And the winner is...
...Helios!
This is just a quick post to announce the well-deserved winner of our create-a-transformer competition - Helios, the hot rod, engineered by Jennyfer Ultsch.
Helios
Jennyfer, AKA 23-yr old Peruvian student Fatima, scooped the winner-takes-all L$250,000 prize after a panel of judges including CC Chapman and Cybergrrl Oh decided that Helios had the moves and the menace to have the beating of competition including a transforming trash can called Oscar.
Boximus Prim and Oscar
Boximus Prim - a transforming... prim - was declared honorary runner-up, on the strength of how well the concept and execution expressed the unique fusion of Transformers and Second Life itself. Oh, and everybody LOVED Tinybot, who was just so damn cute.
TinyBot
The concept for Helios, transforming from a flame-licked hot rod into an imposing female decepticon, came to Jennyfer in a dream while she was suffering from a particularly severe cold, shortly after she heard about the competition. She worked for 18 hours a day for 4 days to create the avatar, which will now be made freely available to visitors to the Sector 7 sim. Jennyfer, who has only been a resident of SL for 4 months, plans to use her winnings to pay for her continuing university studies.
Thank you to judges CC, Cybergrrl, Liam, Sachi and the audience for making today such good fun, but the biggest thanks must go to everybody who took the time to design, build and enter a Transformer. All the losing finalists were immensely gracious in defeat, and seemed to have genuinely enjoyed taking part in the competition.
Left to right: Helios, Oscar, Boximus Prim, Tinybot, Mirage, Dannyboy Lightfoot, Cybergrrl Oh, CC Chapman
Bring on the sequel!
Labels: Competition, Transformers
posted by Dannyboy Lightfoot at
2:12 PM
2 Comments:
That whole 4 days thing is such a bogus lie. She was working on it for months prior to there ever having been a contest or rumor of such.
As far as functionality, if you enjoy dropping through the floor every time you move, having ANYONE able to make you transform (does anyone like being a 'hot rod' floating vertically in the air or a crumpled robot on the ground?) because the chat command is completely open, and lastly if you can put up with the thing not working for shit then maybe you will enjoy the fact that the damn thing is so laggy that no responsible person will let you wear it anywhere near them, then maybe it's ok. Sure it's 'built' really nice prim-wise, but this was supposed to be for the total package. Functionality is a HUGE part of a finished product.
As I said before she knew I had at least seen Helios when she was working on him in Alien Nation Loooong before the contest and she flat out lied to try and one-up Mirage's total build time of one week, and Boximus' of one day by saying she built him in 4 days straight..
Easiest way to judge this is that her Optimus Prime was released 2 to 3 weeks after I had originally seen her working on Helios. He was released approximately a month prior to the contest. At the time she had almost all of Helios done and was just working on the car mode attachment.
Also, it doesn't even transform like most of the others in the contest as you're wearing the entire car on your back and it just makes the whole robot go alpha (prim by prim instead of the entire linkset which is why it's so insanely laggy)
All movie-transformers in SL use Some alpha for the more complicated pieces that either morph or just cannot be feasibly simulated to move to their correct position (or would look aweful doing so), but instead use complicated scripting and animations to perform the necessary changes. Hers does none of this and all you see is the robot crumple like it was hit by a grenade and slowly vanish prim by prim while the car appears in a similar manner (the laying down animation that is playing while in car mode is even extremely crooked),and is simply just a well built robot and a half-decently built car that have nothing to do with each other aside from a similar paint job and Some of the prims from the car mode are Duplicated (not used directly).
It's a waste of prims, horrible AO, and even worse coding. A 'Prime' example of an overall poorly made item in SL. Most people that picked it up when it first became available took it off before ever leaving the sim.
Tinybot...is just a bot that the creator has been selling forever that he added a cheap animation to pull its legs up.
To say that the competition took their losses gracefully is also not true. They were all highly pissed due to the large cash prize and overall inferiority regarding function (and client-crashing lag) of the bot they lost to.
December 8, 2007 at 9:50 AM
i've only just noticed this - looks like it was posted a while back. It would be easy to delete it, but I'm not going to, because i think that runs contrary to the spirit of what we're trying to do here, and some important points are made here.
several aspects of this point of view are disappointing, but we certainly learn from this event, insofar as we are offering a smaller cash prize for our current Iron Man campaign (I think the Transformers prize was too much money, especially for a winner-takes-all contest) and we're offering a runner-up prize as well.
I spoke to Jennyfer after the event, and she seemed like a deserving winner, who took some genuine pride in her work. That said, the same could be said of everyone who entered, and for my part I enjoyed being part of the contest.
April 24, 2008 at 4:01 PM
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