What Now? Learning to Build

There have been quite a few people I have talked to who claim to have simply lots interest in SL at some point. “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of Second Life. I logged in and looked around a bit, but there didn’t seem to be anything going on.” They initially had created an account, logged in and customized their avatar, walked around and explored a bit and talked to a few people and a few have complained they had been chased around by some crazy man wearing no pants (or some similar story of griefing). It is at about this time where they seem to begin asking themselves if if there is anything really going on there… where are all the people… and what is there to really do in here.

Well, the one thing SL is not is a game – in the sense that it isn’t a game unless you make it one. In fact, it isn’t really anything without its residents making it something and it is no surprise that some loose interest for this very reason. At some point you actually have to participate and contribute because it certainly isn’t a platform that can just feed people entertainment. It is simply too difficult to find things on the grid for that to be possible.

So what now? Well, maybe you would like to try your hand at building but aren’t sure where to start. There are three resources in-world I can think of off the top of my head that are great for learning building basics, from prims to textures to particle scripting. You can find these primers at the following slurls:

The Ivory Tower of Prims: The Ivory Tower is a great place to learn about how you can manipulate prims and even covers flexiprims.
Texture Tutorials By Robin: Robin’s tutorial explains manipulating textures on prims. The most useful thing I learned here is how to apply different textures to various faces of a prim.
The Particle Lab: Particle scripting can add interesting effects to your builds and there is a lot you can do with them. The Particle Lab explains how to customize a particle script and gives lots of examples that you can copy and play with yourself.
The Bromley College Scripting Tutorial: A self-paced introduction to Linden Scripting Language (LSL) – the native language of SL.

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