Good Car - ma

This is probably the one and only time you'll find a post about my stuff in this blog, but we had such fun tonight it seemed something you might like to see.

On my private grid, for some time now I've been working on driveable cars. It's easy enough to build a chassis and to get the lights and sound working, but the driving script proved a bit more of a challenge. This was my first effort, a sort of sporty number. I also made some funny anims to go with it, where both passenger and driver wave at passers by and at times cover their eyes. Looks like my companion's searching for a map in the glove box. *should have built a garmin*.

Those of you who know me in SL are familiar with my partner Snow, who's very good at scripting. But mostly he takes it to a higher level than just drivin' around. And, as they say, at the plumber's house, all the taps leak. 
In lieu of a really effective driving script, I moved on to making vintage cars. There are four so far. They're kind of pedestrian, but mmm! shiny!

This blue one is my favorite. The texture is a handmade seamless Lapis Lazuli,  all cool  and slick looking. 
 We got a bit too enthusiastic, and managed to crash two of them. Yeah, I know. Women drivers. All this space, and nowhere to park!

 The driving script works just fine with the arrow keys, except for one thing, the car goes incrementally higher if you go forward. So within a few hundred horizontal yards, you find yourself 50 feet up in the air. Not that we minded. The engine puttered and the tail pipe smoked. Ooh there's a thought, a radio. With static.
 After all there's the little matter of me not having really labelled the 'Passenger' and 'Driver' poseballs right, so it's always a bit unclear who's driving. Blame it on too much multitasking. New grids are great but there's just so darn much to do. Didn't matter. We both pressed arrow keys,  for fun. 

 The script has, in the past, made the whole grid crash. Perhaps. Who can really be sure it wasn't a coincidence? But I think trying to fly off the edge of the sims probably doesn't do.

 In fact, we try not to even fly out of the one region. It's strange how quickly the vast open spaces of open sim aren't nearly enough. In SL my 1/3 of a sim always seemed huge and way more than I needed. Out here, four sims, with your draw distance open to the max, seem just a handkerchief square in the face of the giant builds that spring to mind.

 My favourite bit of this car is the fan in the radiator. The least good bit - the headlights. But some work on particle scripts should sort out all that 'don't try to walk through the beams' trouble. At a certain point, my gal pal Hotti jumped out to check if the back wheels were following the front wheels. Turns out they were. Hopefully too we can fix the jumpiness in the visual effect in time also - the passenger tends not to move with the car, but hangs back, as if on elastic, and ping into position about half a second after the car has moved. On the other hand, there's the same issue in Arcadia Asylum's metro trains, on osgrid, so that's not bad company to be in. 

After a hilarious drive around the Welcome sim, including a trip to the top of the tower you see in the background, we were ready to quit. And inspired, perhaps, to iron out the wrinkles and build some more. Which is surely the point of it all.
What larks.

Full Immersion

Happy Saint Paddy's to you, if you're a believer. 

You're not going to be short of places to celebrate, but make Belfast in OSGrid part of your patriotic pub crawl today. They will have live music starting at 1pm SLT, (that's this evening from 9, for us in Europe) and the lineup includes Joaquin Gustav, Truelie Telling, and some DJ's playing 'rare Irish Vinyl' to finish up with. 

All this, free Guiness - and the Titanic's 100th birthday - can you afford not to be there?

Virt-Me

Maria Korolov rocks, but you knew that already, of course. If you've never been to her grid Hyperica, you've missed out. 

It's not a place of soaring original architecture, or outstanding natural beauty, but it has a poetry of its own, as a train station or an airport. The poetry of possibilities. 

The hyper pools are handily organized in 'Activities, Education, Shopping and Major Grids', but don't feel overwhelmed, many destinations are duplicated in each pavilion. This in fact one of three jumping nodes, Lower, middle and Upper, helping hyper grid travellers hop up and down, bridging the gap from one part of opensim to another. Just for spritz and giggles, we dived into the pool marked virtyou grid, to see what would happen.

virtyou is a caps-off, polyglot haven for noobs, human-interfaced by Nick Zwart and Torrid Luna. Nick has a black beard (vintage '06, by the look of it) which shouldn't be held against anyone. Least of all me. Anyway they were both offline today, though I think I touched something to summon them, but since nobody showed, no harm done, right? 

virtyou has a number of attractions, and where better to start than Asterix Village. It's as cute as can be, with a huge fat statue of Obelix just outside those Gallic gates. 

Where was his diminutive friend? Nowhere to be seen, but maybe it's a work in progress. Or we may have missed him in the fog.

If you have any kind of Poser or QAvimator skillz, and are a fan of Asterix, you might want to approach Master Niflar, a few cute poses would bring this place to life. As it was, Goldilocks decided to risk it with the only pose at hand. There didn't seem to be any bears about.

Still, can't spend all day laying around. Dawn was rising, and so was the damp. You could almost smell the castrum over the horizon, and there was an uneasy feeling that the tribe might be back at any moment, and not be all that glad to see us.

 Shoppppping! Couldn't resist the opportunity to check out the Mall. Not a lot on sale, as yet, at the Plaza, but the architecture was very classy. This is where making and importing your own clothes comes in handy, people. I won't even say the word pigtails.

The architecture is great, but I must confess to not being crazy about the furniture, or the noob avatars, available all over the grid, which are straight out of Scaryville. I guess that beard was a bit of a clue. What's a little disconcerting is that virtyou opened in 2009, and from the looks of things, time has stood still.

 Much more stylish, the little flower shop. You may not be able to buy anything but it's kind of fun to play shop assistant. Gosh is that the time.

Jaynine Scarborough,  SL oldbie and Berlin-based vocalist, is the source of all this elegance, her store just a few doors down from the flower shop offered a freebie dress, and some other interesting packages that wouldn't open, but that's OK. 

Probably they wouldn't have made the trip back to Jokaydia anyway. It's a mad world.

The wall art, mannequins and poses, it's a great place. And oh, that voice.

The Devil's Island Mystery sim was a bit of a letdown, but the French newbie area is touted as the smallest virtual village, but has full size recycling bins.

I know you're supposed to make newcomers feel at home with lots of familiar references, but this seemed a bit much.

In Chatterdale, 'the world's smallest hamlet', (huh, that's where he ended up) I found myself in the back of a cop car within seconds. Guess the Thought Police were onto me. The village, which had overdosed on half-timbering, had a snakes and ladders game in an open area which, I'm sure, breaks some health and safety rules. 

Finally and bizarrely, a pile of rocks where you'd expect to find a house, camming inside it seemed solid. Very odd. What is it? Virtually no idea.

Keep your hat on

John 'Pathfinder' Lester (né Linden) is much too famous to require introduction here: that hat, 'taken from a pirate' (draw your own conclusions, people) is the trademark of a VW guru whose resume includes Harvard, SL, and Reaction Grid, with Jibe Worlds thrown in.

For a more complete story, listen to the recent Metareality podcast where Gianna Borgnine interviewed him (brace yourself  for *sewper excited* voice).

He gets no puppy-dog adulation at the Hypergrid Adventurers' Club, which is the best club in the Metaverse. Here we are, outside the loos in osgrid (hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go) which are part of the Virtual Harlem/Africa build by SL legend and OSgrid goddess, Arcadia Asylum.
What 'is' the HGAC? It's a gentle forum for finding out what's going on in different parts of OpenSim.

In and out of the box

Going to another grid is hard work. No wonder people stay put! It's all sitting in front of the screen, but man, this is exhausting, I'm getting square eyes!  Reaction Grid Thirza  came into existence  in '10, back when Caerleon had some art here. She's languished somewhat since then. It's Jokaydia Thirza who goes Hypergridding, occasionally passing through RG on the way to more exciting places. Seems unfair - maybe there are exciting places in RG, right? 

Erm... RG Thirza had a default noob skin best described as 'Woman vs. Eyeshadow' and the usual Walmart combo of jeans and tee favoured by the makers of basic outfits, and some random black hair. For sanity's sake, basics are a must. Only as I brought them into RG did it occur to me how much work all this is! But the alternative is trawling through endless boxes of drek from the Freebie shop, which is an unsatisfying and long job. The following are essentials:

Shape. Got a shop-bought shape in SL? you're going to want to get a piece of paper and note down all the names and numbers on all the sliders. Then, in your inventory, go to 'Create' and make a new shape, painstakingly copying the numbers. It's a lot of work, but then the shape belongs to you and you can export it onto your computer and import it to any grid you want.  OK I've lost some of you already...

Skin and eyes. Eyes are not too hard, either draw or paint; otherwise, google 'eye iris' and see if you can find something you like, to put on a white background. For personal use only, obviously. Another source (and not just of eyes) is Opensim Creations. For the skin, that's a little harder - but much less than it was a year ago. Several people have made their skins available to download, share, and modify for free. Eloh Eliot's skins from 2007 are still the best place to start, even if you're not a photoshop wizard, but simply want to play about with lip color. Ina Centaur's skins are detail rich, but have two disadvantages, they're saved in a weird type of file (not simple non-paranoiac psd or png), and the women are all homely. Some manly men there, though, so give it a glance, if that's how you roll.

Hair. Thirza's took 15 versions and about 3 months of on-again off-again frustration. Simple sculpty shoes plus foot alphas are also frustrating - but nobody in opensim seems to mind seeing bare feet. Clothes are way easier, but still time-consuming. Craft Grid's elegant shop is full of Josina Burgess and Nicola Reinerman creations, while osgrid has the Fabulous Ada Wong. Most grids are pretty dire, though. Come prepared. Linda Kellie's enormous collection of free and modifiable clothes will give you a jump start at making your own fashion, with wrinkle layers, cuffs, lacy bits and clothing textures. It's impossible to overstate what a star Linda is, in making all her clothing available and modifiable this way. Use Robin Wood or Chip Midnight's clothing templates in Photoshop or Gimp and get creative! It's way more relaxing than trying to follow the plot of NCIS.

Frillies A loop rezzer lets you build prim skirts. To export them from the grid where you make them, you'll need to be the creator of all the prims.  Imprudence Viewer has Export in the pie menu: rezz your object, then click through till you see it. 
If Export isn't lit up, it means you don't own all the prims. Importing is done via File at the top of your screen-  if you created all the textures that were on the original object, they too will be saved with the prims in your computer. 
Here's me importing a skirt into Reaction Grid, together with hair and texture. Of course, all uploads are FREEE !!!
Whoa that feels better ! it's time to take a turn about Reaction Grid!  It's still home to the excellent World's Fair, featured in an earlier post. What else is here?

Some great RL paintings in the gallery on sim Arte, the Catholic University of Peru stronghold. 

 The Grid HQ is a fancy piece of modern architecture, too, and there's this Drive In, high in the sky.

It's early morning in the US, so it's no surprise that there are few people around. OK - make that nobody. For anyone used to SL on a weekly basis, all of opensim has that make-do-and-mend feel, but ReactionGrid feels more than most like a backwater where the shark has most definitely jumped. A cardboard world. These posters aren't helping...

At last I found some life. Six avatars hard at work on the Bedfordia sim. What I took to be a noob was getting to grips with a door script, hiding behind a hill. 

On the other side of the hills, the other five avatars beavered away at what seemed to be a Science Fair, but since none of them would give me the time of day, I can't be sure. No amount of standing around provoked them into comment.  

Torley's textures were all over the place like a rash. The workers walked, rather than working from cam, from one boxy build to the next. Be fair, it's a work in progress, but this is a long way from Second Life. Iron sharpens iron, and while it's true many parts of SL are prosaic and even badly built, the good bits, the innovative exuberance, the preconcept-defying adventurous bits, inspire creative flight. Which you need, if you're going to do science right, don't you agree?

The Bedfordia is a brave attempt at building by newcomers. But I hope these Bedfordians also take time to go and see what's out there. If they like straight lines and, lord know, i'm a fan, then they could start with Oberon Onmura's new build at the LEA, where 15,000 pointy prims are set on a month-long collision course.

He's definitely outside the box.

Push to go

Garry Beaumont has 'no imagination' - or so he says. But pay no attention to that, because this army type who 'likes to press all the buttons' has got some serious curiosity going on, not to mention an eye for detail and the patience to make some fantastic vehicles and gadgets.  In his testosterone-packed store in Wright Plaza, the much labelled motorcycle maniac explained his presence on osgrid.

Garry Beaumont:  I like osgrid, because you have to work at it if you are not techno, and I love the fact that it's all free. The only thing that's frustrating is the viewer; I liked hippo, but now am back using Imprudence - but osgrid will get that sorted soon, it's always changing and improving!  I dont think I've made anything to be proud of yet, I'm not that good! the submarine was the first thing i made on here, but when I look at it now, it looks poor.
Looks pretty good to me...

Garry Beaumont:  If I had to choose the piece I'm most fond of, it would probably be the tank I made with only one finger on my right hand. That is all i could move when I came here, so it was hard to do!  I type with one finger, like most people, but try building with only one! CTRL ALT DEL is a pain! I hit a truck on a motorcycle head on. I should not be here at all, really. I was sat for a long time looking at the computer, then I thought of the days when I was in SL, and started to look at what was out there. In Google, I read about this new grid that was doing things differently, and decided to try it.

Garry left SL, tired of the drama. Then, he had a big accident - truck vs motorcycle, head on. As a result, he could only move one finger. Interestingly, many of the good friends he had left behind in SL were wounded soldiers, whose courage in the face of terrible injuries and long, difficult recoveries gave him the strength to face his own journey back to mobility with a good attitude, and a sense of humour. Garry couldn't get over osgrid Thirza's sexeh a/o which had decided to keep me alternately  trotting on the spot, or gliding like a mummy. 
Garry Beaumont: I like your walk, it makes me laugh. Never seen a walk like it  you should box it up and sell it.
Maybe I should, it would be a good counterbalance to Garry's boy's toys. Is that a tank, or...?

During his years in SL, Garry never made anything - he remembers once putting together a simple Tp device, that's all. It's amusing to look back and think of the little noob house he had, just the right size to fit on a 512 region. Now he spreads himself out over one of Nebadon Izumi's megaregions, and wonders how he ever consented to be so cramped. His interest in art is always understated, always referential, often flavoured with a late-night effect, never more so than in this osgrid version of Hopper's Nighthawks, with good friends Avia Bonne and Richardus Raymaker.

Considering his interest in vehicles,  does opensim's notorious lack of physics, and scripting issues, hold him back?

Garry Beaumont: Not really, because I make my bikes and so on wearable.  Personally, I do not like to script, it is too much like work for me, and it makes my head hurt! But when I need it, there's plenty of help available. 

He produced a fine cine camera.
Garry Beaumont: This is available in my store on Wright. I set the buttons to run 4 films. Inworld video went a bit awry with Youtube a while back, so Neb made a new script that links to http://www.archive.org/internet archives. I got that from him. Nebadon Izumi is everyone's friend on here, from the noob to the old timer and the dim, like me! I try not to bug him if I get stuck I ask the helpers on the IRC chat channel.
We went inside the submarine and I listened for pings on the sonar. Next project for Garry will be making a new version of a friend's build, called Gone City. How does he see the future of the grid in general?

Garry Beaumont: Osgrid is getting better all the time, but you can never tell in this life where you will be tomorrow. It would be good to see more people - the the right people, yes. And when it comes to technology, give me it now, give me more! I press all the buttons!

A Mist Land

Going to CondensationLand is like visiting Tibet, like in Lost Horizons, maybe, but without the plane crash. Or wait, no, there is quite a bit of crashing; and a fair old bit of what feels like walking into the wind, in terms of lag. 

Condensation Land is a small grid consisting of just eleven islands, occasionally reachable from Osgrid, sometimes accessible directly via the grid manager, once you get permission to create an account from Zonya Capalini  who, along with Ludmilla Writer and Favio Piek, founded the Land long before the dawn of mesh. The weight of prims often prompts OutOfMemory errors, making the grid crash, and RL interests have drawn Zonya away from the project. But should you get a chance to sneak in here, you'll find it's like entering a secret garden, a special place of strange imagination and exuberant prims.

It is a girl's first job in any world to import hair, skin, shape, and at least one dress, and that takes about an hour when you're new at it, between the crashing and the importing objects. It feels good to do so, it feels like an investment in the place. OK no shoes. I can live without them. This is a place for flying and staring out over the battlements of improbable castles, or becoming one with the land's very own Klein Bottle.

The bottle turned out to be empty; in this antique world that came as no surprise. There is a strangely airlocked feel to Condensation Land. Knowing you are utterly alone on a grid is not a new experience to me.  In both Craft and my own minigrid, many's the evening I've spent without a soul around. But Condensation Land is like a Lost World, a place of silent awe, of certainty that any speck of pixeldust I might stir with my bare toes will stay moved for the longest time.

It is the evidence of activity, frenzied, purposeful, flamboyant building, that makes the sensation of stillness so poignant. Omurtag Milev's three sims Temple, Conceptior, and Angelico Miguelis burst with energy. Zonja's videos bring it to life.

  Walking quietly in this strange land, it rains down on the visitor just what it means to attempt escape velocity from the orbit of  Second Life. This place is a condensation of all the existential questions, a meditation on the missed opportunities, and the grasped possibilities, the virtues and the drawbacks that come with not being in the 'first world' of VR which we all either love or hate, or both.

Quiet loveliness is here. Like a mystical mosaic hidden in a misty mountaintop monastery, the art in Condensation Land has a special value, one that no Linden Endowment can touch... the effort required to see it. I wonder how many pushing, ambitious artists know what value that would add to their work - a little subtlety, a little more reserve.

To visit glorious, mysterious Condensation Land for yourself, contact Zonja Capalini via email for more information.