The hunt is on for the "2.0 renders"!

BAM!

Thanks to liam for finding the last piece, had be scared for a moment.

Congrats everyone, we did it!
Amazing work to us all, now, Ben, where's our 9th one, and if I have to start scrounging through half the grid looking at the underside of stuff at this point, your key will be published here for griefing, I have it in my records.

yay!

thank you all so much for hunting them down and peicing them together - I hope you guys had as much fun as I did. Happy April Fools, but all thoe pics are real.

ben

stitched, touched up, and color corrected

A 9th picture was promised. Cough up. >:D

I did ^.^

Muahahaha, database of sims came in handy:
http://www.secondlifeservers.com/map.php (warning, data is not all perfectly up to date just yet)

Coughed

oh, and for all those who followed this thread, I posted the originals of each image as they were found here.

It's full of skyboxes c.c
Another City sim shot, looks across continent c.c 9 pics of the future of SL, I think today was very productive ^.^

not very good but eh whatever

Thankye. ^^

Overall... a very challenging, and highly evil scavenger hunt. Congrats to Ben too, for thinking it all up.

Hooray! Much fun had. Thank you Ben for the pictures, they're great!

It's four, actually -- Anshe's A'ksha sims. I think someone was messing with one of them, though.

Wow... when you consider all of that was built by us..

With all the creative tallent in SL, I don't doubt that that was all made by us, just, I'm gonna miss the days when I had a ugly build intentionally just outa my draw distance while I build, cause... apparently I'll be able to see Luskwood from my house, or vice versa.

Comparo-

http://livethenow.com/stever/render.htm

Well, this has been amazing. Looking at the big world like this puts things in perspective.

You know, i think it might have a positive effect. Ugly builds are going to be more visible to alot of people, thus be quite shamefull. And get alot of negativity.

Hope fully a kind of pattern will spring p to builds even a layout. I mean my next door neighgbour crates a build facing my plot, i'll move mine to face theres we get road feel and a set layout, because i know people can see my house from miles off.

This is fantastic. It looks like how I i imagine a Cyberpunk world to look, a real metaverse. In my opinion, there should be a huge sprawl in the theme of Nova Albion Now i'm happy. I'm a bit worried it might just be an April Fools thing though :/ But if it's real, i'm uber-excited!

What really struck me was the crowding and lack of trees. It seems that Mother Nature (LL) creates a nice world, complete with vegetation. We buy, "clear-cut" the trees, "buldoze" the land and fill just about every sqm. with prims.

We are the "ugly virus" that leaves no nature un-trashed!

The thing that's always struck me as curious is "this is just a bunch of pixels on a stack of racks" and yet some of us seem to care so much about preserving virtual nature like we do "real" nature. I'm not going to bring up existential philosophy here, but I think that speaks loudly about the humanity that makes itself apparent even through technology.

Of course, there are still notable whole-sim exceptions like Seacliff and L'Utopie... if you got 50 of *those* kinds of sims together, imagine the contrast and diversity we've had.

Certainly something to think about.

not sure if you guys noticed or not but in those screenshots, textures are turned off completely on objects in the distance. This would explain how all that can be drawn in one frame with limited VRAM.

I wish the screenshots showed some nifty shader effects like bump mapping or full screen glow or something like that but I'm being picky lmao. Thanks for the shots Ben.

[Edit: bump mapping as in per pixel tangent space bump mapping or parallax bump mapping or even just dot3, with customizable bump map textures]

Ben, any chance of letting us know the speed of the computer and the graphics card that was used? Just for a wee bit of perspective

Oh and thanks to the people who found them!

Here's a render of SL's terrain roughly matching the POV of the image Christopher Omega cleaned up. A lot of sims missing in the distance, but it still gives you an idea of how far you can see in that 2.0 shot, without the clutter of the buildings in the way.
Edit - This would be a good April Fools's joke

I am left speechless by how awesome the pictures for the 2.0 engine look.

THAT is what I think of a Metaverse...