Jupiter Rowland @JupiterRowland

"They" are only one, and he seems to log in once a week at best.

Notice: The underwater level actually drops you under water. So come as a mermaid or a merman or in SCUBA gear right away. Otherwise, don't complain about ruined clothes or almost drowning.

Arcadia's Disco Lights made by Aaack Aardvark can be found at the small Arcadia Shop at Wright Plaza, OSgrid.
hop://hg.osgrid.org:80/Wright%20Plaza/53/116/21
hop://hg.osgrid.org:80/Wright%20Plaza/41/116/21

The club lights made by Prinz von Halberstadt can be found at the Prinzsign shop at Oasis Treasure Shopping, OSgrid.
hop://hg.osgrid.org:80/Oasis%20Treasure%20Shopping/150/126...

An extensive assortment of club and stage lights made by Victor Clary can be found at Stage Equipment in the PSSMG Village, Dereos.
hop://dereos.org:80/PSSMG%20Village/61/148/22

I know at leat three places with club lights, but one of them is down, and I'll have to go inspect the other two to tell you exactly where the club lights are. All original stuff made in OpenSim, by the way.

She's going to upgrade Dorenas World to OpenSim 0.9.3.0.

I hope OSgrid will be back online until then, otherwise it'll be cold turkey for me, heh.

It sometimes appears to me like the OpenSim community isn't used to Blinn-Phong, maybe not even to shiny surfaces in general. Maybe that's because they've rarely been exposed to it over the years. I guess that at least some content that was ripped from SL had normal maps and/or specular maps at the source, but whoever stitched the export back together after importing it into OpenSim often didn't know what to do with them and threw them away. In the rare cases you see Blinn-Phong in action nowadays, it's usually on original OpenSim content.

Thanks for the Blinn-Phong brick textures, by the way!

Seriously, if your machine has got what it takes, set your viewer to shared environment, crank your graphics settings up as far as you and your hardware can bear (shadows strongly recommended), take off your facelight and spend a few hours just walking around and taking in the scenery.

This is not a place for the faint of hardware. Best viewed in Firestorm 7 with its higher dynamic range.

Why do I feel the urge to inspire the Argentoratum people to make an animesh Oumpah-Pah?

You need two things. One, a viewer. For complete beginners, I recommend the Firestorm Viewer version 6.6.17. You can get it here (IMPORTANT: Download Firestorm for OpenSim, not for Second Life!):

https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/fs_older_downloads

Two, an avatar. Which also means a user account. You don't have it yet. This place is not the official OpenSim website where you register an avatar. It's only a third-party info site.

One important thing to know is that OpenSim is not a centralised, monolithic silo like Second Life or almost all other virtual worlds out there. It is not one world. It's many worlds, so-called grids. They all have different, independent owners, and they all run in different, independent places. OpenSim is akin to over 4,000 independent, big and small Second Lifes.

But almost all of them are connected to one another via the so-called Hypergrid. This means that you don't need an avatar on each grid where you want to visit a place. You can have an avatar on one grid and still visit most other grids with this self-same avatar.

I could tell you to go find a grid that suits you. But when I was a newbie, that wouldn't have helped me that much either. I know a thing or two about decentralised networks, and one of them is that the easiest way to on-board newbies is to tell them one specific instance to join.

The oldest grid in OpenSim and one of the two biggest grids is OSgrid. Go there to register an account and an avatar:

https://accounts.osgrid.org/?q=user/register

IMPORTANT: Names in OpenSim are always exactly 2 words, a first name and a last name.

It's a pity that nobody builds their own houses in OpenSim anymore.

Here's what that stuff looked like in real life: https://www.goretro.com/2015/10/10-grooving-conversation-p...

By the way, 7.1.11 has been out for a while. I've noticed that at least teleporting to other sims seems to have picked up speed.

Finally someone took the time to fix the restroom door.

It is becoming possible to make actual, real-time mirrors. The secret behind this is called "Physically-Based Rendering", PBR in short. It's available from OpenSim 0.9.3.0 on and from Firestorm 7 on.

It's heavily disputed, though, for four reasons.

One, Firestorm 7 is still rather buggy, and PBR is not wholly defined itself yet. It's all a WIP.

Two, Firestorm 7 is even buggier.

Three, Firestorm 7 has the Advanced Lighting Model permanently on. No way back to "good old" forward rendering without ALM. No way back to turning all fancy rendering features off because your machine is weak.

If you have a sufficiently powered computer with dedicated graphics, and your performance bottleneck has been the CPU because Firestorm 6 only uses one core/one thread, then Firestorm 7 will be faster because it uses multiple CPU threads.

But if you have a toaster with on-board graphics where the graphics have always been the bottleneck, Firestorm 7 will be dramatically slower because a lot of the fancy-schmancy graphics bling-bling that you had turned off for performance reasons is now turned on permanently.

Finally, four, OpenSim with PBR does not look like OpenSim with ALM or OpenSim with forward rendering, only with mirrors. PBR is an entirely new rendering system. You'll notice things like a higher contrast, as if someone had wiped a layer of dust from your screen, or reflective surfaces suddenly being blue because they reflect the sky.

Ryzen 5 3600X, MSI B450, 32GB of RAM, Sapphire Radeon RX590 with 8GB of VRAM. Round about six-year-old stuff, not exactly top notch even for back then. Assembled to live on no more than 500 watts. Also, my OS is Debian with the amdgpu open-source video driver.

Still, this very places gives me constantly over 40FPS in Firestorm 7.1.11 beyond Ultra with screen space reflections on, mirrors on, reflection detail on real time, full scene reflections, all projectors on and even object details cranked up to 4. Even if I really go to photo quality with shadow quality 3 and 16x anti-aliasing, I still get around 30fps.

I don't think my lightweight avatar with not even 20,000 ARC right now is the reason for such good performance. I mean, I could send Juno with lots of jewellery on and try again.

The inside of the Majestic actually seems to cut deeper into my graphics performance.

Also, ShoppingCity, the "general store" in the northeast corner.

https://opensimworld.com/hop/85405
hop://astralia.eu:8002/ShoppingCity/216/209/22

Honestly, I've seen worse rigs than this.

Moichandising!

Well, not quite, but still.

These buses are sturdy. I've once driven one all across Virunga.

Looks safer than the previous tour with the carriage.