Just Out of Curiosity...

1- Is there a way to completely disable the chat functionality of SL? Let's say, for example, I have a little sibling that wants to just walk around and explore. I don't want him/her talking to anybody or hearing/reading anything anybody else says. Is there a way to do that?

2- Is there a way to turn off being picked up by radar? Another example, let's say I want to organize a game of hide and seek on an island. It wouldn't be very hard to follow around the little green dots. Is there a way to make it so my green dot doesn't show up on others' radar, or vice versa?

3- Are multiple characters allowed per email address? If I want to organize a group meeting for my coworkers, but they don't want to create a character themselves (or do anything other than click the login button), is it okay for me to use my email address for multiple characters? If so, is there a limit?

Thanks for any help you can give me!

1. go into busy mode.

2. no.

3. yes, up to 5.

1. Illegal anyway. Send baby brother/sister to teen grid

2 & 3. What she said

1: None I am aware of. You can try opening the chat window and minimize it. That *may* stop the chat from showing. Also set mode to busy to stop IMs from coming. BUT SL is for 18 only and though I understand your trying to let jr. have some run around fun the platform is just not geared to block out all communication for it.




2: No. Even the Lindens can't sneak up on someone off radar. Sorry.

3: They *say* up to about 3 or 4 per email. My experience has been one per. Use gmail to make account emails if you need them for co-workers.


Some may have other insights.. my answer is based on my experience so take it as it is.

Good luck!

1: If chat is all you're worried about, then you need to take a look around the grid. He is likely to get quite an eyeful, even if he doesn't see chat. The grid is just not kid friendly. That's the bottom line. Send him to the teen grid. It may not be a lot better, but at least they try to keep the porn out of there.

2. nope

3. Up to 5, but you aren't allowed to let others use your accounts. Registering 5 in your name and having all 5 log on at once from different computers is likely to cause the risk API to kick in and get your 5 accounts locked. Then you'll have some 'splainin' to do the LL. God only knows how that will go. Just have them Download Second Life and get their own accounts. Teleport them over from OI so they don't have to go through that nonsense, then hold your meeting. It will only take a couple minutes to get everyone there, especially if you have some sort of voice chat like Skype and you can walk them through it together.

Awesome, what a quick response, thanks guys!

Maybe I should clear some things up. I thought using examples would make things simpler, but maybe if I just tell you exactly what I need, you'll be able to solve my problems.

1- The little sibling was just an example. In reality I'm organizing a game (scavenger hunt type deal) for a study I'm doing for work (research on how people use different types of interfaces to work together). One of the things we're interested in is how people react to not having the ability to chat in-game and instead relying on an asynchronous communication system, such as a forum or email. If I could disable their chat functionality, that would be perfect. Also, we want to look at how they use text chat vs. voice chat, so turning only one of them off for certain players would be useful as well.

2- You pretty much answered that one. Darn. I was hoping to be able to have a group of characters hiding for the participants to find, but I guess I'll have to figure out something else

3- I really don't want to have all of the participants log in, get detected by the game, and get kicked out right away. That would really not help the study, especially since we only have one shot at it. The participants aren't supposed to know that they'll be playing SL, so having them register for it ahead of time kinda defeats the purpose. We're helping get more people playing SL, so can't we bend the rules, just a little, just this once?

You could always use the Restrained Life viewer . It can selectively block chat and the minimap.

Combined with your other post about logging you might just want to look into creating a custom viewer for your "experiments" though, it would do whatever you need it to do.

heh.. bending the rules is up to you. We can't advise you on that.

On radars.. you could have all the accounts made and not used until the event. Then TP them from OI like Trout said and get them started. No time to get a radar that way.

If they are all using seperate PCs there likely won't be an issue with the risk API.

I was thinking about doing exactly that, but I only have 3 weeks until the experiment must be run! I'm trying to make this as fool-proof as possible! If I had all summer to make a great Viewer with all the functionality, I'd love to. Unfortunately I'm trying to put this together as quickly as possible

I am going to look into the Restrained Life Viewer though, that sounds promising. I've tried a few viewers, but they never seem to work. I hear that the API of SL changes so frequently that the developers of things like the viewers have a hard time keeping up, and so the products stop working only a couple weeks after they are released. Is there any truth to that?

You could always the RL viewer as a base, and make selective changes that fit with what you need.

Adding new functionality might take a while, depending, but disabling existing functionality is much easier.

Remember that it's a viewer intended for the BDSM community, I never used it but it wouldn't be that surprising if it was tinted "adult" in one way or another so a preview of it is probably in order .

The problem is that every change that isn't picked up by LL needs to be done over again with every single release. You can do it in an automated fashion, but it's entirely possible that the code changed so much that your patch no longer works (or makes sense) or causes some very undesirable results.

Compare it reviewing and correcting a book while the author is simultaneously working on a new revision. When he/she drops off the new copy which doesn't include any of the corrections you made, much of the work you previously did was for nothing and you can start over again.

You may want to consider (depending on the size and scope of your organization and project) creating complementary accounts with their own custom surname and own registration api https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417
This allows you to create as many accounts as you need (up to 500 per day)for what ever purpose. You can even have the new accounts bypass the LL Orientation and go directly to wherever you select.. usually your own sim.

2. You could just turn off the mini-map and either don't tell them about it or tell them not to use it.

I thought about turning off the mini-map as well, but I figure that there's no way to stop dozens of early-20-somethings from clicking around and figuring out how to turn it back on. And kids these days; just telling them not to do something makes them want to do it even more..