Hypergrid – Ciaran Laval

April 30, 2020May 1, 2020

RANDELSHAM FOREST

Randelsham Forest is located in the Deep Woods on the Continent of Bellisseria

The Moles are at it again!

Upon the opening of the new community center in Randelsham Forest, there have been many viewers and ooohs and awwws. Including those from my self. When you teleport into Randalsham you land on the “landing pad” and walk up into the very airy and open Tree House that is now known as the community center for Bellisseria. The walls are open on 4 sides with extremely high ceilings. There are many places to just sit and commune if wanted or you can hop on a “bubble” and float around. If you go to the right you can walk down to another open-air continuance of the community center Tree House. (Obviously nested in the trees). If you go straight you can view the lake and beautiful countryside that is picture-perfect. If you go to the left you can walk out and grab a ride on the Bubble Machine and float on up to the top of the tree lines and jump on the Zip Line. From the top of the Zip Line, you can jump on one of 2 lines to go out to a tiny island or back down to past both of the centers.

I didn’t just float around, I returned the next day and zipped down the zip line. I went walking through the woods, I bought a canoe so the next time I visited I could float across the lake to the mainland. (Bellisserian mainland that is.) You can go for a hike through the mountains up to the tracks at Randelsham Station.

You can wait for a ride while sitting on the “rails”.

Randalsham Forest is another beautiful addition to an already growing list of beautiful additions nestled in Bellisseria. With more to come I know. It’s a wonderful place to visit. I would say “BUT, I wouldn’t want to live there”. But I do live in Bellisseria. My have Linden Homes come a long way.

This is my first blog post in about 4 years (I think). I have so many things to blog about and have not had time to get them out there yet. That and I am learning how to play with “blocks”. I have been assured that it is pretty easy and I can promise my abilities to manipulate them will improve, with time. For now, though, I am going to sign off and hope to talk soon.

Jezebel Bailey

April 12, 2017

Yuri’s Night Coming To Second Life And Kitely

On April 12th 1961 Yuri Gagarin, a Russian Cosmonaut, took the spacecraft Vostok into Outer Space. Twenty years later, April 12th 1981, NASA’s first Space Shuttle was launched. Celebrations of these events take many shapes and forms.

Yuri’s Night is very much part of those celebrations and even goes boldly into virtual worlds, Second Life and Kitely are two virtual worlds you should be familiar with.

The Celebrations in Second Life are co-sponsored by the International Spaceflight Museum and the National Space Society.

They are planning a whopping five hours of celebrations starting at 3pm SLT today.

The event launches (sorry couldn’t resist) at the International Spaceflight Museum in Second Life :

3:00-4:00 pm – Dance to our “Space Filk & More” audio stream.
4:00-5:00 pm – DJ Aristippus spins space-themed tunes and songs of the Space Age.

SLURL : http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Aspen/200/120/3730

Then the party moves on to The Sagan Planetarium in Second Life.

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June 18, 2015June 19, 2015

OpenSim NPC’s Are An Easy Touch Of Fun

I’m catching up with Nara Malone in OpenSim. Nara had told me that there have been some good developments with Non Player Characters (NPC’s) in OpenSim and had asked me if I’d like to take a look. I had agreed, a couple of weeks ago, but I hadn’t managed to login to OpenSim until today. Fortunately Nara was willing to forgive me for being late.

I did try and go off on my own to look at NPC’s but I ran into a few errors, which were more down to me not understanding how OpenSim works than problems with OpenSim. In order to create and use NPC’s in OpenSim the land needs certain permissions and so does the user. However Nara quickly came to my rescue and took me to a suitable location, where I was introduced to Neo Cortex.

Neo knows his stuff and rezzes a camera, which he asks me to touch, I do so and receive a notecard with some settings, this is somewhat important. Then I am asked to touch the camera again, at which point a double of my Avatar appears in NPC form. This is quite impressive, but it’s static and not doing much. However this was a very quick process, less than a minute for me to be able to rez a NPC version of me.

However the new me isn’t doing a fat lot, it doesn’t move, it looks like a mannequin. However Neo and Nara want to shoe me more and they both suggest that I should engage in dancing with NPC’s.

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March 18, 2015March 18, 2015

Ebbe Altberg Opens VWBPE 2015 With Keynote Speech

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to remove your weapon.” the woman told me.

“I’m a Dwarfin King, a King! Do you understand me?” I replied.

“Don’t take that tone with me or I’ll have to ask you to stand outside the room.” the woman sternly replied.

I bowed my head and removed my sceptre. Yes, the educators are in town and Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education 2015 has officially opened with a barnstorming speech from Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg.

Now if you’re looking for a transcript, I’m sorry but I’m not going to provide one. I’m not a big fan of transcripts, but more importantly, my notecard was eaten halfway through so I lost all my notes! However thanks to the power of my memory (this might not end well) and Daniel Voyager’s Twitter stream I may be able to provide some information. An important thing to note is that Ebbe Altberg’s speech may have been aimed at educators but it was extremely relevant to virtual world fans of all types as he delved into the future of Linden Lab’s top secret, but so far unnamed (other than being not Second Life 2.0) virtual world.

Ok so the bombshell news, the nextgen virtual world from Linden Lab will have an age rating of 13+. Now before we all panic too much, Ebbe pointed out that legally there’s really no difference between a 16+virtual world and a 13+ virtual world.

Another bombshell for those looking forward to getting an early look at Linden Lab’s nextgen virtual world is that initially Linden Lab will be hand picking participants and they will be looking for participants who know Autodesk Maya and can create experiences for Virtual Reality and a PC platform.

Concerns were raised as to why Linden Lab were looking for people with skills in what is a rather expensive piece of software, rather than an open source product such as Blender. Ebbe assured people that they will be looking for the nextgen virtual world to be open to many different creation products, but for the early testing, they want people with Maya skills.

In terms of costs, Ebbe is looking to lower land costs and increase sales taxes in the new platform. Linden Lab are spending a decent amount of time trying to find the ideal balance here, although it’s much harder to change the balance for Second Life than it is for the nextgen platform.

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December 31, 2014

2014 Reviewed All In One Post

If you’re read my other two posts reviewing then there’s nothing new here in this one, it’s just a merging of the two posts to make it easier for future reference. This means it will be a long post, with pictures, videos and probably some errors.

January

January started with a look back to 2013 and the number of private region losses. The scores on the door from Tyche Shepherd displayed a slow down on the number of regions leaving the Second Life grid, something that would continue during 2014.

2012 Net Private Region Losess – 2865 (12.0%)
2013 Net Private Region Losses – 1719 (8.2%)

The virtual world of Kitely moved to a different pricing model which largely did away with the pay by the minute options as these had not been popular.

Blackened Mirror poster should be here — The Blackened Mirror Poster

Season 2 of The Blackened Mirror was taking a mid-season break but would return by the end of January. The show was recorded in Second Life.

Linden Lab were Raising The Roof : The HTTP Project. This project, which had started in 2012 was aimed at improving HTTP communications to improve the end user experience. Linden Lab would continue working on improvements during the year.

Second Life users were getting frustrated by tax and account information requests from Linden Lab. They would continue to be frustrated by these requests throughout the year despite Linden Lab improving their communications and information on these issues.

Second Life got a mention in the comedy show, 2 Broke Girls.

Then came the storm to warm up many a chilly January evening, Cloud Party announced that they would be closing their virtual doors on February 21st.

This was quickly followed by even more news to warm up January, Aston Villa fan and Linden Lab CEO, Rod Humble, was leaving Linden Lab. This created a Twitter storm.

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