Outside looking in Pt 2

If you’re new to virtual worlds, the concept might be at the same time alien and strangely familiar to you. In fact, as William Gibson stated in ‘no maps for these territories‘, the concept of Cyberspace was revolutionary at the time he coined it, but still the people involved with computers at the time were aware that there was a space behind the screen.

The biggest, and most well known approach at creating virtual worlds is Second Life (abbreviated as SL). For everyone who is not familiar with SL, the Open Simulator project and OSGrid evolved from that virtual world, and is an attempt at making an open source, freely available and public virtual world for everyone, while also incorporating technologies which Linden Labs (creators of SL) did not, or would not incorporate into SL.

I won’t be writing an introduction to SL here, as there are plenty around for anyone who’s interested in that particular virtual world, but as Open Simulator and SL share some common traits, a lot of the explanations in this tutorial can be applied to SL as well, and vice versa.

As with all things, you first need to register an account on the OSGrid site. You can pick any name you like as long as it’s not being taken yet by someone else (all the John Smiths in this world will have to find some kind of agreement some time). Afterwards, you will need to download a software to access the ‘grid’, as virtual worlds are referred to. This software is called a ‘viewer’ and the official viewer for OSGrid is the Hippo Viewer. A number of other viewers are available, some with extra features. Among these, Imprudence and Meerkat both support a build-in solution to log into other grids than SL.

The virtual representation of yourself is an avatar. That’s a familiar concept which has been used on the net for decades now. To log in, you’ll need to enter your avatar name and password, and you’ll start with a default avatar, which on OSGrid is quite an ugly apparition commonly known as ‘Ruth’. You don’t need to stay like that (unless you want to, of course), as the viewer software already provides you with some tools to edit and customize your avatar.

For this, you have to understand that the appearance of your avatar consists of six elements: Your shape, your skin, your eyes, your hair, your clothes and your attachments. Before you can edit any of these, you’ll need to create them in your inventory. Open the inventory by clicking on its button on the bottom right of your screen, then right-click on the folder you like to create your body part or clothing in, and select the element you’d like to create. (Attachments need to be created in-world first.) We’ll start with the shape, as it is easiest to edit, and will define your look more than anything else. Therefore, open your inventory, right-click on the ‘body parts’ folder and select ‘new body parts -> new shape’. You’ll see a new object in your inventory called ‘new shape’ and you can now rename it to anything you like. After you gave it a name, right-click on the shape and select ‘wear’, which will make your avatar change to the new shape.¹ Now, you can right-click on your avatar, and choose ‘appearance’.

The viewer will change into the appearance editor, with the shape already selected for editing. It consists of 9 parts (Body, Head, Eyes, Ears, Nose, Mouth, Chin, Torso and Legs) which in turn have several parameters that can easily be changed using sliders. Just play a little with them to see what they do, the changes will be shown instantly on your avatar. As ruth is female by default, you might want to change your avatar to a male one, which can easily be done clicking on the according gender in the shape editor. By clicking and holding on your avatar, you can move the camera around it to see yourself from all sides and inspect the changes closely. Once you’re satisfied with the result, click on ‘save’ and close the editor window again.

The same way you edited your shape, you can edit your hair, skin and eyes. You will, however, find that the default editing of these parts is quite limited and doesn’t look all that good. That’s why there is the ability to apply a custom texture to all of these three parts (as well as to the clothes) which can be much more detailed and diverse than you can achieve using the editor.² For now, it is sufficient to say that there are many pre-made skins, shapes, eyes, hair and clothes already available in-world³, usually for free. In OSGrid, the the Wright Plaza and the region Samsara hold a large collection of freebies for any occasion, so we should go there first.⁴ Click on the ‘map’ button on the bottom of the screen (not the mini-map button though) to open up the world map, then type the region name you like to go to in the search field (in this case, ‘Samsara’ or ‘Wright Plaza’). Once it found the region, click the ‘teleport’ button on the map window to go there.

Teleporting is the usual mode of travel in the metaverse. Since not all places are connected to be accessed by walking, you’ll need to teleport your way around, usually using the map or ‘landmarks’.⁵ Once you reach your destination, walk around a little to see what’s there. It might take a while until you can see all the objects around you, depending on the speed of your internet connection.⁶

There are different methods of getting objects that are made available in-world. The most common of these is to ‘buy’ them, as many are set for ‘sale’ at a price of 0. Also, objects can be made available for anyone to copy, or they can be scripted to give you a copy of themselves of their inventories by clicking on them. The modes of aquiring vary from object to object, as the creators / owners of them use different methods to give them away. Usually you can first try left-clicking an object to see if that will give you any result. If the object is scripted to give you a copy, you should see a window pop up in the upper right corner of your screen, saying that the object offers you inventory and asking you to either accept or decline the offer. Once you accept, the offered items will show in your inventory. If this doesn’t work, then right-click the object and try to ‘buy’ it, or, if the ‘buy’ button is greyed out, click on ‘more’ and see if you can ‘take a copy’. If neither of these work, the object probably is not available to be taken.

All the clothes, skins, shapes, hair and eyes you acquired can be ‘worn’ by your avatar the same way you wore the shape you made for yourself. Just right-click on them in your inventory and chose ‘wear’. Avatar attachments (such as jewelry, skirts, hats, belts, shoes and prim-hair) can also be worn that way, and will appear on the according part of your avatar, if done right.

After your first shopping experience at Samsara, your avatar should look much nicer and you should be ready to explore the crazy diversity that is OSGrid.

(Deutsche Version)

1. As the new shape is the same as the default one you already have, you won’t see a difference, though. [↩]
2. Explaining how to make these textures would call for a whole new post – or rather a series of posts, though. [↩]
3. the term in-world means inside the according grid [↩]
4. I’m offering some of my own creations for free on my own region Ever 01 as well. [↩]
5. Think of landmarks as browser bookmarks for the virtual world. A landmark points to a certain location inside a grid and will teleport you there instantly if you chose to do so. [↩]
6. This process is known as ‘rezzing’, a term used for anything that’s becoming visible in-world, either by loading up when you enter a new area, or by appearing when someone takes an object out of their inventory and places it somewhere in-world. [↩]