ADMIRE ’09 – the Real Life gathering of many of the favourite Second Life musicians for a weekend of celebration, fun and music in the Netherlands from Friday 31st July to Sunday 2nd August.
With over 25 musicians to create music all weekend and a large open jam/collaborative session on Saturday 1st August from 9pm-midnight – this promises to be a carnival of music. The weekend theme is “collaboration” between musicians who have never played together and, of course, audience members, too.
Musicans you may hear over the weekend include XanderNichting Writer, Slim Warrior, Al Hoffman, Inchino Melson, Brad “JooZz” Monnett, Mar Biddle, Russell Eponym, Carah Nitely, Aurora Metaluna, Kaycee Drayman and Wannahave Ferraris, Blindboy Gumbo, Bara Jonson, and many more.
Portions of the ADMIRE event will be streamed into SL and there will be video uplinks, too. The main SL location is the SLiteracy / PrimTings sims kindly provided by Ina Centaur: exact location is on the La Performance Stage in the sky above the center of the 4 connected sims:
The venue in RL is the Panhoven in Zevenaar, The Netherlands – a camping and hostel-type accomodation. Lots of places for musicians to jam, one big jam in the Conference Hall on the premisses on Saturday August 1, 12pm SLT (9pm local time)
Further info from the notecard givers in second life or from the management team:
Angrybeth Shortbread, has made some great diagrams about attachment points. It clearly show where they are and can be a great help in getting all your attachments in the right place.
Virtual Neko took this opportunity to at length explain how attachments work, and what you can do to wear all those must have accessories.
"So you bought a cute tail, and when you chose “wear,” it attached (by default) to your stomach. No problem.
Then you bought an amazing accessory belt, but when you chose “wear,” your tail disappeared because the belt also attaches (by default) to your stomach.
Then you tried to wear your skirt prim, and there went the belt… replaced by the skirt, because the skirt also attaches (by default) to your stomach.
With 30 possible attachment points, you’d think getting dressed wouldn’t be so hard…"
Head over to virtual neko if you need help with your attachments, or if you can use a some new tips.
Angrybeth also made a similar diagram for clothing layers.
I expect you all to have perfectly aligned attachments from now on.
Think of Star Trek TNG's Holodeck, but re-imagined in the present, now add on to that the creation tools of Second Life. Bruce Branit's World Builder gives you a vision of what that could be like. It is a stunning short movie, well worth a watch.
Ok ok, it is a Steam Punk party. :P I know there are some fans groupies of both gentlemen out there, and for them there is this large version you can print out and hang over your bed. Others might enjoy looking for their favorite linden in this set on flickr.
Update 8 March: Jeska removed the red eyes version, and uploaded a red eye free one. :)
This fun collection of Linden Avatars was brought to my attention on Facebook. Gellan Glenelg has made a 160 pictures and growing, starting from 31 May 2008. That is about 0.6 photos of a Linden a Day. I wonder if Gellan hunts Lindens daily. :p
Which one is your favourite? I like the Which Linden as Bamboo, or is he the pot?
Ctrl+Alt+Schift+H used to give us Hippos, but for a while now they have been removed. A petition has started on the Jira to return the Hippos to their rightful place. Soft Linden has promised to Fix this when 1000 people have voted. Vote Now!
Why Hippos? The hippopotamus has long been a kind of unofficial mascot of Second Life. Learn more about it on the wiki. Hippos!
Update: Friday February 13th:
When we posted the original message only 5 days ago, there where only 250 votes. In just those 5 days 750 people rallied in a show of love for the hippopotamus, which made us reach our goal of 1000 votes. Soft linden has answered, and is at work to make sure the Hippos will come back in to our lives.
This effort might seem whimsical and silly. In some ways it might be, but it is also sign that people don't want to lose the fun that is or was Second Life. The Hippo as a mascot was a creation by early residents of SL together with Linden Lab. For many people it still stands for the fun, creativity and endless possibilities that is Second Life.
Hamlet wrote about it on his blog as well. He and his commentators make some excellent points about why this was rallied behind so quickly. It basically boils down to this, this was a emotional vote for a feature that is extremely easily implemented and most of all we had the promise of Soft Linden to champion this if we reached a 1000 votes. A feature that can't break anything and we knew we have the influence to make the difference, made the difference, so to say.
As compared to other feature requests or bug fixes, our votes do matter. It is not that our opinions don't matter on the other issues, it is just that LL wants those other issues just as much fixed as we do. But those issues are complex and take a lot of work, our votes can at most only give a indication of what needs to worked on first. This is radicaly different for our Hippos.
Seven months ago, the INSILICO RPG in Second Life has been launched. It has attracted raving reviews from excited residents because of it's extraordinary visual impact and unusually high-quality. But INSILICO is a RPG, and that means attracting players; and for that, certainly "nice graphics" are required, but a compelling story and a good game design is definitely required to keep players in SL and not just have them go away to the next MMORPG.
Somehow, INSILICO got the formula right. I've just visited it once — INSILICO's rules for "visitors" (ie. non-roleplaying individuals travelling through the sims) are quite harsh, so I didn't want to intrude. From the start, however, it was clear that I had crossed a threshold towards a different SL — one of a very high-quality environment with insanely detailed atmosphere and environment, to the breathtaking level more usually found on some games or even movies, and less on SL. Sure, there are very good builds all over SL; sure, there are more cyberpunk cities in SL, from Nexus Prime (the first ever, constantly being rebuilt) to, say, Suffugium. INSILICO, however, is intense — that's perhaps the best way to describe it. The design is done to make you live and breathe cyberpunk — it's like becoming a character in the Blade Runner movie and looking at the buildings from inside the screen, that's how intense it becomes.
Surprisingly, it's less laggy than I expected — sims with a high prim, high texture count tend to be insanely laggy. But INSILICO was certainly designed by pros, who wish to have 40+ avatars role-playing in the sim all the time (it's amazing!), and that means that lag has to be kept as a minimum. How is that managed? The trick is not to count prims or textures, but polygons. Keep the polygon count low, and your graphics card will thank you — the secret of the huge success of World of Warcraft's very low polygon count, which however has a huge visual impact thanks to excellent design. Well, INSILICO is pretty much designed in the same way. The polygon count is low, but you don't notice it at all, since the graphics and effects are so stunningly designed. Still, you notice the lack of lag, even with all those role-players around.
Seven months after the launch, INSILICO has added two more sims, and judging from the ever-present number of players, it's still growing and growing. That's very good news, knowing that there is a limit to the complexity of a RPG done in SL, specially a free one (INSILICO seems to double as a rental/mall facility to cover up the costs; shops have to be in-theme and are as good as the rest of the content there). It also requires new content, which the designers (led by Skills Hak) certainly have managed to add at a pace higher than most MMORPGs out there (after all, how many MMORPGS triplicate their content in just half a year?).
Not surprisingly, INSILICO earned their spot at Linden Lab's Showcase, as well as one of the machinimas below made by the very talented Daniela Jannings.
At last, in spite of all of LSL's limitations, a bit of Philip's original vision of creating "a platform for game designers" seems to be possible. Oh yes, games have been all over the place for years, as well as MMORPGs, there are quite a lot of those around. INSILICO is just a hallmark of what's best in SL.
Now when newbies pop in at the Help Islands and ask "How do I play this game?" instead of answering "SL is not a game" I'll be happy to say: "Do you like cyberpunk-style MMORPGS? Well, teleport to INSILICO, you'll love playing it".
Enjoy the movies :) If they had just a bit more resolution (and make sure you see them in high quality mode!) you'd be able to shoot videos out of it for Blade Runner II :-) (nice choice of music too ;) )
ADMIRE ’09 – the Real Life gathering of many of the favourite Second Life musicians for a weekend of celebration, fun and music in the Netherlands from Friday 31st July to Sunday 2nd August.
