Thursday, March 9, 2017

Sun, Sin, and Saraneth

          To visit Ignis Fatuus is a bit like watching a French film. The scenery is beautiful, and invites long, sweeping, cam shots. The sound track is epic, the dialogue, rigorously atmospheric Gallic. After a while you begin to wish you'd sat up front in your French 101 class, and fear that the subtitles are missing something crucial, and then after a little bit more, it occurs to you that you're not following the plot because ...maybe there isn't a plot.

            Once you've embraced that - and most experienced Safarians figured this out about 2 years ago - what's left is a wonderland of photo ops, cute corners, and remarkable architecture. It's intime and indéchiffrable, not two words readily associated with a field trip, but we kinda made it work.



          We were on Saraneth a region the group first visited some months ago, but which now has a bunch of new buildings. The purpose? It's hard to say. Chiefly, it seems, to 'please visitors' without any plan to create an interactive quest, but when pressed, the group admitted there's a long term plan to turn the region into a game, with a scenario written by Aime Socrates. 

          There's certainly plenty of potential; apart from the principal points of interest, the castle and the palace on opposite sides of the lake, there are dozens of grottoes, towers, pergolas, and houses, not to mention secret passages and caves.

          If you don't know much about Ignis Fatuus Grid, it's HG friendly and online 24/7, so open to the public to visit, but as far as residence goes, they're not into renting regions so much as building as a team and hanging out on some of the most gorgeous regions in the metaverse. Ignis has been online since 2008, so one of the oldest opensim grids, and the core residents have remained more or less the same. That's why there are so many exquisitely detailed regions to visit - time is not a problem.

          Not all, but many items on the grid are free to copy. A word of advice to new people who have come to opensim and decided to try to make money here. Unlike SL, Opensim is a much smaller place than you think. Unlike SL, free is free. If you sell the free full perms items you find, before long, both the person whose stuff you are selling, and the people whose money you are taking, are going to figure out what you've done. And karma is a bitch.

          One thing we found out, Madame Michou who announces people arriving on a region, is in fact a cousin of Max, it's a pretty sweet job but the hours are long. Hmmm... that may be an alternative fact. Max Hill is the chef de la grille on Ignis, (yum) and I tried in appalling french to get the grid 'family' and Ange Menge, a longtime friend of the group, to say something about him. Yeah, you're just going to have to use the translator on this bit.

Thirza Ember: dites-moi quelque chose de belle sur Max que je peut ecrire dans le blog demain
Harthelie Deux: Il n'y a pas plus gentil que Max.
Ange Menges: Sisi Thirza, c'est sa caractéristique principale : il ne peut pas s'empecher de rendre service à tout le monde
Harthelie Deux: Max est le builder fou d'ignis, il ne peut pas supporter de voir une sim vide il faut qu'il la remplisse
Ange Menges: Autre caractéristique de Max : il construit "à l'ancienne" : prims prims prims. Il est tres bon avec les prims torturés, ca lui suffit pour ses création. Pas de meshes
Chip Angelvi: Quand la morosite vous gagne...Un petit tour sur Ignis et vos pensees rejoignent les reves de max le paradis en somme ...
Ange Menges: Allee Max raconte un peu ta vie à Thirza, elle a besoin de matière pour son article
Max Hill: ben mon probleme c'est que je suis tres mal à l'aise pour parler en anglais
Ange Menges: parles en francais à Thirza, elle parle francais comme toi, Max, juste un léger accent italien...
But we couldn't get much out of him. Ange explained.
Ange Menges: Bon Thirza, faut que tu reviennes voir Max toute seule, j'avais oublié une de ses caractéristiques, il est TIMIDE

          There's nothing timid about the regions though, they speak for themselves. If you've seen Saraneth, go to the Welcome sim of Ignis and pick any of a dozen different regions, they're all amazing. If you think you're a 'good' builder, go to Ignis, it will be good for correcting your self-esteem.

          Our second destination was to the US-based Adult grid, Sinful, at the invitation of Destiny Moore. No, no, wasn't an orgy or anything like that, it was a live concert dance event at Club Sinful, an elegant environment with strong masculine lines.

          Speaking of masculine, Drang Po's winged avatar raised a few questions, about rideability and particle action mostly, but we don't need to get into all that. Suffice it to say, there is likely to be an updated, multi-featured version of the avatar available on Sinful Grid soon.

Drang Po, (upper left) wearing a flying phallus avatar.
I tried to make it look as angelic as possible.
          Mostly, we were growling over the ongoing UMMAU issue - that's when the name of an avatar doesn't appear above their head, and the tag reads UMMAU42. This has to do with the fact that when your avatar arrives in a region, your viewer and the region begin communicating.
          The region tells your Viewer about all the people, objects, textures, scripts etc that the region contains. At the same time, the region is asking for information - not only the appearance of your avie, but also the contents of your inventory - the stuff in your suitcase, and (mostly because OSGrid doesn't use the My Suitcase Folder strategy) the Region also tries to read everything in all your other inventory Folders - it can't, but it makes multiple attempts before giving up.
          Now, that's a lot of back-and-forth communication for the server to handle, even if it's just one avie entering a region.
          Imagine the amount of data exchange that happens when 20+ people teleport in from all over the hyperverse. Even more stress on the server if someone has an attachment that has some funkiness about it, like they didn't put it in their My Suitcase, or it's flawed mesh.
          Eventually, when the flood subsides, names will show up. Sometimes, you can force names if you Friend or check the Profile of the person who appears as unknown, but... this is why devs smile at you when you complain about UMMAU.


Kiely Kjeller: what does the ummau stand for anyway? probably something like UFO, hehe
Sunbeam.Magic: it might mean You Might Miss Avatar Unavailable ???
Truelie (find her music here on reverbnation) sang some of her best tunes for us, in keeping with the sinful theme, which kinda suits her, as does her new look shown below.


Destiny Moore:
Welcome to Sinful Grid. The grid was founded in January 2016 we have just celebrated our 1 year anniversary. I was in SL originally, but got tired of the high prices in SL and started researching alternatives and came across Opensim. We were in Inworldz for a while, before setting up our own grid, with Digiworldz hosting.

Destiny Moore
George Equus: place rezed pretty much immediately
Sunbeam Magic: Lots of room for big big crowd !!!
Alya VonZ: looks just as big a dancefloor as the one on event plaza:)
Destiny Moore: On the back wall of the club are Landmarks to regions on Sinful Grid including the new Gloebit Hyper mall

          Sinful isn't just about money though, they have a very nice set of free skins you can find on the Welcome region, naughty and nice as is fitting for an adult grid, so don't forget to go over there and take a look! Beaches, clubs, and various adult fun and games are among the destinations. You may find more than you bargained for, but it's all in the best possible taste....

          Last but not least, Destination 3 - and possibly the longest ever name for a sim in the history of virtual worlds = Power of Green Community region on Dynamicworldz.
          Voice events can be incredibly fun or incredibly tedious, depending on how much you can understand or hear. So it was much appreciated that during our trip to see Powerof Green's var regions on Dynamicworldz grid, owned by Danny Cruise, we had a sort of spoken/written word hybrid conversation, in that PoG talked but she also wrote much of her presentation into local chat. You can find her G+ page here
          Her project comes from some RL work she does DJing and do-gooding in parts of the world where electricity isn't something you can take for granted.

            Before going any further, it's important to know that grid owner Danny's been doing some heroic work on his servers over recent weeks, and yes, would have been smarter to postpone our visit until things are settled, but hey, we like a challenge on the safari, and while Landmarks proved a bit elusive, the HG Address worked fine. Yay low tech!
           PoG had a lot to say which can't possibly be reported entirely here, I'm pretty sure she'll tell you all about the build if you go over to visit. Here's a hiphop taste of the chat.
PowerOf Green: sustainable living
PowerOf Green: green building
Dixie Landmann: Welcome Cookie
(probably a person, since nobody seemed to be eating a welcome cookie)

PowerOf Green:  Hypergrid and viewer classes
PowerOf Green:  Design
PowerOf Green:  here free to all
PowerOf Green:  we were 5 years ago the first REnewable energy academy in Virtual Environment
PowerOf Green:  we are hip hop non profit with celebs on boards so alot comes from them ... we are very well known for working with gang members and teens to get them off street and drugs
PowerOf Green:  we had to move our home cuz the closed grid closed



That's Kaneva grid, which started around the same time as SL (in 2004) and closed abruptly, with just a few day's notice, at the end of 2016. Nah, I'd never heard of it either.
Jessica Pixel: were you able to move your regions and content ??
PowerOf Green:  no, just the .dae files
Sunbeam Magic: It was totally different format I believe
PowerOf Green: yes it was, but we have moved on - there is over 100 of us here and in OS from that grid Kaneva
Jessica Pixel: gaah
Isis Ophelia: uh lot of work, closed grids are a mess
Jessica Pixel: its nice to start with a fresh build sometimes
PowerOf Green: if you wanna build solar and wind hands on here we do that, then you take your designs home. You will see it around this region, you will see ones we made too, so feel free to go around this island and academy building and look.

          No need to go, when you can cam, obviously, and that way you don't miss the local chat.
          There are many ideas about making power from unconventional sources, including a fart-powered phone, - would that be a smelephone? - but I leave you do uncover the other excellent ideas and bright shiny minds of Dynamicworldz for yourself.


          A good time to drop by might be this Saturday at noon Pacific time. They're holding their first HG fashion show on three grids, Zangrid, OSGrid and on sim Clubland Dynamicworldz.

HG Addesses:

Max Hill's Saraneth ignis-fatuus.no-ip.biz:8002:saraneth

Destiny Moore's Club SInful login.sinfulgrid.com:8002:clubsinful

Powerf Green's community grid.dynamicworldz.com:8002:power of green community


Links:
Truelie Telling Music
https://www.reverbnation.com/truelietelling

Power of Green LA
https://plus.google.com/communities/100716396283374707937/stream/9fab6823-8e32-47fd-9ca6-805f2b7b1c1d

1 comment:

  1. Thank you Thirza for the glowing review. We at Sinful Grid are very much honored to even be considered for a visit. We hope to see many of you come back for visit or to make Sinful your home anytime.

    ReplyDelete