Myst Uru Guild Hall

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Two or three years ago Jeff ‘Lehm’ Adams began modeling the Guild Hall from the Myst Online: Uru Live game’s concept art. I later started modeling it for my use in OpenSim. I had started building a replica of the guild hall in OpenSim before the introduction of mesh. So, it was being built with prims, which was rather limiting. Once mesh was on the horizon I lost interest in the prim build.

Jeff had RL distractions. Neither of us was doing much with the Guild Hall. Now he apparently has had some time and has moved his work into the Unreal Engine and made a standalone model available in an executable Unreal file.

Jeff 'Lehm' Adams ' Myst Guild Hall.
Jeff ‘Lehm’ Adams ‘ Myst Guild Hall.

You can find a copy of the Guild Hall linked to from the Myst Uru forum.

SL Mesh Objects
Mesh Objects

I haven’t worked on my model of the Guild for some time, years. Walking around in his model and walking in my model is very different. Seeing his nearing completion rekindles my interest. I need to get Blender’s procedural textures figured out and generate some textures.

Project Sansar: Hours to Build? Really!?!

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Of all places I find Tom’s Hardware has new screen shots of Project Sansar out. See: Linden Lab Reveals First ‘Project Sansar’ Screenshots. But, apparently one image was released Friday 2/4 and another 2/10. Linden Lab CEO Tweeted out the images. May be I should pay more attention to Twitter.

I downloaded the full size image:

Project Sansar: Mars landscape.
Project Sansar: Mars landscape.

Quoting from Tom’s:

Linden Lab said building environments in Project Sansar is quick and easy, noting that, “In just a matter of hours this very realistic, multi-user Mars VR experience came to life.”

Ebbe’s comment that this was done in ‘just a few hours’ has drawn some dubious responses. Hamlet collected some of the blow back in: 3D Builders Seriously Skeptical of Project Sansar Screenshot. 

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How to: AvaStar Following & Vimeo

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Gaia Clary has been putting more of the Machinimatrix/AvaStar videos on Vimeo™. There are good reasons for doing that. Vimeo offers better monetization and distribution control. Unfortunately Vimeo has to compete with YouTube.

Vimeo Following
Vimeo Following

As best I can tell, not that many of the Second Life™ community use Vimeo. If I search on ‘secondlife’ at Vimeo, I find 6,373 videos. Doing the same at YouTube I get 572,000 hits or about 90 times more videos.* 

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Project Sansar Competition?

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We have heard Project Sansar is being built first and primarily for content creators. For some of us that sounds like it is going to be for professional game designers. But, we are told the idea is to make 3D Virtual Reality available for the masses. That tells me professionals to amateurs should be able to use the Sansar platform for their creative work.

postcard pretty is always encouraging - Torley Linden
postcard pretty is always encouraging – Torley Linden

On the high end of game design we have Cry Engine, Unity, Unreal, and others. Those platforms are for professionals. Hobbyists can use them, but they have to be pretty tech savvy about game design. From what we have heard, it sounds like Linden Lab is not planning to compete with those platforms. At least not head to head. 

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Black Desert Coming Sooner

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I’ve seen and played a little with Black Desert’s character creation tool. I speculated about character creation in Project Sansar: What will Character Creation be like in Project Sansar? with a video of the character creation from Black Desert.

Massively Overpowered points me to the release date announcement for Black Desert. Word is: March 3rd, 2016 – a Thursday… Much sooner than most anticipated.

https://youtu.be/v6rmBCMBJWs

Learning to play…

 

 

 

Second Life Servers Week 6

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There are no rollouts this week to either the main or RC channels. As there are no RC updates this week there will be no update to the main channel next week (7). There is no information I am aware of about new packages for the RC channels for next week.

This must be Heaven...
This must be Heaven…

You may remember that last week’s server updates were about fixing problems that appear when server run for more than a week. I was speculating that this week they would be testing those fixes. They have already had QA and testing on the RC channels that make up about 20% of the main grid. Now they are getting a test as the ‘production’ software.

By this time next week we will know how well they did.

Comments in various places have me thinking the majority of the Lab’s effort on Second Life is now on the Project Bento. But, I suspect some changes will be needed on the server side. After all, the project only runs on certain servers in the ADITI (preview) grid. So, it could be that all server changes and fixes are being built for the Bento capable packages. As they need a break in the rollouts to test long term server stability, it may be saving them some work. Rather than build changes for the pre-Bento servers just build the fixes for Bento capable packages.

Some time ago the Lindens added the ability to enable and disable new features in the servers. So, our next server rollouts could be Bento capable, but with the feature disabled… or not. We’ll have to wait and see.