WHY CHOOSE US?

Far too often money is thrown at Second Life® projects without a proper understanding of how this virtual world actually works. This usually results in sterile environments with no visitors. A presence in Second Life® is not like a website. It needs to be designed and maintained to provide an ongoing interest to its millions of residents. Sim Development Services is the Harmsworth Consultancy's Second Life® wing.

BEST VIEWED AT 1280 x 800 SCREEN RESOLUTION

OUR BUILDING SERVICES IN Second Life® 

A three year learning curve has meant that we are now proficient builders in Second Life®. You cannot create a simulation such as the Virtual Scottish Highlands without proven expertise and experience. We don't work totally alone however and have a number of in-world assistants.

The building process itself is relatively straight forward. One of our in-world helpers, Poily, demonstrates in the sequence below.

Amazingly everything in Second Life® begins its existence as plywood as that is the basic building material. Once you have created a simple plywood cube you then have countless options as to what to do with it. If you are building a complex vehicle like a car or aeroplane then you will need to change the characteristics of the material. The characteristics of plywood would not be suitable for, say, a tyre of a car. It would be possible for them to look identical by adding the appropriate texture, but a plywood cube would be unlikely to have any "grip" when a vehicle with such tyres was turning a corner.

When editing any item you can change its behaviour by designating it as rubber, metal, glass or leaving it in its wooden form, which is what most people do unless they are building something which has to interact with the Second Life® physics engine. The characteristic of a wall in Second Life® does not need to be brick or stone in order to appear to be brick or stone, nor in order to be used to build a twenty storey skyscraper. Second Life® physics do not crush such structures.

Poily has considerable powers over her half metre wooden cube. As the sequence continues she increases its facing dimensions to ten metres by ten metres and reduces its thickness to just 0.1 metres so now it is a ten metre square sheet of ply wood.

Textures can be changed on an object too. How about changing that plywood appearance to that of bricks? From her library of textures she has chosen a red brick.

Now, however, the bricks are vastly out of scale so she repeats the texture several times over to make them more realistic for a ten metre square wall.

Textures can be more complex. Using image manipulation programs quite involved textures can be created. Why not produce a shop front with transparent windows and a signboard?

Poily now selects that image to replace the bricks, but of course the repeats are now superfluous and so she returns the texture to just one image on the board.

Note how parts of the board are transparent including the area above the roof and around the chimney for realism.

The build is, of course, somewhat more involved than we have shown here and requires skills in many aspects of Second Life® and image manipulation. Again this can be learned. We started from scratch less than two years ago. If you do not have the time or resources to dedicate someone to your Second Life® project then we are the obvious solution. We can also train your staff in the management of your Second Life® environment if that is your preferred option. You can still buy in our expertise if you encounter a problem.

A recent project was the creation of Aldourie Castle as a networking centre in the Virtual Scottish Highlands. This image shows the end result.