RIHAHN.COM

Month: October 2019

  • Update!

    It’s been a busy month…

    First was Generation 4 MLP coming to a close after nine years, which prompted me to throw a bit of a party in SL. And with that I got enthused to rekindle Roanoak and embarked on another damn fool idealistic crusade — with ponies.

    Said crusade has 21 registered characters played by 19 players and has been pretty busy — and we’re only two weeks into it!

    Anyway, it’s been nice to let The Empress run around again, and that has caused another spate of commissioned artwork:

    Aurora facing down one of the rifts that define her little corner of the world.

    I was able to get TurnipBerry to do another supremely epic piece for me, and that instigated a ton of questions about Aurora, Roanoak, SL, and everything else. And some of the questions led to needing a reference for Aurora — which has never been done…

    Until now…


    When Aurora was originally built in SL, there were some serious limitations to the available avatars… Even things like wings were super simplistic and the ‘feathers’ were just four straight lines on a flat color. You see, textures were limited to basic flat colors and something as simple as a gradient was really, really hard – if not impossible because of sculpts not having good UVs. And everything was made of sculpts to get that easy cell-shade outline, so pretty much everyone was solid colors. Which is okay, the show was also mostly solid colors too so it worked out.

    Since then, everything that has been done since Aurora was built in early 2011, art-wise, has been based on my initial avatar that I was never truly happy with. In the stories, Aurora has always been a bit closer to the new reference because I’m big on details and have an entire cosmology that determines what she should look like…

    I was fortunate that TurnipBerry was willing to listen to me rattle on about character details, and then add her own touches (like the countershading which is really nice) to create a reference for future works.

    Which leads to updating Aurora in SecondLife:

    The “Grand Old Mare” of my setting now sporting her new easier to photo colors and markings.

    Folks in SL will undoubtedly do a double-take when Aurora shows up – after all, Aurora has looked pretty much the same for almost a decade… But I figure Aurora is just getting a jump on Gen5. 😀

  • We interrupt this interruption with an important interruption…

    It’s probably a sign that I’m getting old, but the level of momentary interruption in today’s world is starting to wear on me…

    Phone bleeping and blooping every few minutes with some alert, message, text, or call (did you know the warrantee on my 14 month old car is about to expire unless I call this random robot who left a voicemail!? Three times today!?). Texts get real bad when election season rolls around — like right now; once an hour some millionaire career politician I’ve never heard of (or care about) is begging for money in SMS form…

    Email app popping up every 5 minutes with an alert about something. Don’t worry, it’s just another seven emails about cheap medication — three of which are bad asian translations and one is literally in Hangul… Or it’s an offer to join a webinar!!! for some app I’ve never heard of (or care about).

    The non-stop alerts from Discord / Telegram / Skype / Slack / IM-app-of-the-week because no one can settle on one thing so everyone needs a dedicated machine just to run all of the required IM apps.

    People in SL noticing I’m online and instantly IMing me to ask “What’s up?” — I dunno, you tell me. You’re the one who IM’d me out of the blue… And if I managed to bolt before they can finish typing, SL will happily forward that random ping to my email…

    People at work just walking into the office and starting to talk at me — even though I have headphones on and a deep look of concentration because this code wont write itself. And once I’ve told them, again, to turn it off and back on again for the third time this week it takes a half an hour to get back into the groove… Too bad someone else will walk in and start taking in the next 29 minutes…

    And the intrusive behavior-targeted tracker-based social-engineered pervasive advertising in EVERYTHING… Ugh.

    I need a vacation from always-on, fully-dynamic, mesh-connected, interactive-groupware I think… Time to go be a hermit in a cave. 🙂

  • An update and some new art!

    The event in Second Life to see off Gen4 ponies went off without a hitch.

    I wrote about the events and my synopsis over on my Deviant Art page. 🙂

    I also received some new art for Aurora, the Empress of that little place called Roanoak…

    Ancient magical flying purple horse go!

    The Empress is clearly done with your shenanigans…

    These were done for me by “Marbola” on Deviant Art.

    It occurs to me that the vast majority of art for Aurora was made by artists in either Russia, the Ukraine, Finland, or Poland. 

    Aurora is quite the International Mare of Mystery! 😀

  • Roanoak, the SecondLife sim

    After announcing the event on the 12th to celebrate nine years of Gen4 MLP, I was approached by some two dozen people asking what would become of the Roanoak story…

    You see, the world of Roanoak is quite vast and rather detailed, and there are places on the map that beg a lot of questions that the players never got to ask. On top of this there were several loose ends in a couple of major story arcs that left a lot of questions too!

    Well, given the interest — and the fact there won’t be any more official material from Hasbro for some time to keep the fans afloat — I decided to bring Roanoak back from the mists for an encore performance…

    The Morninglight town square

    The view of Morgan Castle from Morninglight

    The clock for Roanoak has been rolled forward 20 years from the retaking of the capital, and it has been a fairly peaceful 20 years full of prosperity for the Empire.

    But things are afoot in the world, and that peace and prosperity is now threatened by shadowy actors… And it will fall to the players to discover these nefarious plans and put a stop to them!

    Some of the old settings have made a return as well — such as the Royal Library…

    Aurora enjoying a quiet moment in the Library at Morgan

    It has taken me about a week to re-build everything; buildings, forests, ruins, etc. And last evening I got the database hooked to the new racials, skills, and perks tables and cleaned up. And the RP tool is working again as well!

    The tool I use is really pretty fancy in that all of the characters and their stats, skills, inventory, etc. are kept in a database and the character ‘sheet’ is made available via the worn item. This allows a character’s pertinent details (name, status, health, etc.) to be displayed above the avatar’s head.

    It makes Roanoak a bit like a cross between a tabletop roleplaying game, and an MMO. 🙂