Conversations

[Adam]

Welcome to Canopy!

Since 2015, we have provided powerful tools for creating worlds, reducing the labor (and cost) of repetitive, time consuming tasks when creating worlds. You've recognized our work with awards. We've experienced your pain and witnessed your joy as your creativity and capability has flourished.

Over and over again we have seen the same issues and challenges. Lack of knowledge, assets that don't work together, abandonware, lack of support, expense, and a rapidly changing world in which new capabilities and new pipelines cause issues, angst and frustration.

Now, we are excited to offer CANOPY! Our goal is to educate, entertain, and take your skills to the next level in an ecosystem powered by community, and fueled by creativity. You will expand your knowledge, and strengthen your ability to bring your imagination to life. 

As you level up, so too will CANOPY. When you tell us what you want we will make it. Wishing for asset integrations, templates, or have other inspirational ideas? Share them, choose the most valuable each month, and together we will build a creation toolkit for worlds that we haven't even begun to imagine.

CANOPY exists because making the game IS the game!

CANOPY is shiny and new, and needs some love 🙂 Conversations is an open area to chat about whatever you want!

So lets talk! 🙂

[jorikito]

First!

JK, but happy to be here and that you guys have made the step to CANOPY!

[xDonnervogelx]

CANOPY sounds like a really great thing to me. I'm curious about just everything right now. A big Thank You for all the neat support that has been given so far. I always get the vibe that you all just care so much about your customers. It's great, keep that up!
Also hello to everyone in here :D

[Adam]

5 minutes ago, xDonnervogelx said:

I always get the vibe that you all just care so much about your customers. It's great, keep that up!

We really do. There is nothing quite like the feeling of helping someone to level up on their personal journey, and we have a huge amount planned for the future of Canopy.

[Leonie_PW]

On 12/19/2021 at 12:46 PM, xDonnervogelx said:

I'm curious about just everything right now. 

hey @xDonnervogelx Already hearing your curiosity and big visions. Loved your humble suggestion  for seasonal integration - you pitched it with beautiful simplicity. Entities transitioning between biomes... It made me think about (virtual) time and duration in a deeper way - beyond "clock time" and the 24 hour day and calenders. Definitely "benefits for creators" I imagine, but also perhaps for story-telling and deeper immersion in a virtual ecology.

IT got me thinking of the awful (wild)fires in Colorado, whipped up by the wind, and then the sudden "miracle" of the snow falling. Now, Winter has arrived...but has it?.  Our current climate events seem to challenge the human sense of the seasons as cycles marked out in a calendar where we can expect particular phenomena and expect some smooth 'transition' between these states. The images of the snow-covered buildings and the thought of fires possibly still burning beneath. So powerful. 
I don't mean to minimise the tragedy of this (and other) events. Just that big visions like yours, and how virtual worlds can and will be experienced...the potential for deep and compelling (virtual) environments and experiences... well, we have to pay attention to the awesome, unpredictable, and sometimes terrifying, world around us. 

I'm reminded that artists and philosophers have often spoken of the natural world as "sublime" - awe-inspiring, full of wonder and terrors. I mean, there are very different historical takes and cultural contexts on the Sublime. But originally, it was this concept of nature being extra-ordinary and over-whelming for "man"- and arguments about whether what is sublime is beautiful (or not). And of course, it was all underpinned by moral, religious and spiritual ideas of what's 'good' - of higher principles and such stuff.

If you look at the typical image of the British Romantic Sublime - Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog - Wikipedia, it's the archetypal "Grand Explorer  on (his) Grand Tour of Nature", standing on a mountain looking out to the horizon - awe-struck at #NaturesBeauty. Well, actually, (he) can't see the horizon due to the fog:) But that's the point of the sublime: it's this immense, limitless, expanse - almost like a void. Defying the limits of what we can see and know of the world.

Guess we've been heading down the path of the techno-sublime since the 1980s and beyond- you know it, the beauty and power of "code" aka The Matrix and Snowcrash etc. Those early imaginings and predictions of cyberspace  as  "vast", "immense", a "mental geography...or hallucination...of mythical figures, symbols, rules and truths...free of the bounds of physical time and space"  (Benedikt's Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, 1994:3)  

A sublime experience is a moment, a slice of the world, a space in-between radically different spaces. The sublime is an encounter, an experience that involves a transition - and, thus, some kind of transformation.   In the senses. In our perspective on the world. 

We aren't trekking up mountains with easels now. But, like all those painters, I believe you all are envisioning the world as we create worlds. And projecting some semblance of the 'self' that inhabits this (real) world into what is created.

So back to your offering  @xDonnervogelx 

If the sublime opens up a little crack in the world, then - just like your artic fox, I slipped through imaginary 'biomes' and it made me think for a moment  - i even picked up a book! - about the awe-some world I'm living in right now.

Thank you.  

The Tate has a wonderful collection  The Art of the Sublime | Tate