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I don't want to make money
I want to play a game.
Any money I make I'd be putting back out into the economy, buying clothes and stuff. I'm not looking to cash out.
It's the ultimate on-line sandbox. Basically "sim-whatever-the-hell-you-want, as long as you build it first."
DropBox invite link - get 250MB extra free.
Building doesn't cost any money, although you'll need textures to make things look nicer. There are free texture packs around that can help. Scripting is also free and can definitely pay well if you're good at it and make contact with people that need and are willing to pay for your services. In the very shortterm though, a lot of people just camp. Basically, stores and like want a higher traffic value, to boost their supposed popularity which boosts their visibility in searches so they place camping chairs, pads, or other various things you sit on that pay you a certain amount for every x minutes you sit there. For example, 2L per 10 minutes. Usually people just sit down and then goto bed for the night, or whatever. If you are determined to not spend a dime of RL money, this can be a decent way to go, as long as you realize that you are paying more for the electricity to power your computer than you are earning in Lindens.
Thanks, this is exactly what I needed to know. So there is a way to just generate cash in game. What should I search for to find these camping chairs, etc?
My PC is always on anyway, becuse I'm generally running some downloads, or something.
hmmm...
At least SL doesn't have any monthly fees unless you want to be a power user. Camping is what they call it when you sit in some place for hours at a time making a handful of lindens. Let's put it this way... you can roam around your house, and I mean scour the damn thing, and use any left over change you find, to buy lindens directly, and it will still be better than camping. You have to also consider power costs. I mean, if you make 35 cents worth of lindens over night, how much more did that just tack onto your electricity bill IRL. Since yours stays on either way, this won't be a problem, but some people just don't sit down and think some things thru.
With that aside, I really think that just buying your lindens when you need them is the best hassle free way to get them. Unless you just need $100 or so to buy some decent clothing for your avatar, then that's reasonable and no need to go putting in CC#s for that.
Meaning, I can just sit and play 360 while my Avatar camps.
Personally I thought the default avatar was kinda ugly, and that pretty much killed my intrest right off the bat, plus at the time it seemed like without putting RL cash into it you'd never really have or do anything interesting.
IS there any way to at least get out of the default avatar for free, RL-cash wise? Since it sounds damn near impossible to get lindens without spending any actual money... being something of a collector at heart, I think the main thing I'd want to do in SL is just try to find and collect weird but awesome shit (as well as avatars.)
I know I made a post earlier in the topic, but uhh... I can't for the life of me remember which page.
Cool I found the stuff. You're right, the payout is abysmal, like $1L/15min, but I'm just gonna leave it on in there while I try skinning in Photoshop, so it's no big deal for me. Really like how it just runs in a window...
Camping is a scam. On average, you make either slightly more or slightly less than it costs you each month in electricity to have SL running while you're camping. Also keep in mind that SL is a system hog and causes your computer to use much more power than if it were running something far less hardware intensive. So no, if you're the sort who would have your computer on at all times, seeding torrents or whatever, doesn't mean you're coming out ahead.
Unless someone else is paying your electricity, you get nothing out of camping. It's a bad deal. It's a boon to the scammers who use it, and everyone else is just getting duped into thinking they've found free money. If you're making any money at all, it would come to about 12 cents a day, if you camped 24 hours a day. Of course, that was figured back when the L$ was worth a little more. So it's probably less now.
That said, there is a way to get a small amount of L$ to start you off. Simply by connecting a credit/debit card or PayPal account to your SL account they will (unless this has changed, be sure to read the all the information they give you)give you L$250. That's not much, and won't go far at all for shopping, but if you intend to upload textures/sounds/animations for inworld creations, then that will be enough to get you started.
Before you spend that money, go through all the tutorials you can find, pick the brains of any friends you have in SL, and learn how to make something people would buy. Once you're confident you can create something that will sell, start uploading your own textures, find a free vendor, and see if you know anyone willing to let you drop the vendor in their land for a while.
If you create clothing or attachments, wear them everywhere you go. If you make scripted items, vehicles, things like that, be sure to show them off as often as possible. Keep the location of your vendor in the Picks section of your profile, clearly marked so people checking out the profiles (this seems to be how many, possibly most, people in SL find new shops to spend money at) can find their way to your vendor.
Getting that starter money may only work if it's when you first create the account. I'm not really sure. If that's no longer an option open to you, try creating items using freebie textures, or textures from friends who don't mind you using them on products to sell. Build up some money that way and then start uploading your own.
Also, I have scads of textures you guys can have for free if you IM me. A lot of them are ripped from other games that other people have uploaded, I was given them while I was helping build Octopia (some of you guys in the older Penny Arcade Forums group might remember Octopia), and they're all full permissions. Just be warned, that it is an absolute fuckton of textures and not for the feint of heart. But they should be enough to get you started. A lot of them are in heavy circulation already, but I wouldn't know where to find them outside of someone giving them to you.
And, as Radd says, make sure you go to the places set up as a tutorial for noobs, especially the Ivory Tower of Primitives; once I had gone through there I had a lot better understanding of how the building tools worked. It won't make you an ace builder instantly, but it will give you a foundation, rather than you just clicking on 'build' and being all O_o at all of the tools.
The creation tools are pretty easy to use, but my goddamn avatar always gets in the way, which is extremely annoying. I'm noticing it's lacking in a few departments, but... I guess this is the nature of the beast. I was making some sweet goggles last night. Started out making them big, but then I couldn't shrink them down to fit my head. So that kind of sucks. I guess each primitive has a minimum H-W-D of 0.01 or something, so scaling it down just stopped at a certain point.
I'll probably be playing later tonight. I was up until like 2.30 yesterday making those goddamn goggles! Uhh my in-game name is Agrippa Republic, so I dunno... we can like.. do stuff? I'm not really sure what. My character isn't a week old yet so it doesn't let me go to some places though.
And uh, that's not necessarily Roleplaying. When meeting up with some college professors, I made sure I dressed up all nice and proper because I would be actually interacting with real people. Now if I were doing this in Animal Crossing and interacting in such a way with AI that does not understand a damn thing, then it is roleplaying.
Care to elaborate on the methods to get around the minimums?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6XqQM9hgB0
Excellent! Kind of weird, but I guess it works.
That guy's voice has an odd fake cheerful quality to it. Gives me the heebities.
Also after a small sabbatical from SL I am somewhat back, not fully back as I am still trying not to ignore the other games I play..But I pop on here and there.
*I think, it's too automatic for me to remember
Yep you're right. Thanks to this and that tiny-prims video, I made an awesome pair of detailed brass goggles. I'm working on some boots now. I'll try to take pictures of my crap later and show you guys. I haven't touched the scripting yet, but... I might at some point in the future. It looks like fairly simple code.
Hmm, If you are really digging SL and consider wanting to take a step further to polish and get your skeelz down better and make over all better stuff, you might want to get this Guide. The first part of it is "Lol SL!" the next part is pretty much the "Internet Fuckward Theory and You!" and then the next part is really great stuff on building, like great little stuff about how to make sure your textures are lossless and how to make better textures, etc.
Here is a link, check your local B&N store, they may have it.
http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321501667&rl=1
I can only imagine Torley at a party, ^^;
To be fair, he is incredibly awesome at the piano.
They're also available at your local Barnes and Noble and at Borders. I haven't read that one myself, having been a 'resident' or whathaveyou for going on 2 years now, but I imagine it would be quite helpful for someone wanting to jump right in.
A good one that I can say is quite informative in more than just the titular material, is [url="http://www.amazon.com/Entrepreneurs-Guide-Second-Life-Metaverse/dp/0470179147/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197590683&sr=8-1]The Entrepreneur's Guide to Second Life: Making Money in the Metaverse[/url]. I had a few hours to kill waiting for someone at Barnes and Noble and was looking for a book on making textures (it's harder to find a book which is more than fluff on this subject, in my experience) and spotted it. It was obviously in the wrong section, but I picked it up and ended up reading it for close to three hours. Lots of interesting and useful stuff, especially if you plan on starting some kind of shop in SL, with lots of interviews and business models from people who've made successful businesses of it.
Pardon me for my transgressions.
Hardly think that was worth a liming.
I'm just Razzin ya. And it was too irresistible what with pretty much the exact same wording.
Anyways, I know you're all dying to see what I've been working on (haha). Here's some goggles I made, the first pic is on my shitty avatar, but I haven't really gotten around to fixing up his neanderthal face yet.
There's some bizarre clipping through the lens at certain angles and distances that I can't seem to fix.
Here's the whole thing. This is the first object I've made in Second Life!
Here's a close-up so you can see all the screws and junk. I'm not sure if keeping my primitive count down is really important, but if so, then these goggles will probably slow stuff down and need to get canned. I think they're around 150 prims. (Yea, Robertson screw heads, I wanted to keep each screw head at one prim instead of more for a different, better screw-type... I doubt anyone will notice anyways.)
The boots I made. Right now they are two separate objects (right and left feet), but hopefully there is a way to combine the two to make it one object. I'll look into it later, but I'm thinking I'll be out of luck because they need to anchor to one location (it seems).
Side of one of the boots. Some sort of train-like thing on there. If I have time I'll probably change the circles to actual cogs.
Side of the other boot. Some sort of coolant tank with nice brass pipes. I think it looks really cool, and was pretty fun to create.
Because I'm a whore, here's a close-up! Oooooh.
And to end on a down note. My shitty avatar! Look at that free "Dirty Biker" hair go!
Well, that's about it. In case you were wondering, the funky colours in the background are due to the lightroom I made. I needed it to prevent the changing night and day with messing with my colours while I worked. Looks pretty stupid, but it works nicely.
Funny, one of my outfits use the Dirty Biker hair also. It's hard to find decent flex hair for a male avatar.
Also, I like your stuff, especially the attention to detail with the screws.
Btw, those are pretty damn good for just screwing around. hehe, pun intended. I mean, it seems you have good control over the prims enough to do some cool plating effects and detailing like the pipes in the shoes. You are right though, 150 prims is waaay too many. But most people try and make stuff as low prim as possible, and then work their way up... but you probably are going to be getting more practice bye starting big and then dwindling down. Either way, nice work.
I have these skills:
Scripting
Will it be hard for me to make a tiny body? I've seen people with some very small avatars, like the size of stuffed animals and stuff walking around, shortly before I left SL. How exactly did they do that? Where did their avatar's body go?
See a long time ago, I was actually one of the first people to have a HUGE avatar. Basically, it took many builds but I had eventually constructed a massive robot body for myself, and I was bigger than sky scrapers and everything. The body didn't have any walking animation, but it was made in such a way that my arms could move and the body was quite articulate in some places. I was so big, I terrorized this one club all the damn time and they banned me but it didn't matter because my body could reach across the ban lines and fuck with them anyway. I was so big that I used their dance floor, which was overlooking a cliff, as my table, and I watched people dance below like if they were my play things. I was quite popular in an anime sim where people flew around my body in their jets and stuff attacking me, I would smash through people's homes and they would come out and tell me to fuck off, and I would stomp through the welcome area and crush people which eventually led to Lindens getting involved and telling me to leave. I played myself off as the lonely iron giant that nobody wanted.
Well now, I'm interested in using the tiny prim techniques to build myself a very very small insect body. Any advice? Is it practical? I haven't been on SL in years.
Is any of this recorded?
Man, I'll build you a tiny insect body if you show me what kind of crap I have to make. I dunno how you'd do the rest of the crap though.