exploring the colonies extra world

Following many who have done the same after the Openspaces Crisis, I spent some time into the Openlife grid lately. I had created an account there last June, as suggested by the always wise Princess Ivory, in order to protect my virtual identity by registering it in some other world. I did register and I spent some minutes there, barely enough to de-ruth myself, but I had not visited since.

I went back there recently and I explored a bit more. There is the strange feeling of a new land being developed. Mostly undeveloped or underdeveloped land, many features given for granted in SL are missing, old bugs forgotten for months or years are there again. Of course the grid is labeled as being alpha code, i.e. unstable by definition, and so there is little to complain.

Yet some beauty is already present here and there, like this boat that I admired for long minutes during one of my explorations.



The first task once in a new world is to get an acceptable look. It was not easy. There are some freebies here and there but not much, especially for males. I copied the parameters of my SL shape, I found a nice skin and some clothes. Unfortunately I did not find any prim hair that I likes, so I spent some time to shape the non-prim hair in a way that I liked.

People tend to look very similar to one another where clothes and skins and hair are limited, so I spent some time building a pair of sunglasses to give myself something unique to wear.

Once I was satisfied with the look I spent a few sessions exploring around and I started meeting a few people and make the first friends. Today I even met the famous SL blogger Botgirl Questi and we chatted about the protection of one's virtual identity across worlds.

In the south of the grid, I found a large sandbox made by four sims. I have never been to much of a builder and I never even tried to create any piece of clothing, but suddenly I found that I was missing not to have even a small boat and I also missed some piece of naval looking cloting, I invested a few hours in Gimp and Photoshop and I started putting prims together and so I created a small sailboat and a uniform. Surely not the best even appeared in cyberspace but I am quite satisfied as first experiment. I know I have a script somewhere to drive non-physical boats. I must try to import it and to see if I can sail the boat in Openlife seas.

The uniform is far from perfect but not bad either. I am playing with the idea of creating one in SL with the Winterfell colors now :)

By the way, I have already imported the boat building experience into SL, and I have started building a schooner in my shipyard near my airbase. It is just an experiment to improve the technique but is does not look too bad and so I have decided to take it down to Star Port to make some pictures. Still a lot of room for improvement, but so far it has been fun. (psst ... I also have a submarine and a armored airship under construction in the shipyard but do not thell :) )

There are other Opensim based grids out there that look interesting and worth a visit, like OSgrid and Legend City, just to mention a couple. I read today about a hypergrid technology which permits the teletrasportation among different grids and more and more grids are being inteconnected. It is even possible to carry the content of one's inventory from one grid to the other. Sounds very very interesting and I must explore more. Stay tuned :)

W