New World Notes

Spend Your Afternoon at a Small Town Cafe With the Help of This Charming Second Life Machinima

 
Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

It's still hot off the machinima presses (that's how people make machinima, right?) but this short video from designer Maylee Oh might be the cutest Second Life clip I've seen in ages. Just watch it for yourself above if you don't believe me.

Maylee's name may sound familiar if you saw the promo video she produced last year to advertise her brand, The Secret Store. The promo was catchy as heck and a phenomenal success, which I covered here on New World Notes at the time. Her latest machinima work is miles away from the glitter and polish of her promos, though. "Small Town Cafe" is the second short machinima she's produced this week, and both offer sweet little vignettes into surprisingly precious worlds.

You can drop by the location of "Small Town Cafe in SL [Teleport link] or pick up the sweet old lady avatar featured from Maylee's store in-world [Teleport link] or from the Second Life Marketplace. You can also find more from Maylee on Flickr or Youtube. I particularly recommend watching her other recent machinima clip, "Journey", as well as the 2015 promo for The Secret Store posted last month, which features a dash of magical girl flair that I can't help but appreciate. 

Gacha Fever: Second Life Designers Are Dropping Stunning Work-In-Progress Teasers for Upcoming Fashion Event

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

'Tis the season once again -- for The Arcade, I mean. Second Life's most popular gacha event will open its doors on Monday, June 1st, and designers are already starting to tease the sets they'll be offering in their gacha machines.

My favorite so far has to be the work-in-progress teaser posted above, a set of mesh corsets from Pixicat. Pixicat (both the brand and the designer) are known for clothing and accessories with a lot of detail work that's more than just texture deep. She's a phenomenally talented 3D modeler, and her work is always intricate and costume-like. She takes so much care with every swoop and swirl of her creations that these finished corsets are sure to be a must-have from the upcoming event. I mean, seriously, just look at them.

If you want to know more about The Arcade, keep your eyes on their website. In addition to having an event calendar, group info and all the latest news, it  will be updated with a full catalog of what's available closer to the event's launch. As for Pixicat, you can check out more of her work (eventually including the finished corsets) in her Flickr gallery.

Linden Lab Staffer Quits Virtual World to Make Virtual Food

I was enjoying a long, leisurely Memorial Day weekend brunch with my girlfriend when this New York Times article just about made me choke on my carnitas con huevos:

Boom times in Silicon Valley call for hard work, and hard work — at least in technology land — means that coders, engineers and venture capitalists are turning to liquid meals with names like Schmoylent, Soylent, Schmilk and People Chow... Soylent’s success has created opportunity for imitators, who are mixing and marketing their own powders. Alex C. Snyder, known on Internet forums as “Axcho,” quit his job at the software company Linden Lab last August to sell his own variants of Soylent, like Schmoylent and Schmilk. Many of his repeat customers in the San Francisco Bay Area work in technology.

So in other words:

Top Six Posts from New World Notes Last Week!

• Linden Lab Planning to "Deal With Sub-Optimal" User-Generated Content in Second Life Successor
• Oculus & USC Developing RL Expression-to-VR Avatar Tech - Solution for Ridiculous "VR Gawk" Still Pending
• Second Life Content Creators Cashed Out $60M Last Year, Says Linden CEO - Including Someone Making "Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars" Selling Avatar Feet. Yes, Feet.
• Second Life-Based Survival Horror FPS Attracts Over 1000 Players In Its First Month
• How to Approach Women in SL Without Being a Creep
• Watch Philip Rosedale Demonstrate the Latest Build of High Fidelity's Massively Distributed, Multi-World Metaverse

Watch Philip Rosedale Demonstrate the Latest Build of High Fidelity's Massively Distributed, Multi-World Metaverse

Recorded earlier this month at the NeuroGaming Conference in San Francisco, here's Philip Rosedale answering the question "What is the Metaverse?" with High Fidelity's answer: A massively distributed network where every user can have their own virtual world on their own server. If you want to cut right to the demo, it starts around the 24th minute:

I actually find the voice chat the most impressive thing in this demo, conducted with Skype-level low latency and, well, high fidelity. I do recommend watching Philip's whole talk, because I think it leaves unanswered a fundamental question beyond "what is the metaverse?"

Blogger Canary Beck Answers the Age Old Question: How to Approach Women in SL Without Being a Creep

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

Recently Second Life blogger Canary beck posted this gem, titled "How to Approach Women in Second Life," and to be perfectly honest I'm jealous that I (or should I say Miss Metaverse Manners) didn't come up with it first. It details all the things someone can do wrong when they approach a woman for a conversation in SL, as well as some of the things they can do right.

The biggest faux-pas? Sending her an IM while you're halfway across the sim and 400 feet in the air. Surprise surprise, women generally don't like feeling like someone is watching us, especially when we can't see that person ourselves. Most of us have been socialized by every other episode of Law & Order SVU (among other things) to be really uncomfortable in that sort of situation, and that instinct doesn't necessarily vanish the instant we log in to the digital world.

There are already more "Don'ts" than "Dos" on canary's list, but I'd like to add just one more...

Play: My Garbage Cat Wakes Me Up at 3am Every Day

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

I have to believe that this game comes from a place of love. It might not sound like it from the name, or they way you play, or the message you get when you "win", but I just have to believe that the creator of My Garbage Cat Wakes Me Up at 3am Every Day loves the titular garbage cat if he took the time to make a little game about the creature's late-night hijinks.

Then again, maybe it's just the culmination of more than a few sleepless nights.

My Garbage Cat Wakes Me Up at 3am Every Day is short and to the point. With graphics and a greenish tinge reminiscent of the original Gameboy, it puts the player in control of a restless little garbage cat. They can hop around the room, knock things to the floor to destroy them, clamber up tilted lamps and mewl incessantly, even pause to purr and knead their paws on whatever surface they're in the process of destroying. The ultimate goal is to wake up garbage cat's master, with a meter on the top of the screen tracking their success.

It's a small game with a pretty good sense of humor. If you're a cat-lover (or even the distinct opposite of one) My Garbage Cat Wakes Me Up at 3am Every Day is certainly worth a sliver of your time this weekend. Play it on creator Will Herring's itch.io page here.

Visit a Looming Second Life City Turned Inside Out

Caitlin Tobias took some breathtaking images of City Inside Out, the latest art installation by Haveit Neox on the Linden Endowment for the Arts sim until June 30. As the name suggests, City is a massive metropolitan complex seemingly turned inside out, so it has no interiors. Much more, including details on visiting the city yourself, on Caitlin's blog.

Second Life-Based Survival Horror FPS Attracts Over 1000 Players In Its First Month

Unia, the survival horror FPS game which launched last month in Second Life, has earned over 1000 players in its first 30 days, the developer team just told me. (You can even see them on Unia's leaderboard here.) Indeed, says team PR rep Kess Crytal, some players are finishing the game's story mission (10-12 hours total play time by her estimate), then continuing to play, so they can rack up more monster kills to boost their score. "We have one player who we estimate is playing an average of 10 hours per day."

1000 players in such a short time is extremely impressive for an SL-based game. (Remnants of Earth, the popular mini-MMO in SL featured on Kotaku recently, has about 1400-1700 players after running over a year.) That's a lot of people willing to endure the heads-up display setup hassle a game in Second Life requires. For that matter, developing a game within a larger online game platform has its own challenges -- in this case, over three dozens SLers were on the development team (credits on the bottom of this page), and they had to collaborate together online, working across multiple continents and time zones:

"The challenges have been immense...let alone the cost of development," Kess says. "Two full sims for two years while in development. Staff changes were challenging too, and of course pushing the boundaries of what can be done within SL... as you can see, there was a huge number of collaborators involved which all needed to be communicated, and their input managed too."

Unia uses minimal scripts to optimize frame rate, and employs the new experience keys to seamlessly transition players from one scene to another. 

As for the game story, and the name of the game itself, there's some unique inspirations there:

Don't Dawdle, 21Shoe's Deals on Limited Second Life Footwear Won't Wait for the Weekend

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

21Shoe is an event I don't often get the occasion to cover, simply because it's window is too narrow for me to squeeze a post about it into the schedule. It opens on the 21st of every month... And only the 21st. If you miss that 24 hour span then too bad, so sad, because the lovely discounts (and often limited editions) that come with it will soon be out of reach.

This month's lineup has a distinctly summery feel and I've picked a few of my favorite entries to share, so keep reading if you're looking for the perfect pair of virtual shoes to flaunt your avatar's latest mesh pedicure.