Click to Visit Rustica & See How Far Cloud Party's Come

Click here to visit the Cloud Party island of Rustica, created by Maxwell Graf, who also created the sim of Rustica in Second Life, because as you can see by the screenshot above, it's pretty impressive, with vivid textures and mesh made to seem like gnarled trees and strange and alien rock formations. Also: Running water! At a glance, I'd say it holds up fairly well graphically to Skyrim (at least on low-medium graphic settings), let alone Rustica of SL, especially since what you see above is running within a web browser (Chrome, in my case). It will take awhile for Cloud Party to be fully ready for prime time (as the CEO told me last week), but for a virtual world in early beta, as you can see, it's already becoming something worth seeing. And yes, that avatar next to me is claudia222 Jewell, another top SL content creator. She is starting to experiment in Cloud Party, so if you like Rustica, you're likely to see even more to like in Cloud Party soon.

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Comments

[Damien Fate]

Nice work Max, some interesting stuff there.

I wish we had normal maps and specular maps in SL...

[Ajax Manatiso]

The ultimate success or failure of Cloud Party will be if they can come up with a compelling reason to visit and to spend time there. Right now, having normal maps and specular maps means absolutely nothing to 99.9 percent of people. Having the nicest trees you ever seen will put it at number 37 on a rainy day list. "Build it and they will come" is the epitaph on 10,000,000 failed ventures. Right now, SL's compelling reason is because 40,000 other people are logged on right now, but getting there from here will be monumental.

[Bobo]

They just need to wait another 5 years until ALL of the SL created pundits selling VR, have finally died or are now selling expressos or how to use g+.

Then virtual worlds will have more millions spent on them by 25 year old VPs in "old" media companies trying to keep the PR hip and their college buddies employed.

[Pasketto Vendetta]

I took a look around. i also saw a few mesh houses and furniture by Scarlet creative and charlotte bartlett on there too so it is nice to see some known and respected creators from SL showing up.

it will take time but i plan to keep trying it out.