InsaneJournal

What Happened to the First One?

Apparently the other day I decided that I wasn't part of enough fads and, hey, wouldn't it be cool to finally check out this "second life" thing everyone keeps talking about on the news. Just for the purposes of mocking, of course. And to put together a Loki avatar, because that shit is bananas. Or something.

It was kinda an idle idea until I realised that SL apparently does have a Mac client (I was for some reason under the impression that they didn't), which kinda cinched it for me. So I download a client and roll myself a login; Loki Seid. For those of you who haven't touched the thing before, all SL characters have a first and last name, the last of which is picked off a default list. My original choice (Loki Lax) was taken, and nothing else sounded good, so in the end I picked 'Seid' because it's actually a type of northern European witchcraft (seiðr). As far as I know, seid is about the only unmanly activity Loki doesn't get up to in the Sagas, but he does mock Odin for his use of it in Lokasenna.¹

So anyway, I land on the orientation island and spend the next hour or so trying to get used to the controls. They're… not intuitive to someone who's come from playing WASD-mouse games (no mouse turning, WTF?), and I haven't yet been able to find the keybinding options. It took me about three days to find the 'jump' (R) and 'crouch' (C) keys, which are pretty instrumental in flying if you don't want to just have to drop out of mid air in order to land. Okay, you can't die or anything, but you do look (and feel) like a total dork. It also took me several days to figure out how to detach the camera from your character to enable free-looking, and I still haven't figured out the key for it (in the end, I found these little HUD windows in the menu that control directions).

So the keys suck.

I'm one of those people who always spends hours at the character create screen getting everything just so, so that part of SL at least was fun. As far as I've yet to ascertain, the entire game is about avatar customization, or at the very least getting more money so you can get more items to get more avatar customization.

So I do my little tutorials and get my 'key' to the game proper and spend some more time collecting crap from the free shop on Help Island 2. Which is fun enough, but I'm soon done with it and… then what?

Teleporting into a couple of the "Popular Places" in my Search window, one thing becomes immediately apparent; the entire realm is one big shopping mall. Skins, hair, clothes, eyeballs, shoes and stranger thing all clamouring for my attention on wall-to-wall billboards down every street and every strip mall. And here's where SL hits its second problem. All this content is user-created, right? Which means it's only streamed to your computer when you walk near it. The end result is something like walking through a street made entirely of slow-loading webpages. Forget checking out the other people; by the time your client gets around to filling in their positions with default grey placeholder mannequins they'll've already moved on.

I'm sure there are some beautiful visuals in this game somewhere. I mean, people are clever when you give them pretty much free reign to create their own world. But damned if I could find anything worth exploring in between the endless strip malls trying to sell me, for the most part, sex.

And me, of course, bank balance zero.

The main currency in Second Life is the Linden dollar. Since you can both buy and sell this on the open market for real-world cash (as opposed to more traditional MMOs where the currency market is decidedly black) it has an exchange rate and, consequently, Second Life has a GDP. The last estimate was something like half a billion US dollars. And growing.

Making money has never been a main skill of mine, so I resigned myself to a second life of poverty pretty early on. Don't believe any of the hype around being able to make SL your really-real world job. Like real life, the place is a pyramid scheme and you're not any more likely to make it big there than you are here; especially this late in the metaphorical day. Still, even running on empty you can find stuff if you look; malls and shops deliberately targeted at new players that either give items away free or sell them for the nominal cost of L$1. Not counting upload money, I've spent exactly L$1 on my avatar, and that was for the hair prim.² So it's not all bad news.

My main trickle of income thus far? Camping. I'm not entirely sure of the economics of it, but in almost every large mall and club you'll be able to find camping spots; usually dance pads or chairs, but I've seen some slightly cleverer things like a gallows and a janitorial mop. Basically, you stick your character on the spot and just… walk away. You'll get paid out in Linden for the length of time spent idling; the usual rate is about L$1 per 10 minutes.

Yeah, that's right; SL pays you to AFK. Anyone I've ever played Furc with will know why that makes me lulz.

Of course, unless you've got an army of bots, you're not going to get rich camping. Idling for a whole day on your average L$1/10 will net you L$144, which is just slightly less than your average low-priced piece of clothing. Idling for a week is worth L$1,008 which starts to sound promising (the "weekly stipend" for paid users is L$300) until you realise two things.

One: SL logs you out after thirty minutes of inactivity. Of course, this isn't the end of the world. You can buy "anti-idle" balls; scripts you can equip on your character which will prevent them from idling out. I've seen these sell for several hundred Linden, but the good news for the terminally poor is that you can, in fact, turn the idle timer off in the client. Yeah. It's something like Ctrl+Shift+D to bring up the 'Advanced' toolbar menu, then from there to the Character sub-menu which contains the option. Hurdle one, overcome!

Two: The idling spots themselves will kick you off after a certain length of time; usually after 60 or, more generously, 80 minutes. So much for earning while I work (L$48). I've seen some camp-spots that don't seem to do this, but never unoccupied ones.

I'm still looking; let me know if you find a place.

About a day after starting my depressing new second life, I remembered that the reason I signed up in the first place was to see if I could pull off a Loki avatar. Now, Loki has a pretty distinctive look and I eventually found a hair prim that was the right sort of shape if not quite the right colour. But a skin? Forgeddaboutit.

Then I remember, Shit. I'm an artist. Surely they're not that hard to make…

And as it turns out, no; they're not. I had to eek out the specifics but here's the deal; a full-body 'painted' skin in SL is achieved by making up three texture files – head, torso and legs – then applying them to your character's base skin in the slots allocated for tattoos in the UI. A thoughtful user named Robin Wood has provided a highly detailed template for the relevant textures, and from there it's just a matter of whipping out your airbrush and getting spraying.

The funny thing? I've decided that I actually quite like texturing. This is literally my first go at it, ever, but after a couple of hours (all spent camping, of course) I'd thrown together a face skin I could totally live with (with one abortive attempt at eyebrows). A few more hours and I had a half-serviceable torso. And, okay, I need to work on my shading a little more but still… not bad for a first go 'round.

But don't think that making your own skins is all a free ride on the cool train. Uploading a file costs L$10 – hence the idling – and as much faith I have in me being extremely awesome, I've had two goes on the head and I'm going to need at least one more on the torso, plus the legs. So it's not all fun and games. You can sort of preview your work in the upload window, but – with skins at least – it's tinted weird and of course you're just looking at your body part in isolation. I'm sure there's a better way of doing this, but it probably involves something like Lightwave and, well, to be honest I just haven't looked into it that much.

Still, I think I've found my new hobby. I can get Loki's skin, eyes, boots and a basic corset-dress outfit down before I have to start looking into prims (and, ergo, 3D modelling).

Should keep me busy for a little while, at least.

1. Boring cultural note: Practising seid was considered "women's work". A male practitioner opened himself up to accusations of ergi ("unmanliness") which was fightin' words Back in the Day. ^
2. It's the SL equivalent of a wig. The native hair system is pretty weak, so most hair you see is actually a separate object (a 'prim') attached to the character's head. This allows for not just more detail and styling, but also ragdolling. Everyone loves ragdolling. ^

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.