Second Life is a massive real-time simulation with immense user programmability. The sheer depth of building, texturing, and scripting techniques ensures a rich, constantly evolving stream of user-created content.
However, if you are starting out in the game, have just plunked down $9.95 for your premium subscription, and are wondering how you're going to make back that $9.95 (or more) over the next 30 days, learning the techniques you need can be formidable and even impossible if you don't get the right kinds of help.
Wikis, resource pages, and tutorials can only go so far in explaining things (though Torley Linden's tutorials certainly go very far)! There will be times when a pre-recorded response to some burning question just won't follow the exact mental path you need to get something done. For example, there was a script snippet on a wiki that showed me how to measure an object's rotation. But once I used that script, and I got the rotation data from one of my turning objects, how did I make that object act like it was facing in a certain direction? If I had a tank facing a certain way, how would I make a bullet fire off in that direction too, especially if the tank was bumping over an obstacle and the turret was facing somewhere dictated by the moment-to-moment recalculations of 3-D axis alignment?
Those few questions took me about two weeks to solve. First I checked out http://rpgstats.com/wiki, which, while usually very often answering my questions, just didn't have the solution presented in a way I could find it.
It would take a while to get the information. Next I posted in the Wanted section of http://slexchange.com. The next day someone gave me another piece of code to round things out. Little did I know, until twelve hours of frustrated scripting work later, that I was barking up the wrong tree.
Days went by. I still had a tank that could only drive, not fire. Finally, in desperation, I looked for some live help. I joined the group Free Scripters on a whim and poured out my heart and soul, asking in group chat how I could please script my tank gun no matter which way it was facing.
Within two minutes someone who knew what I was looking for got back to me and got me the valuable piece of code I needed to finish my tank. It had taken her about two weeks to get it herself, but within a day I had a running gun system on the tank and it finally made it to market.
The main thing to remember, if you're getting stuck trying to get information as a Second Life businessperson, is that there are several channels of information available. Not only do you have recourse to the official SL tools, like the Second Life Knowledge Base and Wiki, but you can access social networking groups and forums, SL groups, tutors, even ask good Samaritans you may meet on the spur of the moment. And if you need a more applied, thorough approach to any one SL discipline, there are in-game treasures like Ivory Tower, College of Music, Scripting and Science, and TUi Neo. Just decide how much help you need to get your business or short-term objective going, how much time (and maybe L$) you may be willing to invest, and always remember you're not alone in the SL business world if you can simply ask for help.
Published by Lionel Oliva on April 15, 2008 04:58 AM
