Secondlife Sightseeing

by rihahn

Back in 2018, the group I ran role-play sims in SecondLife with decided they wanted to play in a futuristic space setting.

Of course to do this required a sim build, a story, and some rules. So while they came up with the rules they sent me off to make the story and rough out a place to play within that story.

That place would eventually be called “Aedis”. And by the time I was done there were a half dozen alien races, a timeline spanning about a thousand years, a slew of interesting genetic alterations for players, and this massive city that served as an example of Humanity’s corporate prowess and galactic business acumen.

Aedis itself resided on the watery moon of a nearby gas giant many lightyears from Earth, and served as both the HQ of several huge Earth conglomerates as well as a massive shipping hub and warehousing system.

The city itself was divided into two major levels: the lower city where everyone lived just well enough to be useful for their corporate masters, and where everything was built into and around the massive machinery that powered Aedis, created its energy dome, and generated its breathable atmosphere. Above this squalor was the upper city, where the rich and powerful lived in luxury amidst sweeping parks with views of the perpetual twilight light given off by the system’s brown dwarf star, and lived within lofty luxury spires.

And in SecondLife it looked a bit like this:

It’s difficult to get a sense of scale from static images, but that bridge in the lower center is probably a hundred meters long. On the left is one of the fusion reactors that burn deuterium found in the moon’s water. That one is “B7”, which denotes its position on a 7×7 grid.

B7 is also the name of the district, because it surrounds the particular reactor. B7, being on the outer edge of the city grid, is also close to the massive ports that surround Aedis – so there’s a lot of alien presence as well as a fair amount of crime.

One of the surface-level shopping blocks. Pretty much everything structural in the lower city, that isn’t reactors, piping, and cooling arrays, is made from a nanite-assembled concrete. Which is why everything has a similar dark grey modular appearance. Any renter’s “style” is typically done via lighting and holoprojectors as the nanocrete is incredibly resistant to modification.

Looking from a surface-level building back toward some reactor machinery. B7 is on the left.

Another surface-level building. On the left is a hospital of sorts… Most medical services are run by medical staff that ran afoul of something or someone in the upper city and moved to where there are fewer questions asked.

Moving from the surface level to the subsurface levels of the lower city is managed by way of these massive equipment tunnels. These tunnels are the quickest way between the subsurface and the surface, but can be dangerous because the automated machinery that the tunnels were made for aren’t big on personal safety. Other paths exist between levels, but tend to be long and convoluted.

The subsurface of Aedis is where the truly destitute live – like termites boring into the walls and spaces between Aedis’ infrastructure. Above is one of the bazaars that reside over a massive open coolant tank.

If you go down far enough, you eventually come to the hazardous machinery levels of Aedis. Here you’re peering out of a gantry across a space hundreds of meters wide, and looking over the water inlet pipe for reactor B7 about two hundred meters above.

You’d never guess that I used to work in the games industry I guess.

Oh, and for anyone versed in SL; the above is a mere 3000 prims out of the 20,000 available… So plenty of prims left over for players to make it ‘theirs’.

Anyway, the reason for this trip down memory lane is that LindenLab finally offered to let me spin up another sim… See, they’ve been in the middle of a move to “The Cloud” for their infrastructure for most of 2020, which meant no one could spin up additional sims. 

And a few months ago, some folks I know were asking about renting a sim from me but that capability had been shut off… So I got put on a waiting list.

And the wait ended today.

So, I spun up Aedis to see if anyone would be interested in using it as-is. If not I’ll wipe everything out and let someone I know build their own thing on it. If they’re not interested now (it’s been a few months), I’ll probably use it for myself for a while — just for the fun of building entire cities and whatnot. 🙂

Maybe I’ll finish the upper-city… Maybe…