Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
I did not know you could make cool screenshots in The Sims. Of course, last time I played The Sims, avatars were busy peeing on the floor or self-immolating. Tombstones in the backyard proliferated. Katzencie ♡ is obviously more competent at The Sims than I can ever hope to be. I was drawn to "Life is too short to blend in" by its 1960’s sensibility. It’s not just the pop art silhouette, but the “Mod Squad” pose.
I say "users" because almost all of the 30,000 are simulated, along with some actual players -- Dual Universe lead developer Jean-Christophe Baillie estimates hundreds of those.
"This is not a significant number (most people were not interested in participating in a test), " he allows, "but what matters is that everyone was invited and we have witnesses! It's not just a tech test done behind closed doors."
By point of contrast, Eve Online and Second Life, the two top single-shard grandaddies, manage peak concurrencies of about 40,000-70,000 players total. Whereas Dual Universe's stress test suggests many more than that can be handled across its galaxy.
To judge by the video, the stress test could handle many hundreds in the same proximate space (i.e. within a hundred square meters), but JC speculates they may have to add some promixity limits when they launch:
If you can be in the Bay Area next week Thursday night and you're reading this on New World Notes, lead dev Adam Frisby and his team at Sinespace (a proud sponsoring partner of this blog), you are cordially invited to their BKR Launch Party at Unity HQ one block from GDC.
BKR (for Build Kill Repeat) is Sinespace's new open source, completely customizable combat system, so Adam is unveiling an FPS map design contest with a celebrity game developer judge to be announced there.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Sugar Imp gives us pure kawaii joy in "Cherry House". Animals gather around the subject, even sitting on her head. She's sitting in a cute little sidecar made of a wood produce box. It's all bright, colorful, and happy.
Even in her "Sexy Nightie" photo, Sugar Imp's kawaii spirit comes through:
"I have a full-ass real life but let me tell you when I want my down time to myself, just log in, talk to my friends, do some dumb shit, play some games, blah blah blah, make my videos, that's what I want to do in my spare time."
Lexy Nexen, who's one of Second Life's best and brashest YouTubers (so subscribe already), recently posted this fun if frustrating video, explaining -- via her casually cool real life self -- a key frustration with vlogging about SL: YouTube comments full of snark which more or less boil down to "LOL you're playing Second Life to have weird sex and you have no first life". She effectively addresses the second part by mentioning many cool and worthwhile places in people in Second Life (including the late Fran Serenade), but flounders a bit with the first part.
And that frustrates me: This is yet one more time one of Second Life's biggest fans feels she has to put herself out there explaining the world's bad reputation, in a way few other online game world users have to contend with. (VRChat, by contrast has a bad -- and at least somewhat unfair -- reputation for nasty trolls and an excess of anime girls, but that's different.) And the thing is, this was and is an addressable problem:
Led by industry experts from Blizzard, Disney, Pixar, Ubisoft, and Microsoft, DeepMotion leverages the latest in AI technology and robotic control theory, allowing users to instantaneously animate their emojis simply by moving in front of the phone’s camera. With DeepMotion’s Digital Avatar simulation, users will now be able to use their body to express themselves more fully. The new technology will bring body language to emoji communications, which to date have been limited to facial expressions and simple head movements. Users can now capture body movement using the rear camera, or upper body movement using the front-facing camera.
More here, another video below. The demo video leaves me a bit confused as to how the avatar interacts on the phone itself -- in an app, or on the default screen, or what -- but if the real time motion capture works as well as represented, I'm impressed. And plan to check this out in person next week at GDC.
Thyme Carter shot "She took a deep breath...and let it go" and I love it. Every picture in her photostream is so excellent I could have picked them all. I would not be surprised if this were a composite with the avatar and flowers shot in Second Life and the trees in real life, but then again, the depth of field takes the trees out of focus so they could be SL. It can be astonishing how real SL can look with Depth of Field in play.
Here's another Thyme picture that becomes more interesting by being tilted off level just enough to add interest without being irritating. If I have to tilt my laptop to see your picture, I won't bother:
Although Seed is yet to have an official launch date, the Seed Discord server has attracted a thriving community of members, whose enthusiasm for the game’s progress has left the development team in awe, as would-be players avidly discuss the game features they most want to see, and even join player-created factions with competing plans to colonize the new world, the very moment that they can. All this active debate about a world that doesn’t yet exist eerily resembles the thought experiment described in John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice:
