New Meta City UPDATED

At the end of April, I opened a new exhibit on Kitely called New Meta City. It was inspired by Fortunato Depero’s New York 1930 which I saw many years ago at an exhibit in Salzburg. The bright colors and tall buildings and the modern and futurist feel of the painting still has me building. I am working on variations of New Meta City and I have also branched off in another direction with Brown.

The New Meta City build was one of those things that “just happened.” I had made a building and a couple variations for another project and it hit me that they would make for a fun modular build. I messed around with it a little, not planning it out or anything, just putting some buildings and streets down to see what it could look like. And you know how it goes…one thing led to another. A few hours later I had New Meta City.

If I had planned it before I had built those first buildings or before I started laying them out just for a look, I would have designed the buildings differently. New Meta City was 14,693 prims. Of course, in OpenSim, that’s no biggie really. But still. I grew up in SL, so I’m counting prims. But it just happened and it was done. I wasn’t going to go back and do it again. No need to. It was going to run fine on Kitely where the prim limit is 100,000. And I made the OAR available because I know it’s not too many prims for OpenSim. Anyway, there aren’t any scripts. And it’s mostly the Blank texture over and over again.

By the way, 74 people downloaded that OAR over the last five weeks. Cool. Thanks! (I actually bumped into one of the regions someone uploaded it to. On Kitely in fact. Just by chance. I saw it on the World Map. Visited. LOL!) (And don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t use Kitely’s World Map to find places to explore.)

But that prim count still bugged me anyway. So much so that it inspired me to see if I could take the same theme or a variation of that theme – modular build, tall buildings, bright city lights, modern or futurist or maybe other-worldly – and create a region full of buildings but with a very low prim count. That led to Brown which opened on Kitely at the end of May and came in around 2700 prims. And it led to variations of Brown that I am working on now.

I still was really bursting with ideas for variations of New Meta City itself, companion pieces. It seemed the best way to pursue that was to redesign the buildings to cut the prims. So I did. And those new projects are well underway.

But I was not going to do an all-out search for every prim that could go. For the biggest variation project, I needed to get the prim count below 11,000. So I modified the buildings slightly to make that happen. These buildings could easily be deprimmed further without altering their look but I didn’t need to go that far, so I didn’t.

The new version of New Meta City – at 10,819 prims, saving close to 3900 prims – is now the version on display on Kitely. And it is also available as an OAR download on OpenSim Creations.

Visit us on Kitely!

HG address: grid.kitely.com:8002:New Meta City

About Danko Whitfield

writer, explorer of virtual worlds. semi-retired time traveler.

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