I'm in the Hipihi beta!

Thanks to the help of Weasel Gough, 黄鼬 in Hipihi, I got the Hipihi beta to run.

The trick was to turn off Advanced Text features, after installing the Asian language pack and selecting the appropriate keyboard language stuff, which seems to be Chinese PRC, and Chinese Simplified.



This is so cool, I haven't been in new virtual world where you can fly since I started Second Life.



Wall of scrolls with names. Floating wall, umm, conceptual wall.

I've fallen in the water and my avatar is dog paddling.


There's a wheel from my helicopter showing through the surface of the water.

The avatar dogpaddles to stay afloat.

The terrain that's underwater ripples.

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The trees are reflected in the water.

There appears to be a field of burning oil wells or something off on the horizon.

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Flames shooting from the ground.

I saw a volcano erupting around somewhere.

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I wish I could get fraps to work, but I suspect maybe the keyboard lanaguage change is keeping it from activating.

Success regarding Hipihi - Hipihi is neat.

My earlier trouble entering the Hipihi world despite having adequate hardware and having the Proper Chinese language functions installed turned out to be the need to set the Hipihi shortcut's properties to turn off advanced text features for Hipihi. I don't know why that worked but it did. That idea was given to me by a member of a Hipihi group in Second Life.

With that taken care of, I entered Hipihi. I liked what I could see of it, but it was pretty hard trying to use the program with the entire interface being in a language I have absolutely no knowledge of.

Despite the language limitation, Hipihi was pleasant enough to look at and play with.

The F key toggles flying and not-flying. The WASD keys are forward, left,back and right. Clicking and holding both mouse keys lets you go forward and steer with the mouse. Click both mouse keys, and you can turn with the W and D keys. It may be possible to change the key assignment, but I can’t tell because I can't read the manual.

There’s a lot of fires coming up from the ground in Hipihi. I don’t really know why. I think that, in general, if I were trying to select a place to live or found a colony, I would generally try to pick the places that don’t have big gouts of flame shooting up from the ground, especially if particular spots - such as the one I’m standing on - are prone to make a transition from the non-spouting-flame state to the are-spouting-flame state.

So I clicked on the toolbar at the bottom and produced some dialog boxes as a result, but I couldn’t really tell what to do with no English manual.

Yesterday I met a fellow in Hipihi with a name in Chinese that I don't recall, who spoke a bit of English, enough to connect me someone fluent in English. That turned out to be Zafka, who has a blog at http://slwatch.blogbus.com, which I'd seen some posts at. Zafka taught me some of the interface, like how to use the chat bar, which has a send button and a channel select button. I didn’t make it as far as figuring out how to change my appearance. I can get to the dialogs, but I'd rather wait till I get an English set of instructions before clicking too much on stuff I can't make heads nor tails of.

Time to move on.

I strongly recommend anyone interested in virtual worlds give the Hipihi beta a try.

The Hipihi website is at www.hipihi.com.

English page at http://www.hipihi.com/index_English.html .

Beta registration page in English at: http://www.hipihi.com/index_English.html

Chinese download page at: http://www.hipihi.com/download_client.html

In the anyone wants to help document the interface in English, feel free to do so at the Hipihi wiki at http://hipihi.wiki.zoho.com .

I'm hoping I didn't just give away my first born with the terms of agreement.

I got the beta key but I dont have the language pack and microsoft is telling me i dont have the right edition of windows blah blah blah anyhow I hope this works without the language pak

Anyhow lots of investigating your doing there hope your having fun

Hipihi works on Windows XP. I think you may need to have SP2.

I don't know for a fact that Hipihi won't work on Vista putting Vista in some compatability mode, but I wouldn't count on it.

A post in the Hiphi forums says:

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Which Google claims means:
May newly install the official to reveal the card actuation to try 1.NVIDIA the GeForce2/Quadro2/Geforce3/Geforce4/Quadro4/GeForceFX/QuadroFX/GeForce6/GeForce7 series reveals card ForceWare to actuate 93.71 WHQL official official version For Win2000/XP

Http://drivers.mydrivers.com/drivers/161-64459-NVIDIA-GeForce2-Quadro2-Geforce3-Geforce4-Quadro4-GeForceFX-QuadroFX-GeForce6-GeForce7-ForceWare-93.71-WHQL-For-Win2000-XP

2.NVIDIA the GeForce2/Quadro2/Geforce3/Geforce4/Quadro4/GeForceFX/QuadroFX/GeForce6/GeForce7 series reveals card ForceWare to actuate 93.71 WHQL official official version For WinXP-64

Http://drivers.mydrivers.com/drivers/161-64460-NVIDIA-GeForce2-Quadro2-Geforce3-Geforce4-Quadro4-GeForceFX-QuadroFX-GeForce6-GeForce7-ForceWare-93.71-WHQL-For-WinXP-64

Note: Before downloading please see clearly own reveals the card AND-OPERATION system Whether conforms to the requirement! !

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Well now that that's been made perfectly clear there should be no problem with hardware and driver compatabilty, eh?

I just had a nice time in Hipihi, a group of people, a dozen or so, appeared all at once surrounding me while I was tnding in my Hipihi land. They'd come to say hello and talk to me, one of the few non-Chinese people in the Hipihi beta.

After a few minutes of chat, some in English for my benefit, and some in Chinese, they decided to offer to show me one of the group's home.

Here's a shot of the group after the teleport:

Click the picture to see the full sized version. (I wish they had a bigger thumbnail.)

We chatted for hours, till the time zone difference finally wore them all out one by one.

I believe they'd be quite pleased to have some more SLers from around the globe give the Hipihi beta a spin.

Here's a clickable thumbnail of the gathering viewed from underwater:



And here's an arial view:

Thanks for the info when my eyeballs stop spinning from the first read of it i will concentrate harder second go round

yeah i have the sp2 but i think i downloaded it from windows itself anyhow my disk version is "older" then my present windows version and I download all the chinese files and was all fixed up. It wont take it from the disk and it wont accept the download (says my disk is an older version then whats on my computer) anyhow When I get time I will fart with it some more

Also I think my card is okay? Im trying in my spare time I just don't want to down my entire system trying to get a beta to run so i'm gingerly poking around anyhow I"m jealous when I see all your picks

thanks for keeping us up to date

If you have SP2 that you downloaded, you should be fine - that's what I have. I don't have aWin-XP CD; my refurbed Gateway came with XP loaded. (Technically, I do have one for my daughter's computer, but I can't find it)

I believe the Asian language support needed is available by doing a Windows Update.

Here are some urls regarding Asian language support in Windows XP.

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Enabling_East_Asian_characters


Microsoft's detailed illustrated instructions:
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/handson/user/xpintlsupp.mspx#E4

Robert Y. Eng's illustrated instructions:
http://newton.uor.edu/Departments&Programs/AsianStudiesDept/Language/asianlanguageinstallation_XP.html

A comment in the forums at The Pirate Bay at
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3700947/Files_Necessary_To_Install___East_Asian_Languages___On_Win
describes files said to have the asian language support that are linked to on
http://thepiratebay.org/user/The-Duck
and the url for the torrent is http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3700947/Files_Necessary_To_Install___East_Asian_Languages___On_Win

First thing to do is to check and see the if you already have them installed before sweating how to install them.

My settings look like this:



The above shows that Chinese (Simplified) is enabled for the keyboard.



The above shows that Chinese PRC is selected as the default language for non-Unicode programs.

In the Hipihi shortcut's properties you have to set the Advanced Text Services OFF by checking the checkbox.


For some detailed background on multiple language support in Windows see this link:

http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/handson/dev/winxpintl.mspx

Nah this is China, you aggreed not to have a second one though

Do you have your own Forum there, yet

I don't have my own forum in the Hipihi official company forums, although I do have a thread in there: http://forums.hipihi.com/main-read-7-ff80808113634531011383964b885f4a.html



I think my posts regarding the need for English documentation may have had some effect on SL user Jolly Heron, who started a forum with a section on Hipihi at http://www.ideashape.cn , which now has a bug report section for non-Chinese-language users that is looked at by multi-lingual Hipihi staff members.

Then too, there's my blog at http://suezannecbackerville.wordpress.com, which has some useful information on Hipihi.

And a post at slexchange, one at
http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=66700 ;
and a post in the sluniverse forums, at
http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/showthread.php?t=93 .

Some comments in various blogs, like Raph Koster's blog:
http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/06/06/some-hipihi-details/

There's also the Hipihi Google group and the Hipihi wiki at zoho.com that I made.

So, no, I don't have a forum in the Hipihi forum, but despite that, I don't seem to have a shortage of places to post things at.

Hipihi skin and clothing templates are available at

http://www.hipihi.com/download/avatar_templet.zip