Many of you have now taken the opportunity to look around the Nascera continent where Linden Homes will be during the Beta period. Feedback seems to be really positive with some good points about the experience and how it could be improved. Thanks for all the comments!

Today the Beta officially opens for Linden Homes.

What does this mean?
A selection of existing Premium members, that have at least 512m of spare tier on their account, will be invited to take part in the Beta via email. We're going to cap the first wave to around 500 accounts, though, to ensure we get enough people testing the experience we will probably invite more than that. We will also disable the Beta signup if we encounter any significant problems over the next few days. So if you have been invited to try the Beta but find that you cannot get in, please be patient.

Testers will be asked to choose from the four themes, and to pick a house design from the chosen theme, along with naming the parcel. We will then assign them a Linden Home on the Nascera continent. After this they will be sent a confirmation email with a SLurl to their new Linden Home and we will drop a Landmark to them inworld. The whole process should be simple and friendly.

That's about it! We'll be surveying the Beta testers to find out how it went for them and what difficulties they had. There will also be a special support ticket type for them to report problems to us directly.

Tell me more about Nascera!
Our content team will talk more technically about the process of creating Nascera on the DPW blog shortly, but meanwhile some more details for those that are interested.

The terrain was originally created to be relatively mountainous, using a tool called World Machine which is a procedural terrain generator. We then take the heightmaps into Photoshop and do additional work there (such as parcelling) before pushing the raw files onto the grid as new regions. Continents typically tend to be between 700-900 regions in size, with some amount of Linden owned ocean and waterways as well.

It was important from the outset that this was able to scale, therefore manually placing each home would not be feasible. The team created a scripted rezzer that could detect the various parcel shapes (variations of 512m) and then placed the correct house type for the given theme of that region. Not only that but it can travel across the continent building out each region in turn. Immediately after placing the houses, it then places the trees and other scenery items.

For the 64 regions we have currently enabled on Nascera, the rezzer took 13 minutes to place all of the houses and trees. We then spent a couple of hours cleaning up a few areas, and a further two days for the Moles to add detailing and landscaping edits.

We soon found that the hilly terrain made automatic placement difficult. Though the houses have deep base sections, on even moderately sloped terrain we would often get houses with doors that were too high to reach without jumping. Not ideal!*

So, for the Beta we have made the terrain considerably flatter. We still think it looks fantastic, but we do intend to build more height into the continent so this is something for us to continue to work on.

The houses themselves were built by our growing in-house content team, with the super DPW Moles handling the later landscaping and detailing. We chose these four themes from a much longer list, because we felt it gave us plenty of variety for the Beta and the builds were quite simple to build. If things go well and we launch Linden Homes next year, we expect to be continually adding new Themes and house designs to keep the choices as interesting as possible. We will also give out the texture sets so that owners of Linden Homes can add internal walls if they wish to, and so that content providers can potentially add specific Linden Home ranges of furniture to their stores.

That just about wraps it up for this post. Comments again open below. We'll be blogging more as the Beta rolls on and we learn more about how it works in practice. Watch this space!

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