As per my 2018 week #3 Product Meeting notes, the Sansar Client Atlas has been updates to include the new Popularity sort option and currency indicator.
When selected from the sort drop-down menu (see below), the Popularity option orders the listed experiences in a tab by current real-time use, so those with avatars actually visiting them will be listed first. In addition, those experiences with avatars in them have a concurrency indicator in the top left corner of their thumbnail image. This is a near real-time indicator that the experience is in use at the time it is seen in the Atlas.
The banner images from that Product Meeting report was an advanced look at a new experience by Anu Amun, which is now publicly listed in the Atlas, by the name Copper Valley. A work-in-progress, it offers a mechanoid landscape inspired by steampunk.
The spawn point for the experience drops visitors onto a platform roughly in the middle of this curious landscape. A raised walkway runs behind the spawn point, linking a tall windmill, sails slowly turning, with stairs leading up to another platform. Steps also offer ways down to the lands below – on one side a row of little houses, their walls and roofs seemingly made of copper – walls green and aged-looking, the roofs pristine.
On the other side, through peculiar trees, looking like they’ve been cut from blocks of metal or cut from heavy sheets, and past Mecano-like seats, to where massive blocks rotate as if on long axles hidden just below ground, rising and falling from flat fields of screwed-down metal plates. Overhead, great bulky clouds drift across a dusty sky with “normal” clouds at much higher altitudes.
It’s a strange environment, complete with it own enchantment; a mechanical place where the sandy hills are gradually giving way to more of the metal plate fields with their rotating axles of blocks. So much so, that in one corner, the “fields” are still under construction. Exploring this realm is a case of following the elevated paths, climbing the stairs, descending the steps and following your nose – but be warned! Some surfaces aren’t as solid as others.
Having enjoyed Anu’s Anu, I admit to being curious as to where Copper Valley might go. In the meantime, it makes for a most unusual visit.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 