SecondLife - How To Make Money In Second Life

During a recent office hour, a number of fine folks joined me on an excursion to a Region that gets much deserved praise, but that most of us had only seen in pictures.  And I must insist… although they give you a taste of the neon adventure that awaits, pictures do little justice to Spiral Walcher’s work,

You start your voyage in a realistic environment and perpetual darkness, I suspect as contrast to what comes next.  Following the glowing footsteps leads you to the start of your magical journey (or a souvenir shop depending on which way you go) where it’s down the acid-trippy rabbit hole you go!  Briefly separated as we plunge one at a time through the electric entryway, we arrive at the start of what turns out to be a familiar preface - the traditional amusement park lineup where you wait for the next car to arrive.  Or in this case, the next teacup.

While waiting for our whole crew’s descent, a couple rushes by us like excited kids who just finished their first go and are running back to the start for a second, while a more reserved couple stands by, hesitant about which might be the appropriate vehicle…are they simply Friends or is a Couples teacup more appropriate?  Leaving the two to giggle and flirt a bit, and hoping they make the right decision, we split up by fours and cup by cup are immersed in the Glow!

GLOW, a feature enabled in Second Life specifically by your GPU, really powers the wow factor in the Tunnel of Light.  It’s a fun ride regardless, but having Glow turns this digital landscape into a neon nirvana.  So be sure you’ve enabled Shaders to really get the most out of the experience.

In our travels we float on electrical currents via bone china under monster dragonflies and past giant trees.  At a distance the fine mesh of neon lines and their fog of Glow (see above) creates a haze that acts as a kind of atmospheric perspective and keeps foreground items like your cup full of friends in sharp contrast.  It’s an emmersive effect unlike any other I’ve seen in SL.

The ride proceeds at a pace that you can choose (fast or slow) and, should you want to take a bit of a break, allows you to pull off the path to let other teacups float by while you pause.  With this group of chatty office hour regulars, the slow ride is a good opportunity to goof around a bit and enjoy not just the charged scenery, but good company.

A bit later I had a chance to talk to Spiral about how he creates the patterns of light, and was surprised to find that I had guessed all wrong…

Blue Linden: hmmm so no sculpties involved?
Spiral Walcher: nope
Spiral Walcher: i very, very, VERY rarely use sculpties
Blue Linden: i just assumed
Spiral Walcher: most do
Blue Linden: they seem to trace intricate shapes
Spiral Walcher: most people also think all of my stuff is particles.  lol
Blue Linden: hehe that’s not too surprising
Blue Linden: since i discovered SL it’s become easy for me to see the difference when games use one or the other
Spiral Walcher: yeah
Blue Linden: i don’t know if I would have made the distinction before
Blue Linden: now I spend time playing games and saying “how can I do that in SL”
Spiral Walcher: heh.  same here
Spiral Walcher: Crysis gave me a lot to figure out with glow here
Blue Linden: oh really
Spiral Walcher: yeah.  they use a lot of glow highlights in the alien section of Crysis
Blue Linden: oh that’s right
Blue Linden: that’s a pretty game alright
Spiral Walcher: pretty?
Spiral Walcher: just pretty?
Spiral Walcher: it’s damned sexy
Blue Linden: lol
Blue Linden: okay, it’s hardware bendingly pretty

I find it reassuring that despite my 6 years of bending prims every which way, of all the conversations about how sculpties make regular prims obsolete, and of all the amazing things I’ve seen inworld…that someone can come along and make something simple yet elegant that really inspires.

Rezzable’s Tunnel Of Light page
Tunnel Of Light machinima by rockerfaerie

Special thanks to the cool people, and nekos, and hellhounds, and robots who joined me on this Eureka Field Trip.  Good times!

As anyone who’s spent time inworld knows, Second Life is a truly global community. There are Second Life Residents in every country (even Antarctica!) in the world with very few exceptions, and continuing our international expansion is a key priority for Linden Lab. Of course, an essential component of this is localizing the experience for Residents around the world and this requires translating, editing and testing the Viewer, web pages, Knowledge Base, and other materials for non-English speakers.

And today, we’ve passed another milestone, and launched the new French website http://fr.secondlife.com.   With newly translated account tools, registration, land portal, “What-Is” section and many other pages, the new French site provides a more complete Second Life experience for our French Residents. We have a long way to go with the French website but we believe that we have a good start.

Community Localization:

As we blogged several months ago, our localization work is being done by an incredible group of Resident volunteers alongside a core team of Lindens. These Residents’ expert knowledge of Second Life, their enthusiasm and wonderful collaboration has resulted in an impressive level of translation and editorial quality.

Since our last posting, the program has grown significantly in the number of projects, the number of participants, and the level of collaboration, and we wanted to take a moment to thank the volunteers as well as update you all about the progress made so far and what’s coming next.

Localized Viewers:

As promised, the viewer is now available in ten languages. It has been translated into German, French, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Hungarian, Simplified Chinese and Polish. It is still partially translated into Spanish and Danish. Next version (1.23) will feature fully revamped Spanish, further improved Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese and Danish. We will also add the following languages: Italian, Dutch, Russian, and Ukrainian. We may be able to squeeze one more (fingers crossed).

Over the past months, the localized French, German and Japanese Viewers have all been improved through collaborative glossary compiling, translations, internationalization and localization testing completed by Resident volunteers.

A similar effort is now under way for Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, Dutch and Danish where our residents have collaboratively developed glossaries, determining style and register guidelines. They are now collaboratively translating and editing viewer strings.

In the meantime, our Engineering Team is working hard to fix the internationalization issues that prevent full localization of the viewer.

Other Localizations:

Thanks to the collaborative work of our wonderful community translators, editors and testers, the registration section of our website is now available in nine languages: German, French, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Italian and Dutch.

The Knowledge Base now has between 40 and 100 articles in German, French and Japanese, and this number is growing daily.

Thousands of pages of the Second Life Wiki have been translated by our amazing Wiki scribes.

The Linden Prize is another great example of the great work of the Localization Team. To ensure that non-English speaking Residents could submit their projects for consideration, a group of 41 dedicated inworld translators localized the application into 12 languages.

So what’s next?

More localization! We currently have 22 separate Community Localization Projects aimed at enhancing the Second Life experience for non-English speakers, and over 200 approved community translators/editors/testers to help move these forward. We’re continuing to translate the viewer, Knowledge Base, Second Life Wiki and other online materials.

We also want to further develop our international testing. Many internationalization and localization bugs have already been identified and fixed with the help of the community. Our volunteers helped us build Localization Central Island, where we plan to conduct a lot more collaborative tests.

We’ve made good progress so far, again, thanks in large part to our amazing community, but there’s more to do. If you’d like to join us in these fun projects or just learn more about what the localization team is working on, check out the Localization Portal.

Our Localization Team (Lindens and Community) look forward to meeting you inworld!

And last but not least, thanks!

The progress we’ve made so far would not have been possible and the work ahead would be daunting, were it not for the spectacular team of Resident volunteers, and we’d like to use this opportunity to express our LOVE!

In particular, the localized Viewers soon to be released have been made possible thanks to generous full-xml submissions from Resident volunteers like Ian Kas, Jerek Dejavu, Geneko Nemeth, Princess Niven, Maciek Marksman, Malwina Dollinger, Magnus Balczo, Vixen Heron, and Tue Torok.  We have also been impressed by the extraordinary collaboration of Spanish, Dutch, and Italian language groups, and Residents like Biancaluce Robbiani, Gaia Rossini, Ghost Ulich, Ringo Tuxing, Salahzar Stenvaag, Sergen Davies, Lisa Lowe, PF Shan, Bulli Schumann, Lisa Lowe, and many others.

For the improvement of the localized German, French, and Japanese Viewers, our deepest thanks go to Zai Lynch, Lore Lamont, Tom Anetine, Lara Shepherd, Torben Trautman, Thibaud Merlin, Audrey Bisiani, Blaise Timtam, Tupper Weir, Rafale Kamachi, Gally Young, Ourasi Ferraris, Laurent Bechir, Phli Foxchase, Kire Laasonen, SakuraNoel Fayray, and Alissa Sabre.

The growing number of translated Knowledge Base articles is thanks to the efforts of those mentioned above, as well as the work of Nock Forager, Pipinpa Allen, Hidenori Glushenko, Asuka Neely, CharlieA Nightfire, and Clione Clary.