Continuing my rediscovery of SL’s true potential for extreme realism combining the power of shadows with windlight, the next landmark on my list had to be Amiryu Hosoi’s cluster of four sims where you can immerse yourself in the lifestyle of Edo Japan (well, mostly).
My first glimpse was of a fisherman’s boat, nearby the rice fields. Beyond, the pagoda, seen from within the walls of the marketplace.
Inside Matsumoto Castle, you can attend lectures and events organised by Akiko, one of the community members, or find the Magic Lantern to view some amazing hand-painted slides showing glimpses of Japanese society in the 19th century, while listening to the music on the land. There is also a group you can join to keep up with other events, which include theater and the celebration of Japanese holidays and festivals.
The castle has some amazingly textured rooms and corridors inside.
Just past the entrance to Hosoi Ichiba, the marketplace, that houses pavilions, a pagoda, a tearoom and a garden .
Rickshaw at rest, facing some carp banners, or koinobori, put up to celebrate the children.
Somewhere during my last visit, I was accosted by Amiryu herself who patiently answered some of my numerous questions. I didn’t know what the fish banners meant and it turned out that these other vertical banners seen here were simply noren, traditionally used as room dividers. I thought they had religious meaning!
Inside Hosoi Mura, the old town. Nearby are the okiya, the geisha boardinghouse, and the ochaya, the teahouse.
The dōjō attached to the keisatsu, or police station.
View from the keisatsu into the courtyard.
Various sights in and around the town.
You can buy most of what you see there to create your own oriental environment (on xstreet or at the landing points of each sim), including these recent junks at moor.
The Great Wall, on Mao Island.
[All pictures unedited.]
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Wow, The new shadow rendering Has really changed the whole way sl looks. Thats i trully amazing Lili. <3
Thank you, Light! It is! And those sims are really a great place to experience, with the sunlight sifting through the trees, and the music… makes one dreamy and really relaxed. I couldn’t stay away for days. :D
Really nice. I just don’t figure out how this shadow thing works. Do I need a special or modified viewer?
Hey, Ope! You can use the official Second Life client, Emerald or the Kirsten viewer to get shadows. You just have to enable them, and the steps are the same for all of them:
First press CTRL + SHIFT + ALT + D, to bring up the ‘Advanced’ menu if you don’t have it, and find the ‘Debug settings’ at the bottom of the pull-down.
Copy-paste ‘renderdeferred’ in the field and set to FALSE.
Then ‘renderusefbo’ and set to TRUE.
Then ‘renderdeferred’ and TRUE again.
Finally, type in ‘renderssaoeffect’ and change the first value to -1.
After that I make sure I’m running SL in ultra mode and that I turned on anisotropic filtering and have set antialiasing to at least x2 in the hardware options. All that in the hopes it makes things look better but it’s not mandatory. And then I play with the windlight settings.
The shadows are still in beta mode and may bug out in places, like where there’s alpha textures, such as trees. Also, you won’t be able to make snapshots via your client if you’re using the official viewer of Emerald. So what I do is use the screenshot button on my keyboard and stack each screenshot I take as a layer in a .psd file. The snapshot feature works in the Kirsten viewer but the shadows haven’t been working very smoothly for me in it. :)
Thanks for the reply! Works! But it seems it brings my machine down on its knees.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention shadows are very demanding, and still not for everyday use. But I hope someday soon they’ll be ! :)