Thursday, July 16, 2009

Dolls and Dangerous Experiments

The Drama Doll bandwagon is rolling, today Joonie posts about her experience with the dolls. Its so nice to read about people who like what we made.

But as hard as it is to believe, there are people in SL not reading blogs. Sigh, the fun they miss! So I thought it would be cool to put up an ad, especially since I had this 16sqm roadfront parcel in Dauphin lying completely dormant. I tried to make the sign non-obtrusive; its almost transparent from the back so as not to take too much view from the store behind. And if you click it, a Fuginista is temp-rezzed and she shows a few animations.

After putting up the sign I tried to TP home, only to find my region not accessible. And true enough, the rolling restart had reached the City of Paris, and now I'm on server 1.27 too! Pity I have some RL work to do today or I would have experimented with HTTP-in.... But there are other news in 1.27:


A year ago, Linden Lab announced the possibility to teleport from Second Life to an OpenSim based grid. Since then, it's been all quiet. No words was ever heard from the Gridnauts again.

But inside the development unit at LL, it has been anything but quiet.

Second Life Server 1.27, being rolled out this week, contains a set of top secret new features, on a highly experimental stage. Outside every SIM bordering the empty sea there is now a triangle (it shows up red in the map, as you can se above), and when an avatar gets there a new pie menu opens, allowing him or her to teleport to a number of grids, including (gulp) one named "RL".

Now, to reach this triangle, you have to do some megaprim tweeks to transport an island outside of the sim. This island must be linked with some form of poseball and a coconut tree. Sitting on the poseball, waiting for a coconut to fall on your head, you may suddenly be TP'ed to OSGrid, OpenLife, and even the internal LL grid!)

The real tricky one is the RL choice. Because while TP-ed to the other grid, Ctrl-H will still take you home to SL. That was very useful when I explored the CIA grid and got some matrix-style agents shooting at me:

(Picture location courtesy of Rezzable, go see this SIM while you can)

BUT the RL link depends on time- and map-wormholes in cyberspace that opens and closes depending on solar flares caught in the fibre optic cables at SL's service providor. So the return journey becomes much more unsecure!

Some time later today I will dare the RL TP link anyway. Research has made me quite sure of the existence of a return window no later than mid-august, so if you don't hear from me until then I am out exploring the biggest grid of them all. Hopefully I will catch the bus home and come back unharmed.

Until then: Play safe, have fun, be happy!

1 comment:

Honour said...

Have a great adventure and be sure to keep a diary! It may be the only thing left and we'll want to know how to retrace your steps. :)