Click here to visit the Cloud Party world of Aristide Depres, which is the name of a well known Second Life artist who took that identity into Cloud Party, the web-based world, and is now creating art there too. Artistide is among the many SL artists who have created Cloud Party scenes in the last week or two, and so far, it is to me the most impressive. There's a giant sculpture of a woman lying across the surface, above which boulders (physics-enabled) fall. Artistide has added new content to the place since I took this screenshot last week -- interactive music is involved -- but really, you should click to see it for yourself.
This is just one of many Cloud Party experiences created by SL artists, as I said, and I'll be blogging about them soon. And I'm not the only one. A few days ago, Cloud Party investor/adviser Cory Ondrejka, who long ago co-founded Second Life, posted a pic of himself visiting a surreal Cloud Party world on his Facebook wall.
Artistide, I should add, created a Linden Endowment for the Arts sim in Second Life. Normally I would add a teleport link to visit the place, but here's the very interesting thing, look:
Aristide Depres is promoting her Second Life sim in Cloud Party. Clicking the image above left even brings up a SLurl link, so you can directly teleport from Cloud Party to Second Life. (I mean, after downloading, updating, and executing the SL client, and making sure it's compatible with your computer, and tweaking your settings so it runs well on it, and logging into the server, and then waiting 4-5 minutes for the sim to display fully, of course.)
More Cloud Party islands coming soon. If you know of any that you love, please pass the links on. This one comes courtesy Ms. JoJa Dhara (her name in SL, and now Cloud Party too.)
How about an artist to make the horrible avatars look better?
Posted by: Amanda Dallin | Wednesday, July 11, 2012 at 12:58 PM
Not sure why the redirect from a light to heavy experience, but true about the viewer, what a beast when you have something to compare it to.
Maybe just not enough time to port or re-create enough of the artwork into Cloud Party. Or possibly the difference in object/triangle counts from one to the other for the existing stuff.
Still getting used to a relog consisting of just refreshing the browser page, it's just too easy and quick.
Tested Cloud Party on a few different machines. Getting love from hardware that can handle up to a half dozen or more simultaneous logins without complaining.
Still tons to get done in Cloud Party for features, but I'll take Cloud Party's 4 developers with experience in game engine coding over LL's 300 employees that can't figure out what a virtual world is and how to make it a great stable platform after 10 years for its existing customers.
It's not just about lighter weight though, just tons of cruft we never needed in a virtual world, like "economy", mainland, separate in-world vs. web sales, land reselling, etc.
At any rate, looking forward to seeing some great builds at CP in the near future.
Posted by: Dartagan Shepherd | Wednesday, July 11, 2012 at 01:09 PM
Cloud party has the same problem as SL in regards to loading content. I went to the moya flyland and tried to run around but kept being blocked by invisible walls. Turned out it was content that still had to download. If the flylands become as rich as SL islands I expect it to have the same loading issues.
Posted by: Frans Charming | Wednesday, July 11, 2012 at 01:21 PM
Just be patient Frans ;) but true sometimes new items can be tricky but all is in Beta and building up... more beautifull flylands to explore
Posted by: JoJa Dhara | Wednesday, July 11, 2012 at 02:09 PM
Famous SL designer Maxwell Graf also has a large island visible as a skull on the horizon of Aristide's. In the past week most of my friends have moved to CP too, and to top it off my CP neighbour is a Linden! I have mixed feelings about the whole thing, especially the Facebook logins, but it would seem a migration is certainly taking place.
Posted by: EhrmanDigfoot | Wednesday, July 11, 2012 at 03:13 PM
I was lucky enough to spend some time with the famous Maxwell Graff on cloud party, but it was hard to get close to him due to all the paparazzi flashing lights.
Posted by: Cube Republic | Thursday, July 12, 2012 at 12:41 AM
meh @ cube. I am a schmo, sitting at my computer in my spiderman underoos with cheetoh dust all over me, just like everyone else.
As for cloud party, Im enjoying the experiment so far. Its good to see so many SLers over there, and already doing interesting work. After bluemars I must admit to being a bit gunshy, but even so feel it merits further exploration and some time to learn the tools there. The possibility, even remote, of some part of the 900 million FB users being exposed to virtual worlds through CP is too much to ignore. Any exposure the rest of the world can get to the magic you can experience inside virtual reality is a good thing, and LL needs some competition to prod them out of the complacent sleep they are in. Is it going to kill SL? I dont think so, but it may make LL step up their game at least.
I dont plan on leaving SL anytime soon, but I cant ignore something as interesting as CP either.
Posted by: maxwell graf | Thursday, July 12, 2012 at 12:58 AM
I don't get it. When I follow the link I only get the usual castle in a soap bubble. Where is the art of this artist?
I see the point in Cloud Party - it's much closer to "the internet", so it could be a step in making the internet 3D and virtual, as we imagined years ago, when we joined SL. But still CP is light years away from being anything like SL. It starts with the joystick not working in a browser and doesn't end with the strange kind of bubble world in the sky that lacks any landscape imagination. I'm not sure if any of these handicaps can be solved without diving into the problems SL had and painfully managed to come by step by step.
Posted by: Moni Duettmann | Thursday, July 12, 2012 at 01:02 AM
Was teasing Max, you're a good friend and a pleasure to talk to :)
Posted by: Cube Republic | Thursday, July 12, 2012 at 01:20 AM
"As we imagined years ago", Vrml 1996 and still the browser's war.
Posted by: froggie | Thursday, July 12, 2012 at 03:15 AM
@froggie, not quite 1996. Micro$oft is no longer quite as able to stifle, or buy up and ruin, any technology that threatens its revenue model.
So maybe CP can amount to something eventually, unless you use the IE browser of course. That's the only thing that has not changed since '96.
Posted by: Iggy | Thursday, July 12, 2012 at 04:16 AM
I want to get an island, but CP does not accept PayPal. So I'm stuck with OpenSim for now. :(
Posted by: Masami Kuramoto | Thursday, July 12, 2012 at 07:10 AM
I really can advise is to those who can handle it, to use Niran's latest release on SL!
And if any wants to explore amazing worlds, well Open sims are full of wonderful amazing regions and no need to use Mad face login!
Posted by: foneco zuzu | Thursday, July 12, 2012 at 10:43 AM
And Masami, you are nost stucked with open sim, you are blessed with it!
Posted by: foneco zuzu | Thursday, July 12, 2012 at 10:44 AM
It's fascinating and yes, the fact that it could eventually interest some Facebook-users is great, as is the fact that no downloads are needed.
However, I guess I'm still a bit traumatized by the Blue Mars experience, the Lively-failure and the Metaplace shut-down.
As it happens, many of the users of Blue Mars and Metaplace were already part of the unfortunately smallish group of people who are interested in open-ended, user-generated virtual environments.
Often they belonged to the even smaller group of 'builders' in those environments.
However, at the end someone asks tough questions about ROI and things like that, and projects which only gain traction among some hundreds of participants are not very likely to be interesting business-wise.
So, visiting Cloud Party and counting there about twenty to thirty people, I have my doubts, even though the project is still very young. Of course, I do hope I'm wrong and that the project will succeed.
Posted by: Roland Legrand | Friday, July 13, 2012 at 02:23 PM