Saturday, 7 July 2007

HiPiHi for English Speakers

While trawling comments posted to this blog while I've been away I was drawn to an entry from SuezanneC Baskerville, who has been a Second Lifer since December 2003, but who is also an explorer in other virtual worlds - most notably, HiPiHi. Rather than leave it in comments, I thought I would bring its content to your attention, gentle reader.

If you are interested in this new Chinese virtual world, Sue provides a helpful blog that contains views and tips for English-speakers struggling to manage the Mandarin-only interface.

She has also set up a wiki so that people can pool their knowledge of HiPiHi and a Google group, to allow English-speakers to share experiences and information.

If you want more info on HiPiHi, you can grab this powerpoint, which gives you a good background. If this has encouraged you to try and register for the Beta, then go here. I don't know if registration is still possible, but there can be no harm in giving it a go. Please note the warning about Gmail accounts, though.

(FYI: Sue goes by the name SuezanneCB in HiPiHi.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, nice to see the mention of my efforts.

There's more info now, the Hipihi folk have produced a pdf file with screenshots of the Hipihi interface along with English translations. This file is currently available in the Chinese language forums at www.hipihi.com, and to make it easier to get this file I've added this file to the file area at the google group i made for hipihi, at
http://groups.google.com/group/hipihi-group .

Anonymous said...

There should be a third party English language forum focusing on Hipihi but including other virtual worlds, such as the in-development uWorld, opening shortly.

I've had a very nice time meeting the far away people in Hipihi and building on one computer while reading the interface translation on the other.

It's in beta, so it's got some ragged edges, so don't expect flawless performance. It's only running on Windows XP at present. I've not heard or seen anyone with Vista getting it to run, so Vista users might want to wait unless they really enjoy fiddling with settings with little chance of success.

Virtual world enthusiasts with Windows XP should give it a spin.