Action Station

 Soul Grid has a great tagline - 'Living with friends' and it lives up to the name with a very friendly crowd on hand to meet the Safari gang on our arrival this week. Rudi Bakerly: Hallo, willkommen im Soul

Nasti Bakerly: hello and welcome

Star Ravenhurst: Hello Hello!!

Miguel Torres: hello  to all

Cosa Wiefel: hallo

Rudi Bakerly: Yes some residents wanted to join us

Nasti Bakerly [de→en]: nice to see you all here

Thirza Ember: wow 24 people!

Luna Lunaria: that's a lot

Star Ravenhurst: Good crowd!

Our first destination (you will find destination 2, the Emporium of Luna Lunaria, in a separate post) is a colorful, warm and friendly place with a name that has huge meaning in the history of Opensim - Weltraumbahnhof. The word means 'space station' but ask any oldbie what it really means, and they will tell you it was the iconic hypergrid hub built by Spike Sol about ten years ago, an essential place for discovering new places, good shops, interesting events, and new friends in opensim. That build is now gone, and this is its successor the creaton of Rudi and Nasti Backerly, owners of Soul grid.

Spooqued

 It's noon SLT on the first Thursday of the month, so that means it's Frenchie time! This month the Soiree Franco involved a visit to Quebec, in the form of the grid Creanovale, home to Kelso Uxlay and Dabici Straulino.

For those who don't know, once a month the French-speaking community of opensim has a grid jumping event. Things start off on Eden Cat's little grid, where there is a meet-and-greet, in Voice and in French. A great way for you to polish your pronunciation and irregular verbs! But don't worry, if you

Playing Ketchup

 Part one of this week's Safari was a visit to Aire Mille Flux, one of Opensim's oldest continuously operating grids, focused entirely on art.  There are a number of builds by the grid owner Marc Moana, and other builds that originally debuted in Sl, but have been ported here. This is an important aspect of Opensim, as a repository for installations that would otherwise no longer be visitable. 

Due to RL, our host wasn't able to join us on the grid. That is risky, because if anything goes wrong, the sim will crash (sometimes the whole grid, if it's a small one!) and there is nobody at the back end to start it up again. To try to mitigate any teleport shocks, we had a portal set up at the clubhouse on HG Safari, so we could arrive gradually.

I Dew

We all do so love builds by Azi Az and Danger Lytton. In the second part of this week's adventure, we visited the Dew Drop Islands, and what a contrast from the first part of our tour! 

Azi Az and Danger Lytton

This blog covered the Dew Drop  a few months back when it first opened. At that time, the sim was attached to OSGrid. Since then it's been moved over to Danger and Azi's personal grid, called Shipyards, where it is one among a whole clutch of jewel-like regions. HG Address, as always, at the end of the post.

We did manage to crash Sauce, our first destination, but with no casualties, as we were all kind of expecting the crash so we just relogged and rolled up a little early at the Dew Drop Islands, in ones and twos.

Azi Az: Hi Thirza :))) Welcome

Thirza Ember: woohoo we survived!

Kelso Uxlay: Drinking stuff was risky

Namirea

 It's Halloween season, and if you can't contain yourself, then Nani Ferguson and Ange Menges have the perfect Hunt for you - Namirea, on OSGrid. 

Plenty of containers here - a whole ship of them - unfortunately, shipwrecked. On a volcanic island. With zombies and giant spiders and all kinds of other monsters. Some people have all the luck.

Breen's Dreams

Nyx Breen: Hello everyone, and welcome to Aedifex in the AMV grid; Aedifex is an ancient greek name for Creator. 

Nyx Breen

 Nyx Breen:  Today we will explore both sides of Aedifex, the land side of highly detailed nature and builds. Then we will explore the skies of Aedifex and the 3D Artscapes that fill the heavens above us. Aedifex is a 4x4 70,000 prim land surrounded by water, allowing one to explore by boat, vehicle, horse, and walking. At the main welcome area of Aedifex for the land, you will find an NC giver with LMs for all the significant points of Aedifex. 

Snoots in the City

Mal Burns: Hi Snoots

Alexina Proctor: hi da Snoots.

Prax Maryjasz: Hello da Snoots

Sun Tzu: Greeting Snoots and thanks for having us

Sun Tzu: Odd my text does not show up in local for some reason

Kelso Uxlay: Hooo laggy

Snoots Dwagon: There are LOTS of textures and thousands of prims.  So it may take a while to rez.  Please walk in little circles to help it. :D

Thundergod Thor: It's been a while since I've been here but it's an awesome build.

          Lag is blamed on lots of things, on bandwidth, on less than stellar graphics cards, on poorly compiled scripts, on the Viewer (always a favorite), on server configuration, on voodoo - the list is exhaustive and exhausting.  That makes it an interesting experiment to have two avatars inworld, both on the same computer and using the same viewer, both having loaded the region previous to the trip, but each experiencing the sim very differently. 

          Safari Regulars will not be at all surprised to learn that the Thirza who arrived before the rest of the group had zero lag either in chat or in textures (call it 'owner's eye' - the way the sim creator experiences their own build), but the Thirza who was one of the last arrivals suffered the classic symptoms: seeing clouds, falling through floors, rubber-banding, and stuck in chat lag limbo. Immensely frustrating.

          It's handy to see the Safari this way,  it's a reminder that our trips have something of the quality of the bumblebee - flying in the face of all probability. 

Snoots Dwagon: Let me know when ready to start Thirza. :D

Thirza Ember: if you're suffering lag, friends, bear in mind the poor old server is trying to hand out hundreds of textures to everyone, so give it a chance 

Snoots Dwagon: There's THOUSANDS. :D

Lucy Afarensis: I sat but I am not

Alan.Scot: orange clouds everywhere :(

Dabici Straulino: even chat is laggy

Lorin Tone: yes

Thundergod Thor: It is indeed.

Snoots Dwagon: A bit of a note on building technique, for you builders out there. First, I am moving around and have no lag.   So such will have a great deal to do with your computer. Replicant City was built using original, ZERO-LAG scripting

Alan Scot: I got  a superfast pc and exposed breasts