/ commands

hi
i have a few questions in relation to the chatting. i've played DAoC, EQ2, LoTR online and WOW. very little wow.

normally chatting is done in a translucent window that is always open and shows several lines of text or messages. they use almost entirely "/" commands for communication. for instance to send me a Tell saying "Hi" you would type /<name of recipent> space <text> or "/cleowolf Hi" for me to respond with "Hi" i would type, "/r Hi" the /r represents respond to last IM. to say something in general chat i just type it. this system works really fast and is easy. is there anything like that here?

as it is, if i understand the system, i have to use my mouse to open the chat window, click on a button which opens a list of nearby people, click on someone, chose "IM". if i am already IMing some one then i have to change tabs to keep track of communication with several people instead of it all showing in one window and being able to respond from one window.

so basicly i want to leave open the chat window with out it being intrusive and not have to change tabs, also i would like to know it there are any / commands to help with communications.



if i cant do this native are there any mods that will allow me?

The communications window is as you see it
you can tear off the individual windows (such as near me for your history) and of course you can tear off the chat windows of ppl who send you im's

you can send an im via your friends list, doing a search or if they are close by right click on them

there is no chat command to reply to someone or to initiate the im chat

I do not use 3rd party programs for SL so not sure if there are mods out there to enable this ability.

To send an IM to an avatar that you can see, you can right click on the avatar and choose send IM from the pie menu.

thank you for the reply, that is sad news. i just like to use the mouse as little as possible. guess there isn't a way to target things with out it.

ohh, i wanted to ask, is there any way to remap the keyboard?

You can set the chat entry window to open and close on pressing the return key. This is what I do, and leave the history open if there is a lot of chatting going on. The setting is in Edit/Preferences/Text Chat/Close chat after hitting return. When the chat is not open hitting return will open it, type chat and hit enter, and it closes again.

Edit: BTW, there is a keys.ini in Program Files\SecondLife\app_settings but it only deals with camera and avatar movements.

Unfortunately it works a little differently in SL; local chat is not really integrated with IMing (although this can be confusing, because IMs to you may appear in the same place as local chat - this is not, really, very good UI design if you ask me). Also, it is impossible for scripts to access one's IMs, which is probably a good thing for security but is rather limiting.

You can move back and forwards between IM tabs with, er, I think it is ctrl + left/right arrow, which saves a bit of time, and as stated right-click on somebody to IM them directly, but there isn't much more than that. In general people use local chat _far_ more in SL than they do in WoW, I find. IMing somebody directly when they are within chat range (20m) is if you are worried about someone in the area (or with a chat bug) listening in, usually if you wish to criticise somebody nearby's dress sense.

In general, what you might be familiar with as "/ commands" are fully customisable and trigger what are known as "gestures" (they can also be triggered with key combinations). These play animations, sounds, preconfigured chat etc. There are quite a few that are activated by default but you can add your own, with your own animations and sounds, if you wish (or, say, use gestures to activate objects which are controlled by chat). In this sense it is a far more sophisticated system than in WoW. So, in terms of communication, it's swings and roundabouts, really.

ok, got ya, thanks for the info. slash commands aren't available because they are being used for something else. now i need to read up on gestures.

dose any one know of interface mods?

i take it that there are not many gamers in 2nd life?

ctrl+h will bring up the history window,(especially useful if you 'tear off' the window)
enter will open the chat bar on the bottom, (and enter again sends your chat)
ctrl+t will open the im window (I think that's the same shortcut for the regular view as for Nicholaz) but IIRC it won't put the focus in that windows text box... which is annoying

It might be worthy to note that /me works as it does in old IRC chat modes creating an action, e.g. "/me sings a song" will translate to "Charlene Trudeau sings a song" in either text chat or IM (as opposed to: Charlene Trudeau: sings a song).

Char

If you bring up the IM window with Control T, your focus will be in the IM chat entry field.

Press Tab and your focus moves to the tabs at the bottom of the IM window.

Press the left or right arrow key and you move from IM tab to IM tab.

When you reach the one you want, press enter to put the focus in the text entry field.

Pressing Enter on an empty text entry field moves the focus back to the tabs at the bottom, ready to use the arrows keys to select a different IM window.

The thing is that mods to the actual client are not necessary in many cases, because in-world scripting can replace them. You can, for example, make HUD devices which add buttons to access certain features, or indeed do things you can't do from the client without them. There is also no real framework for creating mods apart from compiling a whole new client. So there has been little development in that area; there are a couple of alternative clients but that is it.

There are lots of gamers in SL, but they don't come here to play games usually, except in some limited occasions. SL is not a game, even if there are games you can play in SL.

i was under the impression that 2nd life is a social and economic game.

No. Anything you see people doing in SL is just them using it for their own purposes. There isn't any particular point to SL, no goals or win conditions; you don't have to be social or make money or make art or kill zombies or build houses or have sex etc etc etc, though you can, and for every person who says "X is the whole point behind SL" there will be a dozen who say "no it isn't, it's Y".

It's worthwhile pressing Tab while your focus is in the IM window, then the arrow keys, to see if you can find a keystroke sequence you like for moving from one chat window to the next.

are you saying it is a substitute for real life? or are you saying it is a free for all sandbox?

not trying to be rude just working toward understanding.

gotta say i do living history re-enactments and used to play in the SCA. over the years i've meet some people who think they are the person they pretend to be on weekends. i expect to see some that here and hope that is not the norm.

once again thank you all for solid advice. if i become a pain in the a** let me know. i just started a few days ago and am trying to understand.

*blinks at the all the different buttons covering two entire sides of the screen and all the numbers and bars in the lower right corner*

And people say the SL UI is complicated .

ohh, your right. that screen shot is from fairly complicated old school game but the chat window is a nice interface feature. the buttons are abilities that you use in fights, the numbers on the lower right hand side is information on the group your in (helps with keeping the group alive.) the lower left hand side is the chat window.

see how small, clear and easy to read it is, you can keep track of and respond to several conversations at once. that is the part i was asking about. of course that is now moot.

the SL interface isn't that complicated but confusing. or at least for me it is.

i was just hoping there is a way to adjust things for this old school gamer.

Ofcourse a thing to remember is that here in SL things are not as rushed/urgent as they are in a "Gaming" situation, where combat requires fast interaction with your group/team.

Sounds like you just need to get used to SL's style and functionality. It might feel foreign to you now, but I think once you've gotten a little experience with it, you'll agree that the visual organization of keeping conversations windowed is actually far superior in this envirnoment to the /m's and /r's you're used to. (I'm a gamer too, by the way, so I do know what you mean.)

It's pretty tough for example to use /r when 3 people are talking to you at the same time. I've had it happen lots of times where I'll be typing a /r response to someone, and just as I'm about to hit Enter, another person messages me, and then the response intended for the first guy gets redirected to the second guy. Splitting the separate conversations into their own individual windows, the way SL does it, makes it MUCH easier to keep track of who said what, and to make sure your responses go to the right person.

Games tend not to do this because they are primarily about action, not so much about chat. So / commands are about as complex as they ever bother to get. Those commands might seem fast and easy to you since you're so used to them, and even advantageous in a fast paced game in which you don't want to have to bother visually tracking windows, but really, when you think about chat for chat's sake, they're quite antiquated and clunky compared to SL's setup. Just give it a little time, and you'll agree.

By the way, just so you know, IM'ing, the way you've described it, is only necessary when you want to have private conversations, or conversations over great distances. If all you want to do is talk to whomever is in front of you, just type into the chat bar. That's it.



You might want to try out some of the different viewers that are available.

The chat history window in the OnRez viewer looks very much like the one in your screenshot, Cleowolf. It's small, transparent, and quite easy to read. It doesn't do the color coding for guilds and parties, of course, since SL doesn't have those things, but the aesthetic is similar.

Also, one thing I really like about the OnRez viewer is that its chat bar never has to close. As you've probably noticed by now, in LL's viewer, whenever the chat bar is open, many keyboard shortcuts become impossible to use. For example, the command to activate the reference grid while building is shift-G. Type that in LL's viewer with chat open, and you end up typing a capital G. To use the shortcut, you have to physically exit chat, which means building and chatting at the same time is kind of a pain. You have to cycle in and out of chat constantly, which I find a little annoying.

But in OnRez, all you have to do is click off the chat bar to take focus off of it, and keyboard shortcuts work just fine. You can build and chat at the same time all you want. It's a really handy improvement.

Give the OnRez viewer a try. You might like it better. viewer.onrez.com


As for the / commands, SL has no need for things like /whisper, /invite, /msg, or any of those things that tend to be so common to RPG's. SL's communication system, for all its admitted flaws, is far more advanced than anything in an RPG. You don't need to use commands like that because you've got dedicated windows and panels for those same functions. There's no need to type something like "/f3 whisper hello" (that's send a system-wide hello message to the third guy on your friends list, for the uninitiated) because you can IM the person. And there's no need to type "/invite L337_Demonslayer69" because, first of all no one has a name like that in SL, and second, there's no such thing as party play in SL since SL is not a game. If you want someone in a group you manage, use the GUI to send the person an invitation (the sequence of clicks for invitations is a little ridiculous, but that's another discussion). And of course, there's no need for /emote because you have a fully expressive avatar at your command, which can do a whole lot more in that department than any game character possibly could.

In other words, SL is not an RPG. It's got its own rules and its own system. You can't expect it to adhere to standards that don't have any relevance for it.

You can, however, create gestures and other actions, and tie them to your own text commands any way you want (either with or without the / key). Some of the defaults are simple things like /smile and /clap. You'll find them in the gestures folder in your library. You can make up as many of your own as you want, and they can include a fair degree of complexity if you want them to. They won't do the kind of RPG-style chat actions you asked about, but what they can do is much more interesting than that anyway.

And of course, you can always create scripted systems to add all kinds of functionality if you're so inclined.



I'm not sure where you got that impression. SL is a full-fledged world. Just like the real world, it can have games within it, but it's got a whole lot more than that to it.

If you prefer to treat YOUR second life as a "social and economic game", that's up to you. That's not what MY second life is though. Just as your first life is about entirely different things than mine is, so it is with your and my second lives. SL is not about any one thing in particular. There is no externally imposed purpose to it like you're used to with games. It's entirely open ended. You make your own purpose.

For some people, SL is nothing more than a big 3D chat room. For others, it's a means of artistic expression. For still others, it's a business platform, or an educational tool, or an escapist activity, or a roleplaying scenario, or laboratory, or whatever else you can possibly think of. And yes, for some, it's a game. For most people, it's a combination of everything, in the exact same way that real life is a combination of everything. Second Life (with the capital letters) is quite literally a second life (with the small letters), and just like your first life, whatever you make of it is up to you. Don't ever make the mistake of trying to define as any one thing.

Sometimes, it's a little hard for gamers to grasp what SL is all about in the beginning. In games, your purpose is spoon fed to you. Most of the time, it goes something like this: hit a rat with a stick so you can get gold, and with that gold, you can go to town and buy a bigger stick, so you can come back and hit a bigger rat. Rinse and repeat 10,000 times until you kill the big boss at the end.

Don't get me wrong; I don't mean to knock it. As I said, I'm a gamer too. When you distill it though, that's basically what it's all about.

SL isn't "about" anything. But it's also "about" everything. As I said, it's whatever you make of it. Whether you want to "hit rats", or play at socio-economics, or just paint pretty pictures all day, it's all in there. And if it's not, then simply add it in yourself. Life is life. Whether it's "first" or "second" makes no difference. All the same basic rules (and lack of rules) apply either way. Make of your life (or lives) what you will.

(At the risk of drifting off-topic here with the "game" thing.) I think it's safe to say that most SL residents find it a form of entertainment, but not a game. And the entertainment tends to be exploratory in nature, not competitive.

The idea of it being a "social and economic game" isn't completely wrong, objectively, but it sure *sounds* wrong. A lot of the exploration is social, surely. And there's an economy, where a tiny fraction of the population turns a profit--usually modest. But... well, the "game" noun somehow brings to mind the "SL sociopaths" who lurk in the margins of the grid.

For example, I'm pretty sure that scammers and adfarmers and such undesirables are just playing a different "game" than all the rest of us. ("Hahaha! You fell for that PERMISSION_DEBIT dialog and I sucked all the L$s from your account. I *win*!" or "Hahaha! I pay less tier than you, yet have my full-bright spinning ad spam across 50 sims, and extort the neighbors to buy me out at a tidy profit. I *win*!" So, at those "games" they indeed win: stoopidly tiny amounts of RL money, at the cost of genuine loathing by everyone not playing their "games."It's definitely the case that some avatars are used exclusively for a particular role, so getting them to talk Out Of Character may be nearly impossible. (But if you've done living history, well, that's kind of the whole point, while you're re-enacting, so that shouldn't seem weird.) As for what the RL people behind those avatars think or do, that's really none of our business--and it all would be a lot less interesting if it were. (I've spent a little time on Help Island Public, informally, and find it amusing to hear all the RL conversations there--"where ya from?", etc.--that are relatively rare after residents have some SL to talk about.)

Cleowulf, I just wanted to pop in and say welcome to SL and the Forums. Regarding your question about what is SL, I would say you are accurate that it is a sandbox. It's what you make of it. If you want to game you can, but it seems most gamers get bored here. We tend to get the social types or the creative building types.

No, people say its always broken or better yet useless at times.

It's a free-for-all in a sense, but also a community. In other words, you can do whatever you like (and are capable of - since SL doesn't have a built-in skill system, your own real abilities are a factor), but so can everyone else. So, for example, you can't really become a King or a Queen by force on SL in the same way that you can on some other MMORPGs, because nobody has to respect your role-play if they don't want to. If you do want to play such a role, it's more like becoming an organiser or entertainer (in other words, helping other people have fun when they're with you, so they'll want to respect you) than becoming a conqueror.



Some people role-play full time in their avatars; some people make their avatars equivalent to their real life selves. There is a huge spectrum of views across SL, although I have found it is more common for people to use SL to talk about real life or personal issues - because the internal "games" that are part of SL don't appeal to everyone, and SL is competing with WoW and the other traditional games for attention from those people that they do appeal to.

aboslutely right. unfortunately i have an annoying habit of preferring to ask stupid questions instead of doing stupid things.

thanks for the solid advice.

Yumi i know what you mean, i don't like wow much either. unfortunately they have so much of the market that other developers will follow suit. i tend to use wow in examples because every one has either played it or heard of it.

I'm not a "gamer", so cannot make comparisons. But I will offer that there are very few "stupid" questions when one is just starting out in here. I was fortunate to have a really decent and sweet (now my SL "wife" lady who helped me along and advised me.