A bunch of questions from a newbie

Hi, I started playing this for the first time yesterday, after seeing it on various tv programs. So far I'm not really impressed, so I figured I'm doing something wrong!

Firstly, the performance of the software is abismal. I have a fairly high spec PC (it runs Crysis at medium setting, perfectly) and yet walking across the screen feels like I'm stuck in sticky treacle. Its really unresponsive, slow and I have really low FPS, how can I improve the performance?

I also signed up for the CSI:NY community as I'm a fan of it. However, I think I'm missing out on a lot. The place is practically empty and its tiny. Wheres the rest of Second Life? Is it possible to delete my avatar and make a new one in Second Life?

Is it possible to set up shop as some kind of tailor, or someone that makes things for other people? Do I need a premium account to do this?

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and hopefully answer my questions!

please stay. stick it out for a cpouple of weeks...what you saw on CSI ny is NOT an accurate depictions of SL..a virtual world does not exist like that yet but Second Life is definitely the closest.

~Lana Tomba

If you want to go somewhere other than the CSI island, try opening 'Search,' typing in some criteria that interests you, then clicking 'Teleport.' It's all the same grid, so deleting your current av and creating a new one wouldn't gain you anything.

You don't need to be Premium to open a store, but you do need some SL-specific skills and templates, as well as a decent grasp of a program like Photoshop. The texturing forums can help a lot if you're looking at something like clothes design. Also, you might want to have payment info on file for you Basic account so you can buy Linden dollars to help with the initial in-world setup. If things go well, you may reach a point where you don't need to buy L$ for rent, uploads, and whatever else, but that probably won't happen quickly.

open up your map..all those squares on the map are different servers..everything you see here is made by its residents...well 99.5% of everything you see.

you can teleport anywhere you want...open your minimap..look for green dots..those are real live people!

Make friends..use your search tab..you'll be hooked in a few days..trust me.

Your'e not the first to expect a nice big smooth running shiny machine and be slapped in the face with lag. It is worth it to struggle thru..you will get used to it.

Welcome to the Forums and to Second Life

~Lana Tomba

You can start a new Account at any time for free.

You can also totally redo your avatar on your current account.

Its hard to know whether your "sluggish" is actually sluggish performance. What sort of FPS do you get in busy sims and in empty ones?

Theres a massive world outside of the CSI area - In fact Ive never even been to the CSI area.

Lilith, I think that you'll find that a lot of us were very frustrated our first few weeks in SL. I remember thinking the same thing you did; that this place was EMPTY. I'd wander around wondering "where are all the people?" I nearly gave up until I found this forum and started communicating with people here, learning more and finding a group of people who could guide me around the grid.

As I started making friends, exploring more the world began to open up to me. I can guarantee if you stick it out a few weeks, the same thing will happen for you too. May take a while to develop friendships, but you'll start meeting people who will certainly be happy to take you under their wing and help you out. It's amazing how friendly and helpful people are around here (for the most part, ignore the bad apples, of which there are a few).

Perhaps SL won't be for you, or it will be, but by then you'll have a better way of judging it than right now. As it mentioned time and time again, the learning curve is huge here and the only way to get through it, is by living it.

You might want to try other viewers too, to see if they help with the technical problems...I believe the one you download on the CBS/CSI site is different from the one(s) on SL's website.

I'll try to message you in world this evening..I have a free female skin and can direct you to some newb stores where stuff is free..clothes and the like.(some of it isn't that bad..I still wear some tennis shoes i got from there )

~Lana Tomba

Thanks all for the replies. The software I have atm is call OnRez. I'm downloading the one on the 2nd life website now.

What time is 'this evening' for you? I'm in the UK, so I might be asleep at that time, hehe.

I'll remember your name..and open search and search for you..and I'll drop stuff in your inventory..landmarks that if you click them you'll teleport to them..and a skin that if you open your inventory and click on them and choose "wear" you can get out of the play dough look.

I wouldn't send you any of my clothes..cause well..they might be insulting LOL but the Landmarks i send you will have plenty of free stuff you can choose from.

~Lana Tomba

Did I miss the memo? Has the 2nd CBS CSI:NY episode with the SL theme aired already? If yes how was it compared to the 1st episode? and if it has aired I wonder if it will be replayed or if it's available on CBS's site?

To the original poster. If you are looking for perfection in SL, you won't find it. SL is full of software "network" problems. There are ways to configure your SL client program to try and limit these problems, but sometimes there are things that occur which are beyond our control. But there is something about SL that keeps us regulars from coming back and we learn to deal with them because we know for all the bad things that happen to us in SL, there is an equal amount of good things that are to be gained from being in SL.

SL is not a game, it's more like an extension of RL socializing with some SL commerce mixed in. You can make RL money in SL, but it requires a lot of effort and most of the time you can make more money in RL than you would in SL for the same effort. That doesn't mean making the effort in SL is not worth it, it just a "warning" that nothing comes easy in SL when it comes to commerce.

SL is a huge world with thousands and thousands of different islands each with their own themes (there are some amazing creative builds in SL and there is some junk) and it is a world which was created by the SL residents for the residents. You are only seeing a very small fraction of SL when you are on the CSI:NY island(s).

One other thing...the amount of lag you experience can vary wildly depending on where you are, how many other avs are around, how many attachments you and/or those other avs are wearing, how many scripts are running, even the size of textures used on builds. You can be in one area with minimal problems, then hop to another and find it abysmal...that's just one of the things we all have to deal with in SL.

There are two possible causes. One is that Second Life uses OpenGL (I don't think Crysis does). Check for any tips on gaming sites for optimizing OpenGL on your graphics card. In particular, OpenGL can perform very badly on Windows Vista if you have the wrong driver installed.

Secondly, make sure your network connection and CPU are fast enough. Having fast graphics is a good thing, but unlike games like Crysis SL's world is constantly changeable, so it streams data across the network almost continuously, and is constantly recalculating 3D world information. You need a _wired_ broadband connection (wireless connections, because of the "packeting" they use, can mess with SL) and as much free CPU as you can manage. Multitasking SL _will_ slow it down dramatically.



You can teleport your avatar from CSI:NY onto the Second Life mainland. Click "Search", then choose the "Places" tab, type the name of a place you'd like to visit, press Return; choose the place from the list that will appear on the left, then click on "teleport". Some example searches you could try to find good places to arrive initially are: 'welcome area', 'nci kuula', 'the shelter', 'help island public', and (if you are interested in building) 'ivory tower library'. (If you had arrived in SL by normal means, you'd have started in one of the 'welcome area's.)



Yes. Second Life doesn't have "crafting skills" though; if you want to make things for other people, you have to actually _make_ them yourself, using SL's building function combined with Photoshop or other graphics tool. If you want to create clothing, you might like to take a look at the templates here: http://goodies.onrez.com/shop/chipmidnight/ . However, don't worry if it's a bit confusing at first - just exploring and learning about how SL works is necessary before you try to jump in to creation, and learning about the social side is just as important as learning about the technical side.

You do not need a premium account to run a shop. As a newbie, some places will give you vendor space for free, and this can actually be beneficial to start with - until you build up a reputation, advertising to bring people to your store will be very expensive, so it's best to try to get your goods placed in places where people already go rather than creating a new place right away that people have no reason to go to.

As far as I'm aware it has been indefinitely delayed by the writers' strike.

First of all, you will see lower frame rates in SL than in Crysis as the same graphics setting. Something like Crysis is a prerendered/semiprerendered environment. This mean everything you see in Crysis has been somewhat rendered and imbeded in the program. As SLs environment is user created this is not possible so your computer has to handle all the rendering not just part of it.

As others have mentioned the rest of SL is just a search away, if you can think of it, chances are its here in SL. Travel around, make some friend, see what SL has to offer and it offers just about everything from romance to combat, and you do not need to delete your account to see it.

Yes it is possible, my SL wife and I are starting out doing exactly that. People love what we build together so we are going to start selling the things we make. You don't have to be premium to set up shop, you can rent shop space in a mall. My suggestion is get some L$ together first, Camp or Money Tree farm. I tried both when I was new, much prefered Money Tree farming, it gets you out and exploring where as Camping you just plan you ass and if you have a good anti-idler walk away.

As for creating itself, I suggest taking a few content creation classes in world NCI or New Citizens Inc has some really good ones. Once you do that start creating and show off you creations and see what others think. The toughest markets to get into involve female stuff, the market is flooded in the area of a lot of female items. Mens items on the other hand can be pretty scarce. Either way you will find you need L$ to upload texture, sounds and animations, so getting some venture capital is a good idea.

Thanks Yumi ...

I don't come to these forums as much as I have in the past and I'm not one who watches a lot of TV. But I guess the writers strike had some positive effects on me, if this 2nd episode has not aired yet.

Hi Lilith and welcome to SL and the forums

I'm in the UK too and will be online most of Friday, so if you would like to, give me a shout via IM or a reply here and I'll show you round and answer any questions I can

Inc

Hi Lilith! Welcome to SL and to the Forums! If you would like to start by looking at some pretty places, try this thread for a lot of pointers:
/327/36/222663/1.html

Also, a great way to meet people is to join groups of people who enjoy things that you do. There are groups of sailors, religious groups, ideas discussion groups, building groups, scripting groups, LOTS of fashion groups ... a group for everything that exists in RL! Go to search and the "groups" tab, you may find something you'd like to join! Active groups usually hold events or do things once a week or so ... if you join a group and it's inactive, try another!

A bunch of the folks who post regularly on the forums are having a party this Saturday ... drop by! It's at the Hangout on Allana ... someone may send you an invitation as a result of this thread, but if you want to find it yourself join a group called The Forum Cartel and browse thru the back notices (hint: you can order them by date by clicking on the date column header).

Avoid camping. It contributes to lag and, in most cases, the payouts are awful...maybe 2-6L$ every ten minutes, which means that, at the mid-range, it would take something like 4 or 5 solid days of camping to earn 10USD.

Just a note: The CSI:NY default avatars are much higher quality all the way around (skin, prim hair, clothes, etc) than the normal default avatars.

This is also to the original poster of this thread, as they asked if they could restart. No need to restart, and you start off in a higher quality default state than the normal method of entering Second Life.

And yes, Second Life really isn't like that episode of CSI:NY, which I only just recently watched.

Not to throw a scare in or anything, but I'll note that I've been here since March of 2007, and I still have no idea what I am doing (I do not mean to imply that learning how to do stuff here is that tough, I knew how to do stuff the first day; no I mean learning what to do ).

Writers strike is over, I believe. Will take a while to "ramp up" again, though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Writers_Guild_of_America_strike

True, and bloody boring to boot!

Hi Lilith !, try this first...., go into preferences and select Network, then check to see if the maximum bandwidth slider is not completely all the way to the right, also check disk cache size, try 200-400 for the cache.

Next go into Graphics and set the resolution to something like 1024x768, go to draw distance and put it at 128.

Go to Graphics Detail next and turn off all the shaders, but leave the lower sliders all the way to the right.

That should help, there is more you can do to speed it up, but this is good for now...

Thanks for all the really nice replies

I downloaded the software from this site, instead of OnRez or whatever its called, and it works a lot better, I'll also try your advice, Judie, thanks.

I did see an episode of CSI with second life in it, not long ago, not sure which series, theres so many of them! I also saw it featured on a show called 'This Morning' where a couple met and got married in real life 6 months later. It was funny seeing the real them and the avatars they had designed, so different!

I did some searches in the map window, and found quite a few places with free clothes, really nice ones too

Its nice to see a lot of friendly people too, I'm a really shy person, which is why its taken me this long to sign up with 2nd life (i've known about it for a long time) so I'm hoping it wont be too hard for me to make some friends

Hi Lilith, welcome to SL, more ppl in same/our time zone the better IMO...




"First Basic account is completely free. Additional Basic accounts are available for a one-time fee of $9.95 each. "

Not sure creating an Alt is free anymore.. (Maybe wrong, I often am.... but at least I try

Velda.