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Thursday 12 September 2013

InWorldz, Our Home Away from Home: A Letter from Immortalis


If you are in InWorldz now, have you left Second Life? Why did you move to InWorldz?


The short answers are "No, we have not left Second Life.", and "We moved only our personal home/estate and our building studio/experimental builds parcel."

Alchemy and I live in both places. InWorldz is our house in the country and Second Life is the big city where we commute to work, socialise, and enjoy the nightlife. Then at the end of the day when we are tired and ready to be alone at home, we go back to InWorldz.

As all of my building for the store starts in InWorldz first. Naturally our experiments show up there first. When products are retail ready, we release to BOTH grids at the same time. Second Life is where we started and we will always be there.

We will also be releasing, over time, items that are specifically needed in InWorldz only. Due to a smaller base of stores/designers, there are avie-related items that I want and cannot find, so have to build myself. It's strictly necessity building.

The biggest reason we are in InWorldz is financial. When Alchemy and I gave up our 5 sims in Second Life, it was purely a real world financial decision. Our sims were approaching the cost of a RL home mortgage and we did not have that money to spare.

If we could, we would have left our sims up for eternity in Second Life. When we gave them up, we lost our home, not just our retail shop. To remain in SL, we relocated our retail presence. We are still there...but we have been homeless for a long time.

A lot of people would simply say, just buy a small parcel and set it up. I tried that. It didn't work very well. I felt constrained by the theme of the other parcels. I didn't have enough room or enough prim, so we moved our personal home to InWorldz.

I found room for my imagination, with extraordinary prim counts and not much financial investment.

I don't expect people to follow us to InWorldz. This note is just for the few people that wonder if we will ever build sim environments again. The answer to that is yes, and we already are. If you want to see what we have going over there, I have experimental sea caves, ruins and soundscapes that are meant to be experienced with a particular windlight setting and water, and explored with a particular playlist of music, that is on the sim now.

If all you are interested in is our shop, our brand is on both grids. Releases are synced to both grids.

...but for those times you miss just sitting in one of our landscapes, exploring and listening to music...we can offer that again. Don't get hung-up on it being a different grid. Think of it as a weekend trip to the country. You're on holiday. You're a tourist.





In my short time in InWorldz I have made a few observations. I have not found it to be as easy finding the really artistic and immersive sims OR find designers I really love by exploring. There are here but spread out in pockets.

Quick Points:

  1. Because of the lower population, I find my time here more solitary than SL...but I'm here with Alchemy so this grid is appropriate for a private home.


  2. Because uploads are free, land is cheap, and transferring creations between grids is pretty easy, this is a haven for builders like me.


  3. Sculpt bounding boxes respect their visual shapes so additional invisible prims/setting to phantom is not necessary.


  4. Mesh is here in the beta client and I have brought mesh in easily.


  5. One of my biggest worries was that I would not have an AV that looked good. Alchemy and I are vain I suppose. LOL But that worry is unfounded. It simply took a little longer to find what we wanted. There are just enough big designers here that we got our AVs set up in a day.


  6. You can bring in Lindens and exchange them into the local currency, which are IZ's (pronounced Izzies). So we found nearly everything here priced at half of what we were used to. We use InBiz to exchange IZ's in and out of Second life. It's a 2 way transfer.


  7. Our windlight settings are already in the stock client. We gave permission for that a long time ago ironically.


  8. InWorldz CAN be immensely ugly, just as SL can. But as designers we control our own environments and one of the best things you can do is change your windlight settings immediately. We use and have designed our environments to be experienced with windlight set to "Shadow1" and the water set to "glassy.


...then, come visit us:

The Sanctuary (237,84,21)

-- Immortalis Cyannis

(Don't forget to turn on your music. Sound is an integral part of the environment).

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