June 2015 – AvatarPlanet Blog

Tutsy Navarathna’s Double Award-Winning Machinima at SL12B

Tutsy Navarathna’s machinimas never fail to amaze me. The latest, MetaPhore, exceeds any I’ve seen before and received awards at both the University of Western Australia in Second Life’s MachinimUWA VII competition and on the same day, was winner of the SciFi Film Festival’s Screen my Short award.

You can see it at SL12B by teleporting to maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/SL12B%20Wonderous/98/180/22. Upon rezzing you’ll see five chairs. Sit in one of them and the chair will carry you into the viewing area, where you can watch the machinima.

You can also watch it on Vimeo (vimeo.com/110111415)or YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=zby0oM5xqaE).

Like all of Tutsy Navarathna’s machinimas, MetaPhore is filmed exquisitely. You’ll find some still frames from it below. I won’t give away the plot here, but it’s a love story, said to be based on a true story, with a twist that anyone who’s spent any amount of time in virtual worlds will recognize as plausible. If you don’t see it at SL12B, be sure to watch it on Vimeo or YouTube. It’s worth watching.

SL12B – first photos

Here are my first shots from SL12B. There are some great builds – the following photos are only four of them.

SL12B's Ixtlan Stage — SL12B’s Ixtlan Stage

Evolution, created by Chagal Campestre (chagalvision)

Sink into the Mind, created by Kerupa Flow

In Dreams Awake, created by Alex Bader

SL12B’s Ixtlan Stage

Evolution, created by Chagal Campestre (chagalvision)

Sink into the Mind, created by Kerupa Flow

In Dreams Awake, created by Alex Bader

Second Life’s 12th birthday bash starts next weekend

In recent years my focus has been more on OpenSim than Second Life, but I’m looking forward to next week’s SL12B Community Celebration. It opens on Sunday June 21, 2015, and runs through Sunday June 28. You can see photos of SL12B on flickr. I spent the last year working mostly alone in an OpenSim virtual world I was building for a client. With that behind me, returning to SL and taking part in SL12B will be almost like returning from a isolated mountain cabin to the bustling life of New York City or Paris. I’m looking forward to it and will be reporting from SL12B with lots of photos.

Reviving the blog

I started this blog six years ago, in February 2009, but in recent years I’ve let it languish and for the last year I’ve written no posts at all until today. I’ve had the avatarplanet.com website even longer, since about 2005, but although it once had a decent following, I’ve let it wither and have made no updates for the last three years. It’s time for me to revive both. A total revamping of the website will be coming soon.

A World That Never Happened

It’s been over a year since my last post. In that time, I built a 32 region OpenSim grid for a client, doing everything from creating the terrain in L3DT, building and obtaining content, and administering the server, including writing the PHP and Powershell scripts that ran the grid.

Sadly, just when it was ready to open for beta. my client shut it down, so no one will ever see what I put so much effort into over the last year. In retrospect I can see a number of things I could have done differently that might have avoided it, but maybe the most important is this: my client never visited the world I was building for his company! Despite my urging, he never had any interest in seeing it.

The next time I build a virtual world for a client, there are a number of things I’ll do differently, but at the top of the list will be making sure that my client sees what I’m building and has an interest in seeing it to completion. It’s extremely disappointing to put over a year into building a world only to see it vanish before it even opens to the public. I was paid for my time and gained good experience, so it wasn’t a wasted effort for me, but it is painful.