There's no such thing as an official Clubmaster v2.2
There's no such thing as an official Clubmaster v2.2
Comparing various "v2.2" Clubmasters with the official Clubmaster v2.1 led to the conclusion that no
One rumour that keeps going around the Hypergrid is that Áine Caoimhe has released a Clubmaster Dance Machine v2.2 at some point in the past.
I myself got my hands on three "v2.2" Clubmasters:
- the Clubmaster Dance Machine v2.2 as available from Paramour Shopping
- a teal Clubmaster Dance Machine v2.2 (2019)
- the Clubmaster Dance Machine v2.2 Sex Edition
And I took myself some time and compared all three with an official v2.1 Clubmaster.
First of all, none of the three look like an official Clubmaster. The Sex Edition is of course red, the (2019) is teal as I've already said, and what's being offered as an official v2.2 is a disco ball hanging down from a cable. I thought that people had messed with all three, and it could be possible to reconstruct the closest thing to a vanilla v2.2 by looking at the differences, merging changes in the newer controller scripts that must have obviously been done by Áime into the 2.1 controller script and finally putting everything that looks official into a golden v2.1 Clubmaster.
So the first thing that struck me was that there is no v2.2 dance controller script. The version number of the controller scripts in all three "v2.2" Clubmasters is still v2.1.
In fact, the controller script in the disco ball offered as official is vanilla except for one difference that marks it unofficial: The dance machine identifies itself as a "Speakeasy Dance Machine" rather than a "Clubmaster Dance Machine". The one in the teal (2019) variant had some colours changed, the NPC dancers were renamed from "Dance Partner" to "Kroatan Dancer" which means that this is a dance machine customised for the now-defunct Kroatan Grid, and the entire Matchmaker code was removed. If the latter had been an official change, the readme notecard would have been updated accordingly, but it wasn't. Finally, the controller script in the Sex Edition is a 100% vanilla v2.1 controller script.
As for the already mentioned readme notecard, it's identical in all four dance machines.
So, except for the aforementioned edits in the controller scripts, are there any other differences?
Well, I guess the differences in the Sex Edition should be clear, given its purpose. New animations including 18 new sets of couple animations in two categories, new nude NPCs.
The "Speakeasy" disco ball has 18 new solo animations, three of which have their own category while the other 15 are squeezed into a fourth inspite of there only being nine buttons available. The NPCs remain unchanged.
The (2019) variant has the same set of animations, but the NPCs were all replaced.
So here's my verdict:
- The "Speakeasy" disco ball was custom-made, probably for a specific location. The contents of a Clubmaster v2.1 were poured into a disco ball, new solo animations were added, and the identification of the whole thing was changed. Curiously, it was not renamed which leads to the false impression of it being official. However, both the total "change in style" coming with what the version number suggests to be a minor release and the way the new solo animations were integrated suggest that this was definitely not Áine's doing.
- The (2019) variant isn't official either, nor is it based on an official v2.2. The controller script still bears the version number 2.1. The Matchmaker feature was removed that's still present in the other two v2.2 dance machines. The readme still refers to a v2.1, and it doesn't mention the removal of the Matchmaker. Also, I'm not even sure if that point in 2019 which the name of the machine hints at was still within Áine's lifetime.
- The Sex Edition has a vanilla v2.1 controller script and a vanilla v2.1 readme. What it actually is is a third-party bugfix update for Pagane's v2.1 Sex Edition which has a few bugs. I'm not even sure if this update came from Pagane herself.
- Since all three are obviously unofficial, and since there is neither an official v2.2 controller script nor an official v2.2 readme notecard to come along with it, the newest and last official Clubmaster released by Áine herself is the v2.1.
If you're looking for an official, vanilla Clubmaster, get yourself a v2.1. v2.0 is outdated, and all v2.2 are third-party mods.
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So I got a comment from Walter Balazic himself under my post on OpenSimWorld. And it came with a twist:
The Speakeasy Dance Machine v2.2 is official. Sort of.
Here's the story: Áine was actually working on an official Clubmaster v2.2. She had a dance club on Refuge Grid called Speakeasy. At that club, she had a prototype dance machine in a disco ball in which she experimented with the v2.2 upgrade. It must have been in a pretty early stage because, as I've found out, the script itself is mostly untouched, only those 18 solo dance animations are new. Still, it's clear that Áine never intended to released it this way, but she did plan a v2.2 upgrade some three years after v2.1.
However, while she was working on the upgrade and experimenting with the prototype, her health deteriorated so much that she never recovered from it, and she was unable to come back to OpenSim. v2.2 never evolved beyond this stage.
While the Speakeasy Dance Machine is nowhere near release quality, much less an official release, it is actually the latest official version by Áine. Basically, Walter had managed to secure a copy of it and put it into the v2.0 box with a hover text above it for historical reasons. But since this caused quite a bit of confusion, he has now replaced that box with the official v2.1 release.