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Building in Second Life

Well, welcome aboard, it is to me too. Having a ‘rezday’ (the day you’re ‘born’, or rezzed, or painted on screen in this 3D environment) in July 2006 definitely makes me a ‘newbie’. And ‘OMG’ (‘Oh my god’) I haven’t even been seriously ‘grief’ed (hassled ‘in- world’ verbally or physically) yet!

Jargon aside (and you’ll learn there is plenty of non-english language that you don’t know) I have developed a fairly heavy interest, scepticism, fascination and cynicism, in no particular order, by researching this world, from the inside and out. I have already made a number of posts about it – most of which are ‘sort of reflective’, rather than this one which is pretty well observational of a building task I set myself.

Most of my ‘in-world’ research has been to check out the technology from a ‘builders’ perspective. Essentially you ‘build’ things by combining primitives (prims), which are basic shapes (squares, circles, triangles, cones, tubes etc), to form what you want. They can be coloured, textured, lit, made flexible, and possibly most interesting, programmed (scripted). So I decided to build a house – possibly an unwise decision I realise ‘many hours’ later – to put all of these things into practice. After all you can’t say much, or have much of an opinion, about something if you haven’t done it, can you?

So the images to the right are some ‘snapshots’ of progress.. foundations, then some walls and windows and then the product as it is today.

The tools are actually quite good (I definitely have conceptual knowledge only of 3D graphics, no practical experience before this) and, as you get to know them better, not surprisingly, they get easier to use. It is a challenge to work in 3D – effectively sculpting something together – as all the ‘bits’ have to fit together, and be aligned properly, in 3D space for the illusion to work well. Interesting it doesn’t feel like an illusion as you build, it feels quite ‘tangible’.

With the basic shape together (and I’m not going to admit how long that took..) it started to get interesting, from my point of view, because to achieve some of the effects I had seen elsewhere (sliding/opening doors, variable tint windows etc) would require ‘scripting’. Given I ‘cut code’, or program, professionally I’ll admit I have a head start. There are some good tutorials on scripting out there though which assume no prior knowledge. The Linden Scripting Language (LSL) is based on C++ apparently. So if you have C, perl, php or any of the other C derivatives in your experience set you are going to be pretty comfy.

Once you’ve got the basic language constructs in your head then doing most things is a matter of becoming familiar with ‘the world’ your script is running in and figuring what functions you need to achieve the desired effect. The short version is LSL is event driven (the object is touched, an amount of time has expired etc) and you are pretty much only limited by your imagination.

Back to ‘building’ in a general sense.. Do go to a couple of classes at TeaZer University and visit The Ivory Tower of Prims – learning is so much easier with a ‘leg-up’.

Oh, and yes, the house now does have sliding doors which open when touched, a bay window which changes its tint darkness when touched and a radio which listens to verbal commands to change ‘streaming internet radio stations’ you are listening to.. didn’t think I’d ever call myself a geek :-)

[UPDATE: 17Aug2006]

It’s also interesting, but I hadn’t thought about it until now, that although I could have chosen to build pretty well anything, that I chose to build something which is kind of real life based.. For some reason that reminds me of a quote I saw over at Virtual Surburbia:

“If anything is possible, nothing is interesting” – H.G. Wells

[Update: 21Aug2006]
The next in this ‘series’ is ‘Is this a game?.. or if it isn’t what is it?’