One of the wonderful things about Sansar are the collaborations which have sprung up as people work together on projects. One example of this is The Combat Zone, where Gindipple the programmer and Nya Alchemi the mesh content creator have worked together to create a fun, fast, first-person-shooter capture the flag game with a Desert Storm feel. HoverDerby now has some serious competition in the esports department!
When you arrive at The Combat Zone lobby, you face three entrances. Enter the door with the blue light above it and you are on the Blue team, and entering the opposite door with the red light above it puts you on the Red team.
You can pick up a gun at your compound, and use that, or you can get a paintball gun attachment for your arm ahead of time from the Sansar Store for free (male or female models, which Nya Alchemi made). Note that you can play in desktop mode just as easily as you can in a VR headset. Instructions are on the signs in the lobby.
Scoring is pretty simple. Hitting a target dummy with a paintball gets you one point, hitting an opposing team member gets you 2 points. If you hit your own teammate by accident, you lose a point. If you capture the other team’s flag, you win 30 points. The first team to accumulate 100 points wins the game.
Solas has made T-shirts for both male and female avatars, for both the Red and Blue teams, which are also available for free on the Sansar Store.
But Alfy has really gone all out, creating helmets, fatigue pants and shirts, vests, ammunition belts, and combat boots to make a complete outfit, for both Red and Blue teams, and both men and women! In the picture below, I am wearing the men’s complete Blue team outfit and Nya’s paintball gun attachment. All these items are free from the Sansar Store, just search for “paintball” to find Nya’s, Solas’s and Alfy’s items for The Combat Zone.
If you’d rather watch the game than play, from The Combat Zone entrance lobby, take the elevator in the middle (with the camel) and you are teleported to the spectators’ viewpoint, an invisible floor high above the playing field that gives you a complete birds-eye view of the entire playing field and the scoreboard.
Gindipple tells me that he has spent about four months working on the coding for The Combat Zone. For example, he can issue God commands that completely rearrange the random placement of the buildings and palm trees on the playing field, to make it more crowded or more sparse as required.
One great part of the game is the target dummies! They are randomly-appearing flat-panel Ebbe Altberg figures (in his now-trademark dreadlocks and rainbow T-shirt) which pop up now and again for you to target with your paint balls!
Here’s Gindipple himself posing in front of a camel in game. The top bar above his head indicates his team (blue); the second green bar indicates his level of health (100%). If your health goes down to zero, you die, so try your best to evade the paintballs from the other side!
Games are usually scheduled at 7:00 p.m. Sansar Time/Pacific Time, and Gindipple tells me that he usually gets between 8 and 12 people showing up to play.
The Combat Zone is yet another potent argument against the “Sansar is pretty but there’s nothing to do” naysayers. With the dedicated work of scripters like Gindipple and designers like Nya Alchemi, the opportunities in Sansar are indeed almost endless, and limited only by the imaginations of the creators!
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