Ajax ArenA sim opens

If my avatar and Oclee’s avatar reflected how we were feeling, I’d need a “flops exhausted to the ground” pose ball. Nemesis Content Creation has just finished a week of 18-hour days to finish the Ajax ArenA build, and today it opens to the world.

The build is a 75% lifesize replica of the Ajax ArenA within certain constraints. In SL most avatars are more than 100% of lifesize, and so some adjustments have to be made in a 75% lifesize building to ensure that avatars can move around easily. It’s a huge structure, and the biggest stadium build I have seen in SL.

Oclee started building on January 15, 2007, and finished today. We encountered a number of difficulties…the rotation bug was a real problem in building something rounded which relies on rotations to be accurate. The prim limit of 15,000 prims on a whole sim was a constraint when it came to the seating within the ArenA, as we could not possible put in seating, but the colourful seats are part of the atmosphere of the real arena.

Our solution for that was to take pictures of seats of various colours, and pictures of people (thanks all who came and helped make that possible), so that we can have a stadium with people, or a stadiuim with colourful empty seats. I think it is quite effective.

Oclee went to the ArenA and took photographs, and made textures for the build. We tried very hard to restrict our use of textures nevertheless, because it helps to speed up rezzing of the build for users. Cierrah Blair built the shops, and I built the cafe/club, again attempting to use a swatch of textures.

The build is sponsored by KPN, a leading Dutch teleommunications company, and so you will see the KPN logo in the skybox.

The fans seem to be liking it so far….

To see the ArenA for yourself, type “Ajax Arena” into the map, and tp.