Chinatown!!!!!!!!!!

Move your mouse under the streets, and you'll see how it's done - yup, upside down it's nearly all there What you're seeing is slightly transparent sections of the ground, showing through the upside down versions of the builds etc. making it look like reflections - very clever. I suppose some of the signs are scripted both above and below the ground as well to make it look like the reflections are dynamic. It's very nicely done.

I imagine it would have been a lot smaller without the skate park. A sparse area like that uses little prims per square meter, so they could spread the map out a little. If it was another alley, the overall map would have been smaller.

Plus, from a design perspective, I think it opens the map up a little and gives it some breathing room.

Congrats Chinatown on a successful Grand Opening! I was honored to have been a part of the featured video along with my sexy Grim hehe. I agree with Pirate..Darklife and Simcast are definitely two other great builds. Simcast is and has been working very hard to pay attention to every detail. Keep an eye out for it in the future, I can't wait

Huggerz,
MJ

That explains something. While in an alley way I moved my camera angles around and all of a sudden everything appeared upside down and I couldnt understand what happend. Rather disorientating imo.

However the effect is cool when the camera is kept in the proper perspective. hehe. Makes it hard to go back to my sl home now. it looks so primitive.

Thanks to LL for putting up some Darklife pics on the website!!!
And Chinatown looks absolutly incredible!!! But I wonder if it was worth using so many objects to do a reflection effect. I sure hope they made them all phantom so they're not used in physics calculation!

While flying is still enabled, you can fly off the side of the area and fly back in under the street level. That's fun. Not only is all the geometry repeated upside down, but they've gone to the extra effort of modifying some of the textures (e.g. for lit windows and doors) to be blurred so as to make the puddle reflections more realistic.

I have to say Chinatown is by far the best looking thing I've seen in SL. It's not that there aren't very impressive builds elsewhere, but Chinatown is the first thing I've seen that actually looks professional if you know what I mean. It's the effort that's gone into the texturing to make up for the lack of sophistication in SL's lighting model. Lighting and texturing is what makes top PC games look so good now and I think the Bedazzle crew have captured some of that. For example I don't know if anyone has seen Doom3 with all the lighting effects disabled (there was a site where someone got it running on a Voodoo2 card) and it looks a lot like SL does most of the time, i.e. the geometry in Doom3 isn't any more creative than we see in SL all the time, the difference is textures and lighing.

*smiles softly*

From Bedazzle team, thank you for sharing your comments.



This is one of my personal faves too. Next up -- let's get alts with inverse positioning to act as avatar reflections. Hehehe.

Lora, I share your opinion in regards to that. Chinatown itself is claustrophobic and intense -- like a real Chinatown. I think the design flow is a sort of an alternate-reality feng shui, and that mix of realism and fantasy in SL is one of the most powerful creative weapons we have to yield.

Speaking of weapons...

UL IS NOW OPEN FOR... GUNFIGHTS!

Visiting Chinatown and Abraxas should give you notecards when you TP in. Get yourself the freebie weapons and if you have questions that aren't covered by the instructions, feel free to ask. I'll be coming by often to see how things are going. CrystalShard Foo, our Head Programmer, has been working hard to fix bugs as they're encountered. Please IM reproducible bug reports to myself and/or her so with full details that she can improve the system. It's an informal setting right now, so come as you please and join in. More to follow.

Oh Yes.... this is just so much fun.... now I really have had some fun with a seburo in the past, but this has just got to beat it

Good luck with it. I was there yesterday and today. My system is pretty obviously below minimum specification though, since with everything off and draw distance at 64, I can barely get an fps above 3-4.

Admittedly, it does look very pretty though.

i suggest turning off shiney and light for chinatown. you won't miss them. i don't know if they have even used light prims anywhere but i turned it off for good measure.

the fps is a lot of fun. i am blown away by the depth of this project.

The secret for walking around Abraxas and Chinatown without having your computer torture itself at 3FPS is in taking down as many graphic options as you can.

I usually get around 11 to 17FPS in Chinatown which isnt all that bad. My preferences are set to the following:

In the Display tab:
Performance Options: Only shiny enabled - though you can safely turn that off as well, its not really used anywhere in Abraxas or Chinatown. Make sure that Local Lights is off - it really is a resource eater.

Terrain Detail: For Abraxas: Some. For Chinatown: Non. In Chinatown the floor is 100% prims as you are high above the ground. There is no need to waste cycles on rendering it.

In the Options tab:
Object Detail - Set on level 2
Tree detail - insignificant. Barely used on Abraxas, non at all in Chinatown.

Turning Avatar Names to "Show temporarily" helps as well. I've found it very possible to play combat with these settings up.

Fortunatly The UL builds do not really use any special rendering functions - its all smart building and texturing - so feel free to take down as many options as you can.

Thanks for the tech tips, CS.

Bedazzle has set the bar in the stratosphere! Hats off to the Bedazzle team for sending SL builders back to the drawing board!

I think that I am the only one who noticed that some of the signs were backward so no biggie. I don't know if the Bedazzle team is aware of what's written on some of the crates, but at least one of them contains a dinosaur according to what's written on it.

-Kiamat Dusk
Chinese speaker

Which part of 'everything turned off' didn't you understand?

See my response to Jauani above.

I have ...

CPU 2.6GHz
RAM 1GB
GFX Nvidia GeForce FX5200/128 AGP 8x

The real UT gives me about 50fps, UL gives me 3-4... go figure...

Then it won't matter...



Then it won't matter since it won't render...



And also, obviously, did not matter...

It's not like I'm some newb who doesn't do these things by default on entering a laggy sim. I hate having to relog to change settings, but for something as well advertised as this, of course I will... It still won't help...

Needless to say, I won't be back. Sorry, I really liked it, but it's a waste of time and effort for me.

ok perhaps you should turn on your monitor.

your system is better than mine and i'm doing ok in chinatown if there is only around 6-10 avs present (i also turned down av detail).

i run a p4 2.0 GHz, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9800 128 MB RAM AGPx4.

i found that bullet ghosting eventually piled up and created lag. that's another problem to contend with that i could only resolve by teleporting away and back.

~copies and pastes that to Jimmy multiple times on a notecard~

We know, its just that we hoped no one will notice. By the time Francis mentioned that the chinese is backwords it was too much work to go back and change it. Blame laziness and lack of knowledge of any actuall chinese. o.@



I'm sorry that this isnt helping you Sio - but I posted this for everyone else... among which some may actually -be- a newb who doesn't do these things by default on entering a laggy sim.

It took me months before I personaly noticed the ability to change some of these options myself. I figured mentioning how to do this in this thread will be helpful in general.

Re: shiny, it does matter when you have 20+ avatars with shiny attachments... re: ground, logic says it shouldnt render - but I was surprised to notice it did actually make a difference on my system. I turned it on and off a couple of times and noticed a significant difference. Could be my draw range.

Overall I am sorry that your system cannot handle the sims. But I am sure that we will see more builds like this coming to SL soon.