Otenth Paderborn's virtual existence
And for the not-so-new, as well: SL Trip Tips | Cool tips, secrets, touring, and resources for Second Life®.
So you found Second Life, and you’ve started to explore things a bit.
Now, you need the scoop: the cool places to visit, fun things to do, tips and techniques for building, buying, and playing in this amazing world!
(Tip of the hat to Eloise Pasteur at Massively.)
Lord Primbroke sets a high bar: National Inventory Week. A worthy cause.
So each day this week, try and put aside an hour for inventory sorting.
General tip
When you are in a menu with a ========= at the top, you can tear it off into its own movable window.
Beacons and highlights
The various beacons (3-D cross-hairs) appear under view menu; these will help you find specific kinds of objects (including griefing objects that are spewing particles).
When you turn on the highlight beacons under the view menu, you won’t see any change on the screen unless you are in the edit mode, or use View > Beacons Always ON
Types of objects:
Highlights are an alternative to beacons, makes objects slightly red (but not sound sources). You can use either or both.
In Edit > Preferences > Graphics you can change the width of the beacon (currently only up to 10).
When you turn on beacons, in the lower right corner of the viewer there will be a list of the beacons that are currently on.
Dealing with griefing objects
You can hide particles several ways: In the View menu, click “Hide Particles”, in the Client menu > Rendering > Types > Particles (CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-=, CMD-OPT-SHIFT-= on Mac). [Torley didn’t mention it, but you can also turn particles to 0 in your preferences.]
If an object is spamming particles, use the View menu to turn on the beacons for particle sources while hiding particles, and you will more easily find the griefing object and can return it to owner (assuming you are on land where you have the power to do that).
General Tip
World > Force Sun > is a local effect. You can set the sun on your viewer to Sunrise, Noon, Sunset, or Midnight. No one else will see this change in the lighting.
Show Hidden Selection
Create a cube as an example (easier to see if you blank the texture and make it gray).
When editing, a yellow glow shows the edges of objects. “Show Hidden Selection” will show all the edges, even the ones inside the object or on the back.
Show Light Radius for Selection
When editing an object you can make it into a light source in the Features tab (check the box); you can also choose the color of the light and three other variables.
To see the effect of making an object a light source, you must be using Nearby Local Lights in Preferences > Advanced Graphics (whether you can see this depends on your computer’s graphics card). It’s easier to see if you use World > Force Sun > Midnight.
Show light radius for selection shows you the sphere where the light will reach (the actual effect is affected by falloff).
You can also select objects owned by other people to see the light radius.
Show Selection Beam
Default is on; these are the dots that appear between you and objects you are editing. These dots are a particle effect, and you can change the dots’ color in Preferences > General > Color For My Effects. This is a viewer-side control: Disabling it will hide everyone’s beams on your screen but everyone else will still see your beam if they still have it enabled.
If you prefer information in a concise form, I’ve watched Torley Linden’s video “Tip of the week” so you don’t have to. Here in brief are the salient points of the first three weeks (with links to the videos on blog.secondlife.com).
I use an RSS aggregator (Bloglines) to track quite a few SL blogs and websites. One of my favorites is Natalia’s Second Life Diary Blog. Natalia combines step-by-step tutorials (mostly female fashion), site-seeing, and delightfully low-key role-playing narrative. I encourage you to check it out.
And if you’re so inclined, vote for her in the Miss Second Life contest:
The Miss Second Life Finals is this Sun Feb 25, from 9:00am-11:00am SL/PST. If you are around a computer, please vote for me! The website is www.MissSL.com/gallery (The voting will be between 09:30am-10:30am SL/PST). Just select Rank 1st under my picture and click the Vote button. That’s it! You dont need to be in Second Life or even have a Second Life account to vote. But the votes *MUST* be cast between 9:30am-10:30am SL/PST to be counted! Thank you so much in advance! 🙂
There’s been some slowdown noted on the SL blog, and on the front page, the resident statistics say there are now 3,025,109 residents, 1,014,117 of whom logged were online in the last 60 days, and 27,724 in-world right now. I haven’t noticed any major lag.
It should be noted that that’s 2,000,000 signups in the last two months.
I’m using the First Look viewer, which is a test version of the SL client software that runs on the live grid (in contrast to test viewers that run on the beta grid). And it is great so far. Seems much faster and smoother.
21st December, 2006
All decked out on the festive Isle of Wyrms.