Dana in Geeksville

Becoming a Land and Home Owner in Second Life

If only buying land and a home in the real world were so easy!

This weekend I became the owner of a parcel of beautiful land in Second Life. Like the real world, land in SL can come empty or come terraformed with hills, grass, sand, or some other kind of terrain. For now I didn't want to start completely from scratch, so I bought a little over 4,000 square meters of terraformed property. This ocean front property came with a few trees and bushes, some flowers, and a lovely waterfall and creek. Hills separate me from one neighbor, and bushes and land slopes separates me from the other.

As in the real world, I paid an upfront fee, but in Linden dollars, and a small amount at that. But also like the real world, that is not the end of the fees. Each month I also pay a monthly tier to the SIM, or region owner, kind of like paying property taxes. Region owners have to pay monthly fees to Linden for use of the region itself  within Second Life.

While it may seem crazy to some to buy virtual land in a virtual world, there is real money being made by business in Second Life, and there are people who buy many regions, parcel the land, and rent or sell those parcels, very similarly to how it's done in the real world.  But here in Second Life you don't have to sign 6,200 hundred pages of contract, and you can be a whole lot more creative.

But what good is property without stuff on it. I'm eager to learn to build, and I am going through the Linden Scripting Language (LSL), which is used in Second Life to breathe life into objects, such as animating an animal, creating different poses for an avatar, or simply making a boat sail over the water. It's interesting to see that the Linden Scripting Language looks a lot like the Java programming language.

For now though, while I'm learning LSL, I decided to buy some things for my land to make it feel more like home. The first priority was to purchase meditation cushions so my avatar could meditate by the waterfall and ocean, and a Buddha statue. The Buddha I found is neat because it comes with a  meditation seat already.

I discovered that when you unpack objects from their boxes, they don't know where you want to sit or how they should be positioned. But I soon discovered that SL comes with some really great tools for positioning, rotating, and editing objects. Within a few minutes, I was working with the edit tool without any problem, and I set the my Buddha fountain exactly where and how I wanted it. The meditation cushions worked the same way. After I unpacked them, I position them and rotated them so I would be sitting in the right direction.

Next, naturally, I decided my home in SL needed a house. House shopping was interesting and fun. Eventually I want to build a home of my own from scratch, but I spent several hours house shopping. One of the interesting thing right away was that houses are made up of  more than one primitive, using as many as hundreds of prims. Since every property is allowed only so many prims on it, this is number to watch.

Once I had my house bought, unpacked, and in place, I felt some landscaping was in order. So, off I went to shop for garden flowers, some bushes, and a few trees. And the fun is only just beginning. I have plenty of land still to get creative with, and I have yet to furnish the inside of my house. But I have a nice start on it so far.

Now my dog and avatar have a plce they can call home.

Posted at 09:33AM Sep 22, 2008 by dananourie in Virtual Worlds  |  Comments[1]