Real Life Cities revisited: Brussels, Utrecht and Brugge

One of the trends in 2007 was the creation of Real Life Cities in Second Life. Most of these sims were MDC showcases providing a home for their community. Quite a bit has changed though at a few of them.

Brussels

In July I blogged on the Belgian city of Brussels (Bruxelles), which housed a grand casino in the Royal Palace. I needed a clear Belgian sim as a decorum for a machinima and went back to Brussels to find it completely changed. Probably this is due to the gambling ban Linden Lab imposed, but the current sim is an assorted mess of prefab homes.

After a bit of a search I found another Brussels (Capital of Europe) replica in a quarter of the Edmond sim, which looks a lot like Brussels, but is of a far less quality. It mainly is a sim full of basic square prims laden with textures.

Utrecht

For the same machinima I went in search of Utrecht, but found it taken down. The MDC Evident evidently has overplayed its hand on this one.

Brugge

In July I also blogged Brugge, another Belgian city which at that time was at the early stages of construction, but had a promising look. Now it's finished and looks marvellous:

The only problem I have with these sims is that they're so heavy on textures that it takes ages to render the graphics at high resolution. So forgive me for a couple of snapshots of bad quality when I grew too impatient to wait for the screen to fully rez.

[UPDATE]

I received an update on Brugge:

Hallo Veejay, ik merk dat je op je blog over brugge spreekt. Er zijn namelijk 2 sims met Brugge. Virtueel brugge heb je besproken de eerste keer (sim = Belgie), nu heb je een "ander" Brugge besproken. Het klopt dat Virtueel Brugge
voor mij een showcase is als MDC. Meer info op www.louisplatini.com en www.virtual-bruges.be

which reads: There are actually two sims that are Brugge builds. This one is one the Brugge sim, the one in the older blog is Virtual Brugge, build on a sim called Belgique and is build bij Louis Platini