Second life build program

Join their 3x award-winning group, and there is even a Sandbox for builders. Check their website for their schedule of educational events. More info at buildersbrewery. View this destination ». Underground offers full permission items for designers, with a large enough selection to fit any genre. Offering rigged mesh clothing, hair, shoes, clothing templates, textures, poses, building supplies, accessories, and jewelry.

Come visit today! The Happy Hippo Building School is a long-term, well-respected and large school. The instructors provide a building course to take you from absolute beginner onward. M2D is an interactive particle store. Visit the platforms to use huds and create beautiful scenes for photos, or just play around.

One of the best store designs around, every particle can be rezzed and looked at. Gestures are animations that can convey a mood or simulate an action.

Second Life includes a tool that lets you design your own gestures, or you can get them by buying them or trading with another resident. In the next section, we'll learn about the engine running Second Life and what kind of computer equipment you'll need to explore the community.

One reason some users give up on Second Life is lag. Lag is a delay between the time you give your avatar a command and the time it actually responds. Lag happens when servers are overworked or when the connection between your computer and the servers is weak. Longtime residents accept lag as part of the Second Life experience, but for many new visitors it is off-putting. Second Life uses the Havok physics engine. This software simulates real physics within a virtual environment. The physics engine determines how avatars and objects behave within the virtual world, including collision detection the engine tells the software when two items are touching and how each should react , vehicle dynamics and what animations look like.

Residents can hear and view streaming audio and video inside Second Life. Residents can choose to display video on specific surfaces in the land they own. To do this, they designate the surface's texture as a media surface. If any other surface within that resident's land has the same texture, it will also display the streaming video.

Since this can cause confusion, residents should make sure the surface they choose has a unique texture within their land. Second Life is compatible both with PCs and Mac computers. Minimum technical requirements for the PC include:. The Mac requirements include the cable or DSL connection, the same amount of computer memory and graphics card requirements as the PC, and:. Residents can apply textures to the surface of objects. A texture is just an image file designed to give a surface a particular look.

Examples of textures include wood grain, brick patterns and metallic finishes. Many residents create textures in graphics programs like Photoshop or Paint Pro and then import the files into Second Life. Absolutely every object, building and flying car you see in Second Life was created by a Resident.

The basics of object creation are easy, but it takes a lot of practice and some serious scripting capabilities to make the really impressive stuff. Fortunately, there's a designated place in Second Life for you to practice these skills: the sandbox.

The sandbox is a public space where residents practice building different objects. When you open the object creation tool, the default window is "create," indicated by a magic wand symbol. At the top of the window is a list of the 15 prims — basic shapes like cubes, cones and tubes — available to Second Life users. A seasoned builder knows how to stretch, cut, link and multiply these prims to create everything from a hotel to a Ferrari. With just these simple tools and key controls, you can make almost any stationary object in Second Life.

But if you want to bring your creations to life — give them movement and interactivity — you'll have to learn the Linden Scripting Language LSL. LSL is most similar to the C programming language and Java. There are many websites and online tutorials for learning basic and advanced LSL scripts. You can even find a few at the Second Life forums. To attach a script to a Second Life object, click on the "scripts" tab in the edit menu and click "new script.

Although, without a basic understanding of LSL, you can't just piece together a working script with those commands. One of the cool things about Second Life is that you retain intellectual property rights for every object you create in-world. With those rights, you can choose to allow other people to edit your objects or not.

You can also assign a price tag to an object and sell it on the Second Life marketplace, which we'll learn more about later. Linden Lab listed the population of Second Life at more than 10,, residents as of October That figure sounds impressive, but it's important to keep a couple of mitigating factors in mind.

First, Linden Lab allows users to create more than one account, so some of the 10,, residents are duplicates. Second, the virtual world has a high churn rate, meaning most visitors only log on once and then abandon the program. In , some observers marked the churn rate as high as 90 percent, meaning only 10 percent of all the people who visit Second Life came back after the first visit [source: New Scientist ].

By its 15th anniversary in , Second Life reached some 57 million subscribers but most of those weren't active. In fact, only between , and , subscribers regularly logged in, and around , users accounted for 90 percent of logged-in time. Linden Lab no longer releases stats on its users, so these were from other sources. One unifying trait all residents share is that by creating an account in Second Life they agree to obey Linden Lab's terms of service TOS.

Linden Lab designed the TOS to help protect itself and honest residents from malicious users. Users should read the TOS carefully, particularly if they want to participate in Second Life's economy.

The TOS makes it clear that Linden Lab has the right to wipe out a user's inventory, including any in-game currency he or she might have. The company also makes it clear that users can't hold Linden Lab responsible for incidents that delete user information. Community Standards list several kinds of behavior which could result in a users' suspension or banishment from Second Life if he or she violates them. They are:. Linden Lab has employees in Second Life who can respond to situations, but the company mainly relies on users to report misbehaving residents.

For most first offenders, Linden Lab will issue a warning. However, for repeat offenders, Linden Lab may suspend or revoke the user's membership. Offenders could lose all their items and money in the game, and as the Terms of Service make clear, Linden Lab would not have to refund their money.

Second Life's economy is based off a unit of virtual currency called the Linden dollar. Residents can go to a currency exchange service to convert U. The official exchange service is called LindeX. The exchange rate fluctuates, just like real currencies.

In October , the exchange rate was about Linden dollars for every U. In August , you could exchange a U. Most transactions within the game world use Linden dollars. In May , Linden Lab announced that U. Although it may seem that someone else has come in to handle Second Life's economy, it's really the other way around.

Tilia is a part of Linden Lab and now operates virtual economies for other online environments as well. Sansar, a virtual reality world, was originally developed by Linden Lab but sold to Wookey Projects in March Resident Ailin Graef became the first person to become a real millionaire through transactions in Second Life in Graef made her fortune by dealing in real estate, becoming what some residents call a land baron.

She bought land in Second Life from Linden Lab, developed it using creative and stylish themes, then rented or sold the land back to other residents. Not all purchases use Linden dollars — land sales and auctions usually require real cash.

This will buy a 65, square meter island an entire region. For this fee, you get to choose the island's terrain and location. A homestead will allow 5, prims and no more than 20 avatars at a time, but the full region allows up to 20, prims and up to avatars at a time.

Your land use fee pays for renting space on a server. The monthly premium membership fee entitles a resident to 1, square meters of land at no additional charge. As a user purchases more land, the land use fee increases. Linden Lab bases the land use fee off the maximum amount of land a resident owns during each day billing cycle. In the next section, we'll look at how organizations and events in the real world are crossing over into Second Life. Some people believe that the future of the internet is in 3D virtual worlds like Second Life, where users will navigate through creative landscapes in search of information and entertainment.

As a result, some organizations jumped into Second Life hoping to get in on the ground floor before the community's popularity explodes. More than companies and organizations had online presences in Second Life.

Many owned islands and host events like press conferences or concerts. Others use Second Life to promote charitable organizations or political philosophies. Some companies created a space in Second Life with no clear strategy on what to do with it, which usually backfires — no one wants to go to a location that's just a big advertisement.

Other companies try to avoid that mistake. Coca-Cola, for example, held a competition in which residents submitted designs for a virtual vending machine. The winner of the competition appeared in a video about designing a Second Life object.

By creating interactive content, Coke avoided the pitfall of jumping into Second Life without contributing to the world's content. Uploading a mesh model - How to upload a mesh model to Second Life Calculating land impact - How to determine the impact your creations have on your land usage limits. Mesh and LOD - Mesh objects that don't crash your friends' old computer. Making Mesh Physics - Why and How. Making Mesh for Pathfinding - Pathfinding friendly mesh. Pathfinding Overview - Pathfinding explained.

A Visual Guide - Watch how easy it is! Walkability Coefficients - Control the speed of your Walkable areas. Material Volumes - Control the speed of your characters. Universal Attribute Changes for Pathfinding Configure objects for pathfinding in bulk. Physics Optimization - Not everything needs physics, learn how to add the least load necessary to the physics engine.

Best practices for creating efficient collision volumes - Tips from the creators of the Havok physics engine that can help optimize the physics of your creations. Tips on how to best use sounds in your creations.

Environment Sounds - Ways to generate sounds without input from an avatar Event Driven Sounds - Ways to generate sounds in response to a specific event. Scripting object behavior - A brief overview of Linden Scripting Language, which can be used to bring your creations to life.

Modular Pathfinding Kit - code snippets designed to be plugged together to quickly build unique behaviors. Pathfinding Cookbook - ready made solutions for some critters.