AAA Little Nightfire

May 22, 2015, 9:34 am

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          Flashing can be bad for people. But if you don't have a photosensitive health issue, then animated attached art - let's call it Triple A ! - is probably the best thing out there, especially when combined with live music. Fuschia Nightfire put on a cracking display for the HG Safari First Anniversary party this week, and it was interesting to hear a bit about what went into it. 

          First off, where did the inspiration for all the bright colors and attachments come from?
Fuschia Nightfire: I think it was Wizzy's idea actually. We were chatting about the party and said it would be good if we could get SaveMe to come, but realised that probably wouldn't happen, so we joked about making a NOT SaveMe performance, and I realised that with the dancing cat animation and the avatar starter kit, I probably already had some items that we could use. I also have some of her pieces on SL, so it was not difficult to look at those and make my own versions here, like the personal ban lines.

Thirza Ember: technically, did you find it a challenge?

Fuschia Nightfire: I was actually surprised how easy it was.  The difficult part was knowing how large to make the attachments, so I came and made them here so that they fitted the space. I had to make sure I stood in the centre so that everything came inside when I wore it, but I understand now, why SaveMe prefers to do her performances on an empty sky platform.

 Thirza Ember: you combined textures on prims and objects, like the herd of giraffes and the rotating jeeps and the flies. Which are harder to do?
Fuschia Nightfire: It's really simple to be honest, the animations are the only things which can be more difficult. The gifs  need to be broken down into frames and scripted to be animated inworld.
Thirza Ember: did you organize a specific cycle of effects, or just grab them as it happened?
Fuschia Nightfire: I wish I was that organised! it was only 'Where's my Hair' for Truelie's song, that I had 2 specific pieces for, and then I wanted to make sure I had Safari items for her HG Safari song.
Truelie Telling: that party was so wonderful... and the video by Fuschia -- she has great taste in what to use, hehe, that performance was the best of show, I know
  Thirza Ember: it came together really well, has it made you think of doing more shows like this?
Fuschia Nightfire: not really, i don't think of myself as a performance artist, but may do if i get asked.

           The worm effect was particularly amazing. people flew up to get out of it! At the party, like almost everyone else, I didn't notice the bugs flying around. Glad we got a second look at it... 

Fuschia Nightfire: i love the way the alpha textures fight each other
Thirza Ember: it is mesmerizing and the endless layers make a mirror-like effect effect on the collective creativity. Maybe it's unique to vws and the computer age. You just can't help taking pics or video or gifs, so one person's creativity spawns everyone else's. I know you're not changing the effects every 2 seconds but it seems like it, so a little goes a long way. Save!!!
            Second Life original  SaveMe Oh is not the kind of person to object to a good friend like Fuschia paying tribute to her - she knows she is irreplaceable, and not just for the light shows. But a lot of other people get paranoid about having, as they see it, their ideas nicked. Is that nuts or what?
Fuschia Nightfire: well, not really, I think if you are trying to make a living from your art, it doesn't make sense to just give it away but in RL I am used to making public art, and I do love to work with other artists too, and share ideas and methods of working all my attachments that I made myself I am happy to give out full perm, so that people can play around with them. I was really pleased when some people started to add the attachments during the show, meant I didn't have to do ALL the work.
          And does it really make lag and crash sims? Well, no.
Fuschia Nightfire: as for lag, I think most people have seen lag caused by particles at live shows in the past. None of my attachments had particles in them, I used low res images and kept the prims as low as possible. Most people were probably wearing more prims in their hair than i wore in my attachments throughout the whole event. These worms are 54 prim for example - probably the highest prim attachment that I have.
          The worms and such have ...spawned three music videos so far, here is the second of the two featuring Whirli Placebo.
Thirza Ember: There is a down side of this kind of attachment art -  seems like it is too immersive for some - how do you react to that?
Fuschia Nightfire: I think this sort of thing is exactly what virtual worlds are about, making creations that aren't possible in the real world. And people can derender! If you don't like it, you don't have to see it.
          How's that?
HOW TO DERENDER
      IN FIRESTORM
1.   Right-click on the prim that's annoying you (or on the whole person!)
2.   Choose 'More' at the top of the pie.
3.   Choose 'Derender'
4.   Changed your mind? In the top menu: World > Asset Blacklist (at the bottom of dropdown menu) > find item and remove from list . you may have to cam away from the object and back again before you see it. 
      IN SINGULARITY 
1.  Right-click on the prim that's annoying you (or on the whole person!)
2.  Choose 'Tools' in the pie.
3.  Choose 'Derender'
4.  Changed your mind? In the top menu: Singularity > Asset Blacklist > find item and choose 'Remove from list' at the top of the window. You may have to cam away from the object and back again before you see it. 

Thirza Ember: It was a great show, I know everyone would love to see it again. I hope you'll consider doing something similar for us soon.
Fuschia Nightfire: I am hoping other people will also make their own attachments, basically most people on here create stuff, it just means enlarging something they already have! Even wear a house if they feel like it!

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The Supremacy of Twinity

May 27, 2015, 9:46 am

≫ Next: A Crash Dancing, Scope Riding, Anvil Dumping Safari

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There is nothing, nothing at all, like an urgent deadline to make time wasting seem like a good idea. Of course, we are spoiled for choice when it comes to time wasting, between all the many online and RL activities available here in the Western world. But it seems likely that if you're looking for the Supreme waste of time in virtual worlds, Twinity is it. It's hard to say which was more surprising, to notice that my first visit to Twinity was back in 2011, or to discover it still exists. The fact that little has changed is no big shock, for while someone who's been away from SL for a couple of years might be amazed by the advent of mesh, Twinity was always that way.

Putting a map on the wall just makes it even more obvious (and sad) that these guys never did get around to recreating 3D cities.

It always takes a bit to remember how stuff works, and sheesh what is going on with that nose??! becomes your number one obsession whenever you dig out an old avie. Luckily most places are empty, so nobody's going to notice your body overhaul. 

You can check out any time you like, but ...

Moving around on this grid makes the Kitely Waitaminutesighwhileweturnonthelightsare yousureyourealllyneedtogotothatsim? room seem positively supersonic. Wherever you go, you never feel like you're properly 'outside', not even when you get to the ghetto. The oversize buildings here make you about the dimensions of a cat which, in turn, makes the animated cats about the size of rats, I suppose. And surely that's a CGTexture texture there, isn't it? Maybe not.

And then, for absolutely no reason at all, there was Jabba. He wanted to dance, and one doesn't like to be rude.

 Another thing that's creepy about Twinity is the desperation of people to find someone to talk to, and one can't help wondering if the Cloud is going to produce the same sort of generation of visitors, not doers, wandering around hoping someone will offer to hang out. As opposed to the grumpy old builders we have in OpenSim.

The Twinity chat room was alive with rich cultural banter, as always. And grey is the new sexy, as we all know. Only there seemed to be just one shade of it...
So what is there to see in Twinity these days? It looked like a lot of their original vision, to recreate famous cities of the world, has been shelved. Not surprising, in these days of bomb scares and cities on alert. They have a Washington DC which is 98% obelisk, and jingoistic music. You can't cam back far enough to see if it has a tip. Believe me, I tried.

The Egypt build is enlivened with these NPCs although they are transparent, almost holographic. And this appeared to be the entire build. 

Well, OK, maybe they can't do authentic whole cities, or even neighborhoods. Let's try something atmospheric. How about The Sewer? 
This turned out to be an attempt at an American street scene somewhat confusingly 'located' in Germany. I didn't go and find out what that watchtower is guarding, seemed wiser not to. The two guys were NPCs again - burn victims, judging by their faces up close.

I was just getting ready to leave when I saw the Main Attraction of the region - the eponymous sewer entrance! 

Immediately my mind raced to the famous subway build by Aley, with all those fabulously witty ads, and the escalator, and the less than hygienic restrooms, and the often ghostly train running by. So down I went!
The Twinity 'sewer' runs for about 10 m before stopping. It was pretty atmospheric, with the bags of trash and the green water and the one giant cockroach and son, slowly rotating and scaring the heck out of me just for a moment. In fact, so scary was it, I fell in the water. And couldn't get out.
In Twinity, you can't double click tp  anywhere, so you're pretty much trapped in a situation like this. Walking is the only option, you can't fly or run. You can't properly see what's up ahead of you in order to make your choices. It's kinda real world in that respect, and that's not a good thing, not when you're up to your ankles in virtual sludge.

An easy choice

You can't effectively cam away from your avatar, you can't really adjust your clothing, or make anything, or do anything but chat. The builds would make a beginner in opensim laugh with derision. But people here probably don't know any better, because they have never been able to interact meaningfully with prims, so chit chatting is enough for them. Supremely pointless.
Of course, it's all pixels. We should be out there curing cancer and bringing world peace. But if not, if you have to be online passing the time, surely ... imagine a world where you're not inspired to learn Qavimator, or Blender, or Audacity, or Gimp, or how to make machinima or music or customize your NPCs. Imagine a place where you can't click on stuff and see who made it, where there are no freebies you can customize, where you can't experiment with anything other than the mildly porno conversations of a few sad and lonely souls. Would there be any point in being there?
Although, I did give Jabba my number, so if he calls ...

A Crash Dancing, Scope Riding, Anvil Dumping Safari

May 29, 2015, 2:34 pm

≫ Next: Safari Watches Witches and Work in Progress

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Jessica.Pixel: I decided to be human today so lets hope all of my hair makes it
Thirza Ember: I feel like hair like that deserves its own greeting
Wizard Gynoid: at least it's not up her bum

Ms Pixel and her remarkable hair

          There was loose talk at the 54th HGSafari about gorean virgins and Mal Burns, most of which I can't divulge.
Fuschia Nightfire: when I was a noob, me and a friend once did a parachute jump from a sky platform and landed in a Gorean village, where she was taken as a slave, and this is the absolute truth, I never saw her again

Thirza Ember: o m g
Wizard Gynoid: we should go rescue her
Fuschia Nightfire: shame I didn't know you back then Wizzy, we could have
Selby.Evans: Got all the LMs -- in order  good planning
Thirza Ember: don't get used to it

Azi Az

          Two things we can guarantee you, on Safari - well, OK, three. We will probably lose you, at least one sim will crash some or all of us, and there will be dancing.

No-one was disappointed by this week's adventure, in those three departments. But for those who were able to stick with it, there was much to learn and much to laugh at. URIs as always at the end.
          The very beautiful Azi Az organized a great dance and chance to discover her sim Water Dreams on refugegrid. 

          Water Dreams is an ocean-side region that reflects the lifelong love of the sea and a charming, sensual, harmonious old-world atmosphere that reflect Azi's Portuguese heritage and impressive skillset when it comes to textures, building, and putting things together. 

DJ Pooh

          The party got started with DJPooh, spicing up the event with some powerful tunes, rocking us as we rezzed, which took a little while - this is a detail heavy sim, and worth the wait. Refugegrid likes you to tp first to their Welcome sim, and then to your destination in a ploy to amortize the stress of new arrivals, but I'm pretty sure not everyone did that. Even though it was mentioned on the notecard ... honest. It was easy enough to pass the rezz time just dancin' and talking to the locals, including Seth Nygard, who told us a little bit about the genesis of refugegrid. 
Seth Nygard:   Refuge grid was started largely because there was a number of us with too many projects in hold while OSGrid was down. We needed a stable place to work from. So I took what I knew about systems admin and OpenSim and started up the grid.
Azi Az: on which Seth does an amazing work......Refuge Grid works really good and very smoothly :))))))

       Is it a big grid? Is their aim to go large? Nope. 
Aine Caoimhe: just thirty-something members
Seth Nygard: There are 38 registered users, and about 50% of those have been online in the last month. We see about a dozen or so on frequently
Aine Caoimhe: the idea is to stay small and avoid all the major issues of scaling that larger grids have to fight with.

Azi Az: and the good part of being a small grid ......we all are like a family here...what is really good :)))))

Seth puts the moves on his NPC partner, while Safari veteran and remarkable punk rocker Ange Menges looks on.

                Water Dreams has a number of environments, including a twin photography gallery with some of Azi's pics and a space where grid members can contribute evocative shots. It's a lovely way to tie together the various creators who are all working on their own ideas, and is an unmissable stop as you explore the grid.

        Azi's partner in cr...eativity is Danger Lytton, and they have a number of lovely regions, some collaborations, some made independently. Originally we hoped to get over to Danger island as well, but between chatting, and one crash and another, we ended up staying put. 

Danger Island

        That means we will just have to keep coming back to refuge till we've seen it all, poor us! 
        Next, the Safari headed to a couple of destinations on the the OpenSim Scripting Showcase Trail. If you haven's tried this yet, you should! It's a chance to visit 7 scripting destinations on 7 grids, each one is unique and offers chances to learn, play and explore the many aspects of scripts. We couldn't go to all of them in one safari, but just visited a couple, starting with Jeff Kelley's place.

Snowbody and Lucy quiz Jeff about the Language -and future - of OpenSim scripting.

          Showcase, the purpose-built sim on Jeff's grid, offers Trailgoers a huge number of things to play with, useful tools to take, and informative notecards to read. The emphasis of Jeff's collection is the way that opensim can be used to educate students in the real world. It includes a great video featuring two of Safari's favorite frenchies , known in vws as Acryline Erin and Aime Socrates. 
          Between the clones, and the color changers, the Inventory Organizer and the Maze runner, we managed to turn the serious telescope into a toy... and even managed to get Jeff to take a ride on it!
          Although, he's just a beginner. You need Wizzy and Fuschia if you really want to see telescope riding.

          There were attempts by some of the ladies to attract the attention of the sim athlete, and a great many balls were released into the wild.

          The trail is a lot of fun.

          We moved on to Littlefield Grid and  Dirk Mathers' Mad Scripter display, which narrates some of the ups and downs of porting scripts into OpenSim. Dirk is a great writer, and he makes the fun and the frustration come alive.

          The ecclesiastical construction by Camryn Darkstone, with trees by Ada Wong and a fabulous spooky gate custom made by blender guru Aaack Ardvark are just some of the attractions of the build. 

           Then there are the anvils.

          It was late by the time we attempted one last jump, using Dirk's excellent tp device, over to Kayaker Magic's fabulous watersports region Panthalassa on Kitely. The region is so full of things to do, that it was a sin to spend only a few minutes there, and we'll be bound to return very soon.

Serene and me read the fine print, on Kitely

           The Trail is open for another month, and of course the region will continue to be thriving indefinitely. So - much fun to be had for a long time to come!

Safari Watches Witches and Work in Progress

June 4, 2015, 4:58 am

≫ Next: Fest'Avi II

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          There were two official destinations this week, but the hard-core Safaristas ended up on a third, and there was a lot more tail by the end of the adventure than we started out with. Addresses at the end of the post.
          First, off to Kitely, to get an idea about their regular WIP (pronounced whip) event, where builders and inventors can show off their latest Work In Progress.
Here's the movie of the event! 

 Serene.Jewell: So welcome to the Hypergrid Safari! So it's simple - you stand, you rez something and you talk about it.  It is one hour long only! Everyone will get 5 minutes today, I call the time when your time is up. We don't have many presenters so you will be able to jump in at the end. Nara Nook [aka Malone] is First!

Nara.Nook: I'm using Aine Caoimhe's PMAC system to make the cafe in the Greyville Writer's colony more interactive.

          Nara explained how the cat keeps writers company, and can be easily modded with poses and animations. It looks complete, but is a work in progress because she is still looking for animal animations, rather than the human ones she is currently using (although they looked great to us). The audience loved it.

Dabici.Straulino: Garfield Malone
Ricardo Sorciere: great work
Frans.Charming applauds
111shawn.resident: Got a dog?
Serene.Jewell: she does have a bunny and a cow. We're going to have to get some animals from Ferd maybe.

Ruby ODegee

          Ruby ODegee  is working on a 16 sim story build called Brantley No. 3 Shaft on Kitely, and showed us a little piece of her work.
Serene.Jewell: July 4 weekend she is having an openhouse! Her build is steampunk URU Myst mystery, she is creating objects for herself because she can't find them anywhere; it requires lots of Jules Verne type accessories. If you make steampunky items that you are willing to share on Kitely, do contact her, she's particularly looking for clothing.

        Ruby rezzed a mesh object that will be, when it's done, a sort of prototype typewriter, and will be all golden and punky, with a letter inside it - the object will be found all over the build, as a way to transmit the next piece of the story to explorers. 

Neo demonstrates his prototype.

          Neo Cortex also shared a prototype for a mesh thong. he is a talented pixel jeweler, so this was a natural evolution in his creative process... Huge fun, this event, a little bit stressful for HG visitors because Voice often fails for us, and those who are deaf or not native English speakers struggle with it, but all around very interesting. When can you be part of WIP on Cookie II sim, on Kitely? Join the G+ group for updates, photos, and networking!
Serene.Jewell: We do this every 1st and 3rd Friday and 2nd and 4th Sunday!

'Sit in progress'

After our visit on Kitely, we were off to OSGrid and the sims of Clairwil Oh and Emme Zelnik. It's witching hour here, pretty much all the time, with sims named 'Strega' and Strigoi' and Debauchery. 

          There is just so much to see (they have about a dozen sims) that it would be hopeless to try to do it all on one visit, but the girls have prepared a notecard with a mini 'Rough Guide' to their land. You can find it in the LM box at the HG Safari Clubhouse on Teravus Plaza.

Map of Clair and Emme's zone on OSGrid

Clairwil Oh: I was building in Sl and taking photos there, did some writing, and then illustrated with SL images. then....I got excited about the idea of a shared, open sim, and so came to osgrid, and of course, over time, I started adding sims and regions. A good friend of mine, Emme Zelnik, started building here. She built an island region with many humorous, sly English tricks in scripting. then Starlord from SL came over and starting building like a gansta lol and then Scottius brought us The Docks from SL. My areas are mostly "goth" areas, dark and moody.

Clairwil Oh so glamorously goth

Dabici.Straulino: very effective rendering of mood
Thirza Ember: so we all want to know - are you this dark and moody in RL?
Clairwil Oh: laughing...Scottius knows all my secrets. (winks) it's a dark world, let us all cry. there's a cemetery over on the side if you need to really mourn all day and night. And let me say for the record that this is, like many open sim areas, often empty but I would love it if more used it as a hang out area.
        So feel free to drop in over there!
Thirza Ember: I watched The Addams Family last night in prep for today
Clairwil Oh: I LOVE them, they are my ideal: rich, eccentric, and always lucky.
           The idea is to walk all over the build, and take photos for a bogus 'prize' offered in Facebook by some disreputable tour organizers. As we headed out across the many sims, it was hard to take in the countless lovely corners that these builders have invented with style and delicacy. 

"sob"

          Gorgeous textures and perfect terraforming come together to make that wonderful 'outide' sensation open sim is so good at. But there's plenty of interest in the interiors too - inside the mansion on Strigoi you'll find a piano, here's Fuschia weeping onto the keys.

          On Strega, the glorious oceanbound castle and divine columns and pergolas enchanted us, and eventually we found our way to the Kraken, which is such fun!
                But by then, it was getting late, and many safaristas had been lost or logged off. And when it's late, it's time for dancing. Turns out, one of the best places for that is... Mobius! I spy a fuchsia tail... not surprising. This Sonic-themed grid is an upcoming Safari destination later this summer, and as you can see a happening place at any time. WOOT

URIs
HG Safari Clubhouse on osgrid (It's next to the waterfall, Southwest corner!)
hg.osgrid.org:80:Teravus Plaza

Kitely Work In Progress (held weekly  on the Cookie II sandbox sim)
grid.kitely.com:8002:cookie II

Clairwil and Emme's witchy sims
hg.osgrid.org:80:strigoi    and hg.osgrid.org:80:strega

Mobius Grid dancing 
grid.mobius.us:8002:chemical plant zone

Fest'Avi II

June 8, 2015, 6:55 am

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Last year, Francogrid's Fest'Avi was a blast, a fun family gathering.
The idea of the event is to get people - including those who don't think of themselves as 'artists' - to express themselves by creating an avatar. It was a way to get the Francogrid community together, and it worked. A bunch of local people participated, helping set up the sim as well as contributing to the fashion show. They included Cherry Manga, Erasme Beck, and Archael Magic, and several designers from beyond the FGrid frontier, like Alpha Auer, CapCat Ragu and Meilo Mintaur. 

Fest'Avi 2014

By the end of the event, OpenSim had more than a dozen original avies that newbies and oldbies alike could grab. They ranged from  Cyberwolf to Hibou, from Akiko to the Arbre, figures that have become synonymous with OpenSim. Fantastic avatars a world away from the humdrum human skins and shapes.

Akiko avie on the road (worn by Wizardoz Chrome)

This year, Fest'Avi exploded with an amazing light show and a new batch of avatars, eighteen in all, by Fuschia Nightfire, Cherry Manga, Imperator Janus, Dora Twinklens, Archael Magic, Zany Foxtrot, Cendres Magic, Capcat Ragu and Meilo Minotaur. 

Praline and Cherry (left center) dwarfed by the huge blue set, just one of a dozen compositions by Cherry

The avies were worn in the show by performers Cherry Manga and Praline B and they were brilliant, changing costumes and swapping out one build for another with (apparent) smooth calm. Want to see more? here are the Highlights of a show that was so good it could have lasted three times as long, for my taste...

None of it would have been possible without the rest of the Franco crew, including those mentioned above, plus Gill Beaumont, Ssm Binder, Nino85 Whitman, Cendres Magic and many more... if I try to list them all, you know names will be missing from the list, so ... add them in the comments, if you want.

Sim Avatar

But while the presentation of the new avatar collection (already available on sim Avatar, Francogrid) is impressive, another really nice innovation was the chance to attend Avatar-building workshops each Friday during the runup to the festival. It just shows how much closer the HG community is growing.  

View from the stalls of the oriental build

The Premiere was an amazing event. Each avatar or avatar pair (some are available in male and female form) had its own theatrical set, built by Cherry Manga.

 From an ocean to a desert to colossal abstract forms....

 ...from a Renaissance interior to a collection of postcards recalling the Safari, it was an amazing tour de force.

Stunning to look at, the entire production was brought to life by the music of talented  Christine Webster .

Christine seen here wearing Imperator Janus' fiery creation

The other really amazing thing was how well the sim stood up to the beating we must have given it. 48 avatars on the sim (I counted about 55 individuals present at one time or another, over the entire event) each one with all their hair and attachments, and while a lot of us found a poseball to sit on, thus lowering the lag by occupying our limbs in an impossible pose or two, quite a lot of the public were basically groundlings... all this, plus the huge sets coming and going in rapid succession, and the sim didn't flinch at all. 

Amazing work by grid co-founder and treasurer, Nino Whitman. 
We were all astonished by his prowess, it's unlikely that even an SL sim could have done better. Prims, mesh and textures seemed to rez instantly, despite the comings and goings of the audience.

The evening ended in great style. 
The ever lovely LadyJo Martin was our DJane, and she had picked out a whole set of vw and rl songs that had the 'avatar' as theme. As we danced, the sets from the show were reprised, and formed a second lightshow, as if we hadn't been treated enough. Especially as the new avies began to sprout all over the room...
A triumph. So... next year, will you be part of fest'Avi?

Safari turns Blue

June 11, 2015, 4:03 am

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≪ Previous: Fest'Avi II

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BlueWall Slade: Friending is a mystery

               Hypergridding has changed the face of OpenSim. It has opened doors and forged friendships across grids. As much as it's still a work in progress, the possibility to visit 'foreign countries' is one of the most intriguing, challenging, and fascinating aspects of OpenSim. Once considered the denizen of curmudgeonly geeks, OpenSim has blossomed into a cross pollination of creativity, and created in many a sense of belonging to the whole hyperverse, rather than just one niche.

               All this liberality fosters a sense of love and tolerance, the precious values at the heart of the first destination visited this week, Pepperland in Littlefield Grid built by Mudpuddle Cleanslate and Chelsea Louloudi. (Addresses for the destinations are, as always, at the end of the post.)

                    Mud has created an excellent video of his build, and you can watch it here. It was great to be able to see the builders in person - and we appreciated them both taking time out of their day. On a weeknight for Mud, and early on a week morning for Chelsea, they accompanied us around the build - just as well they did for, as Mud pointed out, it's quite easy to get lost here.

                It's an immense, and immensely entertaining place, and there is no way we could possibly see it all on just one visit. There is a lot to see on the ground, but much of the build involves reading bright yellow signs and finding secret portals that allow you to teleport up to skyboxes, so if you're overwhelmed by it all (which often happens to visitors in a new place) you risk missing a lot of crucial bits of the story.

                The two sim region recreates scenes from the 1968 musical fantasy Yellow Submarine, an animated film based on the songs of the Beatles. You can watch Yellow Submarine online here. It's 90 minutes long, but I highly recommend you take a look, either before or after your visit, because it will deeply enhance your appreciation for the build, and make you want to visit again and again!

Mudpuddle welcomes the Safari crowd.

               More than a dozen safaristas showed up for the tour, one of the most extraordinary in all of OpenSim. Why? Because it is a tour-de-force in 3D modelling. Eight months in the making, the likeness to the film and the attention to detail are astounding. Mud told us it took him ages, for example, to get the feet right on the policeman, shown here with Fuschia and Wizzy.

Nice shoes!

                 In a gorgeous hall with an interior by Chelsea, Mud has assembled the full gallery of characters, so you can easily imagine this build being used in an academic setting, where students explore the meaning of the film, both in terms of its wealth of allegory and in terms of  the way the songs have been woven into a surreal narrative thread.

                 Like all great works of art, its brilliance shines through on a lot of levels. If you are already a fan of the Beatles and know this film well, then you're going to be astounded at how accurately it depicts all the various scenes. The interior of the Yellow Submarine, for example, is amazing! (That's the lovely and very talented Chelsea in the foreground.)

                 If you're not a big Beatles fan, or (like me) enjoy their songs but have never seen the film, then a visit here may turn you into an enthusiast. If you're in a more lighthearted mood and simply wish to see something brilliant without getting into the culture behind it, then equally you'll love this place. 

               We sat on the Beatles, as they turned to the song 'Nowhere man'. The instinct to interact with the build is a very strong one, although maybe not what the builders intended.

                    We were on Pepperland for well over an hour and still had not come close to reading and looking at everything, and then it was time to go, as BlueWall waited for us on the other side of the metaverse. This was a return visit to one of OpenSim's core developers, and we were eager to talk to him about HG bugs, and get some more insights about things that go wrong with intergrid communication. 

                   We all gathered on his grid Indigo Expanse, a collection of sims that reflect his long presence in virtual worlds. As we did some months back, we sat in the arena at the Grove sim, which is decidedly not a blue place.

Bluewall (in the foreground) talks Profiles

                    This is not the kind of blog where we go in for reposting the entire Local Chat, so more was said about all these issues than is written here. Anyone who was there, and wants to add a point that isn't mentioned below is free to do so in the comments.

                    Basically we talked about three things, Friends, Assets and Lag.
FRIENDS
Nara.Nook: why is friending so difficult?
BlueWall Slade: profiles might be an issue since a lot of grids built their web frontends around it. They are incompatible.  I added profiles to core and made them different because the old ones are not exactly right. They have bits of the search mingled in profiles and needed to be separated. Also, I needed to pre-fetch the images for the profiles. I hope to be able to do some work on those, then try to get others to upgrade their profiles to work. But, the old profiles will never really work with HG unless they are drastically changed.
Neo.Cortex: just tell us how and we will do it
BlueWall Slade: could start by updating "open profiles" to match the core ones.
logicamp.master: I have a problem with the new profile module
BlueWall Slade: Which new one? core or updated open profiles?
logicamp.master: the built-in
BlueWall Slade: what is the issue?
logicamp.master: xmlexception in avatar_properties_request
BlueWall Slade: they use jsonrpc, not xmlrpc - so any idea where that is coming from? Maybe you are pulling up a profile that resides on a grid running the old profiles; that would make sense, and that's not a bug, but a feature.
logicamp.master: I think its a problem of compatibility between php4 and php5
BlueWall Slade: core profiles are all in C# - part of core code. I know the old profiles haven't really been maintained in a good while. But, there were issues in the old ones that were better dealt with by replacing them. They could work if someone wants to put in the effort. Get the open profiles maintainer to update them to handle HG. I worked on them for a while, but it was hard to try to get things done.
Thirza.Ember: is that why on a lot of grids you see people have two profiles in Search?
BlueWall Slade: the old ones were mixed with search, and couldn't carry things across HG
For instance, you can't make a favorite place in the old one. With the new one, that works. Old ones, lots of times a blank profile pic will be shown. They have issues getting that data because of asset server permissions. The core profiles handle that so the image assets are there. The core profiles also carry information that can support extended applications to be created on top of them.
Thirza.Ember: so Profiles are a lot more crucial to HG than we imagined
BlueWall Slade: yes. The issue is that the old profile doesn't work. If people update those to handle hg and speak to the core profile, then it works.  When I made core profiles, I made them a little different, because talking to the old ones wouldn't work.
Neo.Cortex: so what can we do right now?
BlueWall Slade: the old one's maintainer just needs to fix them. Someone tried adding a patch to core to make them talk and made it worse. The old ones need to be updated. I am planning to add some security things in - if I do it will really break them - the old ones are insecure, so are core - to a point. We need some modern methods of securing them, the old ones will never get updated.
Thirza.Ember: don't break them PLEASE
BlueWall Slade: lol, If I work on them I will fix them, it is up to non-core implementations to follow suit
Neo.Cortex: so there is nothing i as a grid owner can do atm?
BlueWall Slade:  Study core profiles service in robust and update their protocols against that api
Neo.Cortex : that's development that has to be coordinated.
BlueWall Slade: it is - core has an implementation
Neo.Cortex: ok, so lets all move to core
BlueWall Slade: the grid owners need to implement the proper protocols
Neo.Cortex: as i did, yet still it wont work with many grids
BlueWall Slade: What doesn't work?
Neo.Cortex: the grid owners are using the core opensim distro most of the time, only some use different implementations
BlueWall Slade: So, If I take time to fix stuff and extend so it is useful - do I suffer because others are lazy
Neo.Cortex: i don't think so
BlueWall Slade: core is the reference implementation
Neo.Cortex: if your solution offers a working way to fix our problems we will all move there
BlueWall Slade: one thing to watch for ... the search is tangled up in the old ones, that was part of the reason to move. Old ones, you can't see classifieds or picks, they just weren't built with Hg in mind and I did do some work on them, but, was hopeless, so, if you want to move, make a test case and see if it works for you.

             ...I hope you all followed that conversation, as there will be a test later.

Jessica Pixel mimes 'Chair Sitting' as we muse the interesting topic of assets

ASSETS
 Lucy.Afarensis: One of the bad things that was inherited from 2nd Life is the central asset server. It worked for them because it tied an avatar to their grid and they had lot of money to throw at maintaining a large data base. This is not the case with opensim. Most of the larger grids have been plagued with problems trying to contain ever increasing assets. It might help to change things so that an avatar could be part of a grid but their assets would be stored as part of their home sim on the hard drive of their server. All of the other services could be provided by the grid. I am not sure how big a change this would be but we are half way there already with people being able to participate in the hypergrid from standalones.
BlueWall Slade: assets grow and grow in a grid, but distributing by allowing transport from various places helps.
Lucy.Afarensis : So the devs are thinking about this?
BlueWall Slade: Lucy, I'm not sure ... We seem to all be pretty busy trying to put bread on the table atm.
James.Atlloud: Or could avatars store assets in location like google drive or Box? 
Mal.Burns: if someone set up central server for "suitcase" assets would that sort of thing help? (aside from home grid user assets that is)
BlueWall Slade: Hmm, it would be interesting to see some service like that - Assets cloud
Lucy.Afarensis: Could the assets be stored with the viewer instead of a grid?
Neo.Cortex: that would mean you have to have a really big upstream bandwidth at home, because you'd have to give that info to all users around you
BlueWall Slade: one thing, people take their entire asset tree with them ...
<< Inventory tree. I have thought that it would be handy to have an "Attic"-  just opposite of the suitcase. If the viewer would just leave those alone except on sandbox or home regions...
James.Atlloud : Yes! I'm sure even me (infrequent user) , I do not use 98% of inventory.
BlueWall Slade: When you login, you get your inventory folders - top level I think then the viewer starts requesting the contents -all of them - and then when you jump to another region, you carry that as well. On HG, you don't really fetch the data, but you go through the motions. At least the other data is not available. But, if there were an attic, that would alleviate lots of data that is rarely used. I would say that it would open on the home region - maybe sandbox regions, otherwise you couldn't access it. 
Thirza.Ember: and you could move it out of the Attic and into the ordinary folder if needed before you left home.
BlueWall Slade: I suppose you could.

The conversation being completely over our heads, Fuschia and I decide to dance.

LAG (and more about assets) 
Nara.Nook: I have a huge problem with users on very slow connections taking the regions down with all the resend requests. Especially if there is a Small group on the region. Is there any fix for that in the works? Satellite and Starbucks users are big contributors. I have one guy hits us with massive lag before he ever rezzes. We know he is trying to log on.
BlueWall Slade: ++ Nara I have heard of that. We (OpenSim) needs to really look at how we do some things in the network)  I think that is terrible for a slow connection to bring it down
Serene.Jewell: The grid owner should be able to set a flag for slow users and when it gets tripped, the user gets warned or ejected.
Jessica.Pixel:you could probably limit someone from coming in if their suitcase was over a certain size.
Thirza.Ember: that Suitcase Size idea is a good one it would make people more aware of what they are packing
BlueWall Slade: wouldn't really be able to do that level of manipulation
Jessica.Pixel: once the assets are brought over do they stay on the other server unless manually removed?
BlueWall Slade: that is the point of the suitcase ... that is a protection mechanism to keep a rogue operator out of your things
Mal.Burns: grids without suitcase dont help at all lol!
Nara.Nook: you need a suitcase big enough to carry your extra hair and feet for when they disappear
BlueWall Slade: hmm, we probably should let attachments through
Neo.Cortex: But many ppl run HG1.0 because every so often SuitCase simply sucks
BlueWall Slade: Hmmm, sucks because of operation or just an inconvenience?
Neo.Cortex: ...can't access you inventory, even if you want it. The  suitcase is great for commercial grids but not for the open hypergrid
BlueWall Slade: Neo - that is by design. If you can access your inventory, then so can I. I can wipe out your inventory,steal it, etc.. so we don't want that.
Nara.Nook: as in delete it?
Neo.Cortex: so what? my stuff is CC.
BlueWall Slade: ok, but not everyone's is.
Neo.Cortex: i understand the need for a way to lock things up, but why lock all ?
BlueWall Slade: because I may buy an item that is supposed to be protected, then visit Thirza's region and she could have a module that lifts a copy. that would go against the creator's wishes.
Neo.Cortex:  if someone wants to copy, they can, but that's not the point. The rights system is weak. There isn't even some watermark system in place to file proper complaints. If there was a way to protect those bought items it would be great.
BlueWall Slade: the suitcase is the only real thing we have though.

Blue surrounded.

        This is my last Safari for a little while, so I wanted to ask the group one question
Thirza.Ember: Question for the whole group - over the past year that we have been doing the Safari, do you think hypergridding has become easier for you, yes or no?
Lucy.Afarensis: easier - easier in part because I know more now
James.Atlloud: mostly yes, easier.
Neo.Cortex: besides those few bugs we mentioned... it is ok
Jessica.Pixel: yes, i think i crash a lot less between teleports
Fuschia.Nightfire: yes definitely
Mal.Burns: actually - a bit worse for me, but I rarely lose my hair anymore more - small mercies!
Nara.Nook: I think hypergrid is better. I find I crash less, turn up bald less, and can get to 90 percent of places I want to go.
Serene.Jewell: easier yes. but I lost my branches in transport today, so not perfect yet...

BlueWall Slade: I wish I could say that I will be able to work on these within the month, but I am working 12-18 hours / day
Thirza.Ember: we don't care Blue, we just are very appreciative that you have us and our problems in mind, we know it's a long process
Nara.Nook: What Thirza said
BlueWall Slade: I do, I really do. And I have these in mind always..

          Hooray for the devs! 
          Safari meets as always next Wednesday, noon Pacific time, on Teravus Plaza OSGrid. Join the group, you will have fun!

URIs
Mudpuddle and Chelsea's Pepperland     lfgrid.com:8002:pepperland
Bluewall Slade's meeting arena             indigoexpanse.net:8002:the grove

Pick and Choose

March 16, 2015, 9:09 am

≫ Next: Goodbye to Gatsby

≪ Previous: Safari turns Blue

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It's time for you to give back!
Please help us with a new project, Safari Suggestions. The idea is to give every hypergridder the chance to name five memorable places in open sim, and share their thoughts and Landmarks with others. This is not a popularity contest, but more a chance for you to let us know a bit more about you and your tastes.

You can suggest your own sim, or not, there's no rule against self promotion. Don't feel you have to put the five most 'important' places, or limit yourself to Safari destinations. Maybe you like art, or education sims, perhaps let people know about some good free shopping regions, or tell them about community or music events. It's up to you.
It's harder than it sounds! Can't remember the name of a place we saw while on Safari? 

Looking back through this blog may jog your memory, or the Safari Archive inside the clubhouse may also help.
Once you've chosen five places, what next? 

Visit each one and take a new LM, and a 256x256 snapshot (Snapshots are free in opensim, in case you didn't know.) In the Snapshot Window, select the 256x256 size, and then make sure you check the Keep Aspect ratio box to get a nice square picture.

Why this size? It helps reduce lag once we begin to get a lot of suggestion boxes.
Make a notecard and list your five choices, with a comment about why you like each place.
So now you have one notecard, five photos, and five Landmarks. What next?
Visit a clubhouse

Francogrid clubhouse - go inside!

on Francogrid, at hg.francogrid.org:80:hgsafari
or on OSGrid at hg.osgrid.org:80:Teravus Plaza
(we will be adding more Safari Suggestion areas at other clubhouses in due course)

Teravus Plaza

Inside, you will find the 'Safari Suggestion' area.

Safari Suggestions on francogrid

Take a copy of the scripted, full perm cube.
Rez your copy of the cube. You will notice it's called Picks by [your name here] - delete [your name here, and put, duh, your name! in the Contents, there is a script, if you click on it and hit reset, your name will now appear in the floating text above the cube.

Safari Suggestions, upstairs in the OSGrid Clubhouse

Make sure the snapshots you took are full permissions. Put your five photos on 5 sides of the cube. Put the Notecard and the LMs inside the cube, double check they are all full permissions.
Place the cube on one of the shelves.
Now anyone visiting the clubhouse has yet another way to explore the metaverse, and to feel part of the community of travelers.

Goodbye to Gatsby

February 26, 2015, 7:46 am

≫ Next: Safari gets corny

≪ Previous: Pick and Choose

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                       "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year." She looked at us all radiantly.
                       "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always
                       watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."
                       "We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker.
                                                                                 The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

It's easy to miss things in OpenSim; we are all so busy making, inventing and scratching our heads as the platform throws up some new curve ball that takes away an hour or two we might otherwise have spent  relaxing. 

But some things should not be missed, and this is one of them: The Great Gatsby build, part of EXPLORESeanchai on Kitely. After a month or more of performances and guided tours, the build will be closing, with a party on the last day of this month, Sunday 28 February, some time after 2 pm Pacific. Here's the address:
Hypergrid URI    grid.kitely.com:8002:EXPLORESeanchai  

East Egg and West Egg have been coming alive in this very special way throughout the past few weeks as the Seanchai has presented readings of the novel in weekly episodes with performances by both Caledonia and the great Corwyn Allen. The readings
have been spread around the sim, according to where the action of the story takes place.

As well as the locations featured in the book, the sim features an orientation room, showing people how to walk and talk; and a Fitzgerald gallery, full of information about the man himself. 

  The evolution of the Gatsby install is interesting. Seanchai has teamed up with the Tacoma Little Theater for this foray into immersive literary builds, and inside the Buchanan Mansion you'll find a replica of their Gatsby set used on real life. 

The TLT is a community theater group in Washington State. It was founded almost a hundred years ago, and is in its 96th season - impressive! They also organize a fine program of classes and workshops for both kids and grownups. They've recently been performing Simon Levy's stage play of the Great Gatsby.  And they have teamed up with Seanchai to create a learning experience, which is perfect for people of any age. 

The Buchanan Mansion at dusk

This is certainly not the first literary sim in the metaverse, not even in OpenSim; both OSGrid and Craft have had some lovely didactic builds. On Craft, for example, there was sim Pindaro which held builds representing four classics of Italian literature that form part of the Technical school curriculum, as a way to introduce 'old books' to kids with quite a different passion in life. 

But while it may not be an original idea - if such a thing even exists- it is an exquisitely executed one. Caledonia Skytower and friends have put together the fabric of the story, the bricks and mortar if you like - in an original and beautiful way. You'll find the Gatsby and Buchanan Mansions, Nick Carraway's little rental, the Valley of Ashes, even Dr. Ecklenburg's poster, with his giant spectacles. 
Another great feature - the clickable pictures and posters that take you to fascinating webpages about cultural context. In the  bar, in the Valley of Ashes, you'll find these.

The build is a labor of love, very easy to follow (there's an excellent map right outside the Welcome center) and the attention to detail is unparalleled, from the vehicles, to the information about music of the period inside the Gatsby mansion, to the books in  Nick's cottage,  sitting on his shelf "in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew." 

All of which is even more astonishing when you think that this Great Gatsby build is simply a pilot program, with a view to making more 3D workshop events in the future, exploring other literary works.
The Safari got a chance to visit the sim last week, and hear Caledonia read two extracts. I love her voice. She brings life and drama to the text without ever overdoing it, and her warm good humor is irresistible. 

We sat on plants and in cars and tried to get our bearings, and all of us wished we had been present for the other readings, like our good friend Miney. Supporting art is important. Not to mention rewarding. 

Wizardoz and Isolde on Safari

This build is not something you can absorb in a single visit, certainly not on Safari. It takes time to grasp the nature of the place, and the book too. That is in a way the greatest challenge of making a build of this kind. 
There is, on one hand, the specialness of the event, exactly like an evening out at the theater. On the other hand, the audience in OpenSim, scattered across an archipelago of imperfectly connected grids and having to contend with a world of time zones, it was hard to find a time convenient to the size of audience that an event of this caliber deserves. 

In the end, I found the book on Youtube and went to sit down by the water, to listen, to meditate on the Long island landscape and the gaudy trappings of wealth, and the vices it breeds. Except that this being Kitely, where  you're never allowed to forget that tick, tick, tick, time is money, after half an hour of dreamy contemplation, I was kicked from the grid.

So here we are, at the end of the month, and just as the play has ended at the TLT, so the Seanchai Great Gatsby build will soon go into storage, to make room for another brilliant build, of course. But before then, you have the opportunity say farewell to Jay and Nick and Daisy, and to be part of the closing party on Sunday. Hope to see you there.
Hypergrid URI:    grid.kitely.com:8002:EXPLORESeanchai  
Closing party Sunday 28 February after 2pm PDT

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Safari gets corny

February 26, 2015, 11:26 am

≫ Next: Blue Safari

≪ Previous: Goodbye to Gatsby

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This last week of February is, has been and, perhaps, will forever more, be Cornflakes Week in OpenSim. It's a celebration that transcends the rivalries of individual grids, that doesn't require any special outfit or costume, loosely based on the memory of Cornflakes Woodcock's zany, gaudy art, but not limited by his freebies. Anyone can do anything, as Virtual Christine pointed out, no-one's in charge! The week long celebration was publicized in facebook and in G+ and for a first year, seems to have been a modest success. It owes nothing to real life or second life traditions, it is wholly ours, and perhaps as time goes by it will be embraced by all those who love silliness and the mad variety and independence of OpenSim.

Franzi, Nara, Wizard, Mal and Apmel Fransson await the arrival of the latecomers

We celebrated with a few stops this week, picking up birdy nam nam shoulder pets, or
cornflakes hats. Delenn showed up with her OSGird avie!! WOOT! How long since we had one of those on hgsafari? Well, actually never, because this sim didn't exist until after OSGrid went offline.
Delenn.Daines @hg.osgrid.org: I logged into os grid with this avie and hypergridded to get here, but I notice i don't have a My Suitcase folder in my inventory
Franziska.Bossi: i lost allot of things
Lucy Afarensis: Lost my underwear
Apmel Fransson: UNDERWARE LOSS RIGHT HERE!!
Wizard Gynoid: i never had any underware to lose 

Zaphod welcomes the group

 OK There is a software/hardware joke in there somewhere, I leave you to find it for yourself.
Our first stop was not a cornflakey place at all, but a really wonderful art show by Sina Souza. It is hosted on Beeblebrox sim on Dorenas-world grid. Zaphod Enoch was there to meet us.
zaphod Enoch: Welcome to the exhibition of sina souze. she wants to excuse but she can't make it in time to talk about her pics. 
Apmel Fransson: what a shame..would have been nice... I never met her in open sim¨
zaphod Enoch: All works are done in secondlife and they are photos which are done in the world and not post processed, except the blue one in the corner which is a commissioned work and postprocessed with photoshop. 
Serene.Jewell @grid.kitely.com:8002: These photos are magnificent. Did you say they have no post-processing on them, Zaphod?

Thirza Ember: this is such a nice show
Apmel Fransson: Nice is not a word I would use for Sina's work..but they are very good
zaphod Enoch: Each picture tells a little story about sinas life or her feelings.You can find sina's work on american fine arts in the web

Me and Art looking at ... art.

Art Blue: are they on sale or not as one I like much
zaphod Enoch: Best is to get in touch with sina on Facebook or SL. There she has another two exhibits going on at the moment.

Chip Angelvi breaks down and wears a cyber cornflakes hat, as Lucy and Wizard look on.

           Now, a show like this is too good really for a safari. In the sense that, it's good to get some group awareness of the works, but you really want some alone time in front of the canvases. The gallery is very cunningly built into the landscape of the sim, which is also home to the Hyperzette offices. Dorena's world is a small German grid, but boy, it is rock solid, and before long there were 18 of us looking at the art, nattering, putting on Cornflakes hats, and just generally making a lot of noise. 
           The images raise disquieting notions of entity and power, the deep shuddering inner sensations that can rise up when we peer at the interaction between avatar and owner, as worlds collide. You have another week or so to visit, the HG Address is, as always, at the end of this post.

Mal Burns

Mal.Burns: nice sim
Wizard Gynoid: where is the "like" button?
Thirza Ember: just a great sim and this was a gorgeous show
Serene.Jewell: Agree
Apmel Fransson: Sina is one of my favorite artists
zaphod Enoch: happy you like it
        From Beeblebrox, to Hubbub. we were invited to try to crash the sim on Craft grid.

Thanks to Billy Bradshaw, and to Licu Rau and Tao Quan for letting us come dance to Lady Gaga

Patti looking particularly corny, while Licu leaps like a virtual antelope. Where does he get the energy?

            Once again teleporting was suspiciously easy. I'm always worried when things work properly. But hey, there we were, all of us, on Craft, failing completely in our attempt to break Billy's record player. They were testing something, I don't really know what, except we managed not to crash anything even though there were avies from at least 6 different grids present.

            Before you knew it, we were off to the Cornflakes-Tribute sim on Metropolis grid. Without our NPC dance partners, much to Wizard's chagrin. The sim is owned by Wordfromthe Wise, who opened it up for Cornflakes Week, to give people a chance to see and to copy any og Corn's items they particularly like. Up until the return of OSGrid, Word's collection was one of the few still available for viewing and indeed it's probably the most complete of all. Cornflakes hats were handed out. 

 James.AtLLOUD: booyah! now properly attired.
Thirza Ember: HAPPY CORNFLAKES WEEK
James.AtLLOUD: HCW!
Mal.Burns: i see white light
Wizard Gynoid: I never liked corn flakes unless it had lots of sugar and milk on it. To the point where they were soggy.
 PatriciaAnne.Daviau: oh yuk lol
 Sunbeam.Magic: then you must like the Soggy Bottom Boys lol
Wizard Gynoid: photo op on the sign post

James.AtLLOUD: We had cornflakes bars (like rice crispy bars) in the midwest USA
Max.Hill: joue nous une belle musique Aime
 Aime.Socrates: le perroquet va chanter
Max.Hill: zy va
Wordfromthe Wise: nice having you all here .. i think cornflakes will watch us in heaven ...
Art Blue: yes I just spoke with him
Thirza Ember: wow there are so many small pieces I never noticed

Apmel rides the fish. It's a Swedish thing.

Wordfromthe Wise: yes his style was so people have to move close on the items to see what he really meant, One example is this here, where that bird is watching the worms in the bus ..see worms in a can .. here where i stay .. zoom in ..
Serene.Jewell:"Never make eye contact while eating a banana" Good advice.
PatriciaAnne.Daviau: words to live by!
Dings Digital: I didn't know Cornflakes personally, but I have been here a lot, in OSGrid times. It always inspired me of seeing the funny side of being inworld. I guess this is often lost.

Dings rolls out the barrel while Aime plays an intermittently invisible violin

Wordfromthe Wise: i dont know if you all know the story of this region ..
Wordfromthe Wise: Back in the days, Cornflakes and I where gòód friends on the osgrid. When i moved to Metropolis he wanted to move there as well and gave me his Sandbox Region to load it for him on my simulators in Metropolis.
Wordfromthe Wise: But before he started to build, he passed away. His Stepson contacted me via Facebook, and told me about his death. The only gòód thing about this is, that all his beautyful objects - and in this case - a whole Region full of Joy did not vanished when his creator left Earth and departed to (Builders) heaven

the lovely Wordfromthe Wise

James.AtLLOUD: OH, I did not know about Cornflakes - thank you for telling us.
Serene.Jewell: So glad you were able to save this, Word
Thirza Ember: next year for Cornflakes Week we'll have fancier costumes ...
Lucy Afarensis: Fun!

Blue Safari

March 5, 2015, 6:46 am

≫ Next: Fun with the Frenchies

≪ Previous: Safari gets corny

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There are two kinds of people in this world, those who do, and those who don't.

          This week Safari began with music and a big ole crash. Wolem Wobbitplayed the blues for us on the dance floor on hgsafari sim. Wolem is working on a great performance sim on Metropolis grid, called Chicago Blues. Go visit if you get a chance, you'll like it.

          It took a while for stream to kick in. Wolem did back flips while we waited. I was thinking of all the signage I should have put up to make it easier for people to understand where we are and where we're going, but let's face it, nobody actually reads anything. So
why not simply relax and enjoy the chaos. 

Truelie.Ellen: wolem is jumpy today,  but what else would we expect from a wobbit

Wizard.Gynoid: gets tired watching wolem. 

Wizard.Gynoid: siwwy wobbit trix r fer kidz

Truelie.Ellen: it's just hard to play guitar And sing And jump around like that

Scottius.Polke: why is there no my suitcase in OSgrid?

Scottius.Polke: am I visible?

Thirza Ember: you're complicated
Scottius.Polke: wooo, I am somebody now
Truelie.Ellen: I still don't see any bod, Scottius...
Wizard.Gynoid: i see you Scotti

Chip.Angelvi: hello

That's cool cat Keve

Truelie.Ellen: but we are getting a good crowd! Hi Chip 

Spike.Sol shouts: KEVE

Keve.Magic: wünsche schönen guten Abend
Beth.Ghostraven: OMG! I found you guys!
Wizardoz Chrome: Buona sera :)
Atom.Hax: I appreciate Spike's homage to Spock. Live long and prosper Leonard!
Wizard.Gynoid: can you believe it? we've been doing safari for 42 weeks! the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything is 42. Week 42!
Art Blue: week 42! my performance was post phoned. I ask for compensation!
Beth.Ghostraven: wow! and I finally got here! I usually have an Hour of Frivolity at my pub in SL at this time, but I had to cancel it today.
Truelie.Ellen: the more I hear Wolem, the more I like him... and I liked him a lot to start!
Aime.Socrates: we have a slow rock'n roll

          Wolem gave us about 40 minutes of really great music. He mixed it up with rowdy numbers and moody blues, it was just what we needed to get set for going on the road. 

Some piano shenanegans. The Wolem tee shirts are top right in this picture.

          We really appreciate the musicians who play on the Free Grids of open sim without a thought for money. We have some Wolem tee shirts available on hgsafari, so if you feel like showing your support by dressing as a fan next time, come over and get yours, or make your own, perhaps. 

Arriving on Indigo Expanse. BlueWall Slade: it looks like a picture :)

          Usually we manage to lose all the newbies when we make our first jump, but for once, most of them got to our second destination, Bluewall Slade's Indigo Expanse (URIs at the end, as usual) which is a small grid where he runs tests and experiments. 
          It's up 24/7 and there is a Sandbox sim, so if you're looking for somewhere quiet and reliable to do some work, use the URI at the end of this post and get yourself a LM. The grid is full of Virtual World history.  
 BlueWall Slade:  The Island over there was on the Linden OGP Beta grid. It has a whiteboard that says "Welcome Gridnauts",  as far as I know, the first jump from LL OGP to OSGrid came through there. It was setup with the OGP + the newly developed Hypergrid. Over in the other corner is a place that looks like a wreck, it was originally a region on the LL OGP. We had no inventory, so all regions were the initial turtle islands, and I figured out how to load the region using backups w/o inventory. In the other corner is the first build I had on OSG, it was beside Charles Krinke's regions.
Thirza.Ember: How did you get involved in open sim?
BlueWall Slade: It was sort of an accident. I started making some bots. Before that, I saw OpenSim and was interested in running it, but I was very new to SL. I didn't understand it all. But I didn't like SL too much, not the griefing, etc. so I kept OpenSim in mind. When I started making libomv bots, I decided to try OpenSim, and boom. That was spring 2008, I think.
BlueWall Slade: Whump Linden made the first jump through those regions and was the first person AFAIK to jump between to grid.
           There is quite a bit to see on Indigo Expanse, but being a big group, the simplest thing was for us to head over to The Grove, where there is an amphitheater, a piece of VW history, it's where Snowdrop Short taught C# classes on OSGrid.  The group asked 'why the Lindens gave up on hypergridding' and suggested some reasons: investor's interests, permissions anxiety, competition, xenophobia, and general bloody mindedness. Blue gave a nice diplomatic response.

BlueWall Slade: As you know, OpenSim has continued to build on Hypergrid. I see it as a way to build out a web of 3d spaces, of course it doesn't work as smoothly as we would like. We are missing a few things tom complete it. And that is what occupies a lot of my free time - how to connect the dots. I have done a lot of "Blue Sky" development here to experiment with a few things. So, I'm pretty happy to be able to open a grid to put into practice some of the things I have been learning and thinking about.
Thirza.Ember: we need you to fix a lot of stuff, Bluewall
Beth.Ghostraven hands Bluewall a hammer and some wrenches
BlueWall Slade: And, hopefully will be able to connect the parts so we can travel around better than in the SL grid. We need a distributed search - that is a project that I want to tackle. What challenges plague you all most on your excursions?
Serene.Jewell: Addresses. Can't communicate in groups across grids.
Unknown UserUMMTGUN9: losing my hair
Nova.Saunders: losing my ava
Thirza.Ember: not being able to talk when you're frozen in a tp
Billy.Bradshaw: Friends is a big one
Jeff.Kelley: intergrid IM, first failed teleport...no maptiles on map
Unknown UserUMMTGUN9: when a teleport fails you lose all your attachments. that's annoying.
Aime.Socrates: we do not all have the same priorities in using opensim.This is the real problem.
Mal.Burns: Different grids with different OS versions is awkward. Some stuff works and improves, but old versions don't connect right. Nice if OS was stable enough for auto-updates to grid owners.

Wizzy a cloud, and Scottius with half his mesh missing - some typical HG problems.

Billy.Bradshaw: I think Bluewall is very brave
          Billy's right. But if it seems like we want Bluewall and other devs to to wave that magic wand and give us an instant seamless hg experience, that's not so. It was heartening to look at the group. Ten different grids were represented, half a dozen countries and at least five languages, all these hardy safaristas who show up week after week, crash after buggy crash, to explore and share and learn. The hypergrid  experience is really worth fixing. We don't need display names, we need "Unknown User" syndrome to go away.
          But it is a fragmented 'accident of geography' rather than a consolidated empire, this open sim of ours. For every choice, whether it's monetizing, permissions, upgrading, security, and so forth, you'll always have those who do and those who don't. No two grids are going to have the exact same preferences when it comes to parameters, and that's what makes it a wonderful, yet frustrating business, to manage hypergridding.
          It was a great discussion, and hopefully the first of a series of encounters with Bluewall and other devs. 

Hidden Leaves on Bubblesz grid

            From Indigo to Bubblesz, Taarna Welles' little grid. Taarna chatted in voice as Mal Burns asked her a number of questions on behalf of the group. 

           Taarna explained that her grid began just a couple of years ago. She had been active on a number of grids, including OSgrid and Metropolis, before she started Bubblesz with her husband. She has been making sculpty objects for years, and with the advent of mesh she's been busy making even more stuff, notably the BEST footware in opensim. 
          There is however a lot more to Taarna than her gorgeous boots. She has always  made a lot of sculptures, inspired by the natural world, but also by images she sees online, and her sim Hidden Leaves is a creative archive going back over a long career. it was interesting to learn that when you import a sculpty it loses 75% of the detail. Wow. No wonder everyone loves mesh. 

Brain or no brain? Talk to the Patefatio Mens

          Taarna is quite a perfectionist, she takes something like 30 to 40 hours to make a n item, be it art or a wearable. The woodland of Hidden leaves is studded with sculptures, often hidden in the truncks of trees or nestling in the hillside. Of particular interest is  Patefatio Mens, this head. Does it have a brain? 
           Other lovely pieces include harps, hands, and her naughty-looking toadstools. 

Face in a harp

          We wandered for a long time before heading to sim Savvy where her beautiful shop La Baronnie can be found. Shoes, hats, furniture, goggles and more are available here. She is a huge fan of Steampunk - hooked on all that detail - and she shared with us her latest, not yet finished project, a Steampunk streetlamp. We also visited a little house full of grungy, delicate beds and dressers, and the darlingest rocking horse.

La Baronnie

            The high quality of Taarna's free, mostly full perm, creations was bound to bring to mind the  content-theft/permissions-angst/money-making debate. 
 Taarna Welles: I don't want to sell items. I want to share and make people happy. For me it's a learning curve, and if it makes people happy, why not. It's a free metaverse, so I contribute too! Sometimes people take my things, they can change the content owner on their own grid, I can't do anything about that, so I don't let it worry me. When I see people selling my items as their own, it is a very big compliment.

Aime the pirate studies the steampunk lamppost.

            May all thieves and opportunists be shamed into quitting, and may the rest of us be inspired to create and freely share all the more.

This week's URI's
HG Safari Clubhouse:               hg.francogrid.org:80:hgsafari
Wolem's sim on Metropolis:      hypergrid.org:8002:chicago blues
Bluewall's grid:                        indigoexpanse.net:8002
'Historic' amphitheater:            indigoexpanse.net:8002:the grove
Taarna's art:                            bubblesz.nl:8002:Hidden Leaves
Taarna's mesh store:                bubblesz.nl:8002:Savvy

Fun with the Frenchies

March 10, 2015, 6:47 am

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          What keeps a grid alive? A sense of place, a sense of purpose. That is the secret behind Francogrid's longevity. The grid is founded on good old French ideals like Liberty and Fraternity, and they mean it. Freedom is paramount on the grid. A free exchange of knowledge. Creativity given the freedom to grow. And free space. The grid has an impressive history of sims donated to creative people. Freedom too from the humdrum cookie cutter architecture of the past.

Accueil, Francogrid's welcome area, with TP parlor. Build by DJ Phil and Cherry Manga

          The English language is, obviously, a crushing force for communication in the metaverse. In Francogrid, just about everyone makes an effort to speak English if they meet a non-francophone, however, this grid does a little bit to push back and remind us all that there are other languages out there. For some people, this may mean stepping
out of their comfort zone, but that is extremely healthy for you! Isn't that why you came to OpenSim in the first place, to expand your horizons?
          Francogrid is run a bit like a republic. They have a president, and town hall meetings in which people propose schemes and ideas and people vote on it. Just 30 euros a year earns you the right to be a voting member of Francogrid.

Levillage meeting area

          Francogrid is quite ancient in vw terms. It began in May 2009. It's a bit like a lovely old chateau. The plumbing doesn't always work right; notoriously, Contacts get backed up, lost, and generally make a mess all over the floor; but it is full of lovely unexpected corners, sudden vistas, useful places, and most of all, lots of serene space. When the HG Safari sim on Metropolis began to have serious problems, gill beaumont of Francogrid immediately donated a brand new sim, and enabled us to make our  group's second seamless migration. It's a tribute to the generous family of OpenSim grids and residents that our weekly Safari trips have been able to continue uninterrupted for nearly a year now, despite the dramatic ups and downs that the platform has experienced.

safari pre-gridjump chaos

            This year Francogrid launched three projects that should make life more fun on the grid and provide some practical help for locals and visitors alike.
       1: Promotion of free content with a Freebie-finder
       2: Promotion of francophone regions via a HG machine
       3: Promotion of the making and sharing of new avatars at Fest'avi
The Freebie Finder
Imperator Janus is in charge of this.
Imperator Janus: There are, in fact, a lot of regions or zones of regions with freebies, scattered about all over Francogrid. the idea is to create a network of these freebie regions and color code them.  A color for each area and a portal that would allow you to get to the freebie zones.

Imperator sits on his Freebie Finder, while Claudius looks on with gallic stoicism

Cherry Manga: Currently we have  Freebies Garden, which has trees, plants and vegetables. Then there is 4 seasons, which is all about furniture, HomeSweet Home; then there is Wallonia, which has a bit of everything, and Claudius Utopy and cendres magic are planning a free script region.
Imperator Janus: There is also gill beaumont's Ile aux freebies.
Cherry Manga: Yes! that has all kinds of things.
Imperator Janus: And then there are areas on other sims, like the shop on leVillage, and Le Pingouin Elegant on LaCaldera.

(just a tip: sim names on Francogrid never have spaces in them. So it's Levillage, not Le Village.)

The CMVO
The second project you may find interesting is the one to link up all the french-language regions and grids of the metaverse. This is the brainchild of Claudius Utopy. The name is a bit confusing, most people would never guess that a CMVO had something to do with hypergridding, but go figure the French, right?

Claudius and the machines

Jack Jacksweb came up with five different designs for the machine. This is the one they plumped for in the end.

It shows you a website, which lets you know where the regions are. Participating sim owners rez a copy of this board inworld, and you can see in real time which regions are currently online or not. The load of the device is relatively light, just 33% script inworld, with the other 67% of the action happening on the website end, and the machine is customizable to blend in with the sim's theme or color scheme.

Add to all this Francogrid's new HG arrival point, Hypergrid, with its multitude of destinations. The HG addresses were collected by Praline B and the overall construcion is by Cherry Manga.

Praline and Cherry model some fun avies

Fest'Avi
Last but definitely not least, the second annual Fest'Avi!
After last year's triumphant success, Francogrid is again holding a series of workshops to get people to make fresh new avatars, and the whole thing ends with a big party, a 'fashion show' of the final results, and then the new avatars are put out as free items on Francogrid for everyone to enjoy.

TP to the tutorials, next to the free items

Many of the unusual avies you see when you're out hypergridding were made in last year's event, including the Tree, the Owl and the ShadowMan avies, (they no doubt have better names than that, but you'll know what I mean) so it's an important contribution to the whole of OpenSim, not something exclusive to grid members.

Inspiring Yann Minh build

Sim Avatar has free items you can copy, and also many display items that are there to inspire you to make something good for yourself and others.
The help ranges from how to make a skin and baked clothes, to rigging mesh, and making tinies and furrys.

The workshops are held on sim Avatar on Fridays, 21.00 European time. There are loads of step-by-step picture guides and Cherry and Praline both speak good English if you need some help.
Fest'Avi ends at the beginning of May, so there is still plenty of time for you to make your dream avatar, and share it with the world!

URI: hg.francogrid.org:80:avatar

Safari crosses over

March 12, 2015, 4:45 am

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            Institutions. We all love them, and most of us belong in one. This week three SL/opensim crossovers were our destinations, each one an epic in its own way. First up,  Seanchai Library which this month celebrates seven years since it was founded in Second Life. That's a big deal when you think of all the performances that this group has put on, and all the money they have collected for charity too. We met on sim Inis Arcain in Kitely to hear the short story 'The Bard' performed by Caledonia Skytower. This is a tale of druids and warriors and ancient angst, and one of the most memorable menacing laughs in the metaverse.

          Caledonia set things up so we could hear her via streaming anywhere on the sim, making it possible to go wandering around the build without missing any of the story, also making it easier on those of us who find that Voice does not work well when
hypergridding. Thanks for that! Not to be missed when you visit, the castle and the small stone circle, which in the misty windlight has the flavor of the Rollright Stones. In celebration of their big day, Shandon Loring and Cal have organized a Celtic Hunt on the sim, seven crocks of gold each containing a gift. She invited us to move around the lovely woodland, but as you can see, we flock together, camming like crazy. 

          Mal Burns was trying to TP over to Kitely from Great Canadian Grid, but nothing worked - not landmarks (I sent three different ones), not personal tp's from different parts of the sim, not the HG address, with and without the sim  name, not even the gate on Sanctuary. 
          A Kitely problem? or is this some fiendish plot by GCG to prevent residents going to Kitely? With all the stories of grid owners arbitrarily picking and choosing which grids they're connected to via HG, I was curious to check this morning. And voila - no conspiracy, must have just been a momentary glitch, here is GCG Thirza, snooping around looking for crocks of gold.  Make sure you don't miss out on these very appropriate Irish gifts! The URI or HG Address is at the end of the post. 

GCG Thirza finds a crock of gold

         Visit Seanchai in Kitely this weekend to hear live stories in Voice. All times PDT.
Caledonia Skytower: 9am Saturday - Black Hearts and Ivory Bones, 11am Sunday - The Quiet Man.  I believe both will be on the homeworld [in Kitely, aka the sim called 'Seanchai']. The hunt will stay open and we have something scheduled in SL . . .  we haven't figured out what to do here just yet. Our birthday here is on May 2.
        After much applause and thanks, the safari moved on to our next destination, and boy was it nice to be back on OSGrid! We were at a new sim, called The Docks, part of Clairwil Oh's region, this one inhabited by the talented Scottius Polke. He explained that the idea for the build began in Scribbler.

Scottius Polke: this was the original drawing
PatriciaAnne.Daviau: cool picture
James.Atlloud: oooh, that's nice.
Gavin.Hird: very nice
Scottius Polke: A fellow sl'er said I should make a build of it, so I did.  And all the textures here are created in this program. Here is the website: http://www.zefrank.com/scribbler/scribblertoo/
snowbody.Cortes: very nice pic Scott, I love it
James.Atlloud: am drawing now. awesome.
Nova.Saunders: new toy. Love new toys.
Scottius Polke: after this build was released, a machinima, poem and short story were made from this build. Hypatia Pickens made this machinima in it.

Thirza.Ember: how long did it take you to import into open sim?
Scottius Polke: it took a few days, mainly because there were lots of megaprims. Plus some scripting issues. I also had tons of alpha textures that weren't mine, so had to pinpoint all the places where they were, but it went smoother than I expected. The only thing I couldn't get to work was an inner tube vehicle, which was a shame, as it is fun. There is a story in this build, but I have kept it intentionally open ended. This version is only about a week or so old, so still has new sim smell.

Aime Socrates tries some fishing

Fuschia.Nightfire: it's so great to see it again!
Gavin.Hird: It reminds me of a child book I had - extremely cool done
Serene.Jewell: It's so soft and dreamy here.
PatriciaAnne.Daviau: the sounds are awesome
Aime.Socrates: maybe time for lobster catching ?
Scottius Polke: yes, undead lobsters lol - would get some odd catches here :D
Thirza.Ember: lobster zombies
Scottius Polke: zombsters
Wizard.Gynoid: i'll bet Cthulhu is close by
Gavin.Hird: look at the mountain over there, it has a face on it. I live in Norway and we use to see trolls in the mountains
Scottius Polke: you can see his pipe and still lit lantern on the rock below. Those are very much troll mountains :)

       It was very nice to have with Selenmoira from the USS Davy Crockett join the Safari this week, it was a great way to remind everyone that next week we will be visiting two outstanding Star Trek builds, in celebration of the life of Leonard Nimoy, everyone's favorite Vulcan. Before next week, sort out a Spock costume, and brush up on your Star Trek trivia, there are bound to be questions about Pon Farr.

From left to right, Delenn, James, PatriciaAnne, Thirza, Wizard, and Scottius arrive on the MdM

           Last stop for this week - the Museo del Metaverso on Craft Grid.  The MdM, as we call it for short, started back in 2007 in Second Life. Over the years it hosted loads of artists, some great, many not so great, but Rox gave them all a chance to be seen and praised. I am not sure how much good it does to praise people whose only real claim to fame is their unfettered personal vanity, but it's a free country. 
          Roxelo Babenco moved the MdM to Craft some years ago, but the project stalled when RL commitments became too great for her to be able to keep up her presence in virtual worlds. Now she is back, and it is a tribute to her likeableness that so many of her old SL friends and colleagues have chipped in to make this titanic re-opening happen. This sim contains an eye watering nine thousand scripts, well over 15k prims and takes a full twenty minutes to restart. The heroic efforts of Craft grid owner Licu Rau, ably assisted by Billy Bradshaw must be recognized here. The main gallery was designed and built by Alpha Auer. Forty SL artists are on display here, and on the opening night, there were 68 avatars on the sim. It did finally crash, but only when people started talking about watching a performance by DC Spensley. 

Betty's pretty build high up in the MdM

          Maybe 14 Safaristas made it over to the MdM. It takes a very very long time to rez even the notice boards on the welcome area, so brace yourself if you decide to visit. There are some nice things to see if you have the patience.  Betty Turead was on the sim, and we went up to look at her little patch of color near the top of the gallery. On nearby sim Uqbar, there are some fun fridges that ooze fruity particles, and an antique install by Gazira Babeli.

Lucy Afarensis kicks art.

Congratulations to Roxelo, mostly for having the foolhardy courage and fortitude to put up with that considerable percentage of Second Life artists who produce way more presumptuous, preening bullshit than they do art. More power to her, and may the MdM have all the success she hopes for it.

Roxelo, snowbody and Lucy in the fruit.

URIs:
Inis Arcain Celtic sim and hunt:   grid.kitely:com:8002:Inis Arcain
Scottius Polke's The Docks:          hg.osgrid.org:80:The Docks
The new Museo del Metaverso:    craft-world.org:8002:mdm

Safari goes Looking

September 10, 2015, 4:01 am

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John Snow: Ahhh, glad you made it. I'm told by my old colleagues at Westminster Medical School that you are one of their finest graduates, Stephen. I am in need of a skilled yet young-minded doctor to help me with an investigation of utmost importance. Do you feel up to it? (say "yes" in local chat).

Sonic, cholera, and OnLook might not sound like an appealing mix but for this week's Safari it was a wild ride through space and time!
This week Mobius Grid wanted to do something special to mark the 16th anniversary of the launch of the Dreamcast console, an iconic piece of gaming equipment that changed the virtual lives of many a young(and-not-so-young)ster. 

A party ? You better believe the Safari wanted in on that! To try to blend in on Mobius, which is in layman's terms a 'Sonic the Hedgehog-themed world' most of the safaristas donned appropriate furry attachments, some like Jessie Campbell and me for the first time. 


 Some possibly wiser heads (or less adept avatar-changers) chose the 'normal' option and to sit out the dancing, which was largely Funky Gibbon on Acid. It was hilarious fun, and some really embraced the idea - here's Pathfinder

Lucy Afarensis

and Wizardoz Chrome

Rocks the Squirrel was spinning vintage tunes in Dreamcast theme, and a whole load of Mobians were there to welcome us, to represent them all, here's the top Mobian Serra Royale, our kind and friendly host.

Going to Mobius is always a treat. Everyone we have met there has been so kind and friendly,and immensely creative in a style that is as unique as it is beautiful. Go check it out! The addresses to all our stops will be at the end of the post.
Our second stop was a big change of theme, but also extremely well thought out. We went to REDGrid, which is the virtual world belonging to Ball State University. Dr Stephen Gasior uses the 3D environment to help students learn about investigating epidemics to figure out the cause.
Getting to REDgrid was no picnic, because the hypergrid was spitting back landmarks - but as you all know by now our Safari notecard includes the low-tech HG Address for each destination. 
At REDGrid on a sim named after pioneering medical detective Dr Snow.

Fuschia and me blend right in with the Victorian ambience

It's called 'Virtual Epidemiology Investigation' - a series of NPCs explain about the theories held in Victorian times about what caused cholera. The visit starts in the classroom with the received wisdom of the time, and with the help of a HUD, follows in the footsteps of Dr Snow by allowing the student to interview various sufferers and survivors of cholera, trying to understand the anatomy of the outbreak. It's interactive learning - you're meant to respond to questions and answers given by the  NPCs. Some are funny, some poignant, all very lifelike!

Somehow the build, by Stephen and Kim Anubis - managed to withstand the arrival of about ten of us. It's really meant to be visited by one student at a time, but despite that the NPCs behaved pretty well. Here's one of them with Stephen and Kim. 

It's a really interesting exercise in figuring out how people's answers can be interpreted and used to create a scientific model of an epidemic. There's a lot of interesting detail here and it's a fun trip to take even if you're not a student. I heard this radio play about Dr Snow, and you might enjoy hearing it before you go, although *spoiler alert* the play reveals just what was causing that cholera!

Last stop was to UCI Mondego and a conversation with Crista Lopes aka Diva Canto about her OnLook viewer. Here's the tidied up transcript. 

Thirza Ember: so can you see yourselves?
Casias.Falta @hg.osgrid.org: i dont see my ava
Mal Burns: yes - all good here
Crista Lopes: are you all using Onlook viewer or something else?
Casias.Falta @hg.osgrid.org: i am using onlook
Thirza Ember: I have OnLook working
stiofain nbmcmedia: i relogged with diff av on fstorm because my av disappeared on onlook
Mal Burns: oh - forgot - still in singularity
Crista Lopes: if you are on Onlook you should not see yourslves. Maybe you need to close the local chatbar by pressing ESC
Casias.Falta @hg.osgrid.org: when i arrived with onlook i saw my ava for a few seconds the it disappeared
Crista Lopes: ok great, yes that should happen
Crista Lopes: you should all be invisible if you are using OnLook, I haven configured my server here to make ppl's own avatars invisible, but it may not always work...so mileage may vary!
Crista Lopes: try closing the chat bar. maybe that will make it work
Thirza Ember: it seems to make Singularity get some problems, though - when I use Singularity now, it has lost all my passwords, for example
 Stiofain.MacTomais: i seen my onlook av for around 30 secs then disappeared and ui changed
Thirza Ember: the ui changed?
Stiofain.MacTomais: the radar disappeared and ctrl commands dont work
Casias.Falta @hg.osgrid.org: crista will the documentation on how to set up a server for onlook be online sometime or maybe already
stiofain nbmcmedia: can the hg destination for onlook be preset?
Crista Lopes: casias, it's not documented. I'll try to write a blog post about it
Casias.Falta @hg.osgrid.org: great am looking forward to trying it out
stiofain nbmcmedia: Crista do u plan further updates to onlook ? or do u expect viewer devs will adopt the features?
Crista Lopes: I am actively seeking funding to do a complete re-engineering of one of the viewers based on my experiments with OnLook but taking it to the next level but it requires money, because it's a lot of work that I don't think viewer devs will do for free. It's all a matter of who's going to do it  reengineering the viewer will be a departure from Second Life and most viewer devs don't want to do that -- or haven't been wanting to do it so far
Casias.Falta @hg.osgrid.org: great news
Mal Burns: yes - very good
stiofain nbmcmedia: sl is a pretty toxic brand name, i would say there would be interest from the community for a crowdfunding
Mal Burns: Crista - can i ask about how much funding would be needed for something like that?
Crista Lopes: I'm not talking about $5k...
Crista Lopes: I'm talking about $50k at least
Mal Burns: whew - ok
stiofain nbmcmedia: ok will just chk my paypal balance lol
snowbody Cortes: lol
Crista Lopes: yeah it will not be viewer development as usual. Most 3rd party viewer development is really lightweight, not much more than changing the skin, really. Little things. I'm  talking about a complete re-engineering os substantial parts of the viewer and breaking compatibility with Linden Lab, in the sense that once we do it, we will not be able to merge any further developments from Linden Lab
Casias.Falta @hg.osgrid.org: what economic entity do you think well benefit or be interested in funding a project like that
stiofain nbmcmedia: would that be with the aim of having it work in a browser too?
Crista Lopes: no -  two completely different technologies -- browser and this
Crista Lopes: but this can be made to be more like a web browser
stiofain nbmcmedia: ok good info
Crista Lopes: a different species of web browser
snowbody Cortes: C++ ?
Crista Lopes: it's not the language
Crista Lopes: it's the graphics code
Mal Burns: and could possibly be engineered as an app at same time?
 Mal Burns: for android,ios etc
Crista Lopes: no
Mal Burns: ah ok
Casias.Falta @hg.osgrid.org: well there is an android viewer
Crista Lopes: this will be a standalone application, like what it is now, but where the UI is completely programmable server-side, so it's another kind of browser
Crista Lopes: not a web browser, but a opensim-VW browser
Mal Burns: got it
Crista Lopes: a web-browser based viewer for these kinds of content is not feasible
Lucy Afarensis: thanks
Mal Burns: might be a boon to closed grids wanted custom viwer, but defeats hypergrid idea 
Crista Lopes: the only way to see this content on a web browser is to use streaming services like frame and appstream
snowbody Cortes: just to understand better, do you think to extend the Linden protocol stack or do you plan to create something different ?
Casias.Falta @hg.osgrid.org: probably better to call it a viewer and now a browser
Crista Lopes: this content is completely unoptimized, it blows over the limits of the browser in no time
stiofain nbmcmedia: yes and that seems to be prohibitively expensive
Crista Lopes: so my goal for now is just to have a better viewer that works more like a web browser in the sense that the UI comes form the server
snowbody Cortes: so you extend the protocol
Crista Lopes: I hope to make it modular, the UI be interpreted by a JavaScript engine, just like in a web browser but with ties to the 3d scene so that if you click on a object, JavaScript can be run and then potentially talk to the server some more, basically like a web browser. I'd like to preserve the rendering engine of these viewers, which is amazing for amateur content
snowbody Cortes: TCP instead of UDP then
Crista Lopes: no, this will not be a web browser, it's still a standalone application, so it will use whatever protocol is better
Lucy Afarensis: A few years ago i was involved in a project to create custom linden plants by modifying the trees.xml file
Crista Lopes: it just uses the model of the web browser, it will be much more than that and the data will come from the server rather than being hardcode din the clients
Lucy Afarensis: could this be module so the the server could tell the viewer to use a custom set?
Crista Lopes: yes
Lucy Afarensis: cool
Casias.Falta @hg.osgrid.org: i take it this will not address the issue of customizing what URI is the default when a viewer is downloaded
Crista Lopes: For OnLook there is no default and yes, that is orthogonal
stiofain nbmcmedia: so we cud set the destination on hg ?
Crista Lopes: on login?
stiofain nbmcmedia: yea crista is what i was hoping
Crista Lopes: I really can't answer that. Once we make the UI programmable it really opens the decisions up to the virtual world owners - that's the whole point
Crista Lopes: I am about zero interest in making a bunch if UI decisions for everyone
Crista Lopes: people should decide
 stiofain nbmcmedia: lol
Crista Lopes: I'll make decisions for my vLab and my other grids, and those decisions will be based on what I think is important for my grids, which is actually different from grid to grid
Crista Lopes: my vLab has a certain type of uses that are very different from my urban planning grid, hence they require different UIs. There may be groups of people who decide to normalize the UIs and that's fine,  just like social network sites all look more or less like facebook, but that's a social convention, not a technical necessity
Casias.Falta @hg.osgrid.org: do you ever have trouble showing a new user how to get the proper URI into the viewer the first time
Crista Lopes: Casias not with Singularity or OnLook. Since the grid box is writable, so I just tell them enter this URL on the grid box. Fair enough, ppl don't need to use the grid manager anymore in Singularity
stiofain nbmcmedia: that's why we use singu dload for newbs every step cut out makes a diff to take up
Crista Lopes: yes, the grid box being writable was a great thing they did at my request...
stiofain nbmcmedia: but is still way too complicated for most ordinary comp users
Crista Lopes: yes - viewers need a complete rewrite not just the minor aesthetic changes that the devs do
Lucy Afarensis: Do you think it will happen?
Crista Lopes: I hope so!
Lucy Afarensis: me too
Crista Lopes: it'll just be a matter of time until I find the funding for it; it's not research, otherwise I would have gotten the money already
Casias.Falta @hg.osgrid.org: are you in touch with the fellow that developed ctraltviewer
snowbody Cortes: Crista, when you say UI, do you mean also the 3D viewing of the world or the classical user Interfaces ?
Mal Burns: aside from funding, how long would such a development take?
Casias.Falta @hg.osgrid.org: and are you interested in the stereoscopic option
Crista Lopes: 6 months to have something usable.  I'm interested in VR headsets, but that's orthogonal to this, and when I say UI I mean the GUI, not the 3d scene
Crista Lopes: the 3d scene (the rendering engine) is just about the pearl in the middle of a very ugly piece of code
Casias.Falta @hg.osgrid.org: ha ha
Crista Lopes: what they are doing with rendering these highly unoptimized 3d scenes is unparallelled
snowbody Cortes: the middle pearl that do see the world so nice ;)
Crista Lopes: there is not other rendering engine out there that can cope with this, so imagine just the 3d scene with no UI no avatars, no nothing. That's the base. Then the interaction should be programmable, and each application requires their oen interaction and UI, some need avatars some don', some need chat some don't, some need rich buttons, some dont, etc
snowbody Cortes: a web bower is already a programmable GUI and the HTML page fetched and displayed is the result of that ...
Crista Lopes: exactly, like the web browser: -- the model not the actual software
snowbody Cortes: html is based on a xml description sorta
Crista Lopes: because web browsers have limits that are unable to cope with this kind of content
Crista Lopes: web browsers are able to do two things:
Crista Lopes: (1) interpret html -- that's the equivalent of interpreting the 3d content here
Crista Lopes: (2) interpreting JavaScript so to be able to support a multitude of UI -- that's what I want to do here
snowbody Cortes: uhm ... 3d could be realized by vrml... that's another xml description sorta
Crista Lopes: web browsers can render 3d content. They just can't render the kinds of content that tehse worlds proud themselves of having -- amateur-created content. Amateur-created content is highly unoptimized -  there's megabytes of stuff
stiofain nbmcmedia: guilty
snowbody Cortes: with some extension 3d java they can
 Crista Lopes: that isn't really necessary, and would be optimized by professional artists - webgl can do 3d content very well
Crista Lopes: so if you throw one of these scenes at a webgl viewer, it will crash in no time
snowbody Cortes: so my wondering is where you will be in between ...
Crista Lopes: what do you mean?
snowbody Cortes: I mean that you will plan a remoted-designed UI; the server will insruct the client about how to organize the widgets, or something like that
Crista Lopes: My plan is to save this rendering engine from the misery where it lives and give it a proper programmable framework for UI
snowbody Cortes: by xml format
Mal Burns: i assume the final (actual) design will depend on the world provider/host - what you will create is the template for a modulr system they cvan use for that?
Crista Lopes: yes
Lucy Afarensis: yay!
Crista Lopes: funding permitting!
Thirza Ember: My friends... I must close it's late here ... thank you Crista for letting us visit! I'm going to post a little bit of this conversaton, I know many wanted to be here but hypergridding today has been terrible, so many got lost.
Mal Burns: yes indeed
Crista Lopes: thanks for visiting! Bye

This week's URIs (HG Addresses)
Mobius grid               grid.mobiusgrid.us:8002
Virtual Snow             redgrid.bsu.edu:9000:virtualsnow
Crista's grid              nile.ics.uci.edu:9000

A Pale Safari

September 17, 2015, 6:40 am

≫ Next: Bon Voyage Justin

≪ Previous: Safari goes Looking

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Wonderful architecture this week on a rip roaring Safari. A number of new friends joined us on Teravus Plaza, OSGrid, where the Safari generally starts out. It's always hard to tell if they're just curious about our group, or actually want to gridjump with us.


 If you're new and shy and not sure if you're going to be able to make the jumps, please go ahead and IM Fuschia, Wizardoz, or me and we will make sure we get you to the first destination. It is extremely common to crash when you're new to hypergridding, so don't hesitate in asking someone to shadow you on your first few trips - that's what the event is really intended to do - help everyone get comfortable with hypergridding!
Also to mess about, obviously.

Anyhoo, there was some doubt whether our first destination could possible stand a lot of avies arriving all together. We never let that bother us, of course. Here is a diagram of what generally happens.
Sirin Peccable couldn't be there on the day on Atoll Lost, but Francogrid Femme fatale Praline B was on hand to welcome us and tell us a bit about his regions. (freebies! woot!)  As usual, the addresses for these destinations are at the end of the post.

Praline (right) welcomes us to Atoll Lost, Francogrid

 Praline B: Sirin has a real life very busy and the key word to describe him is: volunteerism! He is very involved and a real activist for defense and promote universal accessibility and full citizenship for people with handicap. When he discovered Second Life in 2007, he immediately saw virtuality as a very powerful communication tool to help people. He decided to use OpenSimulator because of financial and open source aspects.For now he is the owner of the opensim grid SirinHGpole-Grid. This grid is dedicated to a project for developing immersive tools for people with mental handicap and autism. But Sirin who enjoy build too and take a pause from his real life, wants show with his builds how it's fun to build with OpenSimulator. To help new people to discover this pleasure, he gives the opportunity to have a land with a particular style and a house ready made.  Atoll Bahuu is an example of a tropical sim furnished. Here in fact it is the entry of the archipelago he is building right now. You may find his freebies shop at City White which is a monumental build, a must to see. Always this idea to push the limits of Opensimulator ;)  I invite you another time to visit City White, its a monumental build,  he built it just for his pleasue and to forget time to time his rl but also he is really involved to show how it is fun and easy to share here. 

Praline B: have a look to the Dragon ship if you can ! Sirin told me something I want share with you, .he has a little daughter, and when he is building she is the painter of his build. She comes and have a look to his build - all the colors you may see are from her. Sirin builds in white, and the daughter gives the colors.
Truelie Telling: the colors are so very joyous

This joyous grid was a tad too fragile for this many outrageous avies, and after we had all crashed about five or six times, we decided it might be just as well to go on to the next destination a bit earlier than planned. Sometimes that can be a problem, if we go too early, because sometimes the region owner waits until the last minute to restart their grid in readiness for our arrival. 

But this time, we were going to a home from home - Ivory City, a region on Sanctuary Grid. This construction is in memory of the late, great Lumiere Noir, and has been beautifully orchestrated by his partner Tosha Tyran.

Tosha Tyran

Thirza.Ember: kudos to the ladies all fressed in pale colors.... looking good!
Tosha Tyran: ah, most of you I see as unknown users - so forgive me for not saying names :)
Aime.Socrates: Fuschia's fault..we are all unknown since she's testing levitation
Fuschia Nightfire: i gave up on the levitation when i crashed the 2nd time
James.Atlloud: bit of work getting around today.
Alya VonZ: how many sims supports all these structures Tosha?
Tosha Tyran: 4 sims. 
Thirza.Ember: Tosha, what year did Lumiere discover SL? was Ivory tower the first building school in SL?
Tosha.Tyran: he came to SL in 2003 and SL had then about 300 residents :) and yes, I am quite sure, his was the first building school, and I think up to date various thousand noobs have passed for the tower and learned to build there
Lucy Afarensis: 1st place I went in 2007 - There were thousands by 2007
Alya VonZ: he builded Ivory Tower, awesome, thought this looked somewhat familiar - took my first lessons there:)
Tosha.Tyran: I learned all I know first in the tower and later from Lumi directly. He was a great teacher.

arriving on Ivory City

             We moved over to Maison Noir, so we could all take a load off and read the interesting Notecard about Lumiere's life and work. 
Thirza.Ember: I think it's wonderful that we are able to still enjoy Lumiere's art ... it's such a rich way to remember him.
Tosha Tyran: sigh - I wished remembering would not be all, but it is great to go on with his work - it is sort of like comunicating with him..
Lucy Afarensis: These places can be palaces of memory
James.Atlloud: The first Ivory tower brings back such memories.
Tosha Tyran: oh shucks yes, what a nut I was then, hehehe,  I spend my first weeks changing clothes and hair and going to parties, hahaha, hippy camp and money trees, and that gets boring pretty soon...

Patricia Ann in one of the Tutotials on Ivory City

                We can all relate to that. It's rare to meet anyone in open sim who doesn't like to build - and this new Ivory Tower complex on Sanctuary offers valuable help to anyone needing a few pointers. For this is not merely a monument, it's a living center for learning. Tutorials in a number of different languages are available, and we hope to see frequent events here - it's what Lumi would have enjoyed, learning, laughing and lots of creativity.

Telling Tales on OSGrid

             Our last stop was on Telling Tales, the sim of Truelie Telling who is a classic example of someone who in SL never got to grips with building, yet now she has a space in open sim, has taken to terraforming and immersive micro environments like a duck to water.

It's a humorous, warm and welcoming sim, and as always Tru sang a lovely set, including a nimber of new songs, reflecting her experiences in virtual worlds, both the highs and lows of this alternate existence. 

Next week, big party celebrating the contribution of Justin Clark- Casey to Open Simulator. Justin has moved on to a different field of work, but his hard work over many years, alongside the other great opensim core developers, has made our worlds possible. Looking forward to seeing you all there.
URIs HG Addresses
Sirin Peccable's region                       hg.francogrid.org:80:atoll lost
Tosha Tyran and Lumiere Noir           sanctuary.homelinux,org:8012:Ivory City 1
Truelie telling's sim                           hg.osgrid.org:80:telling tales 

Bon Voyage Justin

September 24, 2015, 9:48 am

≫ Next: Safari Summer... of Arts

≪ Previous: A Pale Safari

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        No trip this week, just a quick tp over to OSGrid's Event Plaza, for 3 hours of music and chitchat.

         Justin Clark-Casey, who has for several years been a key member of the OpenSimulator core developer team, recently announced he was stepping down from the project to focus on his new job.
He wrote about it here, if you'd like to know more.
Well, we couldn't let him go without a party! 
In classic Safari style, we started the party early, with Truelie Telling warming up the crowd, doing some of her classic set of songs based on life and love in virtual worlds. 
Fuschia livened up the dance floor with her light show, consisting of attachments of all colors and shapes including vacuum cleaners jeeps and of course the giraffe!

Animated attachments aren't everyone's cup of tea, although it's an urban legend that they 'cause lag' - a typical attachment has fewer prims than a lady's dress, and contains no scripts. But if you don't like them, the solution is 2 clicks away... simply derender the person they are attached to!

Voted 'Kitten most likely to be derendered 2014-2015'

 Mal seemed pretty stoked by the galloping horses... nice moves Mr. Burns! And that's Selby Evans sitting in the background
By 1pm grid Time we were really busy, about 50 avies were already present when Justin arrived. By then Wolem Wobbit had taken the stage. 
What a set! 
Missed it? Here is Wolem singing live for us yesterday! Please, show the love and check out his Reverbnation page (he's Mr Wobbit there)  Opensim musicians deserve our appreciation! 
Wasn't long before Justin was trying out all the dances in the menu of Aine Caoimhe's famous dance machine. That's Strannik Zipper in the white tee shirt acting as his wing man, and the lovely Isolde and Sun on the right, and - is that James Atlloud in the star trek suit? I hope you're not expecting me to name everyone who was there - See that greetings card in the background? It had a visitor list script in it, and when i checked it, there were 97 avies registered on it, from a whopping 22 different grids. Wolem gave us the best set - and the conversation was also a lot of fun.
valerie llauke: welcome JUSTIN !!!!
Fearghus McMahon: quick everybody lets chain justin to the region!
Justin Clark-Casey: ha ha
snowbody Cortes: eheh Ilolde, do you have some bug to fix ?
Isolde.Caron @hypergrid.org:8002: want my sensual dance i am using lol
Justin Clark-Casey: I'm immediately back to scanning stats :)
Sunbeam.Magic : Busman's Holiday eh?
Sarah Kline: lol
Justin Clark-Casey: So how is everyone doing?
strannik.zipper: We're having fun - just wish it didn't mean that you are leaving opensim dev!
Isolde.Caron: likeing ur new job?
Justin Clark-Casey: new job is okay, still finding my feet. I only have GCSE science so having to learn about reverse PCR, protein domains, affymetrix arrays, is quite challenging :)

Graham.Mills: Great project Justin
Isolde.Caron: ah, those affymetrix arrays are simple....
Fearghus McMahon: challenges are good though....prevents getting bored
strannik.zipper: hard science is hard for a reason!
Licu.Rau: from virtual world to a different world, justin
Lance Fang: well Justin, you can already see the MASSIVE impact you've had on OSgrid and the entire Open Sim universe
James.Atlloud: I always wondered if I could do PCR in my kitchen oven.  hmm
Isolde.Caron: lol
Lance Fang: I'm half expecting to see your name in life science research journals in a couple of years Justin :)
strannik.zipper: making zombie apocalypse viruses is NOT allowed ;-)
Mercalia Beck: thanks justin for helping make this all possible
   
      Two wonderful hours of great music - when Wolem's epic set ended, LadyJo Martin gave us a fantastic succession of 'Bon Voyage' related tunes - she really is a wiz at themed evenings. We reached a peak of 63 avies all on the sim together, without any problems at least not on the grid's side. Well done OSgrid! Personally, my internet was shaky, and if it hadn't been for the fabulous Foxx Bode backing me up behind the scenes, I don't know what I'd have done. But this marvelous group of people made it all happen.

Neb and Graham Mills

Thirza Ember: not only 60 of us but 16 grids represented right now - not to mention all those who dropped in earlier
Jessica.Pixel: all the different grids is the coolest part
stiofain nbmcmedia: i wonder where all are geographically - ireland here
    The answer came back - Germany, Netherlands, Montreal, Toronto, British Columbia, Wisconsin, Ohio, Sun City, LA, and Silicon Valley California, Mississippi, Nice, Sardinia, Lombardy, Piemonte, Liverpool, Cambridge, and London in the UK, and more. Yet we were all united by talk of drinking and dancing and how sometimes the two are symbiotic!

Here are some of the nice comments made to Justin.
Taarna.Welles: Justin, we will miss you and thank you for everything you did for the OpenSim community. I wish you all the best and hopefully you send a wave once and a while.
Arielle Popstar: Opensim would not be where it is without your contributions Justin
Lance Fang: Lavender and I have go to ...... Justin, thank you very very much for all you have done for the Open Sim universe ..... your work has touched many people world wide and we are all very grateful!
Caro Fayray: i have to leave...justin ty for making this life possible and  all  the b est for the  future
Licu.Rau: I must go too... thank you Justin... I think the best way to honour Justin's work will be making our best in our grids

The Great Wolem Wobbit gave us an epic set!

 Sounds like Justin is on the threshold of a really wonderful new chapter in his professional life. He said he will be back to see us all from time to time, and we're all looking forward to that! 

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Safari Summer... of Arts

October 1, 2015, 5:58 am

≫ Next: Safari gets Tangled and (almost) Terminated

≪ Previous: Bon Voyage Justin

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        Plans change, and sometimes that's a very good thing. This week the plan was to spend just a little time taking a look around the Summer of Artsregion on Metropolis, and then move on to a music event. 
        Apart from the general insanity, the opportunity to make new friends, the underlying purpose of the Safari is to practice grid jumping, that's why we usually have two three or even four different destinations each week. But due to a last minute cancellation, the 72nd consecutive Safari was all Metropolis all the time. And boy, what a fantastic time it was too!
        As usual, the Safari began on Teravus Plaza, OSGrid. Teravus is a residential sim, we occupy the south west corner of it, right next to the waterfall. You will find the Group Joiner poster by the elephant. Every week a new Notecard + LM folder is prepared and you can get your copy from the sign marked LANDMARKS by the main entrance to the Clubhouse. I usually only do it at the last minute when all the panic has subsided. If you belong to the HGSafari group in Metropolis or OSgrid, you should also receive the information via group notices. Events are posted in a community on G+ called Hypergrid Safari, and a  group in Facebook, so find us there, if you use suchthings. 

Panorama of Summer of Arts

        There are about 40 artists exhibiting at the soa sim on Metro (The full address is at the end of the post) and, considering that the HGSafari visit was not part of the official Summer of Arts event calendar we were incredibly lucky to have many of them on hand to talk about their work,  making the visit feel very special.
The build is divided into a cityscape - a lovely 1920's design by Oddball O'Toole, and an open area for the bigger art which we'll call the garden. Officially they're sims called soa1 and soa2.

        Art Blue suggested we start with his camera capture seats in the garden area of the exhibition. This was a really good way to recover from the inevitable lag that 20 avies from half a dozen different grids cause when they all show up together. Took a while to assemble here, and not everyone's a llGetCameraPosition fan.
Selby.Evans: The chair offered to give me cam view.  I blocked it 

Wanda greets the group

        Event organizer Wanda Shigella said a few words.
Wanda Shigella: organized the Summer of Arts again this year. We make it all 2 or 3 years and you can find here different arts from artists from different grids. As well from SL and different Opensim grids Metropolis has always stood for diversity and cohesion and especially in these times where acceptance, funds and cultural diversity or its perceived threat are hotly debated, we would like to send a positive signal of cultural diversity and community today - albeit indirectly. A friend from Franco Grid, the enchanting Praline Barjowski has summed it up: "The Metaversum does not ask about borders, it is a place for everyone, with all our differences. This type of event is the best way to connect with each other. And cultural events are the best link we can share." And now here we stand in the midst of more than 40 exhibitions and are excited about the diversity and specific characteristics... and I just wish you a lot of fun with this regions :)
Spike.Sol: thank you wanda
George.Equus: The Cam View is great! I will have to come back here. Will need at least a couple of hours for this...
Thirza Ember: must have been a lot of work to coordinate 40 artists
Wanda Shigella: Hehe yes it was, but I had a LOT of very nice conversations about art and the metaverse :)
Spike.Sol: yes i think so.. with artists always
Wanda Shigella: Many artists are good friends until now from the last summer of arts. We just love to bring them together - it's alway fun to bring a project up like this
Jessica.Pixel: this auto cam is awesome

Miss Mouse Avia Bonne surrounded by the group

         I'm not going to lie to you, there were an insane number of IMs on my screen, the lag was eyewatering because internet here was playing up, and even though it wasn't my first visit to the exhibition, it was still pretty disorienting. However, then Avia Bonne came into the picture, and her simply gorgeous art made it all worthwhile. Avia was in her kinda cute rat avie, and the lag stopped me getting a better photo of it but here's a 'gif i made earlier' at one of Truelie Telling's concerts - that's Avia in dancing out front.

Thirza Ember: Avia Bonne's art is really gorgeous, she is known by most of us for her 3D work, but look in her exhibit at the 2D stuff- amazing! Avia, can you tell us why you chose to exhibit the 2D art?
Avia Bonne: well, that was the first thing which came up in my mind - I just anted to show something else I make then prims ;-) Open Sim can be used for all sorts of arts, most people only know me for my fashions, which is a minor thingie of me

Taarna Welles: Fantastic! I love the steampunk paintings on the website. Gorgeous!
Thirza Ember: is your art available in the real world too?
Avia Bonne: Ty Taarna. yes, I do sell the acrylics and my website is aviadezigns.com. The avatarArt I made for postcards
Wizardoz Chrome (it>en): are beautiful paintings by Avia, they are really special
Mike.Townsend: I like the ones on the top floor best :-)
Jessica.Pixel: i'm loving the avatars on the second floor so cool
aime.socrates: I love you tool belt avia :)
Avia Bonne: yes, that's art too Aime ;-)
Jessica.Pixel: i love the stuff upstairs that's partially hand painted and part digital collage :D

Caro Fayray

Thirza Ember: next artist is Caro Fayray, she is here with us, she needs to leave soon so let's talk to her ...Caro's exhibit is in the 'garden' sim where we first arrived, let's see if we can go back there without crashing...
Caro Fayray: feel free to dream:)
aime.socrates: wiz..you should clic on "dream" !
Billy.Bradshaw: cool stuff! unique in my experience.
Caro Fayray: all  the  photos are mine
aime.socrates: even lions and pelicans caro ? you went to safari ?
Caro Fayray: yes - and  galapagos islands:) they  were all  real and up close - wasn't so much a safari as hardcore camping trips, and like these, the trips become blurred and mixed.

Wanda Shigella: Caro, your exhibition made my dreams colorful 
Caro Fayray: for  me the  wonder of creating in virtual is that you can do anything  you can imagine. It's so great to see so many different grids  involved here too.

        Next up, Cherry Manga and Praline B, Francogrid natives whose building in the city is a cool elegant strange environment that quite literally captures you once inside.

Cherry.Manga: glad you like the small version, the final one is huge
Praline.B: This is a detail of a whole scene for Immersive Edge , an hypergrid story , you will discover it in November.
Thirza Ember: good re-use of the art work here then!
Praline.B: its not really a re use, in fact we choose to show a detail, just to give you the taste for the entire story lolol - it's a première !

Wizardoz Chrome with Ssm Binder and Spike Sol

Wizardoz Chrome was our next stop, Her bright photographs of installations from Second Life are combined with overturned barrels, creating a wet and wild feel to the gallery. Wizard, who is Italian, spoke in voice in English and for those of us who could hear her, that was a delightful addition to our experience too. 

Knowing her ties to the SL art world, it seemed natural to ask why she feels drawn to open sim. Her answer? So many people think opensim is empty - it's not. "A lot of people, a lot of art. I like to explore!"

Daco's home away from home

Up next, Daco Monday. It was fun walking the streets to find gallery number 15. Daco has, he said, recreated a little bit of his real life home/studio in this building.

 Everything is in movement, subtle, stylish, surprising. Using photos and scripts from his many shows in second life, Daco's treasure house is another one of those galleries where you could spend ages exploring all the angles.

Art Eames

Our final stop was an unexpected chance to meet Daniel, aka Art Eames, at his Mondrian inspired gallery. 

Mondrian fun

      Our last, but certainly not least stop on this whirlwind visit to SoA. Art Eames has made "an art machine generating Mondrian cubes in 3D.   The 2D version was programmed in 1979 by Prof. Herbert W. Franke on a TI 99/4 homecomputer.  We recoded a 3D version of this first interactive Art machine for Windows and for SL / Opensim. You have the chance that your own MONDRIAN creation will be presented at the IMMERSIVIA section of the Art Blue Colosseum" 

See, I was kind of paying attention.

This is a hilarious opportunity to get inside Mondrian's art and completely give yourself over to the color of joy.

Thanks to all the artists who were able to join us, and to the many who we didn't get a chance to speak to. Do not miss this show, and the events in both English and German being held over the coming weeks. Bookmark the Summer of Arts website! And see you next week for another madcap adventure with the Safari.

HG Address: hypergrid.org:8002:soa

Safari gets Tangled and (almost) Terminated

October 8, 2015, 8:55 am

≫ Next: Happy EVER After

≪ Previous: Safari Summer... of Arts

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This week we got some answers to questions like 'What's going on with this year's opensim convention?''How many times do you have to crash before you get to TanGle grid?' and finally, 'What's it like to have your own personal Terminator?'
Of course, there were other, perennial questions, such as 'Where's my hair?''Am I naked?' and 'Who is UMMA?' - all things that anyone who's been on Safari has heard - and said - many times before.

Joyce

Joyce Bettencourt, co-owner of AvaCon grid, and local residents Sun,Tzu and Frans Charming welcomed us to the main plaza decorated with Ruben Haan artwork. After the usual - lovely - flurry of meeting, greeting and friending, we got right down to business.
Jessie Campbell: so I beg the question...what IS Avacon?




Joyce.Bettencourt: hi all, so AvaCon is a 501c3 nonprofit org... we have organized a lot of virtual worlds, things like the Second Life Community Convention that took place in real life in Boston in 2011 and Oakland CA in 2012, and also this past year's Federal Consortium of virtual worlds conference
Selby.Evans: 501c3 is non-profit
George Equus: Tax exempt non profit right 501?
Joyce.Bettencourt: which means any money donated would be tax exempt and able to be deducted if you are in the United States. It also means we can't make a profit, all funds raised go towards programs, and the resources and staff needed to support them.
Thirza Ember: this grid is made for conferences that's why it's so robust.
Jeff Kelley: How do you make it robust?
George Equus: lots of titanium probably
Thirza Ember: underpinned by a giant dev who never moves
Joyce.Bettencourt: we have also helped organize with the OpenSimulator core developers the OpenSimulator Community Conferences. This grid functions a lot like our virtual office and event space, along with hosting others like the Virtual World Best Practices conference presence in OpenSimulator, and several unique projects from other AvaCon folks like Fleep Tuque's Primland build that is a colorful, game-like how to build in OpenSim walk through... influenced by the game Candy Land if you remember that, and also Nebadon Izumi has a region here that has a lot of his work in progress and interactive objects in his studio - that is the Oni Kenkon Creations region.

Jessica.Pixel: joyce have you any news on opensim community conference this year and have you heard of avatarfest coming up?
Joyce.Bettencourt: As for OSCC, we are working on a scaled down event of presentation, along with a call that will go out for folks to do their own events and add them to one big scheduled celebration. Is Avatarfest what Han Held was talking on planning
Unknown UserUMMAU42: Yes - that has a google plus group [Here is the G+ page for that!]
Thirza Ember: avatarfest is holding a special after-fest event for the safari - a safaravatarfest!
Joyce.Bettencourt: with some of the changes to core developers and a lot of business of folks over the summer, it seemed a smaller formal event made more sense this year, and with cross promoting any of the other Avatarfest events and others who want to hold them.
Selby.Evans: Avatar Fest, celebration of the Hypergrid community. Nov. 13-16.
Sunbeam.Magic: Nara' s Immersive Edge will be the grand event of the end :)
Joyce.Bettencourt: well we use a schedule web app that we could also list those and others events too, and our day of presentations that is being scheduled for Dec 5th. - so the overall mission of AvaCOn is to support the users and developers of virtual worlds / metaverse technologies like OpenSimulator, SL, etc so helping to support these events, and also we have done that through holding a Metaverse Cultural Series of events.
Jessie Campbell looks around and thinks we have our own AviFest here!

                      We took a quick look around Fleep's Primland build, which is a really charming way for anyone to learn about building, and not just noobs - there are dozens of hints that even a quite experienced builder can benefit from.

Here's a photo of Truelie wearing all her attachments - skirt, hair, shoes, even a hat. It would be the last time most of us saw that level of complete wardrobe-ness for the rest of the Safari.

Our next stop was on TanGle grid. Peter Veliz, sometimes known as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, is point man for the regular Expo events on tangle, which the Safari has visited in the past. This week, their Steampunk Fair was due to close, but they kept it open just a little longer so we could visit.
The 20+ avatars who departed hopefully from Avacon, however, encountered severe hypergridding problems, mostly getting stuck in that Teleport limbo where the only thing you can do is log off - and even that can be difficult, I find that I have to open the Task Manager (Control-Alt-Delete in Windows) and use that to close the viewer when it freezes in a teleport.

         Tangle grid is set up so you first arrive on the HG Station sim, and have to look for the teleport door to the Expo sim... it's not hard to find, if you know what to look for and are completely rezzed, but for a newcomer, or someone whose patience is running out after multiple crashes, that can be one more layer of complication they don't want to bother with. Frustration runs high when you crash six or seven times, especially in a hypergrid group like ours, where all the people you were just talking to now appear to be offline. They aren't - it's just that until you open an IM with them, or you are both on the same sim, you can't tell that - and that creates a sense of 'the party's over'.

           All of which is a shame, because the Expo was truly excellent.
           Here's our host, Isambard, in all his steampunk glory. The Expo was simply amazing, with most of the names you'd expect to see represented, from Aley to Vbinnia Radek. A sprinking of steamy NPCs brought the festival to life.

George Equus: Absolutely smashing Isam!
Jessica.Pixel: yes i am finding endless things to cam at
snowbody.Cortes shouts: I love this sim

Thirza.Ember: how long does it take to set up a sim like this?
IsambardKingdom Brunel: usually a month to get every one involved if was just me on my own probably few days if i have things in inventry. I have a cool expo gift for every one just i ran out time completing in time so I'll pass you it in morning,

           And here it is, the Steam Devil, no mod/transfer, but apparently Take Copy works, if you want to get yours at the clubhouse. Thanks Isam!

             The Expo already has a wide range of events planned for 2016 - that means you can get involved, and be a part of the fun. whether you make clothes, cars, or some other crazy stuff, see Peter Veliz about an exhibition place at one of the upcoming Expos.

                Our final destination was on Repudiator Quann's sim Ero. Rep has a lot of regions in OSGrid, he turned off a lot of them to make resources available for our arrival. He also quickly organized a place for the group to sit once we got there, and that made a big difference. Often seen with his skeleton avie, we were there to see something even more sinister!

                  We were there to meet him and hear about his year long odyssey, building a highly detailed Terminator avatar, using some totally original parts, and some parts borrowed and re-worked from other mesh models.
Repudiator quann: please give the server a bit time to load all

             After a little bit of rubberbanding, we made ourselves comfy at the medieval table. Wizardoz wen all Predator on us, and - wait, is Spike one of the Borg by any chance? Wow that's quite a dinner party!

Taarna (left) dreams of her perfect mesh man...

snowbody Cortes: hoo - nice castle - Alya can you pass me the bread please?
Lucy Afarensis: I am petting an invisible cat
Alya VonZ passes the bread
Truelie Telling: I need the mead
Cendres.Magic: some beer - rhum - or whisky could be fine
Mike Townsend: How do you know its a cat Lucy?
Spike.Sol: How do they fit together. a medieval castle and a terminator from the future?
Mike Townsend: Back to the Future?
Jessica.Pixel:it is mesh? it's so many little pieces omg lots of detail!
Thirza Ember: Terminator has good teeth, I like that in a man

Mal Burns... you are being observed!

Repudiator quann: my Avie is 100% Mesh, if your viewer don't support it you see me as lines. And set your objects to 4.0. I also rezzed 2 models a gold one and silver one, that are statues, and 1 NPC as terminator behind me.
Taarna.Welles: @Repudiator: Can I marry you?
Alya VonZ: now you need that metal stomping sound when you walk:0
Jessica.Pixel: lolol hearing a child laugh come from a terminator just now
Mike Townsend: Don't worry Jessica it was one he ate earlier *gulp
Repudiator quann: yes loll stupid gestures
Sunbeam.Magic: its an unbelievable avatar Repudiator!!! Unbelieveable! well done, thumbs up!!!
George Equus: Repudiator, how often do you have an oil change?
Mike Townsend: I want to know what toothpaste you use?
             But it was a serious chat too, about rigging issues in particular. Repudiator explained how helpful this Avastar video had been to working on the shoulder/collarbone joint. In the end the secret to his success can be summed up in one work - persistence. Eight months of trial and error, perfecting the various parts, have culminated in this lovely model. It was nice to think that, here in open sim, where everyone has a go at one kind of building or another, he has an audience who could truly relate to his achievement.

Sunbeam.Magic: dedication at its finest!!
Wizardoz.Chrome: It is magnificent
               About halfway through our banquet, we all crashed - but within minutes just about everyone returned, which says a lot about both the Safari spirit, and our interest in Repudiator's work. Interestingly, once the sim came back online, the chat lag and the missing clothes issues went away.
               What a nice man. His next project is a reconstruction of the terminator world - he's already made a start with the Cyberdine building, the 'birthplace' of the Terminator. But note his willingness to be involved in other projects... need some help from a wiz at mesh avies? He may be your man!
Thirza Ember: but this has been fun, so I hope you will let us return another time
Repudiator quann: oh yes!! I will invite you sometime, when i have more build and maybe other projects and I also want to join someone project maybe to help as well.

HG ADDRESSES:
Primland on AvaCon grid             grid.avacon.org:8002:primland
TanGle Expo                                tanglegrid.net:8032:HG Station 1 .... then go through the door marked Expo
Repudiator's region hg.osgrid.org:80:ero

Happy EVER After

October 10, 2015, 11:48 am

≫ Next: Safari gets a Fair Shake

≪ Previous: Safari gets Tangled and (almost) Terminated

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         When the French invite you to dinner, you'd be crazy not to show up. When they say 'dinner theater', then even more so.  

            Grid EVER is the virtual home of the University of Strasbourg, and the performance was 'Au fil de l'eau' by Ann Rocard, performed by the Adret Theater Players - Jenny Bihouise aka Cheops Forlife and Lorenzo Soccavo are the guys behind the event. The audience was limited to just 15 avatars for technical reasons, and it was the perfect size for the group.

        Au fil de l'eau - literally 'water current' -an also be translated as 'streaming''as it happens', 'constantly updated' or even 'randomly' - but there was nothing random about yesterday's first performance, which was a triumph of organization and smooth sailing, puns and poses. There was even a free hat! although no dinner, which was a slight disappointment.

drink break during the performance. This is my kind of theater!

             First off, this event is meant to be accessible to people unfamiliar with 3D worlds, and at the main Welcome sim, everyone was encouraged to show off their walking skills, and to buddy up with another theatergoer in case they got lost.

Cheops aka Jenny Bihuoise in That Hat.

          Why would you get lost in a theater? Well, because this is a walking performance, that orbits around the magical world of French waterways. A charming old batelier led us around the regions, and we were regaled with tales of the riverbank in Voice.
Cheops Forlife: It is talking about the history of the old time of the "house boats" of the rivers in France with winks about the present period and so on.. BUT what can be interesting if not the meaning of the tale, is the new format that we try to experiment for Theater. Jacqueline Barral is the real creator of "theatre promenade" (walking theatre) in France 40 years ago and here with opensim this is a candy to try this format, I don't think to have ever seen such a test with professional actors talking live while their avatar AND the attenders avatar will participate playing with the environment.

         I have a feeling there are one or two theater groups in SL and InWorldz who might argue about any hint that this is the first time such a thing has been tried in virtual worlds, but the event was flawless, lag free, and beautifully planned. Even the distracted found it easy to follow the group and the action as it progressed; everywhere we went there was somewhere amusing and picturesque to sit and listen. And look at Cendre Magic's steely physique.

              This is the beginning of what will no doubt be a long series of cultural events on EVER, so make sure you keep informed about what's going on on the grid. Jenny and Lorenzo will be the first to acknowledge the huge amount of help they have received from other members of the opensim community in particular, but reallty, the night was theirs. Chapeau !

Safari gets a Fair Shake

October 14, 2015, 4:35 pm

≫ Next: Safari on the 'Fly

≪ Previous: Happy EVER After

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       Two destinations this week, and both of them are about connecting and sharing across grids. Two hosts, Satyr Gator and Ozwell Wayfarer, both of them keen builders who have done that extraordinary thing, they have looked up from their own work and beyond their own creativity, and decided to do something for the greater good.

Ozwell Wayfarer and Satyr Gator

          Our first stop was on OSGrid, Satyr Gator's sim opensimworld full HG Addresses at the end, as usual. 
        This is a lovely imaginative build where you can find the famous beacons available - the beacon you'll need to add your grid to the opensimworld.com website which allows people to find your region, club, shop or institution in the massive universe of ... well, open sim worlds, there's really no other way to put it. 

        Get your beacon, but explore the rest of the region too, there are NPCs and spaceships and a lovely psychedelic dance floor. But for our group, there was - let's say, a certain amount of lag.


Lucy Afarensis: drifting about...dreamy
Jessica.Pixel: i'm just floating in space listening to the region radio
Mike Townsend: I am stuck in some sort of Limbo land watching the stars
Thirza Ember: OK guys - the region is not able to take the crowd, so let's all go to LBSA on osgrid, where we will meet up with Satyr!
Satyr Gator: woow. that was a nightmare !
Fuschia Nightfire: that's what we do!
Satyr Gator: that was dangerous!
Jessica.Pixel @os.liftedpixel.net:9000: it's always exciting with safari
Thirza Ember: sometimes we completely crash the sim
Lucy Afarensis: Chalk up another one
Jessica.Pixel:...also if you can dance, you know we'll be dancing

Satyr Gator: sorry guys, the server cannot handle a lot of traffic
James.Atlloud: After everyone left all the objects rezzed.  But it was so lonely.
Jessica.Pixel: don't worry about it stayr, most places can't handle us ;]
        We began to dance much to the bemusement of the folks chilling on LBSA. So ... how did Satyr come up with the website idea? Was it difficult?

Satyr Gator: No, it wasn't hard. coding and stuff, the hard part was to figure out how to make it easy to use. Actually I thought someone might have made it before me. but I searched and I couldn't find anything similar
Jessica.Pixel: I'm very surprised it took this long to make a system like opensimworld
Mike Townsend: Yes me too. You're doing a great job there Satyr
Jessica.Pixel: i think more people just need to start using it, start listing their events there
 Mike Townsend: Yes Thirza that's the important thing. It isn't tied to any one grid or influenced by any grid
Satyr Gator: yeah exactly. it would be pointless to make it for a specific grid
Jessica.Pixel: do you have any numbers as far as growth? are lots of people still adding their regions? have newly added regions tapered off?
Satyr Gator: well there are about 800 regions registered, but only ~350 beacons are active
Fuschia Nightfire: the website says LBSA is currently the most popular region with 23 users
Satyr Gator: yes we have a beacon that you rez in your region and it reports how many active visitors are on your regions on our website.

Jessica.Pixel: I love that you can make a little photo slideshow on your region page, I upload periodic screenshots on how my region is growing
Satyr Gator: yep I like when people add photos of their regions. it's like a web profile for your region
Thirza Ember: I'm curious which grid uses it most
Satyr Gator: 183 regions osgrid ,125 metropolis, and 63 Great Canadian. those are the big winners ;)
Mal Burns: yes - lot in Canada

The openisimworld wesite

Thirza Ember: Is it true you're quite new to opensim, Gator?
Satyr Gator: Yes, I actually found out about the whole thing last summer when osgrid was dead. I'm a builder mostly so I loved it
Jessica.Pixel: wow you learn quick :D

          And just as quick, it was time to head for Destination 2 - A Preview of Kitely Merchant Hypergrid Fair (opens October 18 for 2 weeks only). The fair was opened literally just for our visit, even an hour before our scheduled arrival you couldn't get in, and so it felt very special to be there, a feeling that in no way diminished when we arrived and had a chance to rez. There were several of the builders and merchants present, and we were delighted to have Ozwell Wayfarer explain a bit about his brainchild.

Ozwell Wayfarer: Well, just that the market was growing quickly, and Kitely doesn't have so many community events, so it seemed a good idea to combine the two, but I think the main thing is that it has been a great community effort. There is over 40 merchants involved and everyone has been helpful and generally fantastic
Read more about ozwell's vision for the fair here
Jessica.Pixel: hello ozwell, awesome avatar
Zuza Ritt: Oz is the one with best groomed branches;)
Ghaelen.DLareh: Oz has done the lion's share, no doubt
 Isolde.Caron: it is very well made

Ozwell Wayfarer: I didn't want it to be "forcing shopping in your face", so I asked Zuza and a number of others to come and help me landscape everywhere. I am sure you can have a lot of fun just exploring but there is going to be a hunt when the fair officially opens on the 18th. With prizes hidden in treasure chests around the fair.

Spooky masterpiece by Zuza Ritt

        There's always a moment when people from not-for-profit grids visit commercial grids, a sort of coming together of two tectonic plates. Perms or no perms? Is lucre filthy? Is it OK to take freebies if you won't make freebies? Un-exportable items - good or bad?  Rather than judge, we seemed to come to a delicious understanding that variety is the spice of life.  Ozwell came across as a man with a good and generous heart who has managed to pull off  a triumph in the planning and execution of an extraordinarily liberal event where each maker follows their own instinct regarding how they purvey their creations. 
          

          Kitely fair is about landcaping, clothes, household items, just about anything you might need or want for your sim. Free items sit side by side commercial pieces. It's not only full time Kitely residents who have participated in the Fair, here is our own Fuschia Nightfire's Art shop.
             It truly is one of the most beautiful, imaginative and vast fairs you will see in any virtual world. Don't miss it.

Another gorgeous corner of the Fair. Legend has it, you can sail all the way around the island!

HG Addresses
Satyr Gator's Opensimworld region    hg.osgrid,org:80:opensimworld
The Kitely Merchant's Fair (Opens 18 October for just two weeks)
grid.kitely.com:8002:Kitely Hypergrid Merchants Fair

Safari on the 'Fly

October 22, 2015, 7:11 am

≫ Next: Calendar Girls

≪ Previous: Safari gets a Fair Shake

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          This week we went Back to the Future - in so many ways! Spike Sol invited us to join the party on sim Pyramid, OSGrid, organized by Samira Santanko at the Blue Wave Club. The mesh Delorean was without doubt the star of the evening, as well as DeeJane Samira's choice of music - which began with the soundtrack of the film. You'll find the info for getting to our destinations at the end of this post.

Photo by Spike Sol

          it was a fair bet that this was not going to be a simple Safari. After 75 weeks, none of us expect things to be super smooth, but that announcement on the OSGrid splash screen 'mandatory update' was bound to make the blood run cold.  
         
We made our way over to the Blue Wave, and for a few minutes all was well, but maybe we clicked a little bit too much on the hover boards, or bopped just a little bit too deeply. Before long whoosh, the sim had sent most of us packing. 

Photo by (and of) Spike Sol at the Blue Wave on Pyramid

         A huge amount of interest in this event meant that there were loads of new and old friends present, for a party set to last all evening. For the Safari it was just the first stop on our journey. It was nice to be able to see them, but after crashing two three or even four times, we regrouped on Teravus Plaza, at the home of Snowbody Cortes, a nice green garden called 'Script Fruits' right next to the Safari clubhouse. Some brand new Safaristas showed up, which is always nice! 

           That is Mal Burns in the foreground, and George Equus in the black hat. Since they both usually prefer not to dance, it seemed only fair to name and shame them here. Don't look at this gif too long or you may go blind.
        All well and good, just needed to wait a little until it was time for our next destination, a concert on Westworld grid with Truelie Telling singing and Leslie Kling telling us about the shopping possibilities of the small, Country and Western themed grid. Imagine my shock when I clicked on the Westworld landmark and got this old message! Talk about Back to the Future!


          Using a different avatar, it was possible to arrive on the gorgeous little grid, but there were attachment issues, and in the end it seemed better to bring Truelie back to Teravus rather than try to join her. Leslie Kling kindly agreed to meet us on another occasion to take the grand tour and to learn, among other things, about the Curran Journal which has an office here. 

        It was a shame because Westworld is a really peaceful, harmonious spot not to mention very photogenic. 


        There is a lovely old barn complete with line dancing anims, and a range of Western style streets with shops that anyone can use, rent free.
        Onwards and upwards....

        Our last destination worked just fine though. We were welcomed to sim Dar Pha on the francophone grid, Ignis Fatuus, by many of the team. Each visitor was presented with a book about the grid, and Aime Socrates spoke a few words of explanation in English on their behalf.
Aime.Socrates: Anybody heard about Ambre Ulrik?
Tom.camellian: no

Fuschia Nightfire: no
Aime.Socrates: she was the grid creator... unfortunately we lost her in july 2012...but, as you can see..we tried to keep this grid alive. Max is the wonderful owner, he gave all his time to keep our team alive. This sim is to prove we can have physics and art living together. You can fly around , the deal is to find the red gem...but only after trying to understand the water movements in this world. The wonderful builds here are 'Max-made' with Harthelie, the wonder builder, Jeff the awesome scripter, and Chip, Claudius...and..me...doing nothing here ! just making mess haha.
Truelie Telling: I love this place

Group photo with elephant!

Aime.Socrates: lets go ! Everybody walks on the bridge 
         Despite the sudden arrival of at least a dozen newcomers, Dar Pha sim was extremely safari-friendly, with minimal lag and a horizon that simply begged for us to expand our draw distances, to take in the far-away towers and sailing ships. 

          Max Hill, the grid owner, sports a 17th century mesh master mariner look. try saying that after a couple of sherrys. WAt the end of the long stone bridge, we arrived at a curous pool.

Aime.Socrates:  tout le monde à l'eau
George Equus looking for his snorkel
Aime.Socrates shouts: Fuschia dont loose your colour !
Fuschia Nightfire shouts: that will never happen Aime
George Equus: blubbblubbb
Wizardoz.Chrome: Nemo is Here? :)

Fuschia demonstrates she is color-fast

Aime.Socrates: ok, here you will see 5 propellers... energy comes from the sea, the sea currents make rotate those propellers and acts like a pump to pull water upstairs
James.Atlloud: I like how the gears are precisely moving and placed.
Lucy Afarensis: Like a school of fish
Aime.Socrates: but now..we have to fly upstairs..are you ready ?

Aime.Socrates: now..you have to understand how this disk can turn !
Jeff.Kelley: hamsters ?
Thirza Ember: magnetic personality of Aime?
Mal Burns: gremlins?
Jeff.Kelley: solar winds? coal? fish activated?
Aime.Socrates: engrenages
snowbody Cortes: ingranaggi in italian :) very close.
Aime.Socrates: no - we have to fly down a little bit.  who knows that system ? you have one at home..for sure ! a satellite gear !  James..ever see this kind of gears?
James.Atlloud: yes. orbital?
Mal Burns: in a clock

Aime.Socrates @ignis-fatuus.no-ip.biz:8002: no, not a clock. try once more. Fuschia, where can you find this kind of system ?
Fuschia Nightfire: looks a bit steam punk to me
Mal Burns: somewhere in water pump system?
Thirza Ember: all this is making me think I need a bathroom break
Mal Burns: in a tap?
George Equus: au maison?
Truelie Telling: an oldfashioned hand eggbeater
James.Atlloud : automobile?
Aime.Socrates: who wants to have the answer ?
Fuschia Nightfire: give us another clue - I want to guess
Truelie Telling: elevators use gears like this
James.Atlloud: oh, I was going to say pencil sharpener, but who uses pencils anymore
Fuschia Nightfire: i do

From left to right, Builder Harthelie Deux, Grid Owner Max Hill, and our guide, Aime Socrates (and coco the parrot)

Tom.Frost: lighthouse?
Aime.Socrates: starts with a D
snowbody.Cortes: drill ?
Aime.Socrates: yesss! Snow won! this is the mecanism inside a drill 
George Equus: Mine is pneumatique!
Aime.Socrates: next sim we will build one with pneumatic mechanism.

         There was plenty of fun to be had with the cloning diamond, the windlight wonder-boxes, and just making your draw distance big to take in the incredible views from the top of the tower. 

          Usually when loads of us descend on a sim and start messing with scripted objects, the whole place usually crashed, but once again, Ignis Fatuus showed itself to be remarkably robust. And you can never have too many Jameses, can you?

           Finally we ended up dancing on Guinguette sim, a safari favorite. But there's even more to be seen on this beautiful grid.

sim Guinguette

Tom.Frost: ahhh 45 regions here to explore!
snowbody.Cortes: very nice place,  and the sim didn't crash! yay! well done, thanks Harthelie
Harthelie.Deux: ce fut un plaisir de vous accueillir
George Equus: One of the more interesting places on the HG Safari tours !

HG Addresses
Blue Wave Club    hg.osgrid.org:80:Pyramid
Westworld Welcome shopping mall and dance hall:   westworldgrid.com:8102
Dar Pha the water sim: ignis-fatuus.no-ip.bi:8002:dar pha 

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