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Permalink Reply by Aaliyah on October 22, 2007 at 7:54am

While I am not versed in sim development per se, I do have experience with smaller building projects, in which I contracted out for builders (Builder's Eden is a great resource group to find builders who may be available for work). I am skilled in design, so after the builder would erect the frame and apply textures, I would design the interior and do landscaping. Networking is honestly the best way to get things accomplished in SL- through affliations I got a lot of project work done for free. Align yourself with large networks- some of the best are again Builders Eden and Help Island- and query its members for someone who may be able to help with elab city.

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Permalink Reply by Arturo Sinclair on March 11, 2008 at 10:30am

Tom, I've done all three. We needed to populate our Gator Nation Island with different buildings representing different colleges. Some I built myself, no problem there except the expense of my time vs. student or SL contractor work.

Hiring students was not so successful both in the time it took them to ramp up their skills or the time they could actually work within their schedule. The pool of students with enough skills, (or interested in any case) was very limited to my surprise, considering we have a 50 thousand+ student community!

Hiring in SL was the most successful both in quality and price, not to mention speed which was quite amazing in some cases. Of course not every one worked out. Some were real slackers (we had real deadlines) and had to be catapulted out!

The way it worked was like this: I went around SL visiting sites that I either liked myself or recommended by somebody. Contacted the owner of buildings, objects or scripts that were really good and offered her/him/it a job in the island. Some agreed and I offered a tentative amount of Linden, which everyone agreed was a very fair amount. Not having any parameters to work with it was a mere guess as to what amount of $L that would attract good builders, specially those who did not consider themselves "builders for hire" and so they had no "rates". Good scripters tended to be more business oriented and they usually set their price, which considering the exchange rate was very, very good, compared what it would have cost to "hire" a programmer in RL. SL is like the old China!

This will surely change in the future as development picks up and there is more demand. I am talking about 10-15k for the most complex buildings.

The downside of this approach was the issues of responsibility and accountability, given the complete anonimity of the people contacted for this job. Although anonymity is one of the drivers of VW and SL in particular when it comes to critical jobs in world it can (and it did) become a problem.

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