Oasis

The cliff houses above the Oasis have gone now, and building has moved instead to the top of the hill, an area I’m calling Folly Ridge. There are some interesting buildings up on the ridge including a Roman folly, one of tempest’s castles and a couple of Moroccan palaces. In the middle is Leran’s Folly Springs portazone, pictured above.

This zone was built with aztec3’s help, and uses his pool object as its central feature. The large green boulders are recent designs by Arepera. The smaller round boulders are seating, and another 5-seater group seating object is concealed within the pool itself. This is a lovely place to just sit and read the newspaper or chat with friends.

It doesn’t make sense to try and document every change in a place like the Oasis village, but over the couple of weeks since my last overview pictures, it is interesting to see what has been stable and what has stayed the same.

Perhaps the most obvious thing that has happened is that the village is now larger, with more builders and more portazones. It is no longer possible to take a picture of the whole area, so I have taken three to form a kind of panorama (unfortunately, normal panorama software doesn’t work very well with There screenshots).

The center of the village has opened up a lot, so that there is now building on both sides of the road (the light-coloured area) that leads to Sirocco Heights to the west. The spaceship you can see straddling the road has since flown off to another part of There. Since these pictures were taken, one of the shop units in the central “L” has also been converted into a bridge to allow easier access from the ruins on the western side. The tent at far left was originally part of the central garden area; it is now off to one side and provides enough seating for large groups of people to talk at one time.

At the eastern end of the central area (right hand end in these pictures) you can see that a brown tower has been erected; this is actually made by two separate builders working together.

Out of the picture to the right (east) are at least another three portazones at the time of writing. The images were taken from the top of Dark_Viper’s tower bar before it was replaced by the Viper Pit Bar.

Dark_Viper’s original bar for the Oasis area (see my earlier post) had to be torn down because he picked up a lower floor by accident while working on a higher one…

I actually prefer the new building: the ground floor and upper floor both have two sets of group seating in the “wings” and there is a bar with a nice view over the desert on the upper floor. My only quibble is that the bar stools are in the form of two 2-person sofas instead of four individual ones, so people at one end of the bar can’t see the chat bubbles of people at the other end.

These artful ruins were created to the East side of the Oasis village some time ago, but I’ve only recently managed to get a clean image of them (even this one needed a little retouching). The ruins are partially visible from the main plaza and help to break up the eastern edge of the village.

Constructed by villager Terrapin, you can see a half-buried deck used as a sand-covered ruined floor. This is possible because the ground is uneven here and when placing a deck, only the very center of the object is used as a height reference. Thus, while the center of the deck will always be above ground, the edges may be partially obscured. Rocks and plants are by marisa9.

Caldera Sun-Times journalist Rose_E_Vette has a new article out interviewing some of the principals from the Oasis neighbourhood.

The Oasis: User-Created Community covers some of the history and personalities of the area from a point in time that although only a week or so ago already seems pretty distant, as the locale has developed in a number of ways since the article was written.

I wasn’t interviewed, but I am mentioned in the article as the Oasis’ chronicler. I will try to make good on that description soon with details of some of the recent changes.

The serenity of the Calderan desert was shattered today by the arrival of an alien spaceship. As can be seen from images taken at the landing site above Sirocco, the green warp cores are clearly visible and point without question to the use of Tyrian technology in the design. The spaceship’s commander is believed to be a long-time Tyr resident known as pixiemoto.

Here’s another building style I haven’t seen anywhere else. In this case, the left-hand building is the first to be constructed and was erected by Kobby, who is apparently some kind of builder in the real world. You can see that he favours building something that looks like it is solidly constructed and definitely connected to the ground.

The second cliff house belongs to MupP3t; both houses have fantastic views over Dune Valley and Sirocco.

In the Calderan desert, an oasis has appeared containing (amongst other things) the first flamingo I’ve seen in There with its feet in water…

It is perhaps too much of a simplification to say that member-built architecture has tended to be along the lines of a large portazone, a couple of sky decks and some components from the Roman builder set. However, the oasis is clearly a departure from the old style.

This has been enabled in part by the new “shop” construction objects, which are being used as small accommodation units. Their flexibility, low price and size (they will fit in a medium builder portazone) has allowed a number of different people to come together to build a little spontaneous village around a shared garden. Perhaps half a dozen portazones of different sizes are involved in the current setup.