Day: June 4, 2019

Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies: Legendaire

The Legendaire V.I.P. group is once again free to join for a limited period of time, and when you join their group, you can scoop up 36 group gifts at their redesigned store location (here’s the SLURL to take you there):

Here’s the Like I’m Gonna Lose you gown, paired with the Boho earrings and Reese shoes, all free group gifts:

The shoes come in ten different colours, and the gown comes in four different patterns.

And this is the Georgia dress paired with the Jadore boots:

Once again, the boots come in 10 different colours and the dress comes in 4 different textures.

This avatar is also wearing:

  • Mesh Head and Body: Juliet by Altamura (former Valentine’s Day group gift; Omega compatible with the L$99 Omega System Kit; the Altamura group is L$50 to join)
  • Skin Applier: Mitsu by !OS! (L$1 gift from their previous Easter Egg hunt; no longer available)
  • Hair: Amy in mink by Firelight Hair (from The Free Dove freebies store; the Free Dove group is free to join)
  • Mesh Eyes: Realistic eyes by Dossier (from the men’s section of the excellent freebie store at Ajuda SL Brasil; no group required)
  • Animation Override: Chubby Girl AO by [ImpEle] (free from the SL Marketplace)

Decentraland Moves to Unity, Releases More Pictures of Its Avatars

Decentraland (DCL for short) is launching its public beta at the end of this month, and more details are coming out about the platform and how it will work. Carl Fravel reports:

DCL just released SDK v6.1.1. By default it now uses the Unity rendering engine, performance is better. I see FPS of 120 to 160 on my GTX 1070 laptop. There are now shadows, [and] HUD UI elements.

When asked why they decided to move the project to the Unity game engine, which is not open source, Carl replied:

They were seeing such poor performance and severe scene limits with both WebVR and BJS [BabylonJS, an open source webGL engine] that they opted for a higher performance rendering engine. The rest of the stack above that remains open source, and they will be catching the open source BJS client up to the SDK 6 version, which means that if some wizard is able to come up with an open source rendering engine that performs well enough then they can work it into that environment in the future. Nobody seems to have an open source rendering engine that is fast enough to make scene devs and users happy yet. One can clone their open source reference client that uses BJS and deploy it on one own servers. That sounds pretty open source to me.

And on their Instagram channel, they have released some more pictures of what their avatars are going to look like. They’re looking pretty good!

I’m looking forward to actually getting in-world at the end of June!

Second Life Artist Bryn Oh’s Rabbicorn Trilogy

I first encountered the work of Canadian artist Bryn Oh in a whimsical yet menacing 2012 installation called Anna’s Many Murders, commemorated in this machinima created by the artist herself:

Since then, Bryn Oh has created dozens of evocative and compelling art installations in Second Life, skillfully using the virtual world as her canvas to tell many stories at the intersection of technology and art. Linden Lab has chosen to highlight her Rabbicorn installation trilogy in the most recent episode of their Second Life Destinations video series (created by Draxtor Despres):

If you have never experienced Bryn Oh’s art before, you owe it to yourself to pay a visit to her sim, Immersiva, and explore her work! Part one of the Rabbicorn trilogy is Daughter of Gears, followed by The Rabbicorn Story, and the third and final part is called Standby.

You can follow Bryn Oh on Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or via her blog.