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Introducing our New Male Gakurans!
By extrude.ragu
They're here! After much work, Kokoro Academy for the first time now has male uniforms available to its students! Our male Uniform has some subtle details of their own that we are sure students will enjoy~ Buttons 心 is Kanji for Kokoro Our Gakurans have golden buttons with a custom design by Ni. Did you know it is a custom during your graduation ceremony to give the second button of your Gakuran to your sweetheart? It is considered a confession of love!- 4 comments
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End of year address
By extrude.ragu
Looking back at 2021 2021 is drawing to a close and we're about to enter the year 2022! Some of you speedy time travelers are already there! We haven't been doing year reviews lately, but a lot has happened at Kokoro over the course of the past year, and I thought this year it would be worth covering some of those things! So many new students have joined us This year we have seen way more new faces than usual, many of which have went on to become enrolled students at our scho- 0 comments
- 1,028 views
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Happy New Years!
Hope everyone's had a good 2024!
Works Updates
Town
This year major building works have been ongoing at Kokoro on the Seiiki isle.
We're working on redeveloping Seiki island into a new town. This is going on in three Phases, and we're about halfway through Phase 1.
The works have been a learning process as we've had to develop and learn new tools and workflows. Seiki town is being built in PBR using Trim Sheets with the aim to ultimately provide a more high definition experience, whilst simultaneously reducing system VRAM requirements.
You may have noticed the town is PBR only and old viewers are rendering the town green. We've decided given the length of the project to go PBR only. Whilst this does cause inconvenience in the short term, we anticipate that finishing the town development will take years and by then most performance issues will have been ironed out of the viewer by LL and third parties and people will have upgraded to the new viewer.
NPC's
We have been developing walking and talking NPC's this year to help give a sense of life and bring additional entertainment to the sim.
Our NPC's are unlike anything seen before in SL, taking advantage of bleeding edge LLM technology, and are constantly being improved.
You will find some of them wandering our sim now and can talk to them!
Works have included:-
- An advanced roleplay chat system using a local LLM capable of complex conversation and context sensitivity.
- New advanced NPC Pathfinding logic and Navmesh capabilities in Kokoro.
- A decision making system and an action sequencer that allows NPC's to interact with the world.
- A sims-like 'needs' simulation
- The creation of several unique NPC characters with unique lore, personalities and avatars.
- Using the NPC's to detect sim restarts and teleport you to a new holding parcel instead of disconnecting you during a sim restart.
- Long-term memory generation and simulation (experimental)
We have been tweaking and improving this all year and have a pretty advanced backend that powers the NPC chat at this point. There are reliability problems that need addressing still but we are working on it. It's all self hosted by the way. You're talking to my graphics card!
Minimap and RPT
We introduced a new Minimap HUD to the sim and introduced the concept of RPT (Roleplay Time).
A new windlight was developed and our sim now has two daycycles, one being Monday to Friday and another cycle from Saturday to Sunday, which means there are more daylight hours to play in and night time gets its own day on Friday!
Spawner
Kokoro gained new spawner logic which will vary your spawn point based on various factors such as time of day (RPT), the clothes you are wearing and weighted random chance.
Additionally, the spawner is capable of spawning you sat on objects and a few other surprises. We want to make it feel like your character was there all along!
Community
Although we are currently primarily focused on building, we have gained a few new students and guests of interest, and formed something of a relationship with the Tulagi community, who make battleships such as the one that was generously gifted to us in the new Seiki Harbour!
Kasai also ran a new Paranormal Activities club this year, which had fun field trips. We hope that more events can happen in 2025!
2025
We anticipate this year that we will be primarily focused on finishing the exteriors of the Phase 1 area of the town, and possibly begin work on Phase 2.
It's also anticipated that Utilizator will release his new body this year, so it is likely that some time will need to be spent adapting our Uniforms and also making new clothing products to support a new generation of anime body!
We will be continuing to pioneer the NPC's and may also introduce new characters during the year.
Due to the ongoing works we do not currently plan any large social events, although we would of course welcome any student initiatives.
That's it from us for our update. Happy New Year!
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