Dankoville

Yes, I’ve been quiet. It involved that darn RL that you hear people refer to now and then.

Let’s see now, any news since we last spoke? Hmmm.

Oh, I started my own world.

It was spur of the moment.

That is how easy it has become.

No kidding. I had time on my hands at odd hours and needed something with which to pass that time that would focus the brain but not overtax it. I was reading past articles about OpenSim and bumped into a piece about New World Studio that I had read last spring. This time I went over to the NWS website and read some more. Couple things caught my interest and something raised a question or two. I was going to email somebody these questions when I thought, “What the heck…” I decided to download the software and fire it up and get my own answers. As if it would be that easy.

It was.

LOL!

Here I was, inworld, staring at an empty region that was online, on the grid! And I had arrived there in less time than it took to write the above.

Well…

…what can I do with this? /me rubs hands together and smiles

Last February, I used Sim-On-A-Stick for the first time and it changed my virtual life! But I hadn’t actually had the time I needed to devote to the projects I started in SoaS. I have a folder with the saved OARs and some other free use OARs I’ve collected. So I reviewed that and quickly mapped out a 3×3 grid to establish with New World Studio. I would use two of my own OARs and one that I’d collected, have an open water sim and a wooded region and three unassigned regions that would be sandboxes and places to upload and look at other OARs and that left one more region….well, I’ll figure that one out later.

I fired up NWS and sat there thinking about a name for my world. I didn’t come up with one. I collectively call my sims created in SoaS, “DankoLand,” as I wrote about here previously. It’s a joke. For myself. For my offline “world.” I even have a slogan for it, “DankoLand – the virtual virtual world.” But it’s all a joke and I wasn’t going to name an actual virtual world after myself.

But all the names I thought of sounded…too big.

I didn’t want to name it something that sounded like the name of a “real” grid. I’m not going into business up against, Second Life or Kitely or InWorldz or even the littlest guys. This is just my own little standalone. Just because I can. It’s open to visitors via Hypergrid but I’m not looking for people to open accounts. At this point I didn’t even know how often it would be online. This really was a spur of the moment thing, just to see if it would work. I had no master plan. So I didn’t have a name for a world ready to go.

The working title of the town in the OAR I was going to use for my prime region on my world was Dankoville. It was also a joke. It was just the name I used in SoaS. When I got it ready to load to Kitely I was going to call it something else. But I needed a name right now and I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on it. I could always change it later.

So I sat there for a few minutes thinking about a name. And then, in less time than that, I put Dankoville and its eight neighbor regions online.

And that’s how Dankoville made it to OpenSim. I started testing it on September 8 and on September 13, I posted the news of its existence – and its HG-enabled status – in a couple of places.

I’ve already added seven more regions! Sixteen total now. You can read more about it and find out how to visit, on the official Dankoville website.

A collection of photos of Dankoville is on flickr.