THE SIM'S STORY, CHAPTER V

(Being an ongoing account of one simulator's history, from its appearance in the world to the community that emerges from it. Chapter 1 here; Chapter 2 here, Chapter 3 here, Chapter 4 here.)

June 29:

Sometime very near the end of June, Sophos Casanova followed through on his promise to turn Tenjin into a kind of Cape Caneveral of Second Life. Though I didn't quite expect him to stream hardcore gangsta hiphop onto the launch pad.

“I've had three people go on this and it lagged out a lot,” Twist Zaius, the rocket’s chief engineer, warns a half dozen plus residents, as they pile into the capsule, “so we're pushing it.”

However, I’m still trying to push out of the elevator that’ll get me onboard, in the first place. Members of Mission Control wonder out loud if they should just leave me behind.

“Launch ‘em!” Jon Wheeling says. “Science must go on!”

Before they can, I finally reach the platform into the rocket. I look around, because instead of hearing a symphonic score from Apollo 13 or The Right Stuff streaming into the launch pad, I’m hearing someone singing about the desirability of females who shake their rear end.

I look around; no one seems to notice.

“Wait, am I the only one hearing hiphop?”

A few agree; why yes, there is hiphop being streamed into the launch pad.

“It's like a Snoop Dogg video where Snoop flies to the moon,” I observe, as I step in.

Raemus Patel shouts: “EVERYONE SIT DOWN NOW!” It’s not a matter of surviving the G forces; in Second Life, you either sit on a vehicle, while it’s in motion, or due to the physics, you usually go flying off.

Once the passengers are all in their seats, the countdown begins, and soon the rocket rumbles upward, gaining momentum and distance, until it's reached the very edge of the world’s atmosphere. In a seat next to me, Meta Abattoir is screaming; as the ship goes horizontal to the earth, Raemus Patel announces, “Damn we’re sideways. IM GONNA FALL OUT.” But the ship just cheerfully pings the message, “Now en route to Ahern”— and somewhere over Ahern, something goes horribly… well, I leave that mystery to future travelers of the starship Casanova.

“We used a llSetPos function loop (which means it doesn't use the physics engine),” Twist tells me later, explaining the rocket science behind the ride. “Plus we used the llGetRegionCorner function to locate simulator locations as well. The original rocket used physics but kept on crashing.” According to Twist, the Lindens set the world’s height limit to 715 meters up. “But this rocket only goes 480 meters because the script gets errors if we go near 500. Had we used physics, we could have gone much farther.”

For all that clever rocketry, however, I didn’t hear any roaring sound effects, when we left the launch pad.

“An explosion was supposed to happen,” says Zaius, when I point that out, “but Ludacris' voice drowned them out.”

As I waited my turn on the launch pad, my attention kept wandering to an oblong red building nearby, that now looms much higher than the space port. “It’s a big tower,” says Luminia Olsen, a kind of punk rock devil munchkin with fangs and coal black eyes. ”I was thinking of calling it the Tower of Sickness.” She points me to the tower’s spinning core, sure to induce nausea, as you fall through it. “I wanted to make the highest tower in Second Life, but I’m not a good builder. I will learn, I think.”

While we talk, another rocket rips off, behind us, but the pint-sized succubus pays it no mind.

July 2

Of course, there’s still a fair amount of “conventional” builds going up, in Tenjin—lovely waterfront homes, one of them featuring a pod of dolphins. But then right across the water, there’s a couple of monkeys hopping around a row of computers, loudly demanding your attention. And monkeys with computers always require a hearing.

“I wanted to keep track of Cordova's FPS,” the monkey named Jim Bunderfeld tells me. “And then the project grew, and grew, and then Derek...” He nods to Derek Jones, veteran simian. “Monkey see, monkey do.” So the rows of computers are tracking the frames per second for the Cordova server, and the other world’s sims.

“I have nodes in a few sims,” Bunderfeld continues, “e-mailing these trackers the sim's FPS.” The higher that number, the better performance the sim has—less lag, and better frame rate for each resident in it. All of this is actually what you’d expect the server monkeys at Linden Lab to obsess over—and indeed, they do— but for the sake of pure research, these two monkeys have taken up the project on their own.

As is prone to happen with monkeys, left alone in a laboratory, chaos soon erupts, and suddenly, the computers are set ablaze. Then a kinky sound effect which probably violates the spirit if not the letter of Tenjin’s PG-rated restriction begins to play over the sim, in an infinite loop. Loudly.

benji Czukor tries to shush them. “I have grandparents next door—shhhhh!”

From the bonfire to the lurid sound effects, we go straight to gunplay; within minutes, Jim Bunderfeld is wielding an M60 machine gun.

“Get off my porch, Human trash!”

He goes on an impromptu strafing run, and then into a monkey-versus-monkey dogfight over Tenjin.

Take a look at the road to Tenjin, as it was on June 11, here.

Now compare it to this screenshot, taken on July 2nd.

In less than a month, the freeway to Tenjin is now framed by a Japanese fortress at the border, a space port, and other random constructions. And what began as a placid, watery simulator with a gorgeous view at the far end of the world, has also become a place for hiphop rocketry, a devilette with a vomit-inducing tower, and a pair of profane monkeys with a mad science project.

And with that, we take a break from the Sim’s Story for a month or so, when we’ll check back see what new, wild forms Tenjin has taken, in the interim. It may even go back to being a placid, watery simulator-- and given what's come before, that'd be pretty wild, too.