(lol)
May 28, 2012
May 17, 2012
Hi guys, sorry for the lack of activity here while I've been living back in the UK. IO and virtual has kind of been at the bottom of a long list of things to take care of.
But,fear not, this is not the only blogspot on the block.
There's a new kid in town, and the url to take you there is.....
Ready ? ..
Ok then, here you go.Island Oasis Grid
But,fear not, this is not the only blogspot on the block.
There's a new kid in town, and the url to take you there is.....
Ready ? ..
Ok then, here you go.Island Oasis Grid
March 26, 2012
Firing up Firestorm
Remember way back when (no,not the Gnarls Barkely song) when I said "avoid any V2 based viewer" ?
Well...umm....*coughs and shuffles feet*; just ignore that original remark. Or at least let's pretend that I meant to add "until they get better at supporting OpenSim type grids"
The truth is the Firestorm viewer from the Phoenix team works remarkably well with Island Oasis, better in fact than Phoenix itself. Everything except search seems to work fine. Search doesn't work because they use the SL web based search that is totally incompatible with the search system for OpenSim.
So..how do you use Firestorm (or FS to save my fingers) with Island Oasis ?
Very good question, allow me to explain.
First of all, install Firestorm to your computer. You already did ? Oh,ok ..but if you didn't head here and grab the latest version. Windows, Linux and chocolate flavors are available. I mean Mac flavor.
Now using the shortcut icon on your desktop or from your program menu,you just need to right click the shortcut and select properties , choose the box that says Target and add at the very end of the line "-loginuri http://islandoasisgrid.biz:8002" , remember not to include the speechmarks, or you could just copy paste from here.
What this does is tell the shortcut to use the IO grid instead of the default SL one.Click ok on the shortcut then start the viewer and login. It should log you right in to IO.
After you logged in from the menu at the top of the screen,Select Viewer-Preference (ALt+P) and in the menu that comes up click on the advanced tab. You need to check (or tick if you're British) the box that says "allow login to other grids"
the reason you're doing this is so that when you next run FS you'll have a grid option on the login screen that will allow you to select the Grid you want to log into.
Ok,log out of IO then run FS again. This time, because you've already logged into IO once, it will have an entry in the grids list for IO ready for next time.
Awesome !
Now,you'll see that it looks a bit different to regular V1 type viewers but don't worry,because if you want the classic look back, the Phoenix team added a special skin selectable from Preferences-Skins menu (I know right ! ?) called Vintage, that emulates the old UI almost perfectly.
So, enjoy, play and have fun in IO !
Well...umm....*coughs and shuffles feet*; just ignore that original remark. Or at least let's pretend that I meant to add "until they get better at supporting OpenSim type grids"
The truth is the Firestorm viewer from the Phoenix team works remarkably well with Island Oasis, better in fact than Phoenix itself. Everything except search seems to work fine. Search doesn't work because they use the SL web based search that is totally incompatible with the search system for OpenSim.
So..how do you use Firestorm (or FS to save my fingers) with Island Oasis ?
Very good question, allow me to explain.
First of all, install Firestorm to your computer. You already did ? Oh,ok ..but if you didn't head here and grab the latest version. Windows, Linux and chocolate flavors are available. I mean Mac flavor.
Now using the shortcut icon on your desktop or from your program menu,you just need to right click the shortcut and select properties , choose the box that says Target and add at the very end of the line "-loginuri http://islandoasisgrid.biz:8002" , remember not to include the speechmarks, or you could just copy paste from here.
What this does is tell the shortcut to use the IO grid instead of the default SL one.Click ok on the shortcut then start the viewer and login. It should log you right in to IO.
After you logged in from the menu at the top of the screen,Select Viewer-Preference (ALt+P) and in the menu that comes up click on the advanced tab. You need to check (or tick if you're British) the box that says "allow login to other grids"
the reason you're doing this is so that when you next run FS you'll have a grid option on the login screen that will allow you to select the Grid you want to log into.
Ok,log out of IO then run FS again. This time, because you've already logged into IO once, it will have an entry in the grids list for IO ready for next time.
Awesome !
Now,you'll see that it looks a bit different to regular V1 type viewers but don't worry,because if you want the classic look back, the Phoenix team added a special skin selectable from Preferences-Skins menu (I know right ! ?) called Vintage, that emulates the old UI almost perfectly.
So, enjoy, play and have fun in IO !
February 18, 2012
Minor Update
Hi everyone, no, not a post about young people infiltrating the grid but a smallish update to let you know what's been happening the past week or so.
The IO desginers have been releasing lots of new products; clothing, eyes, avatars...lots of creativity and one shop has expanded to a big store on a private sim.
The Special forces combat sim has gone LIVE so you can shoot people DEAD ! Hmm...sounds bad but is a whole lot of fun. The creator of the Dead Rising zombie shooter had added an extension that let's you go Dirt Track racing. (I'm convinced that the bumps in the road are the buried bodies of the aforementioned zombies you know)
One thing that newcomers should notice is that the mentor team is sharper and better than ever and should make their IO experience get off to a great start.
The Star Trek inspired sim UFS (United Federation Starfleet) is looking fantastic, you can see lot's of pictures in the UFS album on the Island Oasis FB page. Well worth a look and if you love Star Trek role play, sign up for an account at the main UFS homepage.
BUT the BIGGEST news story this week is.......
Drum roll please ... *rolls a drum down a long slope*
that....the founders of Island Oasis, Damean and Sugar Paolino are getting married today (Saturday 18th Feb) at noon Pacific time!
Everyone is invited so log in or Hypergrid over and come along. The LM for the wedding can be found by touching the Invite giver located at the Welcome Centre.
Should be a great day. Congratulations to Damean & Sugar and see you there !
The IO desginers have been releasing lots of new products; clothing, eyes, avatars...lots of creativity and one shop has expanded to a big store on a private sim.
The Special forces combat sim has gone LIVE so you can shoot people DEAD ! Hmm...sounds bad but is a whole lot of fun. The creator of the Dead Rising zombie shooter had added an extension that let's you go Dirt Track racing. (I'm convinced that the bumps in the road are the buried bodies of the aforementioned zombies you know)
One thing that newcomers should notice is that the mentor team is sharper and better than ever and should make their IO experience get off to a great start.
The Star Trek inspired sim UFS (United Federation Starfleet) is looking fantastic, you can see lot's of pictures in the UFS album on the Island Oasis FB page. Well worth a look and if you love Star Trek role play, sign up for an account at the main UFS homepage.
BUT the BIGGEST news story this week is.......
Drum roll please ... *rolls a drum down a long slope*
that....the founders of Island Oasis, Damean and Sugar Paolino are getting married today (Saturday 18th Feb) at noon Pacific time!
Everyone is invited so log in or Hypergrid over and come along. The LM for the wedding can be found by touching the Invite giver located at the Welcome Centre.
Should be a great day. Congratulations to Damean & Sugar and see you there !
February 06, 2012
Linux and the art of noise.
Hi everybody.
After the last tutorial I thought I would do another post with a video link for you.
This time, I'll be talking about Linux, so, if you have no interest in Linux just skip this and wait for my next post. Ha ha !
Now basically, Linux is usually really easy to use these days and things usually work right out the box. So, your desktop, the client you use for Island Oasis etc, will frequently be really easy to set up and use.
Couple of caveats though. Sound is still the most problematic thing to work perfectly. Some of you will know when I try to speak on Vivox using Linux all you hear from me is bursts of static instead of my voice (and some more of you will probably be saying that's a good thing ! meanies !)
Usually these problems will be down to your choice of distribution, the sound card you have, and what sound server is running.
Most distributions use something called Pulse audio which now is stable enough to work pretty well, and in fact, I now have voice working prefectly under Linux (Ubuntu) inworld.
Now, as you probably know, in IO we use Ventrilo for conference calls, meetings and group chats etc. But sadly, those people at Ventrilo have been promising a linux compatible client for several years and not come up with the goods. So it's Opensource to the rescue (yay opensource, it's why we have a choice of clients for IO,opensim and SL) in the form of Mangler. A fully compatible client for your voice server needs.
Suffice to say, it works very well and the short(ish) video clip shows how to set it up and running.
Hope that explains things better, and check back soon Windows users. I'll be doing something O/S agnostic very soon. :)
After the last tutorial I thought I would do another post with a video link for you.
This time, I'll be talking about Linux, so, if you have no interest in Linux just skip this and wait for my next post. Ha ha !
Now basically, Linux is usually really easy to use these days and things usually work right out the box. So, your desktop, the client you use for Island Oasis etc, will frequently be really easy to set up and use.
Couple of caveats though. Sound is still the most problematic thing to work perfectly. Some of you will know when I try to speak on Vivox using Linux all you hear from me is bursts of static instead of my voice (and some more of you will probably be saying that's a good thing ! meanies !)
Usually these problems will be down to your choice of distribution, the sound card you have, and what sound server is running.
Most distributions use something called Pulse audio which now is stable enough to work pretty well, and in fact, I now have voice working prefectly under Linux (Ubuntu) inworld.
Now, as you probably know, in IO we use Ventrilo for conference calls, meetings and group chats etc. But sadly, those people at Ventrilo have been promising a linux compatible client for several years and not come up with the goods. So it's Opensource to the rescue (yay opensource, it's why we have a choice of clients for IO,opensim and SL) in the form of Mangler. A fully compatible client for your voice server needs.
Suffice to say, it works very well and the short(ish) video clip shows how to set it up and running.
Hope that explains things better, and check back soon Windows users. I'll be doing something O/S agnostic very soon. :)
February 01, 2012
Skinning the Hippo
In my post on viewer wars a while ago, I mentioned the possibility of tutorials for Island Oasis viewers.
This is the first, and is about giving Hippo a custom skin or theming it.
Come on ! you didn't really think it was about skinning Hippos did you ?
This is the first, and is about giving Hippo a custom skin or theming it.
Come on ! you didn't really think it was about skinning Hippos did you ?
January 29, 2012
Club Ecstasy Web Site.
Hi all. I wanted to let you all know about a brand new site featuring Island Oasis' hottest clubClub Ecstasy.
First of all the link is right here and second there will be a more detailed feature and video on Club Ecstasy very soon !
The site was created by Will Paolino (he of the mega awesome dance moves) and features the staff of club Ecstasy (with photos) event postings and you can leave comments about how great you think the site is.
So pay a visit,leave a comment and let everyone know how great IO really is.
January 25, 2012
Places to Visit part one - Oasis Gardens.
Have you been yet ?
This is one of the beautiful locations you really should try to get to see.
The Beautiful Gardens of Island Oasis
From the inworld description "In this place you will find tranquility. The atmosphere is breathtaking. Come relax and enjoy the Oasis Gardens."
To get there the slurl is http://slurl.com/secondlife/Oasis%20Gardens/83/128/39 (copy and paste into local chat inworld then click the link)
They say a picture paints a thousand words....
Well how about a video instead ?
This is one of the beautiful locations you really should try to get to see.
The Beautiful Gardens of Island Oasis
From the inworld description "In this place you will find tranquility. The atmosphere is breathtaking. Come relax and enjoy the Oasis Gardens."
To get there the slurl is http://slurl.com/secondlife/Oasis%20Gardens/83/128/39 (copy and paste into local chat inworld then click the link)
They say a picture paints a thousand words....
Well how about a video instead ?
January 19, 2012
Viewer Wars
(cue stirring music)
A long, long time ago, in a virtual galaxy far, far away; Avatars fought wars over the right to view their universe in their own way.
There exist incredible tales of Hippo's dancing, the mighty Phoenix rising from the remains of a crushed emerald that once burned so brightly, and the Beatles sang Dear Prudence....wait....I mean some guys did a viewer called Imprudence. Meanwhile the Cool guys who thought they were all mad, distanced themselves from all of this and went and did their own thing.
Ok,ok...scratch the music ! Let's get back to (virtual) reality :)
Viewer choice is a very personal thing, and people swear by one or the other. Which is best ? The greatest ? Has the most features ? Well the truth is they all do things in more or less the same way with some differences.
Some of those are purely cosmetic, some are better for OpenSim and we'll focus today on officialy supported viewers for Island Oasis and a few others that are allowed to connect. I'm not going to go into lot's of details on each one or it'll take five minutes to scroll from the top to the bottom of this blog post ! Visit the respective links in the opening paragraph for a complete feature list and download links.
First of all, there are only two viewers at this time that are officially supported on the Island Oasis grid. they are; Hippo and Imprudence. Inworld you can expect that if you have any problems with either of these two viewers, or need help setting them up, then the Mentors ( the awesome team that provide help to new users) will be able to advise you on that. They are both also available to download direct from the Island Oasis web site and getting them from there means you have the fabulous,cool, lovely IO icon for the viewer.
Hippo, is designed for OpenSim. It has features not supported in that other well known grid that we are to afraid to mention. Well I'm not. The Linden gods cannot scare me ! Hippo is a modified Second Life viewer, It allows building up to a height of 10,000 m, scaling prims up to 256x256x256 m and other exciting features. It looks most like the original 1.23 viewer. I'd never used Hippo before coming to IO and it's a very nice viewer, even featuring a pretty good radar (that I only discovered it had very recently)
Imprudence has some other great features, notably the colour purple, full radar and one as part of the mini map.
It has client Id, where you see the name of the viewer someone is using and a look at feature with the name of the avatar displayed next to the crosshairs. It also supports different skins. My favorite is the dark skin. Dark is cool.
Incidentally, although Hippo doesn't have themes, you can copy one over from another viewer and replace the silver theme with it. All my viewers have the same theme (beacuse that's the way I roll)
Imprudence also has a built in AO, so you can save a Hud on screen and enhanced boobie physics. (I can't write Breasts, it makes me blush) Bear in mind: Imprudence has a stable and experimental version on their web site. The version from the IO site is the stable one. The experimental has more features but might be unstable. Having said that, I've not found any problems with the experimental client.
Now moving along to Phoenix. Phoenix does work in Island Oasis but it was designed primarily for SecondLife ! On opensim grids like IO important features don't work properly, or not at all. The map doesn't work well,and search is broken. In fact search works less well than it used to because the developers moved over to LL's new search system. Things that do work are chat command line options like calc, tp2cam, DD (draw distance) etc.. Enhanced radar, perhaps one of the best. Phoenix supports mesh on grids that have it and outfit inventory linking (again where supported) Please bear in mind that a lot of features, like enhanced build functionality don't work properly in Island Oasis because they were developed to work on the SL grid.
Cool VL viewer is an independant viewer developed by Henri Beauchamp. A really,really cool French guy. He does it all on his own, no team behind him. And I'm including Cool VL because Henri is famous in the virtual world devloper community.
If you ever look at the features of other viewers and their credits, often you will find Henri's name listed for some sort of contribution.
He was the first person to backport Mesh to V1 style viewer, when everyone else (including LL) said it was impossible!
He does have patches from other viewers as well, but suffice to say Cool has all the neat features you'll find in other viewers and then some. The menu and button layout is a little different, separate group and friend buttons instead of an integrated contacts tab for example. Cool VL also has an excellent grid list for most popular virtual worlds, including of course IO.
Overall, and this is just my opinion, this viewer works great for IO. Search and map works as expected and no problems with building or attachments.
Now a word of caution. *glares at you ominously*.. Island Oasis has hypergridding enabled so visitors from other grids can teleport in. If you log in from another grid using ANY version of Viewer 2, Firestorm etc, it will NOT be a good experience. Strange and weird things will happen and you might grow an extra leg, grow a funny mustache (not fun for the ladies) or start singing Seargant Pepper at odd intervals. OK, I made the last line up, but trust me. It will not work well so.......
Stick to the supported viewers. You will get help with them.
If you want to try the other viewers that can connect then feel free to try, some have nice features, but there is NO support for those.
List of viewers allowed to connect:
With Support
Without support
It has client Id, where you see the name of the viewer someone is using and a look at feature with the name of the avatar displayed next to the crosshairs. It also supports different skins. My favorite is the dark skin. Dark is cool.
Incidentally, although Hippo doesn't have themes, you can copy one over from another viewer and replace the silver theme with it. All my viewers have the same theme (beacuse that's the way I roll)
Imprudence also has a built in AO, so you can save a Hud on screen and enhanced boobie physics. (I can't write Breasts, it makes me blush) Bear in mind: Imprudence has a stable and experimental version on their web site. The version from the IO site is the stable one. The experimental has more features but might be unstable. Having said that, I've not found any problems with the experimental client.
Now moving along to Phoenix. Phoenix does work in Island Oasis but it was designed primarily for SecondLife ! On opensim grids like IO important features don't work properly, or not at all. The map doesn't work well,and search is broken. In fact search works less well than it used to because the developers moved over to LL's new search system. Things that do work are chat command line options like calc, tp2cam, DD (draw distance) etc.. Enhanced radar, perhaps one of the best. Phoenix supports mesh on grids that have it and outfit inventory linking (again where supported) Please bear in mind that a lot of features, like enhanced build functionality don't work properly in Island Oasis because they were developed to work on the SL grid.
Cool VL viewer is an independant viewer developed by Henri Beauchamp. A really,really cool French guy. He does it all on his own, no team behind him. And I'm including Cool VL because Henri is famous in the virtual world devloper community.
If you ever look at the features of other viewers and their credits, often you will find Henri's name listed for some sort of contribution.
He was the first person to backport Mesh to V1 style viewer, when everyone else (including LL) said it was impossible!
He does have patches from other viewers as well, but suffice to say Cool has all the neat features you'll find in other viewers and then some. The menu and button layout is a little different, separate group and friend buttons instead of an integrated contacts tab for example. Cool VL also has an excellent grid list for most popular virtual worlds, including of course IO.
Overall, and this is just my opinion, this viewer works great for IO. Search and map works as expected and no problems with building or attachments.
Now a word of caution. *glares at you ominously*.. Island Oasis has hypergridding enabled so visitors from other grids can teleport in. If you log in from another grid using ANY version of Viewer 2, Firestorm etc, it will NOT be a good experience. Strange and weird things will happen and you might grow an extra leg, grow a funny mustache (not fun for the ladies) or start singing Seargant Pepper at odd intervals. OK, I made the last line up, but trust me. It will not work well so.......
Stick to the supported viewers. You will get help with them.
If you want to try the other viewers that can connect then feel free to try, some have nice features, but there is NO support for those.
List of viewers allowed to connect:
With Support
- Hippo
- Imprudence
Without support
- Meerkat
- Phoenix
- Cool VL (IO grid allready set up)
- Singularity
- Radegast (text viewer)
- Mobile Grid client (Android only)
- Pocket Metaverse
- Secondlife Inventory (for importing)
So there you have it. A long post and I didn't even get onto all of the viewers.
For the record, I'm "viewer agnostic" and I've tried almost all of them.
Once again, only Hippo and Imprudence are supported in IO but have fun testing the others if you decide to try :)
Thanks to Sugar for the list of clients approved for connection to the Island Oasis grid.
January 18, 2012
Welcome !
Hello, and welcome to Island Oasis World. A new blog dedicated to the virtual world of Island Oasis.
You might be asking "Why ?" when there are tons of web sites and blogs about Virtual worlds.
Well the main reason is, this blog is not about SecondLife.
Sheesh ! there's a whole ton of those out there.
Also for official news and information about Island Oasis, you need to visit the web site www.islandoasis.biz
Notice at the bottom of the page there is a link to a Fan video ? That's mine, so you can expect more video like that here.
Not only videos, but news, reviews, features, hints, tips (they might be the same thing :P )
Oh !....and your comments to. I'd like you to participate by letting me know about anything you think is particularly great about IO.
There will also be guides here on how to get the best from your viewer, whichever one you use, because, let's face it. Although they all work the same way they all differ slightly.
So things that the official site doesn't cover, like how to get things running under Linux, alternatives to ventrillo. That kind of thing.
If that sounds like it will be of interest then check in from time to time. Leave a comment or suggestion and help me improve the blog.
There should be an update at least once a week, and more often as time permits.
So, for now it just remains for me to say Welcome !
I hope you enjoy the blog,and, see you in Island Oasis !
John.
You might be asking "Why ?" when there are tons of web sites and blogs about Virtual worlds.
Well the main reason is, this blog is not about SecondLife.
Sheesh ! there's a whole ton of those out there.
Also for official news and information about Island Oasis, you need to visit the web site www.islandoasis.biz
Notice at the bottom of the page there is a link to a Fan video ? That's mine, so you can expect more video like that here.
Not only videos, but news, reviews, features, hints, tips (they might be the same thing :P )
Oh !....and your comments to. I'd like you to participate by letting me know about anything you think is particularly great about IO.
There will also be guides here on how to get the best from your viewer, whichever one you use, because, let's face it. Although they all work the same way they all differ slightly.
So things that the official site doesn't cover, like how to get things running under Linux, alternatives to ventrillo. That kind of thing.
If that sounds like it will be of interest then check in from time to time. Leave a comment or suggestion and help me improve the blog.
There should be an update at least once a week, and more often as time permits.
So, for now it just remains for me to say Welcome !
I hope you enjoy the blog,and, see you in Island Oasis !
John.
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