by SealWyf, HSM editor

Sometimes life in Home feels like drinking from a fire hose. Every week there are more things to do, more spaces to visit, and a slew of new items to win or buy. If the Home Mall existed in real space, it would look like WalMart. And, to be honest, most new items are not gotta-have-this-now exciting: another hoodie, another pair of shoes, another winsome virtual companion, another dust-collecting statue.

But every once in a while an object appears that pushes all the right buttons, and it’s love all over again. If it’s clothing, you wear it everywhere. If it’s a companion, it becomes your signature sidekick. If it’s a decorative object, you stick it in all your apartments. The most awesome items can change your mental model of what is possible in Home.

I found one of those last week. You would never guess it’s a must-have, to look at it: a small black box, with a handle on top, some vents on the sides, a dial on one end and a nozzle on the other. It’s machinima gear. I bought mine at the LOOT Stage Set Tour, but you won’t find it displayed there. And so a lot of people are going to miss it.

Fog in the Cathedral

So what is this thing, and why do you need it? It’s the new LOOT Fog Machine. “So what?” I hear you say. “I already have the Party Smoke Machines from nDreams. I don’t need to drop three dollars on something I’ll never use.”

Except you do, and you will. And I’m here to tell you why.

Let’s get the pricing out of the way first. The Fog Machine is $2.99 if you buy it alone. But it also comes bundled with the Searchlight and the Grandfather Clock (each also costing $2.99), for a deeply discounted $3.49. So you are saving money even if you only want two of the three items. And these are state-of-the-art active items, with interactive features, designed to be stingy with your object budget.

The Fog Machine takes up only seven object slots. But, for those seven, you get five levels of fog production, from Off to Intense. You also get a spectrum of fifteen different fog colors. The nDreams Party Smoke Machines can produce only one color, at one level of intensity. And they use 22 object slots. So the new Fog Machine is like having 60 different Smoke Machines, in less than a third of the object footprint. Awesome!

The Metro Apartment looks great with mist

But you may not feel the need to make 60 kinds of colored mist. One color and intensity may be serving you just fine. So let’s look at the other differences between the products.

The most obvious one is made explicit in the names: the LOOT product generates fog, with fog’s distinctive texture and transparency. And it generates a lot of it. The nDreams product makes colored smoke. If what you want is fog, a smoke machine is simply not going to cut it.

In many ways, the white fog is the most satisfactory, the most foglike of the fifteen colors on offer. Set the color to white and the level to Intense or Heavy, and you lay down a nearly opaque blanket of misty whiteness that would make Sherlock Holmes pull up his topcoat collar and hail a hansom cab. Use the Moderate setting for a pleasantly mysterious atmosphere, and Light for the merest hint of mist.

The other colors produce luminous mists that don’t really feel like fog. We simply don’t expect fog banks to come in red, yellow, magenta or cyan. But if the effect is not meteorological, it’s still dramatic — like laying a colored gel over the light source of your personal space. The colored fogs can be lovely, and quite effective.

Bue mist under water

The LOOT fog machines also put out a lot more mist than the nDreams smoke machines. At full intensity, the LOOT fogbank has at least ten times the footprint of the nDreams smoke cloud, and it is much denser.

The smoke machines do have their place. They are useful as accent pieces for parties, or in brightly lit spaces where you aren’t trying to fill the whole volume with colored smoke. By contrast, the Fog Machine creates atmosphere — a mysterious, mist-filled volume for photography, video or dramatic personal space decoration.

Decorating with Fog Machines is fun. Since they only take up seven object slots, you can put several in a space. And, as with Home’s fireworks, it’s useful to remember that these are virtual objects — they don’t obey the physical laws that apply to real fog, or real machines. If you put a Fog Machine next to a piece of furniture or a wall, it will shoot fog right through it. You can use it under water. You can set it against the outer wall of your apartment to shoot fog out into the surrounding scenery. And since the fog does not flow downward, you can set a Fog Machine on top of a high object to create an overhead cloud or a foggy ceiling.

A floating fog

The Fog Machine works best in dark or night-time spaces, or in ones with a mysterious atmosphere. As the photos accompanying this article show, I used them effectively in the Gothic Cathedral, the Metro Apartment, the Island Bungalow, the Underwater Apartment and the Wizard’s Den. I also used them in the Silicon Lounge, the Midnight Glade, and a number of other spaces. Fog Machines are fun to experiment with, and I find they work in places you would never expect them to.

I do have a few complaints. The Fog Machine returns to its default settings, white fog of a Moderate density, whenever you leave the apartment. This is probably simply the nature of active items, but it is a bit annoying if you have created an unusual effect with colored mists, and need to re-do it each time you arrive.

My other complaint is more philosophical. If you Google “fog machine” and look at the pictures, you will see that the LOOT Fog Machine is a copy of a real-world object. Indeed, much of the LOOT machinima gear mimics objects you would be using if you made real-life motion pictures.

Mysterious dragon

But I would argue that, in this, LOOT is still thinking firmly inside the box. Because what we need in Home is not a fog machine. It is, simply… fog. We don’t need to see it shooting out of a little black box with a handle on it. We just want it to fill our spaces and create atmosphere. In fact, that jet of fog shooting out the box is annoying and distracting. Fog is not about a horizontal vortex, however beautifully animated. It’s about a cloud come down to earth, creeping on its “little cat feet”, swirling around the gas-lamps, chilling us as we walk the lonely streets. And that cloud is being generated around the vortex, as a series of translucent sheets. It’s truly lovely. But we don’t need to see the vortex too.

I would like to suggest that what we need is not copies of theatrical machines, but nearly-invisible items that create a special effect in the space where they are activated. One object might fill a volume with fog. Another could create falling rain or swirling leaves. Yet another could carpet the floor with flames, or a layer or water, or a creeping mist.

These don’t have to be realistic effects. Like the avatar auras that are now so popular, they could be complete fantasy. What if your furniture could burn with Saint Elmo’s Fire? What if your room could be filled with rainbows?

This is Home. We don’t have to be practical. We have the technology — the new content shows we do. What we need now is the courage to leap past imitation into visual poetry.

There is so much we could do. But the Fog Machine is a great start. Buy this thing. Play with it. You won’t regret it.

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4 Responses to “Review of the LOOT Fog Machine”

1. SealWyf_ says:

   July 9, 2012 at 6:12 pm

   Remember that you can click on the images in the article to view them full size.

   After I had already posted this article, I discovered that mixing two colors of fog creates some magical effects. Set two Fog Machines facing each other across the Cathedral aisle. Turn up the strength to Intense, and set one to green and then other to blue. Wonderfully ethereal!

   Reply
2. Dr_Do-Little says:

   July 9, 2012 at 9:34 pm

   Thanks, I almost forgot about that fog machine. I always wanted to buy 1 of nDream smoke machine but at 22 slot footprint there is no way you can use it in an already filled party place. So when LOOT presented us their fog machine I was all exited. But kinda forgot about it… Nice review. Now i know exactly what i’ll be buying. Sad that it reset everytime thou.

   Reply
3. Dlyrius says:

   July 11, 2012 at 6:00 am

   Bought it, going to play with it.. curious.. it said i would get a 50% discount if i owned the sunset yacht and/or the space station. I own both, but didnt see any discount from the $3.49 price tag for that bundle.. was it discounted from $6 something? LOL

   Reply
4. riff says:

   July 12, 2012 at 2:49 am

   I need to get this! Thank you for this great review!

   Reply