🚗
Apparently the fighter wasn’t enough, so the village now has a Tesla-inspired
Roadster stunt too. Up the ramp, an airborne turn, a little hover and back down for a landing.
The Monitoring Shire: 2099 🚝
After adding the fighter and Roadster, I started wondering what the village might look like a little further into the future.
So I jumped forward to 2099, added some neon lighting, futuristic platforms and a skyrail moving around the village, complete with its own station.
I'm beginning to think this has gone slightly beyond the original "Meet the Team" dashboard. 😂
behind the scenes
The whole experience runs inside a SolarWinds dashboard using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with WebGL rendering the 3D world. The characters and scenery are generated directly through code, and I’ve been experimenting with animations, camera movement and interactions to bring it all to life.
It's really just a bit of fun for the THWACK community, but I think this is what happens when I keep asking myself, "I wonder if SolarWinds could..." and then get a little carried away finding out. 😬✌️
