Newbie needs advice & help

Hi everyone!

I hope I'm putting this in the right place. ???

I've been lurking in SL on a free account for a few days now. I beta-tested a 3D virtual environment a few years ago, and thought it was terrific -I thought the whole web would move that way. Then, I moved to a home out in the country -or the sticks, depending on how you look at it. Anyway, there's been nothing but very slow dialup available here for years, and I haven't been able to try any of the 3D applications because they just wouldn't load.

Now, broadband is officially here. I won't have it for a few more weeks, but they have application & I'm just waiting for them to come out and plug me in.

Meanwhile, I've signed up for a free SL account, and have been buzzing around looking and learning. So far, I like what I see, and can't wait to see more of it. I can connect -even at 14.4, but it's torturously slow, and sometimes even after it looks loaded I can still can't respond to anyone who talks to me or move away from the spot I'm standing on.

Anyway, I was looking around & found this forum. so I'm hoping I can just ask questions here, and get answers and advice without having to try to login to SL anymore. When my broadband arrives, it will be sooo much better.


Okay...about me. I'm DragonLady, and I own a regular website with a busy forum. I've been telling my members about SL -most of them had never even heard of it. And telling them that I hope that once I'm able to use it properly to buy a bit of land, and build a 3D counterpart to the current site.

But, I'm not sure how I'd go about doing that. I mean, I've read about buying land and building buildings and scripting and buying and selling stuff...but the nuts and bolts of it still elude me.

For instance: I want to buy land that can be configured to match my intended audience. I probably need to start out very small, because the budget is currently non-existent, and I don't know how much real interest there will be. A lot of people who have heard of SL only hear about all the sex and violence and such -definetly NOT what my group is interested in. So a small place to begin.... But, I may need to expand it later. Expand by a lot, if the growth of my current site is any indication (1500 + this year). It needs to be in a PG area, and in a good location to be found my people who are interested, and passers-by who may not think of looking. I'd love to just buy an island, and build as needed, but money-wise that's out of the question.

So, how do I go about finding land that will suit me? I don't want to spend a month checking out every available parcel, and I'm too green to know what I'm looking at or for. With a regular website, I build it to suit myself, with no concerns about who the neighbors are...but here, that would be a different story.

Once I have a suitable plot, how do I build the buildings themselves? I saw freebies at the freebie store on Help Island -a couple of houses. And they're nice. But I would want something more like a convention center to start with, with a central meeting area, a "classroom" of sorts, an outdoor garden-ish area, and maybe a small shop for the members to swap goods in. This would be a subscription-type place, with maybe a small commission charged for sales and such. I think I could also find people who would teach classes or host group meetings of different kinds.

I'm competent in HTML and a little bit of PHP, MySQL and such. But the Linden Scripting Language is still greek to me. When I try to read the notecards in SL, I get completly lost. I need to be able to print them, then kick back on my sofa in my bunny slippers and read and re-read them 'till I start to get it. But I can't figure out how to print stuff in SL.

Okay; I'll stop here for now. I'm really hoping to find some help with these things, so I'll have a clue what I'm doing when I get the broadband, and can look around. What I'm hoping for may simply not be practical right now, but if it is, I'd sure like to give it a try.

BTW -nice site, and nice forum, too. I've enjoyed reading the many view points I've seen here so far.

Everyone's suggestions are going to be different and some will agree or disagree, for what it's worth, these are my suggestions:

* You are in luck, PG land tends to be a little cheaper than Mature. Since, as you said, you do need to be concerned about neighbors and location, take your time. Visit numerous places rather than just buying the first one you see. If you spend time looking and miss out on a purchase, it's not a big deal, something else that's right for you will come along. When you visit a plot that's for sale, take a little time to explore the sim and see what kinds of things your neighbors are up to and whether you'll feel like you fit in. Try to avoid sims that have large casinos or business with lots of camping chairs.



But I'd say that's exactly what you want to do, spend a month or more until you find what you really want and you'll have fewer disapointments. Think of it like buying a house in RL. You wouldn't buy the first house you see, you would explore the housing market and concentrate on getting the best deal you can.

* Building - You definately want to learn first before just setting up a place. Find some sandboxes and spend some time building different things, learn to texture walls, build columns, whatever... give yourself a clearer idea of what kind of structure you want on your land by building it in sandboxes while you're still waiting for that ideal plot.

* Also, be aware of how much land you'll need to house the amount of prims you'll need. Practicing your building in advance will help you with that.

* Don't worry about scripting and stuff just yet, concentrate on learning to build what it is you want, meet one goal at a time. Once you have your land and your building and your friends joining you, then you can make a new goal to learn something else.

* Unfortunately there is no way to print anything directly from SL. But you can easily just copy text from the notecard and paste it into a word program and be able to print it out that way.

Good luck and have fun!

Hi and welcome to SL .

*crosses fingers hoping you'll get your broadband soon so you can enjoy SL a whole lot more*

How much land you'll need is both a factor of what you all want to do with your land, and how many prims (basic building blocks) you'll need. I tried several times to find a good way to explain prims but keep backspacing, hopefully someone else will come up with a beter way . The best analogy I can think of is a bunch lego blocks you'd put together to actually make something.

There are classes in-world that teach you basic building skills, and the Ivory Tower is a great self-learning spot for building as well. You could either go with pre-fabs, or get another resident to build what you want for you, but those two options would cost money, or you can have a go at the basic structure yourself as well, and then just buy bits of furniture as you need them.

As far as owning land goes, you have the option to either go with mainland, in which case you pay both a fee for premium (which lets you own land) and a fee that's dependant on how much land you actually own. On top of that you actually have the buy the land as well first, so all of that could add up.

You have the option of simply renting from another resident as well. Depending on the sim owner, you can just get a parcel and you pay rent weekly/monthly, but there isn't necessarily a need to buy the land in this case. I'm not entirely sure if there are many/any PG rentals out there , but on a private sim I wouldn't think you would really need to worry about having neighbours that are offering or doing something that might offend/disturb you or your visitors.

In either case, you do have to go look for land yourself which could take a bit of digging if you're looking for a good deal, or you could just grab the first thing you find that fits your budget as well.

As for printing notecards, you can select all of the text in the notecard, then use Ctl-C to copy, switch to whatever proggie you normally use, and then paste the text there and print it that way. There is no way to directly print something from SL itself.

If you didn't stumble onto it yet, the scripting wiki (http://www.lslwiki.net) is a great reference or good way to browse around and get an idea of what's possible .

I'm half asleep, so I probably missed a whole lot of things but hopefully it's a good starting point and someone else will touch on the other topics.

[What's up with the forum telling me I have too many smileys? ]

Thank-you, Allana Dion, and Kitty for your quick replies. But I have a question about this:



I have no idea how to guess or determine how many "prims" I would need. I gather these are the building blocks, and I understand the basic blocks link together -I've played with them a little bit in the sandbox.

But once they're linked, are they still seperate pieces? Or do they count as more pieces if they're bigger? Or, does the total include all the little objects and stuff like trees, textures, art on the walls...avatars?

Is there a place with some information such as :

What does the average small shop (1500 items) require? How many square meters? How many prims? How much money to set up? etc...etc?


(( edite 'cause I got the name wrong. )))

DragonLady welcome - good to see someone using the forums before getting really really stuck in SL . Prims are an important concept so lets have a go (as I see it anyway). Prim means primitive because it is the basic building block in all SL objects (except AVs but lets leave them out).

A Prim might be a cube a sphere a slab a torus or - well one of those sorts of blocks - you can decorate a prim, with a texture, each face of a prim can have a different "picture" on it, or be blank or be transparent (see through). Prims have lots of properties like "walk through" or "physical" that can react to wind or pushing or floating on water - but I want to concentrate a bit more on just why you need to know about them at all - the detail comes later (possibly much much later).

Now to build an object, lets say its a simple house, you need to "create" prims (a facility we all have in SL) so if we have just 4 walls and a flat roof (come on lets keep it easy) and its going to be small (less than 10 metres in any direction) - we need to use 5 prims to build it.

One rectangular slab prim for each wall (thats 4 prims) and one rectangular slab for the roof (thats 1 more prim) - so a boxy house with no door no windows and no floor can sit on our plot and take up 5 prims - it will stay at 5 prims forever, we can paint the house, make transparent windows - for example it still stays as 5 prims.

A "normal" house, like the simple free ones might be around 40 prims - a slightly bigger house, say 2 stories and well laid out might be 60 - 90 prims - a biggish pretty house well laid out with rooms inside might be 200 - 300 prims.

Now.......................

You get allowed to use prims in any area based upon the amount of land you own. This is done on a region by region (or Sim by sim, if you prefer) basis.

Most people start out with a 512 sq metre plot - that lets you have 117 prims (I think - sorry not on-line - but its about that). Now I have a dragon statue just taller than me (very pretty - no not me....) that is 190 prims. I could not put him on that 512 plot because the prim allowance is just 117.

A 512 sq m plot will cost about L$7000 which is roughly US $25.

So you see - it can get a bit expensive - "big" projects can get very expensive. Linden do an educational discount on whole islands for the very reason to help educationalists get started.

When you get your broadband, and I am glad you are coming in to SL, do start to get a real feel for SL the cost and the return. Lots of us do have lots of land to build big projects, but it is moderately expensive. I have exhausted myself now, but please do ask all your questions here - always lots of helpful people around.

Hi DragonLady and welcome. I don't think anyone's mentioned land tier yet if you haven't already read up on it in the knowledgebase.
The first 512sm plot costs just the purchase price but increaisng your land introduces what is called tier, like rent in addition to the purchase price so for 1024sm you will be paying 5$US a month if memory serves me. There are bands at which the tier goes up so large land ownership costs more on the monthly tier.
Just my 2 cents worth and good luck

One way of working out how much land you might need is to go round and look at similar places. Several of the places that run classes are broadly similar to what you are describing, go and see how much space they are using. Remember that if you have a garden, you can use relatively few prims to make quite a large area look nice, and the spare prim allowance from that area can go to give you more prims for constructing your buildings.

Also, basic building is much easier than it looks, or at least I found it was. If you want something spectacular, or perfect construction, that takes a lot of skill and practice. But if you can live with a few minor flaws here and there, you might be able to build it yourself a lot quicker than you think.

If you wander round the various freebie warehouses you can pick up a huge range of buildings for nothing. You might find they are just what you need, or if not, taking them apart and seeing how they are made is a good way to learn how to do it yourself.

Finally, the best builders/designers charge quite a lot of money, and rightly so. You might find a relative novice who's interested in gaining experience (like me - shameless plug) would be willing to do something for much less. Obviously you won't get the best build, but if money's an issue it might be an option.

You mention 1500 items. Is this the amount of items that you would plan on selling?

Whether it is or isn't, there are ways to display all of these to prospective buyers withiout actually having them on display...and taking up valuableprims.

There are temporary rezzing displays that will allow the buyer to "flip" through products and view them to decide if they want to buy them or not.
All your products (or different product groups) are just loaded into the rezzer and when selected, the individual item will "materialize"

By SL standards, 1500 items is not a small shop. There is no way you could display that many items in a small store -- you'd quickly run out of prims. So you're going to need a vendor system that displays goods as needed. But even so, you're going to need a large number of vendors to display that many items.

The kind of final build that you envision really would require an island or a very large mainland parcel. So you need to figure out just how much land and land tier you can afford.

As a measure of comparison, I hold 8,192sm and pay $40/mo tier for that amount of land. There's enough room for 2 houses, a large pond, small business kiosk and a large garden, plus some open land. And I still have plenty of prims left over.

So, if you can afford the land (US$400-500) and the tier (US$40/mo), then 8K or so of land will provide enough canvas for your plans, or at least the beginning of them.

On the other hand, if those expenses are too high, you're going to be looking at smaller plots and scaling down your expectations.

Thank-you, everyone, for your replies.



Thanks for the comparison. That does sound like it would probably be enough for me. I do plan to start smaller, as I have no way of knowing how much interest there would be. I don't want to invest anything more than I'm willing to lose outright, although I don't think it's completely a gamble. I do believe some people will visit, if I can set it up so they feel they will be safe & among friends. From there, it may grow, or it may just wither -no way to know in advance.



I will look into that, thank-you. It would be nice if prospective sellers could just open a virtual suitcase & show off samples. Since these would be real-world items arriving through the real world post office, it might not be neccesary to create or upload very many.

I was thinking last night that the notecard system might be good enough, if they can be made to display images and text. Since they can be copied and printed, a prospective customer could collect several, then make choices whenever it was convenient.

There are also external systems to help you sell your wares - SL Exchange, SL Boutique, etc. You can have a smaller storefront that will show off your items, and point people through notecards and signs to check you out on SL Exchange, etc. There are some people who do more business on SLX or SLB than they do in-world.

Btw, when you're finally able to walk around a little more freely inworld, don't hesitate to drop by my land to get a sense of just how much space you get for 8k sm. You can walk from one end to the other, and see what kind of building I've done on that space.

Just IM either Regan Turas or Beebo Brink for a tour. One or the other of us is on most evenings and weekends.

Hi Dragonlady, welcome to SL and I hope it's a good start for you. When I was a newbie, I made the mistake of paying too much for land, both PG and M. So, my advice to you is take your time ! The phrase to remember is, as cheap as possible. Define in your mind exactly what you "must" have, and then define what you would like to have. Look for your "must have" parcels of land. Compare prices and prices per square meter. Do not rush at all. I guarantee you, if you rush into a land purchase, you will pay too much unless some kindly SL resident practically gives it to you.

Best of luck to you !

Steve

How exciting to be new! Do get as much free stuff as you can and do take the classes...NCI has good building classes. And do wander and look around a lot before you make any decisions.

One thing to keep in mind I think is to not build like RL; in SL the physics are different and the spaces can be different...for example, it helps if your buildings are open so people can fly in and out..use teleporting, not stairs,etc...don't use too much detail that can cause lag. And you can build everything floating 300-600 meters in the sky if you want!

For land, avoid areas that show a concentration of people already...sims can only hold about 30 people at a time before getting laggy so if there is already something drawing people, it can cramp your style.

Have fun...I had great fun being new and I envy you..enjoy!