Second Life Sketches: The Great Fissure
By Warren Ellis
The following is an independent opinion column, and is not connected with Reuters News. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not endorsed by Reuters.
Some four days ago, a new sim, or region of land, was instantiated on the Second Life grid. This happens pretty much every day, of course: but it’s not every day that I get to be in on it from the start. This is how land happens on Second Life.
The Great Fissure is the third in a chain of sims owned and operated by the Wastelands team. You’ve seen me mention both The Wastelands and the second, The Junkyard, before. The Great Fissure represents a slight change in style, and greater ambition, in that the area is designed around a geologic feature, a deep canyon cut through the middle of the sim.
The Wastelands sims are themed. These are post-apocalyptic spaces, where the residents are enjoined to create buildings and objects that wouldn’t be out of place in, say, MAD MAX 2, or any other Eighties post-holocaust video flick. If you see a robot flying around with its engine clearly visible through a rusted-out chestplate and steam coming out of a pipe in its head… Well, say hello, because that’s probably Wastelands administrator Neobokrug Elytis.
He’s the terraformer of and a builder on The Great Fissure, along with: GutterBlood Spoonhammer, the primary builder; Makaio Stygian, builder and Sculpty wizard (Sculpties being the new curvilinear CAD objects inworld); and Spider Mandala, builder, whose name I still see all over objects in the original cyberpunk sim of Gibson.
From this point on, it’s easier to just show you what happens. All snapshots were taken by kind permission of Neobokrug and the team. This first one illustrates the virgin land, as it were, freshly delivered to Second Life a week or so after the order had been placed with Linden Labs. You’re given four options to select from, all of which are fully customisable. You can sink it fathoms below the waterline, or raise the land until you can reach up and touch the clouds. The floating multicoloured square is the team’s design blueprint.
Neobokrug goes in first. He raises the land up, because, obviously, he has to cut down into the middle. Less obviously, Wastelanders like to build underground shelters. The original Wastelands sim is some fifty metres above sea level, which allowed people to build everything from abandoned missile silos to bombed-out subway stations.
This is the intended structure of the land in parcels. Using the land tools, he cuts the land up into the pre-arranged rental parcels, and, crucially, the “infrastructure” land that remains under the control of the admins. This preserves the intent of the Great Fissure, and allows the Wastelands Salvage game to function - an entertainment extra the group creates, where post-apocalypse scrap randomly appears on the infrastructural land, to be collected and turned into working devices by the players.
With the land parcelled out, the proper textures are applied to the land, and the cutting starts.
With the Fissure gouged out of the landscape, GutterBlood starts creating the cliff face on the inside of the cut.
The attention to grimy detail is what makes the Wasteland sims stand out in Second Life. This is their art.
Step by step, the builders add layers of detail. They’re careful not to crowd the place out, I’ve found. There’s a definite aesthetic sense at work in these places. As you’ll see later, the renters — participants, really — treat it with respect, without having to be hammered by the overbearing covenant rules found in other themed sims.
Neobokrug adds: “It’s tradition in The Wastelands to have a Killdozer (Left) vs Tankzilla (right) match upon completion of a sim.” I await an additional shot of this event, which I’ll run next week.
I conclude this on Friday. The renters are just starting to move in, and The Great Fissure is about to come alive. This last shot is the view from my spot, The Overlook. Next week, we’ll see how the place stands up to it.
The Great Fissure can be found at: The Great Fissure (57, 220, 72)
