Safarying

Thursday, May 11, 2023

Safari Goes Gunga

Thia week's first destination is a work in progress with a wow factor that will amaze! We visited the Naboo region on Kitely, the brainchild of Mike Lorrey. With a name like that it could hardly be anything but Star Wars themed, and the giant sim while not yet complete already features some fabulous environments, like this Gunga City Deesko in a lake to the South. It was the venue for a 'May the Fourth' party last week, and the vibe was still pitched perfectly when we arrived. The HG address etc, you will find as always at the end of the post.

Thirza Ember: Favorite Star Wars person? I am going with Baby Yoda
James Atlloud: Grogu is adorbz
Star Ravenhurst: Star Wars?
Wizardoz Chrome: Darth Vader
Forest Azure: Spock :)
Forest Azure: /me covers her ears... finally picked one, Jabba the Hutt
Mal Burns: chewbakka - he never messes uip his lines
James Atlloud: Filoni is doing good stuff. The Gungan underwater society is quite a vision from George Lucas. The idea of two separate civilizations on one planet, Naboo, is kinda interesting.
Thirza Ember: is the Star Wars universe comparable with the Opensim Universe?
Forest Azure: well, people die there - a lot even, so no
James Atlloud: Oh, good question.  I see the opensim universe as somewhat tribal and tribalism was big in the Mandalorian series.
Thirza Ember: also, no stormtroopers
Forest Azure: but there are jabba's :)
James Atlloud: Thought I had a stormtrooper outfit, but that must be back on Second life.
Thirza Ember: Yay Mike in the house!!!
James Atlloud: Hello Captain Lorrey
Mike Lorrey, Star Wars Edition
Mike Lorrey: welcome to Naboo! This is the center of Gunga City which you might remember from Episode 1, The Phantom Menace
James Atlloud: Is Hera Sundalla here? 
Mike Lorrey: No, I haven't made Captain Hera yet, that is from Rebels though
James Atlloud: She's my Star Wars crush - hee hee
Mike Lorrey: Hah, I like Darth Talon, who is rather naughty but a hot twilek... I first started building Naboo when I first joined Kitely in 2016, at the time I was just a prim builder, but found that building one of these pods took between 400-500 prims, so I had to learn Blender, first just to merge the prims into one; over time learned to optimize them to be lower complexity. At the time Serenity Jewel taught blender inworld with the Blender Buddies group, nowadays I'm no longer the learner, I am the master lol
James sitting on the submarine
Thirza Ember: jedi? 
Mike Lorrey: Blender jedi sure
Thirza Ember: may the torus be with you
Mike Lorrey: so I reduced the complexity of one of these pods from well over 100k vertexes down to about 12k today, which has allowed for me to build this city out to scale
James Atlloud: It loaded really fast for me.
Star Ravenhurst: WOW that is amazing!, It loaded fast for me as well
Mike Lorrey: I have made the Bongo II submarine that Obiwan, Quilgon and Jar Jar used
Mike Lorrey: there are 7 basic pod designs, this one we're in is the Gunga City Deesko, over there adjacent to it is the Boss Council Chamber, then within the main dome is the residential pods all around us, the main dome is its own pod design but large scale. Then outside the dom are four types of independent pods based on the number of doorways, 1, 2, 4 or 4. My long term plan has been to convert the region terrain to mesh so I can have underground/underwater tunnels just like in the movie
Tosha Tyran: neat works!
James Atlloud: Wow, I'd not noticed the 'large' dome.. gracious!
Mike Lorrey: it not well known but with mesh, if you have many copies of the same mesh in the region, the server only has to calculate the collision mesh for 1 of them
Thirza Ember: great glassy effect down here.
Thirza Ember: is the build a tribute to the show, or is it for roleplay, or events? ...not that it can't be all 3 of course
Mike Lorrey: the intent is to build a roleplay community, but we have weekly parties here with various DJs and musicians and  recently I've been working to complete the Naboo Spaceport. Weve hosted Seanchai's Storylink Radio here for star wars performances.
James Atlloud: Do you have any costume givers?   I'm feeling conspicuously trek.
Mike Lorrey: yes there are some costume givers just outside this pod on the catwalk
Luna Lunaria: We likes Star Wars, we does
Mike Lorrey: if you like smaller avies, you might ask Ada Radius for her Jawa avie or her Baby Yoda, I think she might be putting those on sale at her new store in Discovery Grid that is opening soon
Thirza Ember: oh the bucking R2D2 !!!
Mike Lorrey: yes Kayaker made the R2 Rodeo machine.  I've been coding my droids gradually to have more features, this green and white one, R12, plays various droid sounds and other clips and will poke random people
Mike Lorrey: At the spaceport I've been working on some new starships of my own design but are thematically similar to in-canon ships
Luna Lunaria: Mike and I like ships :-)
James Atlloud: spaceships got me into all this stuff.  Now I want the post-scarcity society.
Mike Lorrey: lol if you've been to the spaceflight museum you know I'm all about the spaceships. 
Mike complete with light saber
 Mike Lorrey:  I just finished my first lightsaber recently though I want to improve it before making it available, the smaller of the two new ships is a Star Yacht which will be available when its finished scripting. It will be usable as a home skybox, or flyable and hopefully will have functional inter-sim and inter-grid hyperspace jump ability. Once the spaceport and the yacht are finished I can finish Theed Royal City up on the mesa.
Lavia.Lavine: A good build is never finished Mike.
Mike Lorrey: we also plan to create a speeder bike course through the region and host speeder races
Star Ravenhurst: Oh that sounds fun Mike.
Mike Lorrey: if you cam over to the far end of the spaceport (you may need to increase your draw distance), you see in those octagonal landing bays, the chrome and gold ship in there, that is the Star Yacht
Thirza Ember: I can see a tornado
Mike Lorrey: yes the tornado is another project, it can follow set spirograph patterns of radiuses you set. 
Luna Lunaria: isnt that cool? love that whirlwind
Mike Lorrey: the tornado is fun, my one complaint about it is that the inherent limits of particle systems make it hard to have big cloud systems. There's two landing bays up north, one with the Millennium Falcon, the other has the Star Yacht - that one also hosts a squadron of N-1 Naboo Starfighters. Luna made the N-1 starfighters
Luna Lunaria
Thirza Ember: how do you come up with your designs Mike? do you make them based on photos, or are there blueprints, or something?
Playing Dejarik 
Mike Lorrey: some things I do from pictures, like these pods are all authentic to the movies. The Star Yacht is just my own design, but based on the Passenger Liners that are docked at the passenger terminal a little sought of that landing bay, the passenger liners hulls are somewhat similar to a model in the prequel movies but the engines are significantly different
Thirza Ember: i like that - some authenticity, some pure creativity
James Atlloud: agree
Mike Lorrey: yes you develop a sense of the different styles of ships for different worlds and for star wars as a whole
Luna Lunaria: yes it has its own unique esthetic
Mike Lorrey: the interior of the yacht is based on modern sailboat yachts I've become a fan of, I'm making the bar and the galley functional food and drink givers - I get a bit detail obsessed... the toaster for instance I'm scripting to produce a wide variety of toasted items to varying levels of toast and each item will have its own scripting to let the user change what toppings go on it. bagels, bread, rice cakes, pop-tarts, etc
Thirza Ember: ok that definitely qualifies as obsession
James Atlloud: lol
Luna Lunaria: yeps
Mike Lorrey: there are a dozen flavors of pop-tarts to choose from even
Thirza Ember: now I'm hungry
Luna Lunaria: that makes two of us - time to raid the snacks -FORWARD SNACKORLINGAS!
Mike Lorrey: the fridge in the kitchen I made various beverages, if you look at the label they use the star wars fonts, the milk cartons for instance, say "Moof milk" in the Aurbesh alphabet. A moof produces the blue milk seen in the original movies, I dont' recall the name of those creatures in the sequels that produce green milk tho
Luna Lunaria: blehh
Mike Lorrey: there's Moof Butter and Naboo eggs in there
James Atlloud: Blue milk - such a reference point to 1977!
Forest Azure: first time I dance with an npc... if I run away, will he run after me?
Luna Lunaria: that would be fun if npcs did chase you
Thirza Ember: that would start a while new craze in opensim... Mike, when you build things, are they ever 'finished' in your  view?
Mike Lorrey: hah... sometimes, if I am extra motivated to put it on the marketFor instance, I experimented with ChatGPT to script an LSL script to work as a multiple-dice roller for roleplay use. You have to know programming to describe every detail properly to get good code out of GPT
James Atlloud: good experiment
Luna Lunaria: At some point they're like kids and you gotta shove them out into the world
Mike Lorrey: so it had a couple bugs but while fixing those I added a few more features, finally put that on the Kitely market, so about 60-70% of the code is actually mine since the features took a lot more work, but GPT is good for the bulk work and setting up the structure/
James Atlloud: Do you have a store in Kitely Market?  Not finding lorey in search.
Mike Lorrey: yes hypersonic systems, https://www.kitely.com/market?store=11711977
James Atlloud: Thank you Mike!  This is astounding.
Alex Salamander: It was very nice here, thanks
Star Ravenhurst: Thanks Mike for having us. It is all so awesome!
Tosha Tyran: It has left me speechless.... so great, thanks for your time.
Mike Lorrey: Saturdays at 4pm Grid time we have Reggae night with a few other acts before and after usually. Sometimes we have Acidic Loop on at 2 or 3pm
Lavia Lavine: Stay Safe Mike and great job on this build!! Thanks for sharing!

HG Address: grid.kitely.com:8002:Naboo
 hop://grid.kitely.com:8002/Naboo/709/292/3

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