DESCENDING ROAD AND ITS WORLD:
The Virtual Way In: How to Go Virtual
The novel Descending Road has a three-dimensional, virtual-world walk-through illustration of one of its most important settings: the city called Tarnus. It's online as TarnusCity. Here's how you can get there and take a tour - or just wander around and click on interesting things.
You can take a tour the easy way with a guide, or you can train and equip yourself and go in alone.
Guided Tour
Using a tour guide is the easy way. Find a friend who knows how to access the virtual world through its viewer, and have them share screen access with you in a Zoom meeting online. That person will be your tour guide. You won’t control the tour directly, but you can tell your guide to go to places and look at things of interest. If your guide is already familiar with virtual worlds and the Tarnus setting, he or she can lead the way. If you choose a guided tour with a tour guide running things, it’s quick and easy.
Independent Tour
Doing a self-tour takes preparation, but it sets you free to explore on your own. If you already know how to get around virtual worlds like Second Life, going to Tarnus is fairly easy – just skip down here to Visiting Descending Road. But for newcomers to virtual worlds, read on.
A good place to start is at https://osgrid.org. Find and select Create an Account, and you will get a series of steps to follow. Write down your username and password. You will be given a choice of avatars. Your choice will be your form in the virtual world.
You will need a virtual-world viewer. It’s like a browser, but it lets your avatar navigate in three dimensions. One recommended virtual-world viewer is the Firestorm Viewer from The Phoenix Firestorm Project, Inc. The correct version to use is at https://www.firestormviewer.org/os-operating-system/ . Download and install the viewer. Start it up.
You need to select OSGrid from the viewer’s grid list. Then enter the username and password you chose when you created your account. Now you can select Log In, and you will see your avatar at the Home location for the OSGrid virtual world. You will also see the avatars of any others in that area.
If you’re not familiar with viewer controls, spend some time learning how to move around. Explore the viewer’s menu and icons. All this takes time and patience, and a sense of humor. Right-clicking on your avatar, for example, gives you a menu of things you can do. The keyboard’s arrow keys let you turn, walk, or back up.
You can chat with avatars nearby. You can dance. You can fly. You can even teleport. You can change your avatar’s appearance, get clothing, and much more. There’s a lot to learn. Take your time.
Visiting Descending Road
When you’re ready, you can visit the Descending Road setting. It’s called TarnusCity and it’s in the Kitely virtual world. To get there from OSGrid, you find the gray bar at the top of the viewer window showing your location, and enter Kitely’s hypergrid address for TarnusCity, which is hop:grid.kitely.com:8002:TarnusCity. You will arrive at Kitely’s Transfer Station, and that will take you to TarnusCity.
Afterwards, you can return to OSGrid simply by pressing Ctrl-Shift-H. That teleports you back.
