Sovaria Estates is a virtual world, that you can access with an ordinary computer and screen. You can interact with other users, form groups and have activities. You can also build your own objects, houses, vehicles, plants, etc. and animate them with scripts.

This technology is very similar to the one of Second Life, with the same viewer. But we are totally independent of them, see here.

The base access is free, or cheap for some basic items or clothes. Renting a parcel or a region is very affordable, compared to previous virtual worlds.

How to enter into the Sovaria virtual world?

Who is owning and operating Sovaria Estates?

What to do in world?

What are groups?

In-world search: how to find places, groups and people?

How to find events?

How to find items, free or for sale?

How to find a residential rental or a store rental?

How to buy regions and what they cost?

Do we have adult activities?

Is it possible to be private?

The sandbox region(s)

What community resources are available now and what near term plans are?

All about the Discord channels.

How to get money, how to cash out, what the exchange rate is?

How to build?

How to script?

How to adapt your "outfit" (Body + clothing)?

Mesh bodies and mesh clothes

How the Sovaria Estate Incorporated is organized?

What is Halcyon and what makes it different from SL and OS?

What is Mundos Market?

- Your computer must be a PC, Windows, Linux or Mac. The experience is much better with a good graphics card and a large screen. More info on the computer requirements: https://secondlife.com/system-requirements

-Install the viewer. We recommend Firestorm, Open Sims version. Due to the evolution of firestorm, the last working version is 6.6.14. It can still be downloaded from the firestorm site, select version 6.6.14, then select the OpenSims version. In case they remove it, we keep the file here 6.6.14, on the Sovaria site. Do not use the Second Life version. (Other viewers are possible, like Singularity: http://www.singularityviewer.org/downloads.

-Open Firestorm and add Sovaria Estates to the list of worlds: copy-paste "http://connect.sovariaestates.world:8002" (without the "") in the field at the bottom marked "Grid:", and do enter. Once this done, the same button has a drop down arrow, showing a list of words, select "Sovaria Estates" (which may appear in the very top).

-Create an account, or character name of your choice here: https://www.sovariaestates.world/Register.aspx. Avoid impersonating celebrities, avoid provocative names. Provide a reliable email address: it will be our only contact with you. Some creators may find their name already here, contact us on Discord in this case.

-Start the viewer, select "Sovaria Estates" in "Grid:", and use the same name and password to connect.

-You arrive in a newbies tutorial where you can learn all the basic for living in world. Until you change your "home place", each time you log in you will arrive here.

Whatever your project is, leisure or "serious", virtual worlds in general, and Sovaria especially, allow you to do accomplish it:

-Social life in general, or in a specific group: gatherings, discussions, events, etc.

-Games, from simple to fairly elaborated, comparable to video games.

-Education, lessons, etc.

-Art

-Models

-Science, technical development

-Industrial models.

-Etc.

Sovaria Estates is totally independent from any other virtual world. It will connect to the common Mundos Market when it will be ready.

Following several cases of virtual world failures, due to mismanagement by a single owner, we elected to create a non-profit company "Sovaria Estates Incorporated" after paragraph 501(c) of the USA Internal Revenue Code, registered in the state of Delaware, USA.

The residents of the virtual world elect the board of directors and various committees. See more info here on voting and eligibility. This makes that, basically, Sovaria Estates is controlled and owned by its residents.

The bylaws are the ByLaws_Nov2022.pdf. Bylaws are the legal document defining the company structure, management, purposes and operation.

You can join or create groups. They allow to contact people, manage events, manage land parcels, share objects, etc. Each group has a profile with the list of members and various settings.

When you are logged in, the viewer has several buttons at the bottom. The one showing a magnifying glass, is for search. You can specify searching for people, places, groups, merchants, etc. to find whatever you need for your project. You may even do unforeseen discoveries, and be surprised.

There also is a map button, to find regions by name.

There are several resources:

-The Events channel in Discord

-In Facebook (unofficial)

-In MeWe (unofficial)

-In world, join the group "Sovaria Advertisement".

You can also create and manage your own events.

-Fleure Homewood is the event manager.

-There are several official venues in the welcome region and in other places.

"Freebies" are free items. We are importing enough to provide a decent character appearance for everybody.

You can also find merchants for various items, character parts (skins, shapes, hairs), vehicles, houses, plants, etc.

-In the world, join the group "Sovaria Advertisement".

-The viewer has a series of buttons at the bottom. One, showing a magnifying glass, is for search. You can search merchants or places per brand name, products, find customer groups, etc.

-In the Discord channel, see "MERCHANT ADD'S"

There are world-managed rentals, in regions called "Sovaria x" (x being a number). This is in the process of implementation, and you will be able to manage this from the site. Contact Myra Foil.

There can be residents renting parcels. You need to see with them, as each may have different rules, appropriate to their own project.

You can also buy whole regions, see here

A region is a 256x256m wide piece of land, where you have much more control than in a parcel, like setting your own rules.

For now, starting a region is manual. Ask Neobela in Discord (Beladona Memorial in world)

Invoicing happens every month on the 25. You receive an invoice at your contact email address, that you can pay with Paypal. Payments are due on the 1st and considered late if received after the 10th

To start, stop or move a region, please notify Neobela in Discord (Beladona Memorial in world) When you buy a region, and the region is created, you will not be billed until the next month on the 25th for the next month.

To stop a region, just stop paying the invoice on the 25 of the month. The region will be disconnected from the world the 15 of the following month, and you can then delete it in Estate Management. Note that the region is not destroyed, it will remain recoverable for several months.

You can request an OAR safe copy of your region, although with only your items or items allowed for export. Ask Myra Foil.

Regions can be private (isolated), or be part of a common ocean for sailing between regions. You cannot place a region just beside someone else's region, unless he grants permission.

Price list (there are no setup fees):

Bronze region, 30k primitives, $16/month

Silver region, 35k primitives, $18/month

Gold region, 40k primitives, $20/month

Platinium region, 45k primitives, $22/month

The following regions can be purchased if you already have a full region, and they must be attached to your full region:

Sea/landscape region, 7500 primitives, $8/month, cannot be deeded to a group

Scenic region, 5000 primitives, $6/month

There also are various collective regions: oceans, Welcome, Community Center, sandbox, etc.

Due to legal risks, access to Sovaria is restricted to only 18+ persons.

To have adult activities is perfectly possible. However there are precise rules: such activities must happen only in clearly rated places, well separated of the others. There are place ratings and group ratings.

It is advised to also place warnings in your profile or group description, before people stumble on too strong spices for their taste.

Anything illegal is forbidden in Sovaria Estates, and can entail a ban.

There are a lot of privacy settings:

-Set your region away from the common regions

-Set your parcel or group not in search

-Restrict access to your region or group (see profiles)

-Use privacy options in your profile info.

-In theory a parcel can be made "no access", but there are easy ways to spy on it from neighboring parcels, so use a private region instead.

-Ban lines are possible, but not popular, and many rentals forbid them.

Please note that "private" is in the legal sense, not as a roleplay. Cheating with privacy can entail legal action. Especially disclosing private chat, group chat, or pictures of private places, is legally considered an Internet privacy violation.

Sovaria Estates does not disclose information to any third party, save if there is a legal warrant.

These allow you to open boxes, build or test things without annoying your neighbors:

-There is a region called "sandbox".

-The newbies tutorial in the welcome region allows you to "rezz" things.

Sandboxes may, or may not, have an automated auto-return. If you work with unlinked objects, save often, or link them.

-We have a complete "Welcome" region, with a tutorial, a pub, demos, events stages, art exhibit, and free items shops.

-Community Center is in the works, to offer switchable stage sets, a pub, and a modular art exhibit.

-Region "Sovaria x" are world rental regions.

Events management, held by Fleure Homewood.

-Public works team, or "The Gophers", is a task force for building community regions.

Short term plans are mostly in the completion of current works (Community, rentals, the web site, etc.) and expansion of the world.

Our long term project is to attract more people, more diverse activities and communities. We shall add other community regions as the world expands. This is difficult in front of bigger competitors, but Inworldz did just that.

Sovaria Estates is on Discord

There is a variety of channels, grouped in:

-TEXT CHANNELS is for various topics.

-In the previous, rl-chat allows us to better know each other. Due to the higher possibility of disputes, posts on general or contentious topics may be removed.

-COMMUNITIES allow people with similar interest to communicate

-MERCHANT ADDS is the place to go to see announcements or find items.

-MANAGEMENT is for the management of the world features and activities (Not the management of the company).

The world currency is the SE. It has a constant rate relative to the US dollars, of SE250 for $1.

This constant rate is to avoid speculation (we don't want it, and it is illegal anyway).

To get money, log in the site https://www.sovariaestates.world and follow the link "Buy SE$" at the top left. We use Paypal (possibly others in the future), to avoid some scams which plagued previous virtual worlds.

It is possible to cash money out. Sovaria's road map is to automate the cash out process. In interim please ask Vinhold Starbrook for a manual operation.

For legal reasons, we cannot warranty a legal value to your in-world money (we would need to abide to the laws on banks). However we shall do our best in any case to preserve your earnings. To start with, they are in a special account, used only for that. This avoids some of the risks.

There is a very small beginner tutorial in the "Welcome" region. Once started, the tools are very intuitive, and most other residents can help and reply questions.

"Prims" (primitives) are the basic building block, of simple ready made shapes (cube, sphere, etc.), that you can edit, assemble, texture, etc. This is a simple and very appropriable tool, yet it allows non-expert people to do interesting things.

"Sculpties" are prims with more variable shape, defined by a texture (image), using the color values as coordinates. Although we still find a lot of them, they are not recommended for new designs.

"Meshes" are prims with a total freedom of shape. Unfortunately, the most popular mesh building tool, Blender has a steep learning curve, so that you will need a starter tutorial.

Scripts allow to give behaviors to your realizations: movement, interactions, modifications, etc.

They are similar to Second Life scripts, although Sovaria Estates has a more powerful script engine, called Phlox.

A script appears as an inventory item in a primitive. It is written in a C-like language called LSL, compiled, strongly typed, event-based, structured but not object. It has numerous functions to interact with prims, objects, people, etc. Each script runs on its own virtual machine. A beginner can quickly do simple things like object givers. But some scripts can do fairly complex things, given their modest resources.

There are many tutorials and resources on line, as soon as you start with the search key word "LSL"

When you enter in world for the first time, you already have a fairly complete and good quality "outfit" (body plus clothing) (Often called "avatar"). This makes that you only need to change parts, at your pace.

In "Welcome" region, there is a newbies tutorial explaining the basics, including on outfits.

Some of the explanations under are somewhat superseded by mesh bodies, but you still need to start with them.

An outfit is composed of several inventory elements:

-The mandatory "shape", which can be edited with cursors. It is somewhat deprecated, replaced with mesh bodies, but the later still uses the same cursors, so that we still start with the shape.

-The mandatory "skin". The old "skin layer" is deprecated, people use the "tatoo layer" instead. To be noted that a common bug makes that your clothes may not appear, and somebody sees you nude. For this reason, skins should have versions which include underwear. But well, I never saw any :-(

-The mandatory "hair" is totally deprecated, and people neutralize it with an invisible "bald hair base". Instead they wear objects as hairs, of two type: flexy (moving), or mesh (more realistic).

-Mandatory "eyes" are in fact pupils. There also are objects which are wearable eyes.

-System clothes, that you can buy, or create with textures and cursors.

-Wearable object clothes, once limited to skirts and frills, can now include all clothing parts, in mesh.

-There are a multitude of objects which can be worn: jewels, hats, skirts, male parts, shoes, drinks, weapons, etc. some scripted

-"Huds" are worn objects which appear on your screen, and which can perform various functions.

-"AOs" ("Animation overriders") are HUDS which can replace the basic animations with better ones: walk, run, dance, sit, etc.

-"Alphas" allow you to hide part of the body, to replace them with something more custom. They are often used for shoes.

Mesh bodies were created to overcome the limitations of the 20 years old "system bodies" (Which cannot be removed, due to the huge legacy). There has been a lot of experiments, proprietary versions and mistakes in Second Life and in Open Sims, some accepting only clothes of the same brand. The first mesh bodies needed several layers, making them slowing down the viewer. The most recent bodies are "BOM", this meaning that they need only one layer, and the various textures (skin, clothes) are mixed in one (baked) at the server level. Be sure to get a BOM mesh body only!

For this reason, Sovaria Estates promotes the Ruth (female)( Ruth2R4-MM1) and Roth (male) bodies. They are free and Open Source, and state of the art BOM bodies. Delete any previous one from your inventory. Once you have one, just wear it as of any object. It will automatically recover your skin, shape cursors and system clothes, merging all the textures in one, making the operation simple and reliable.

The Ruth and Roth bodies also feature a HUD (menu on the screen), that you can wear for settings.

Creators are free to import other proprietary bodies in Sovaria, fitting more special needs. But be sure, before paying for one, that it is BOM, that it is whole body (some don't have a head!!) and that it has a line of clothes to go with.

There also are mesh clothes, which appear as worn objects. They look much better. But be sure that they go with the mesh body you are wearing.

The world and servers are owned by a non-profit corporation "Sovaria Estates Incorporated" after paragraph 501(c) of the USA Internal Revenue Code, registered in the state of Delaware, USA.

This corporation is controlled by a board of directors elected by the world residents, and various committees.

The Board of Directors (BOD) takes general management and orientation decisions. It is elected every November by the residents, in the following conditions:

-Any resident owning at least one full region (Bronze, silver, gold, platinum) in good standing (all pending invoices paid, no exclusion for disciplinary reasons) can vote and be elected

-One vote per person maximum, even with several regions.

-Shared regions get one vote, but any of the two owners can cast it.

-The BOD can attribute residents a voting right, for outstanding contributions.

-Half of the board must be re-elected in October each year.

Once constituted, the Board chooses a president, a vice-president, a secretary, a treasurer. Ideally the board has 12 members, but in the beginning there were not enough people to vote for. Current Members of the BOD are:

-The president in charge of representing the company and organizing meetings: Tuna Oddfellow

-The vice-president who can act as the president in case of absence: Yichard Muni.

-The Secretary who take minutes of meetings: Myra Foil

-The treasurer: Neobela (Beladona Memorial in world)

-Other members: Fleure Homewood, Auburne LittleBoots

The world also has managers and committees, voluntary and/or endowed by the BOD:

-Events management, led by Fleure Homewood

-Public works team, "The Gophers", a task force for building community regions.

-Land management (setting regions) Neobela (Beladona Memorial in World) and Myra Foil.

-Webmasters and a technical staff.

-Our principal technician and technical advisor is Vinhold Starbrook.

Technically, Sovaria Estates runs using the Halcyon virtual world simulator and server.

Historically, the first simulator was the one of Second Life. When they put their viewer open source, this allowed to reconstruct a different simulator, which was called "Open Sims". When the virtual world "Inworldz" started, Open Sims was not really finalized, and the Inworldz techs, David Daeschler and Jim Tarber, had to improve the code a lot. But this feedback was not accepted by Open Sims, so that Inworldz went on with its own design. It was finally put Open Source under the name of Halcyon. Already by this time, the idea was to use Halcyon for several worlds. The most noticeable one was a USA government project, which also contributed to the code.

When Inworldz crashed in 2018, the code remained accessible in Github. So it was used again, for two short lived worlds, finally closed by their owners. Three collapses were way too much, and this led to the idea of a totally different ownership: a non-profit company.

Even with four years with minimal maintenance, Halcyon remains the best. It features:

-The regions simulator proper

-Fast and reliable asset database called whip, with Aperture managing it

-Phlox, the script engine, which allows to do things that the other systems cannot.

-The better physics engine PhysX (A project is to change for one not needing the expensive Windows server)

-The interface with the web (server part).

-Better region crossing

-Many less limitations in import, mesh import, sizes, etc.

These makes that Halcyon remain better than any competitor.

However Halcyon is missing the most recent Second Life features, like animesh (animated mesh objects, like animals) and experiences. This is why it needs a new developer team, that is money.

Halcyon also misses the var regions (larger regions in Open Sims). Some want them, others say that the better region crossing makes them useless.

Halcyon also lacks the hypergriding code of Open Sims, which allow people to travel from a world to another. But here this is by design, as this hypergriding allows for massive violations of IP rights, and for some specific griefing techniques. There has been discussions on a Halcyon-specific system, but a total consensus remains not to allow for the previous issues.

If you want to help Halcyon to evolve, you can contribute to the code for free, or you can send money to help. Donations may be given at: Discover Creo Mundos Project Funds

Mundos Market is a project led by Vinhold Starbrook for a common market serving all Halcyon worlds. It is nearing completion, although it has been delayed due to many other more urgent works, mostly on Sovaria.

Mundos Market will work like Kitely or Second Life Marketplace. But technically it is different: One marketplace to supply merchant contents to any member Halcyon world. Buyer may purchase items for active account from a member world to any other account in any member world as a gift to a friend, or to their own accounts. Items are instantly delivered to the target account inventory.