An alternative?

That's the worst ASCII art ever!

The email I've received from Hipihi has all been in normal english characters.

Hipihi has added an English language forum in it's forums. I believe you will have to have managed to register properly and be able to remember the name you used and the password you created in order to use the forums. The email address for support is [email]support@hipihi.com[/email].

Once you go to http://forums.hipihi.com , there's a link over on the left for "Overseas Zone" .

The language settings shown on my blog's Hipihi page at http://suezannecbaskerville.wordpress.com/hipihi/include pictures of what your settings should look like. These settings worked from the first time I had them all set properly.

Hipihi is currently in beta. That means it is guaranteed not to work properly. If you are expecting a finished product, you shouldn't do beta testing; it will just aggravate you, and life provides enough aggravation from sources beyond your control, so there's no need to go to special pains to add to one's supply of aggravation.

There's no economy in Hipihi yet, and no scripted objects, and there's only a handful of people inworld at any given time, so if you don't find being in at the start of a project and being able to chat with the company's employees and your fellow humans in China and are only looking for a finished system with a bustling economy and sophisticated object behavior, then you might want to wait for the finished product to be opened up before exploring.

If you think that using the interface WITH the incomplete interface is challenging, well... it was REALLY challenging without it , but I managed to buy some land and edit a prim or two using trial and error. Had I been systematic and unlazy enough to write down what I discovered as I went it would have been much easier, but I relied on my memory. Bad mistake. Relying on my memory, especially my short term memory, is not a good idea.

There's a user operated Hipihi forum for those who don't speak Chinese at www.ideashape.com, operated by SL user Jolly Heron.

I missed the beta period at SL, sadly. I don't plan to miss any more similar chances.

i managed to get registered with a username but I couldn't log in for some reason. I can't understand what the error message says when I log in.... bad password? bad username? I don't know... maybe I'll try later when things are more streamlined for English users.

Installing the language pack now let's me see Japanese text in SL. I can see people chatting in Japanese too.. There seems to be a lot more Japanese in SL than I ever noticed before.

Yeah I cant get on either. I was really looking fwd to testing it out.

Ill have to inquire about my issues over at the english forum when I get some spare time.