The Placebo-Hanly family was away on holiday for some time last week, which of course meant further progress or changes in some Breedable animals. We haven’t blogged about these as they occured, because we are busy catching up, but here is the news and changes as they stood for the last week in the Breedables world within Second Life.
Ozimals Bunnies
Another couple of beta releases took place over the week, this time implementing bunny sleeping and holding for the owners. These releases were rolled out to bunny beta testers to try out.
In the latest Beta release a bug from the latest Second Life server upgrades was encountered by one bunny beta tester where their bunnies unfortunately disappeared on them – which goes to show that it’s not all about bugs in-built by the coders (as perfect or imperfect as any human being behind the machine might be), but also there are many external factors which can upset plans unexpectantly and must be sorted out. If you’re interested, check out the Jira on JumpPos which still needs a response from Linden Labs on behalf of bunnies everywhere (and several other products come to that).
Additionally, after some grilling questioning (okay, so I was half asleep also) a little birdie managed to tell me that eventually the Bunnies are going to be opened up for pose / animation creators to tackle. Let me be the first to ask for my bunnies to be transportable in my arms, even when flying – although holding them has an interesting affect on the points system used to track their happiness, as per the instructions for the current bunnies. Currently we can hold them (and stroke them) in male, female and tiny stand and sit positions, and that’s excellent work from one of my favourite pose creators.
HunnyBunny Bunnies
HunnyBunny remained in closed beta also, although on this Monday a notice was sent out to the Update Group giving reasonings behind why there has been as yet no live release, in a similar vein to ones sent out from the Ozimals team - towards preferring to locate bugs or glitches before live rollout. The HB group notice also responded to some questions towards competing bunny products quite eloquently with the suggestion of the differences between the two bunny products which will shortly be available in-world once beta testing is complete. As Hunny Larimore has eloquently pointed out, the two bunny ‘products’ are very different in several aspects, and it’s up to all of us to work out which fits our own needs.
For those who are still wondering -
- Ozimals bunnies are based on real life rabbit breeds, and the game is in working out the genetics to breed the ear, eye and coat types which you may want. Ozimals bunnies also breed via live rabbits – these will be baby bunnies eventually. You may have seen the baskets the bunnies are birthed from around some stalls lately.
- HunnyBunny bunnies are bred for the game of choosing and breeding for particular colour combinations. You may have noticed the preview bunnies around the grid are now (or they were a week or so back) sporting a jade green colour to their coats. HB bunnies breed via eggs – easter eggs in fact, and hatch from these collectable eggs. There will be special eggs available seasonally (similar to some events through sionChickens or lately, Petable Turtles).
Yesterday, the HunnyBunny update group received two gifts from Hunny Larimore – a HB poster texture, and a t-shirt sporting some graphics of the bunnies. Look for an HB bunny on somebody’s chest coming your way soon.
Petable Turtles
The biggest news of the week award has to go to Petable and last week’s update which went exceedingly well. Over the 30th of October, Petable Turtles upgraded to version 01.02.01 in a rolling series of updates from the server.
With this update came two interesting features -
- The turtle vortex is now available – you can pick this up in the freebie pack available through any Petable Turtle affiliate vendor (you can find these at any turtle stall or market across the grid).
- ‘Special’ turtles – laid on halloween only for the first lot.
Turtle Vortex
We have previously blogged about the vortex in this post here. With the vortex, turtle farmers can trade in unwanted turtles into a accumulating box held at the Petable Store. Once that box gets to a certain number of points from overall traded turtles, a new points item will be released. Traded turtles now give the owner a raffle ticket, with five lucky traders being drawn to receive the new points item free.
Special (Halloween) Turtles
With the new upgrade comes functionality to provide surprise or ‘special’ turtles or rare varieties. The first turtles coming from this functionality are five different breeds of special turtles possible to breeders only on 31st October or Halloween. We were told to make sure we were breeding with turtles with special traits (glow, shine, crash turtles and possibly the party turtle) and any eggs laid during this one day would possibly hatch out to one of these special turtles, of a ‘ghostly’ appearance.
Within only a matter of hours into the 31st a person had already hatched out a 10% ghost turtle and sent out an image via groups. This was the progeny of a crash and 40% glow turtle.
During the day my own four pairings produced a 50% output of four special halloween eggs named ‘o9 Halloween’, with either 10% or 20% ghost. My own came from one crash turtle pairing, and one Party turtle pairing. The Halloween special turtles are to a percentage transparent, and try to scare you if touched.
The Halloween special eggs and some lives popped up on sale at many turtle markets almost immediately, and were selling at a premium.
Note – more information about ‘special’ turtles will be provided by Petable, but it is suggested via the groups that such special turtles do not pass on their traits via breeding, so are special via the server and the date chosen by the Petable team, rather than via genetics. However, they do appear to be collector’s items for some, due to their rarety.
Petable Turtles blog post : Update: Version 01.02.00
sionChickens and sionLife
Again, no news from the sionLife HQ.
Although last week saw an interesting little aversion for chicken farmers, with a Chick-A-Pult contest being advertised. This was held on Sunday, with cash prizes, live entertainment and the chance to take in all your soon-to-expire or ugly sionEggs (they expire after 60 days) and send them off in a catapult. Apparently no chickens were harmed in the process, although several rotten eggs may have been.
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