I last visited Sorrow, the atmospheric designed by Voshie Paine and the Lollipop Kids on the homestead region of Paper Dinosaurs, in October 2015. At that time, the region was in the grip of a substantial downpour, which framed a tragic back story concerning a once happy family estate, built on money and handed down through the generations until tragedy came upon the last of the family line.
Those days – and the sad estate – have now long past, the region since having been made over for winter by Voshie and Dizzy Sparrow. The two islands and their houses have passed into the mists of time, as have the rains. In their stead – for the time being, at least – sits a single, snow-covered island, which rises from a sea frozen mirror-smooth under a darkening sky.
This is a place of ethereal beauty, the island rising tall and craggy, lines softened by its snowy mantle, and upon which a single stone sits, reached by stone steps winding up a narrow cleft. Greyhounds stand outside of the tower, whether on guard, or keeping vigil, or for some other reason, is for the visitor to decide.
The dogs suggest the tower is a home for someone, and the blazing fire warming the ground floor further testifies to this, as does the bedroom above. However, where they may have wandered to, is for your imagination to decide.
Vegetation is spare here; the only greenery resides inside the tower, while outside, trees raise their hoar frosted branches towards the sky as they rise from the frozen waters, as – here and there – do tall lotus blossoms, also seemingly frozen in time. Also out on the water sits aki69’s Stairs for moonlight, a gacha item which has been appearing in regions across the grid of late, making as it does an eye-catching piece. Here, it adds a further touch to the ethereal look and feel to the region.
In October, Sorrow presented a place reflective of its name: a setting filled with melancholy. With this design, the region offers something very different: a place suggestive of enchantment frozen in time; a place of quiet beauty and solitude. Yet there does also seem to be a faint echo, within its beauty, of the region’s name; almost as if whoever liver within that single tower has come here to leave their sorrows behind.
Pearl Grey drew me towards The Village & BarDeco after she blogged about it in January. A quarter region in size, it is described as, “a small village on the water where you can stroll beside the sea in a Zen atmosphere and relaxed – a drink and listen to the music of the best DJs in SL at BarDeco.”
The club sits at the far end of the The Village relative to the SLurl I’ve given above; those available through Search may well drop visitors a lot closer, but I’ve opted for this approach so that you can wander the length of The Village and take in the full atmosphere, which right now is one of a mist-shrouded evening or morning, mindful of late autumn / early winter.
The road leading into The Village is a foretaste of things to come. Unpaved, it is rutted and perhaps not in the bast of condition. It also splits at the SLurl I’ve given above, to provide two parallel routes into the hamlet, which run wither side of a large rocky outcrop.
Follow one arm of the road and you’ll travel past an old farm, while taking the other will take you alongside an old railway spur line which presumably once served The Village. Those days are now long gone; the tracks are overgrown, and nature is slowly laying claim to the carcases of two old boxcars which appear to have been derailed in some past accident. A mist is drifting in from the sea the other side of the old railway tracks, making this second route into The Village somewhat more atmospheric (and, if you’re on a lower-end system, perhaps a little challenging as well).
Like the roads leading to it, The Village looks to be past its prime; all of the building look tired, paint fading in the salty air, tin roofs rusting, wood panels in need of repair. Even the vehicles here have seen better days, although the single trawler moored and the little docks looks to be in better condition than the nearby road vehicles, suggesting it is cared for and still plying the seas.
BarDeco sits within what might have once been a warehouse, a place as careworn and suffering from the passing of the years as the rest of The Village. Sans roof, canvas awnings strung from the rafters provide a measure of protection for those on the dance floor when inclement weather comes visiting. Nevertheless, going on the numbers there when Caitlyn and I visited, BarDeco clearly offers a worm welcome together with good music.
Nor is the music restricted to the club; there is a live performance stage facing the church, and one of the largest stores is a record shop. Other artists have settled here as well, as peek through the brightly lit windows of an old factory outbuilding will reveal.
All told, this is an atmospheric place (make sure you have local sounds on to catch the ambient sound scape as well), one which again demonstrates you don’t have to have an entire region just to build something special to share with others. For the SL traveller, it offers an interesting destination to explore, with plenty of photographic opportunities. Add to that BarDeco and the music, and The Village makes for an interesting visit. It even has what could be thought of as an indirect hat-tip to a certain other Village of television history sitting in the town square!
The City is a sprawling 4-region build designed by Betty Tureaud at the LEA. It is a place which at first might seem a little baffling to the casual visitor and those familiar with Betty’s work, which is generally hallmarked by the use of bright, usually shifting, colours and interactive elements.
Here, however, one arrives on a vast desert plain, vast and flat, with only a poem by Betty, delivered via note card, and a whispered instruction to follow the footprints for guidance. Do as the latter instructs, and you’ll come (by way of a skeleton, which has a story of its own to tell when touched) to a DC3 belonging to Adventure Airlines. This will, by the magic of teleporting, carry you away from the desert and to the edge of a city, rising like Las Vegas from a flat plain, albeit this one covered by the first signs of Betty’s familiar vivid colours.
The City sits at the centre of the four regions, surrounded by the multi hued flat plain. To see this at its best, you will at least need to run your viewer with Advanced Lighting Model (ALM – Preferences > Graphics) enabled. This shouldn’t place too much of a performance load on older / less powerful systems, and it is necessary to have on in order to appreciate The City fully, with colours washing over the tall buildings and across the airships flying overhead.
Some of the buildings in The City may have various degrees of familiarity about them. The western edge is dominated by the instantly recognisable form of La Grande Arche de la Fraternité, located in the La Défense business district of Paris. Amidst the taller buildings one can also find New York’s Empire State Building, Toronto’s CNN Tower, Malmö’s Turning (or Twisting) Tower, Tapei 101, the tallest environmentally green building in the world and London’s Swiss Re building (often referred to as “the Gherkin” due to its distinctive shape), whilst the Guggenheim Museum, Copenhagen’s Opera House and more and be found as one wanders the streets (do beware of the trains!).
The building can all be touched, offering links to their respective Wikipedia pages in return. The CNN Tower also provides an elevator ride to it top. Other interactive elements can also be found as one tours – a football can be kicked around a stadium, seats in the parks can be sat on, and pink boxes scattered around the edge of The City offer a neat helicar designed by Betty which can be piloted and carry up to two people. As you travel back and forth between the regions straddled by the build, so to does the time of day change, allowing you to see it under different lighting conditions.
The City is very much an interactive installation, touching and clicking and having local sounds fully enabled is very much required when exploring. It offers an interesting way of discovering more about modern architecture and some of the world’s most famous buildings.
The new year has brought with it a new region design for Sera Bellic’s demonstration region for her Lick Sim Designs. The rural fields and rolling hills of Belleck House, redolent as they were of the Scottish lowlands or the countryside of Ireland, have now passed, and their place taken by another outdoor scene; one this time inspired by the North American continent.
Experience the Adirondacks offers visitors a taste of the Adirondack massif in the north-east of upstate New York in North America. This is a roughly circular dome of mountains whose formation owes much to ancient glaciation, and which shelters a range of wetlands as well as being home to the Adirondack Park.
In Second Life, Sera offers a similar environment to visitors: the region is surrounded by high mountains, some of them showing rounded tops and deep v-shaped flanks, suggestive of glaciers having helped carve them into being. Within their shelter, the region offers a gently sloping landscape with rocky outcrops to one end and wooded slopes leading down to a curving bay to the east. This, in turn, is protected north and south by long fingers of wooded headlands, the northern one providing access to the region’s single cabin, built out over the water.
This is a scene from the great outdoors, where physical activity can be the order of the day, and this latter point is immediately evidenced to visitors upon their arrival. The landing point sits on a large wooden platform sitting over the flooded floor of a sheer shaded crater-like hole, a waterfall plunging into it over the precipice to one side. Unless one resorts to cheating and the use of flight, the only way off the platform is by either a walk under the water or a swim across it with the aid of a “floatie”, rezzed by touching the blue sphere floating over the water.
There are further watery activities to be found as you explore: swimming is available in the curving bay to the east, canoes can be obtained from various points and used to paddle around the region’s shoreline, while for the adventurous, a climb up to the plateau at the southern end of the region will reveal an opportunity for cliff diving – just be warned the water at the foot of the cliffs is a little shallow!
For those seeking something quieter, there are a number of seating and cuddle spots scattered about the region, including a very well-appointed tent for those who take their glamping comforts seriously 🙂 .
So if you’re looking for a brief break from the normal grind and fancy a little fresh, mountain air mixed with a little swimming or canoeing, why not Experience the Adirondacks for a while?
Project Bento is an ongoing project running as a collaboration between Linden Lab and content creators / animators to extend what is possible with the standard Second Life avatar. It’s also the subject of a series of reports and updates in this blog and, more importantly in this particular context, the subject of segment #35 of The Drax Files World Makers.
At just under 3.5 minutes in length, the segment is somewhat shorter than previous editions of World Makers, but what it lacks in time, it more than makes up for in terms of content. Anyone wishing to grasp the intent of the project, its complexity, and its collaborative nature can do no better than to sit down and watch World Makers 35.
Bento’s roots as a real project go back to around the start of 2015. The Second Life team at the Lab (which is probably larger than many people are prepared to give credit, comprising as it does product managers, engineers, designers, coders, the viewer team, etc.), periodically get together to discuss how and where they might improve Second life and offer new features.
Improvements to the avatar skeleton is one of those things that has long been requested by SL users and content creators, and thanks to work previously undertaken under-the-hood within Second Life, both within the servers and the viewer, it had, by early 2015, reached the point where it was felt it could be undertaken in a manner which would both yield a positive outcome.
Vir Linden, Senior Software Engineer at Linden Lab, and technical project lead for Bento
Vir Linden has been the engineering lead in the project, which is by managed from a product perspective by Troy Linden and from an engineering standpoint by Oz Linden. It has over the months involved many from the SL team at the Lab including Aura Linden, Grumpity Linden, Dan Linden, Simon Linden, Rider Linden, and Coyot Linden, many of whom feature in the World Maker’s Video.
Perhaps most importantly of all, from a user’s perspective, is that from very early on, Bento featured – one might say almost driven – by content creators themselves, including Cathy Foil, Siddean Munro, Flea Bussy, Toady Nakamura, and Matrice Laville.
These are the people who focused on what bones should be thought about in order to extend the avatar skeleton, and who undertook a lot of the work testing ideas and feasibility, options for integration into tools already available to support avatar creation (such as Avastar, Mayastar), and so on. Several of the LDPW moles were also involved in the work, offering input and ideas based on their long-term experiences as content creators and developers.
Meetings for the project were held on a weekly basis (transitioning into the public Bento User Group meetings on Aditi once the work had reached to point of being available in a project viewer), and both Drax and I were invited along to witness the collaborative nature of the work between residents and Lab staff (although I admit, my attendance was sporadic, as the scheduled meeting time ended up being awkward for me to make in the latter part of 2015).
Bento project meetings were held in-world, allowing Lab staff and content creators / animators develop the project collaboratively.
The complexity evident in Bento can be summed up in the fact that there are now 106 bones in the SL avatar skeleton, plus the original 26 collision volumes of the basic avatar, giving a total of 132 joints. These new bones include:
11 extra limb bones for wings, additional arms, or extra legs.
6 tail bones
30 bones in the hands (all 10 fingers!)
30 bones for facial expressions
2 other new bones in the head for animating ears or antennae
13 new attachment points associated with the new bones
Bento has huge implications for avatars of all kinds – even bunnies, as Etheria Parrott demonstrates with the facial features on this Bento Bunny . watch the video
Getting to this point alone took time and effort – and no small amount of testing. How many bones could the avatar realistically support within Second Life? What would be the data load placed on the simulator (allowing for a considerable amount of work the simulator used to do having been moved to the CDN service, something we’ll also be seeing more of in the future)? What happens when you get a lot of animated avatar appendages all operating in the same space?
These are just some of the questions which had to be addressed by those initially working on Bento, and are still being considered now in the more open Bento beta. Nor is it just a case of providing the bones and the options for animating them: there’s also the matter of ensuring the data relating to bone movements, etc., can be reliably managed, tracked, communicated and visualised by both the simulator and the viewer.
All of which adds up to a complex project, but it is one seen as genuinely important by those at the Lab working on it, as Troy, Coyot, Aura, and Vir note in the video:
[Troy] The avatar is an extension of the resident. It’s an extension of their personality in a Very detailed way. [Coyot] Enabling that imaginative element of ourselves is really important and not to be under-rated. People can go, “ah well, it’s fantasy, whatever,” but the imagination is an expression of who we really are. [Aura] By allowing avatars to have these new expressive modes, we can really increase this visual communication that people have. [Vir] That’s going to increase the sense of presence in the 3D world.
Windlight Magazine and Art Gallery has relocated in-world. Now located in its own region, the gallery remains the centrepiece of Windlight Magazine in-world activities and the home to the Windlight Art Fellowship Programme.
As well as the gallery, the region is home to the Ristorante Ivanna, Chromatic Gallery, featuring the art of Windlight founder and owner, Johannes1977 Resident, office space for magazine staff, and the Tribute and Crown pub, which is conveniently located a short walk from the offices (hey! writing for a magazine is thirsty work, OK?!).
Ristorante Ivanna
The region has yet to formally open, but work is progressing apace, with the gallery almost completely set-up, and members of the Windlight Staff gradually moving into the new office accommodation.
As the gallery now occupies its own region, there are a limited number of rental units which will be made available as the region opens. These will be available at L$200 per week, with a 100 LI allowance, and are placed in a prime spot facing the gallery building. Artists wishing to have a studio shop will get initial preference on the units when rentals open.
The Tribute and Crown pub – handy for after office hours – with the boathouse through the trees, where visitors can enjoy 7 seas fishing and other pastimes
“We’ve decided to make the move so we can house larger art shows,” John told me as we discussed the relocation. “It also means we can support 3D projects as well.” Having a full region certainly gives an added sense of space to the Windlight facilities, and as a member of the staff, I have to admit the new staff offices causes me to get a little creative in setting out my workspace 🙂 .
So, if you have a landmark for the Windlight Gallery, do be sure to hop over to the new location and update it; and while you’re there, why not have a wander around?
Sorrow (click any image for full size)
Sorrow (click any image for full size)
