New World Notes

Huntington Beach Was Once a Surreal Paradise Hellhole So Of Course Someone Recreated It In Second Life

Pic by Elizabeth Dovgal

Click here to teleport to a new experience in Second Life that's notably strange and wonderful: A recreation of Huntington Beach in Southern California, at a time in the early-mid 20th century when oil rigs dotted the sky, even down to the beach, making the place a surreal combination of placid beach town and industrial wasteland.

To see what I mean, here's the official Rigs of Huntington Flickr page.

Amazingly, the town was created by Jade Koltai, in real life a French woman who's never actually visited Huntington Beach (she tells me), and instead based it on photos from this article, along with other sources... in about a week. Which is all the more impressive to me, because living in Los Angeles, I've been to Huntington once or twice, and Jade gets a lot of the beach town elements impressively right.

Here's a RL pic to compare with the SL pic above:

Visit a Place in Second Life That Looks Great & Has Little Lag, Even On An Old Computer -- If You Follow Some Important Steps First

Last Tuesday we talked about how Second Life, when properly optimized, can look and perform as well as a AAA game, even on older computers. This weekend, you can log in and experience this first-hand, in a small place called Nar Shaddaa - Red Light District.

It was created by Penny Patton, the graphics expert and SL's most passionate optimization advocate,

"The theme is a Star Wars planet of the same name," she explains. "Kind of a Star Wars version of Las Vegas meets Amsterdam. Part of a network of Star Wars RP sims in SL."

Penny just visited it with her near-10 year old desktop computer to take these pics, and as she designed it to be, performance was still excellent: "I was getting a solid 35-45 frames per second. When people talk about FPS in SL they tend to ignore things like stuttering, where SL freezes up for a second or two as you turn the camera. I got none of that even on my aging desktop."

Before visiting, however, you'll need to tweak some settings to get the full effect:

Visit in SL: A Tropical Post-Apocalypse City Called Drune IV - Aftermath

Here's a walkthrough of a quite amazing Second Life sim: Drune IV - Aftermath (SLurl teleport here), a rusted-over city on a small, tropical island, which somehow survived after an unspecified calamity. (Hey, maybe a new kind of twist on cyberpunk: Tropicalypse!)

Your host in this video above is Ayla Pants, a fun and chatty guide accompanied by a friendly drone, who is immediately greeted by an incredible avatar, who compliments Ayla on her fashion choices. The sim comes with great ambient sound (crashing waves and seabird song, to contrast with the rusting skyscrapers), and, Ayla tells me, looks great throughout the day cycle:

William Gibson & Others Note, Celebrate, Mourn SL's Hangars Liquides

Here's the correct teleport link to visit and explore Hangars Liquides, Second Life's legendary cyberpunk city that's still set to close at the end of this month. Thanks to a retweet of my story by William Gibson, this viral Reddit thread, and massive social media shares by Second Life users past and present, the city has been inundated by visitors. However, my post originally included a teleport to a store in Hangars, and not the official landing spot. (Shopkeeper Beev Fallen helpfully added the proper teleport to his showroom.) 

The original post also includes some lovely tributes to Hangars and its lead creator,  Djehan Kidd:

Visit in Second Life This Month: Cica Ghost's Magical Drawn Town

Click here to teleport all through this month (after which it goes away) into the latest gorgeously whimsical experience created by longtime SL-based artist Cica Ghost. It's called Drawn Town, and as that suggests, it's almost like moving through a 3D chalkboard drawing:

"[M]y first public work in Second Life was a black and white world that I called CICA," Ms. Ghost explains. "It was on the Linden Endowment for Arts sim and was mostly black drawings on alpha textures on white background, with some animation script. People liked that place; there are still many who tell me how it was their favorite from all of my work."

But that experience was created quite awhile ago, and she decided to revisit that style: 

Kaoruco City, Jaw-Dropping Second Life Sim Inspired by Blade Runner and Other Cyberpunk Classic, Opens -- Watch the Trailer!

Watch this machinima trailer directed by master SL creator Eripom Moonwall, premiering Kaoruco City, a new Second Life sim inspired by Blade Runner, Altered Carbon, and William Gibson's Neuromancer, along with SL-based cities of the past, most especially Insilico and District 18.

Lead developed by Kaoruco Resident and a team of fellow Japanese SLers, it evokes a neo-Tokyo type vibe. Kaoruco and team re-purposed many pre-existing cypberpunk-themed assets for much of it ("Second Life has enough contents to build sci-fi scene," he notes), and were able to assemble them over a week of work. They paid special attention to the small details that make up a living city:

"We focused on making roads, avenues, and small paths," he explains, "Because in many movies, there's attractive scenes like Deckard eating at a noodle bar downtown."

 

You may be surprised it only took five days to build what you're seeing, but Kaoruco says it worked because the team had the same basic vision in their heads:

Cassie's Clips: Exploring the "Absolutely Stunning" Second Life Recreation of The Upside Down from Stranger Things

Monday's post about the Stranger Things fan community build in Second Life was so popular, I sent NWN correspondent Cassie Middles to explore in person, and file her report to YouTube. Is it laggy? Is it worth the L$1000 group admission fee? Is it as detailed as it seems to be? Watch and find out from Cassie. (And don't miss the moment where she wanders into Joyce's house only to find a couple, um, already there.)

Here's the top takeaway from Cassie:

Visit This Weekend in Second Life: Cica Ghost's Giant Music Box

Sunny Day from Pepa Cometa on Vimeo.

Click here to visit a beautiful new experience from metaverse art master Cica Ghost (ably featured in Pepa Cometa's machinima above): A kind of intricate, giant, moving music box that seems to be from the 19th century of an alternate, lovelier universe. I've always admired Cica Ghost's scenes, but wished they had more animation; this new experience manages movement beautifully. And it's huge! Look at my avatar in relationship to Cica's world:

Watch: Fantastic Nine Inch Nails Machinima Music Video Shot in a Beautifully Fallout-esque Second Life Sim Called Cranium Bay

Continuing our recurring theme of "Yes, Second Life nowadays can look about as great as a recent Fallout game (well, at least New Vegas)", here's a smashing machinima music video featuring NiN's "Only" and an SL sim called Cranium Bay. (Direct teleport here.) Created by Jackson Redstar, the roving camerawork is smooth and floaty, the cinematography is crisp and moody.

Cranium Bay, by the way, has a Flickr group with much more to see.

New in Second Life: Visit Rieri, Japanese Town Inspired by First-Person Photos of Tokyo's Arakawa Lock Gate Region

Click here to visit a new experience in Second Life: Rieri, a Japanese town painstakingly modeled from Google Maps and real photos of Tokyo neighborhoods. As regular readers will have guessed, this project is from Eripom Moonwall, SL's master creator of realistic cityscapes and military hardware. She and her team wanted to a post-industrial Japanese city that still evoked nostalgia. "We had much curiosity about what makes nostalgic scene," she tells me, "and found some keywords like 'riverbed', 'bended road', 'ridge' and 'small buildings' etc."

Since they're based in Tokyo, those keywords took them in specific places around the Tokyo megapolis, until they wound up at the Arakawa Lock Gate and town around it. The visit and the place, a vision of modern Japan from decades ago, made them feel that kind of nostalgia they were looking for.  "We took tons of photos," Eripom says, laughing.

 

After the break, compare some photos Eripom and her team took in Japan in real life side-by-side with what they created based on them in Second Life: