Newbie 2 Newbie

Flying Houses and Vanishing Primitives: Building in Second Life

By ROSE KARUNA
SecondLIFE Magazine

I waited for notification on the availability of my 512 square meters of land in Second Life with the same anticipatory delight as a five-year old waiting for Sea Monkeys. When I finally got notice and teleported to the coveted piece of land, I was struck with the same degree of disappointment that I'd had when I put the much-touted Sea Monkeys in water and realized that they were brine shrimp and would never wear little crowns or perform cute tricks.

By now, most Newbie’s have figured out that the best way to get a chunk of land is to go to the Second Life Forum and note their request in Land for the Landless. It’s best to make sure you are really posting in the correct forum, so here is the link: http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10109

I am a madly optimistic person, so when I took possession and teleported hubby in to look at the land, his dead pan comment was, "Oh boy, I can see what your so excited about. It’s a cliff wall." Smirking as though I’d purchased swampland in Florida. (I must find the avatar gesture for the bow finger salute). Ultimately, I responded by trying to build something magnificent on the land.

With my land editing tool in hand, I realized that the land itself could only be modified to the extent that it conforms to the parameters of the neighboring land adjacent to it. In other words, once a cliff, always a cliff.

In real life, a woman has to know her limitations --this applies in Second Life as well and after two days of trying to build my own contraption on a sheer cliff wall with limited building and scripting skills, I turned to a little pre-fab help from my Second Life friends. I found a lot of good free designs at the Free Bazaar, the GNU Architects Store and Newbie Central.

It was during the erection of my first pre-fabricated house that I realized the value of a “prim” and “object” count. I had a great house, but it took up so many prims that I had to strip just to walk in it. (Hubby thought this was cool, but I just found it annoying.)

Newbie building lesson one: Buy or create LOW PRIM items.

After learning the prim lesson, I moved onto positioning all the housing pieces on my land. Erecting a pre-fab on a sheer cliff wall presented some challenges. One was positioning the house once it was erected. I began this challenge shortly after the new Second Life version upgrade and I was only mildly surprised to see my entire house vanish while using the positioning tool to place it on the foundation. Oh well, I simply pulled another copy from my inventory placed it.

It was not until a very angry avatar came knocking on my door the next day that I realized my terrible mistake. My frazzled neighbor teleported me to her land, where my pre-fab house lay skewered on her property like Dorothy’s house in the Wizard of Oz. I apologized profusely and removed the offending object. Fortunately, she was a tolerant soul and I walked away with a new Second Life friend and an adorable little red dragon.

Lesson two: Careful with the positioning tool. Use the viewer tool to move in and out and to orbit your object.

Once the house was up, I wanted to personalize the color and texture. The house, of course, was linked -- so I unlinked it. Big mistake. At one point, I confused my ALT and CTL key and thought I was using the viewer but ended up rotating critical parts of the house. In trying to re-position them, I of course, lost them. I have not had another angry neighbor show up to return the errant pieces, but the week is still young.

Lesson three: Use the Select Individual before unlinking.

Lesson three and a half: Drinking and Building do not mix!

So after putting up and tearing down about five or six houses, hubby teleported me to the Ivory Tower Library of Primitives. It can be found at Noyo 207, 189. I can’t recommend this place enough to anyone who wants to build in Second Life. In less than an hour, I figured out what most of my mistakes were and learned much more to boot.

Two days later my house was up. I’m still falling through the floor and rolling down the cliff when I walk near the front door, but I don’t want to waste prims on bracing the house against the cliff. So unless I’m flying, I stay away from the front door. I don’t always tell everyone who visits me though, I had lots of fun watching hubby roll down the cliff three or four times. I can’t apply physics, because I actually stuck the foundation right into the cliff wall and physics cannot be applied to objects buried within other objects. All in all, it’s still a pretty cool house and I even have a yard.

Coming up next: Avatar related protocol (why it’s not a good idea to do your yard work naked on PG land) and cool resources for the Newbie.