Safari Reentry

 After a long sultry summer, at least in this part of the world, with lots of distractions and complications when it comes to being inworld, the Safari mechanism is creaking back into gear in time for our first trip on September 2. It will begin at the usual time, 12 noon SLT, which is 3pm on the East Coast and 9pm in Paris. If you use Opensimworld,  Discord or FB or Mewe you can get regular reminders of events, and there's usually a reminder on the day in the HG Safari group on OSGrid..

Among the many things that have distracted me during the long break is a YouTube channel that you might enjoy - BobbyFingers . In a way, his channel is a bit like Opensim, although it's not virtual... with lots of passion going into very specific builds, lots of unexpected global connections, an open-ended, slow pace to the building process, and some amazing, thoughtful, and humorous creations.

Speaking of humor, the new season of HG Safari will bring us to twenty different destinations over the ten week arc, with visits to regions with poetry, art, and new inworld tech, as well as racing and riding, mazes and beaches; mermaids and goddesses, installations and vortexes. Or should that be vortices.

Adventures at the Arcade

This week's first stop on Safari was Winxtropia where Bloom Peters continues to perfect her inworld arcade game, Primmy's Adventure. The giant retro Gameboy machines awaited our group, each one set up with places for two players. This was the first time so many people had come to the region to play, so it was not guaranteed that we'd all be able to play without drowning in lag... Safari is always an adventure! Even experienced Safari hosts have a little bit of butterflies in their stomachs when waiting for the crowd to arrive, and it's in those moments when you suddenly have a thought.... 

Bloom Peters: I am a criminal for not building the sim in the game style with the blocks!  HAHAHA... 

Thirza Ember: hehehe !!! the perfectionist...

Bloom Peters: yup!

Bloom Peters: welcome!

Forest Azure: hello bloom

Cherry Manga: aloha Bloom!

Nara Nook: Hey Bloom :)

Boujee GamerGirl: welcome everyone

Forest Azure: friend of yours, cherry?

Thirza Ember: lol cherry  has to pay for 2 tickets

Bloom Peters: haha nice avatar Cherry

Cherry Manga: Always dreamed about being a plumber going through pipes

Cherry showed up with a friend, dressed for the occasion

Bloom Peters: while you are here make sure to set max bandwidth, on your viewer - slide it all the way right... might not be required but it will help

Super Bloom

Ten giant gameboys, sitting in a row... 

it's a blast from the past for anyone who remembers these iconic plastic boxes offering endless fun. It's located on Arcade Plaza, on winxtropia grid, you'll find the HG Address at the end of the post. The region is online 24/7 unless it's briefly off for maintenance reasons.

The vintage console is to die for, and will bring back memories of schoolyards and long car trips, but it's also modded for our hyperverse... look round the back and you can see the game cartridge: this is Primmy's Adventure, brought to you by 'GameGirl', of course... 

Bloom Peters: Primmy is a cube prim scripted by me but, in the game's backstory,  I am long gone. Primmy's task in the game is to destroy the bad code blocks - the 'enemies'. Basically, she has to defend Opensim from bad coders. Every level is a grid that she visits.  She has to correct all the errors in the region. When she dies, the whole sim crashes with syntax errors all over the screen.

Bloom's MIDI Magic

 Maia Antarra: the one hud to rule them all

Our final stop today was on Winxtropia, to see Bloom Peter's MIDI tool. There was an extended post about it a few weeks ago but of course reading about a place isn't anything like actually visiting, and projects like this one are always getting developed, expanded, and moved ahead in ways that the written word can't always keep up with.

Bloom is undoubtedly an Opensim treasure. The first visit by the Safari to one of her sims was - can you believe it? - in July of 2014, on OSGrid - we visited her famous roller coaster build, back then we knew her as the avatar Cuteulala Artis. 

It all begins with the keyboard.

But today's visit was all about the keyboard, all about the software, the music, the dancing. the cats, and making something even more outrageously fun... We arrived on Crescent Melody Studio (HG Addresses at the end of this post) which is a minimalist space, giving all possible energy to the explanation and demonstration of Bloom's MIDI tool

Bloom, and the Cat's Meow

Bloom Peters has made a major breakthrough with her ongoing project to make it possible to use MIDI  (the Musical Instrument Digital Interface that lets you connect electronic instruments to computers) to musically animate objects inworld. If you have ever read this blog or been on Safari, you'll have been blown away by Bloom's region Crescent Melody, with its fabulously crazy orchestra - here's us all enjoying a concert for Cornflakes Week 2024.

Looking at this gif, are you thinking what I'm thinking? How cool would it be to have the possibility of making your own musically inspired animated scenes - even a whole region - of objects all playing along to a tune. Well, that opportunity is just around the corner...

Before we get into the nitty gritty, I had to ask about the cats.

Thirza Ember: you'll keep the same look, the same animal orchestra?

Bloom Peters: nope it's getting a much more professional design so that on release date people can use it right away to create music or use it to control regions and things. There is a major breakthrough with the machine. I created a program in python. It's called "Midi to Opensim"

Tutti i Frutti

The new Safari season began on January 1, with a fabulous visit to Bloom Peter's Frutti Music Bar, now the main arrival point on Winxtropia grid. The Winxtropia gang were there to meet us, of course! Gorgeous Boujee, Farstar, Arielle, Ghost, YumYum, made a point of being there to be part of the event - much appreciated! The sim, even with nobody on it, feels like the most bustling bar resort in all of Opensim, as you'll soon see... HG Address is as always at the end of the post.

The first thing you notice at the landing point is the busy road with cars and vans rushing by, and pedestrians and joggers too, ad the Safari crowd arrived, and gradually rezzed, their clothes and colors gradually showing up.

Thirza Ember: watch out for the traffic that road is dangerous!

Farstar Enoch: yerrr careful if u crossing the road

Boujee GamerGirl: this is awesome

Forest Azure: lol, of course james needs to try it - daredevil

James Atlloud: Yes!

Dings Digital : oh nice, urban area next to a beach

Tosha Tyran: like barcelona :)

Bloom Peters: Tosha i love your avatar! ... lol the waitresses are going to go nuts lmao

Farstar Enoch: yes, they are busy cleaning etc, i was talking to them earlier, they are excited !

 Thirza Ember: they make a lot of trash here...

Bloom's latest avatar, so cute

 lifted pixel: BLOOM i'm in love with your new avatar...  GASP!!!!

Bloom Peters: I would like to welcome everyone here to the Frutti Music Bar!  ty thirza for making this happen. The Bar was created in honor of my favorite tv cartoon series The Winx Club. But it has some Innovations  as well. As you already can see there is alot of ai stuff happening

We Thinx Winx

Winxtropia is one of the most fun and cutting grids out there, with a strong bias toward original opensim content, cartoon looks, lots of low poly and low lag and high performance happening here. A short while back, the new sim 'Frutti Music Bar' was featured on this blog - it's all your food groups wrapped into one!

But... even super tech savvy grids can have their  hiccups - one happened just over a week ago. A new update caused havoc to Crescent Melody, the music region you probably remember for its dancing cats.

This situation brought Bloom Peters, owner of Winxtropia, to a decision - she decided to start again. Well, not entirely of course...

Bloom Peters: I kept many backups and lost nothing. All sims are restored and inventory so Winx should work the same as it did.

Thirza Ember: OK, so what's new? Re-friending everyone, I know, possibly LMs will be broken... what else?

Weekend at Winx 2

 Bloom Peters: I created a special viewer for serious creators, its a custom Firestorm that allows you to upload insanity mesh haha

Thirza Ember: is there a link to it? or maybe there will be in the future?

Bloom Peters: not yet but i can show u the city, it demonstrates that.

"swishing tp sound... to a region called Whiterun"

Whiterun

Bloom Peters: We can and should have better limits in place. What your about to see was uploaded all in one go in less than 4 mins on my viewer - full textures. With the custom viewer you have no limits to what you can upload. Super super complex mesh, like this town, and it doesnt lag us. I believe Opensim should not have the same limits as Second Life.

Thirza Ember: I have almost 80 frame rate and the build rezzed in about 2 seconds - all of it. Admittedly, there are only the two of us here, but still...

Bloom and ...Bloom

Winxtropia is one of opensim's most innovative and original looking grids. Lots of low lag mesh here, simple but cute-as-anything buildings,  cartoon people with big personalities and all focus put where it does the most good, not on huge photorealistic textures, but on added features that lift the grid into a league of its own. As always, the HG address of this delightful place is at the end of the post.

Bloom Peters 

Of course lots of people are working independently and in parallel on all kinds of innovations in opensim, the difficulty is often in finding out what's going on and that is where social media often comes in handy, although we all kind of hate it! Bloom Peters (you may know her by her previous name Cuteulala Artist) published a vid on MeWe  that got me curious to learn more, and here's the story...

 Bloom Peters: So I created an animesh AI, currently limited but its connected to external AI software... the ai is able to know people and even speak their names... it creates wav files on the fly, and plays them local... it can also see were you are and walk around you, or attempt to, and even change its walking paths to avoid things. The "Bloom" walking here is the experiment.

Thirza Ember: oh  wow! in  pink ?

Bloom Peters: yes... she follows no tracks and she knows almost everyone, if you go near her she might even say your name

Animesh Bloom

Cornflakes in Bloom

The second half of an uproarious, imaginative, and musical Cornflakes Week party was on Winxtropia! A big shout out to everyone who makes the effort (and it's not always easy, as we're all busy people) to honor the event with their great costumes, and by showing up and being part of the fun! But most of all, of course, to our hosts who do so much work behind the scenes, it's crazy. Here we are arriving on Crescent Melody, Winxtropia, among the incredible instruments that play such a vital part to the event.

Jupiter Rowland: Finally I get to see this sim on a decently powered machine.

Bloom Peters:  hehe i love all the cool new avatars to see

Lavia Lavine: ...she said I reminded her of a bag of Wonder Bread

Bloom Peters: Angelic with a cool avatar too, very unique

Lavia Lavine: So I guess I'll just loaf around.

Farstar Enoch: hehe

Star Ravenhurst: Angel always looks amazing