April 2004

I love walking around There and listening to the music people are playing; it adds tremendously to the feeling of “place” when you can walk up to someone’s zone and hear the same music they do.

Sometimes, though, particularly in crowded areas where you don’t want to pay the bandwidth and lag costs, it can be nice to turn radios off. Unfortunately, the obvious solution (turn down the volume knob, or the There music volume slider) doesn’t actually disconnect you from the radio station in the current release (V2.06). Walking up to an individual radio and muting it manually does disconnect you from the station, but doesn’t work very well in an area with multiple speakers.

Although this issue is apparently going to be addressed in a future release of There (V2.10), I’ve decided to make my personal loudspeaker muting program available for download to anyone who would like to try it. This program works just like walking up to every loudspeaker you can see and pressing mute on each one.

This gag blends in well enough with the There-designed parts of the café that I bet a lot of people walking through don’t think anything of it — until it winks at them.

There_Monitor is no longer to be found at Kangaroo Island. She isn’t back at her old haunt on the volcano either; all that there is at that location now is a “Jopy is watching you” sign. My personal theory is that she was scared off by this and has finally run off to join the circus. On the way, she seems to have dropped by the new announcement board to make a post about the system opening late.

For those hankering after the Good Old Days, here is a picture from January showing the old location. The ground looks odd because the image was taken with QuintanaVision enabled. You can see that There_Monitor used to stand with one foot in sector 58 and the other in sector 9.

The otherwise cool and unapproachable There_Monitor has apparently decided to take a vacation from her permanent spot on the side of the Caldera volcano (X=0, Y=0).

As you can see above, she is currently to be found (briefly, every couple of minutes) at Kangaroo Island off Ootay. New location, new clothes, and a daring lack of forcefield. Where will she be seen next?

In the real world, if you came across a couch and three seats with some of your friends, sitting down next to someone on the couch would be a social signal: one of status, alliance or attraction depending on context. I’ve therefore always been slightly uncomfortable with the 5-seater groups in There, so I was really interested to find that Paradise Island’s new clubhouses are outfitted with these rather nice 4-seater groups.

At first I thought they were just four chairs and a table, but you can soon disprove that by observing that you can zoom in on the faces of people in the other seats. That doesn’t happen in ad hoc seating groups made up of individual chairs.

It turns out that although these new groups have four places to sit, their “experience” is the same as the old 5-seater groups. So, there are five zoomed camera angles, two for the chair that is really a “couch” and one for each of the others.

Even more amusing (at least to me), the 5-seater experience is so fully replicated that one of the chairs has the infamous “no emote” behaviour. Once you locate the “couch” chair, try sitting in the chair to the left of that and issuing an emote like 'tu and observe that… nothing happens.

These clubhouses have some other nice touches, too. The seating group next to the (animated) fireplaces works like a team platform, with an MC slot and enough room for an audience of 14 avatars (seven seated with another seven standing behind). The general style is a lot more realistic (or at least less cartoonlike) than we have been used to in the older Tiki islands.