New World Notes

Now in Sinespace: Take a Tour of Home Templates for Your Free Region During Creator Weekend

NWN partner Sinespace is devoting this weekend to its many creator, including store and region tours, micro-games, quests, club shows, and contests. The blog has a summary of events happening today and Saturday/Sunday; for new users, a good place to start is the Self-Guided Tour of Home Template Regions, which can be used in your free home region:

There are room templates in the Sinespace Shop that can be purchased to use for your free home space. Most are well under the 128MB limit - this leaves you lots of room for furniture and decorations. Many of these templates are also regions you can visit before you buy them. 

For instance, above is Wondermere, a user-created region in the store. To visit all the regions, look for this sign (at right) in the Welcome Center, and enter the name of the region in the Explore. (Follow the arrows in the image.)

Much more events here and in the Sinespace forum. As always, if you have questions for the team, post in Comments and I'll nudge them to respond when they can!

Thanks to Sinespace's Dolome Demonia for creating the region tour tutorial!

New World Notes Wants to Partner With a YouTube/Twitch Streamer/Creator!

New World Notes' is expanding its video content and coverage, so I'm looking to hire/partner with a talented YouTube/Twitch video streamer and creator who wants to expand their fanbase, grow their views (and ad revenue), and take on some paid projects for NWN. (Yes, New World Notes pays contributors!)

I'm open to all kinds of video creators of various virtual world/Second Life/MMO/VR/AR topics, including:

• Unboxing/product reviews
• Shopping Tours
• Tutorials for users and creators
• Let's Play/Let's Explore videos
• Live events across various worlds
• Random hilarity

That's just a beginning list -- pitch me! For ideas, here's some videos/machinima I've featured on New World Notes in the past. Here's how to get in touch:

Join New World Notes' Discord Server for Friday Fun, VR/MMO News Tips

Click here to join, and connect with my Discord account directly at WJA#3523. We're up to nearly 100 members now, with lots of cool folks, news, and convos. There's even a channel for submitting News and Events tips that I often refer to for NWN posts! 

Join New World Notes' Discord Server to Chat About Social VR & Whatever

The link you need is right here, with close to 50 members now, a friendly talkative bunch. We're recently talking about VRChat, Linden Lab's recent brush with a real name policy, and you should jump in and suggest some new topics, post some cool links, no big whoop.

WATCH: How to Create Sinespace Fashion from Its Free New Templates

Since Sinespace, the upcoming Unity-based virtual world (a proud NWN media partner!) just released a bunch of free clothing templates -- more info on the official blog -- here's a video from lead developer Adam Frisby showing you step by step how to design clothing from those templates. 

The free templates include 78 individual clothing items you can customize however you like. Also, Adam tells me some pretty cool upgrades to Sinespace fashion are coming soon. 

New World Notes is on Discord for All Virtual World & Social VR Chat Needs

Click here to join, and connect with my Discord account directly at WJA#3523. If you don't know, Discord is a text and voice chat platform for gamers which grew very rapidly last year and now counts nearly 100 million registered users -- it's basically Slack for gamers. (For that matter, Slack is basically IRC for the 21st century, while IRC is basically the telegraph for the 20th.) 

So join the live convo! Great way to chat about SL/VR news and share cool stuff with NWN readers and I. In fact, hours after creating the channel, longtime NWN reader Chav Paderborn immediately started talking about her SL Poop museum, i.e., the history of building in Second Life, from prims to sculpts to mesh, as illustrated in 3D poops. So you know, a super auspicious start.

If you're already a Discord user, here's the NWN chat widget: 

Help Me Offer "Get Well Soon!" Wishes to NWN Blogger Cajsa Lilliehook!

Later today, New World Notes will feature another great installment of Cajsa's Choices, Cajsa Lilliehook's ongoing, indispensable compilation of Second Life screenshots turned into works of art, and her interviews with the artists who create them. (She also features her own SL fashion shoots on blog It's Only Fashion.) I just found out she's again in the hospital, she just messaged me, "waiting to see if I have surgery". (She also had a successful surgery to stave off uterine cancer last year.) So if you're among her many fans, please consider sending her a nice virtual Get Well message in Comments below, or on her Twitter, or on Plurk.

And I should repeat her personal request from last year: If you're a woman, please check yourself for Uterine Cancer symptoms.

It's Janine "Iris" Hawkins' Birthday Today So Go Wish Her HBD on Twitter

Tomorrow's my birthday, just growl in my face, thanks

— Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart) June 15, 2017

I miss her blogging on NWN something fierce, but I'm even happier she's now writing about games and virtual worlds for hipster AF sites like Vice. And I know she's destined for even greater things. Go here to read what she wrote for New World Notes as Iris Ophelia.

Space MMO Preview: Windlight-Type Presets & Other Effects for Developers

Space, the upcoming Unity 3D-based virtual world from SL/OpenSim vets (a proud NWN sponsor!) has a new feature that Second Life landowners should especially enjoy playing with: WindLight-like presets.

"Lots more fine grained control over everything, from the colors and saturation of the images, to how bloom/glow, reflections, depth of field and other settings are applied when a user arrives," Space dev Sean O'Callaghan tells me. We're also talking volumetric lighting support, cloud plumes, shadows, and so on.

Click here to create a free creator account to start playing with this. To create a post-FX process to your Space scene, click in your project window in Unity, choose "Create", then "Space Post-Processing Profile". 

Here's some before and after examples of an interior scene using this tool:

NEW WORLD NOTES CONTACT INFO/TIPS (Updated January 2017)

Reposting New World Notes' comment guidelines and contact information, as they were swallowed in our recent reformatting: