New resident with some questions..

Just when I thought about quitting again, I came here to read my replies, and wow I wish I could meet people like you in the game. Haha..I think I'm having bad luck.

Thank you for all of the tips and info, I was able to get a test model male for my character and I actually have pants on now, yay (thanks to some nice person I forgot his name)! I don't understand how to set my face or clothes, nothing seems to change when I click on the options. I'm not going to make a female avatar I will stick to what I really am. What amazes me is how detailed people's avatars are. My character walks like he has a stiff back though..hehe

A lot of the areas I saw have weird names and are usually empty. I managed to fix the lag problem by lowering the draw distance. I have the GFX up to full with anti aliasing up to 16x and it looks good. I am usually walking on the air for a while and the buildings load after about a good 5 minutes.

On to my first (strange) experiences on SL! It seems every area I decided to check out has adult oriented material, haha. Sure there is a time and a place for that and I don't mind people having fun with it, but I am not really here for that, heh. I must a knack for finding all the wrong zones to explore O_o

I am hoping to see the more interesting parts of the "platform" and meet some like minded people and maybe find out how to have fun (without killing horde/alliance and doing dailies).

I basically looked for lots of green dots and teleported there, and I managed to find a strip club and a "furry sex theater" club (what are the odds?). I saw dog people with boobs walking around. After that I kind of got irritated because this just feels like a weird porn virtual world. Like I said I don't care what people do for fun but I am not looking for THAT kind of fun =/

All the newbie areas are plagued with lag so I am not sure what to check out. =(

I was amused by all the WoW comments, lots of vets here I see =) My account is expiring in a week and I am trying lose the WoW addiction.

I have a couple questions, what is "prim" and "rez"? Rez to me means resurrect. I am always a healer in every game, it's sooo fun, all my 70s are healers..... Oops, WoW is getting in my head again..!

Thanks for all the friendly advice everyone =) good day.

Oh and for the folks curious about my gaming systems specs..

Processor: Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor1 Q9300 (2.50GHz,1333MHz FSB, 6MB L2 cache)

Memory: 6GB (6144MB) 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM (2-2048MB & 2-1024MB modules)

Hard Drive: 640GB 7200rpm Serial ATA II/300 hard drive w/ 16MB cache4

Video Card : NVIDIA® GeForce® 9800GT 512MB Factory Overclocked (Dual DVI, VGA adapter and TV Out)

Monitor: HD2201 HD LCD Display

Sound Card : 8-Channel (7.1) High Definition Audio

Operating System : Genuine Microsoft® Windows Vista® Home Premium (64-bit) SP1

Motherboard: Systemboard with Intel® G33 Chipset

Hi Vincent, welcome to SL and the forums.

Yes, it's the people who make Second Life - it doesn't matter what you call it - game, metaverse, what you will. Just hang on tight to your sense of humour and you'll be ok.

If you want to learn new things, this is the place to be. Just explore and ask questions. You can even go to classes - use the Search function for Events and search for education, classes, courses etc.

As you have noticed, SL is very demanding on Graphics power - doing what you can to reduce the graphics processing is a good way to combat the dreaded "lag". It is possible to run SL on a very basic kit if you pare everything down, but your set up looks good and you should be able to get it running SL well. Cable internet connection is usually more stable than wireless.

The best advice I can give you is take it gently, explore a lot and remember that SL has a very high learning curve ...and above all, enjoy yourself.

EDIT - Oh, sorry I forgot...

Prim is short for primitive. This is a basic building block of SL. Primitives or prims are simple 3 D objects like a cube, cylinder, sphere etc. They can be maniplated using the SL Building Tools to create most of what you see in SL - buildings, vehicles, clothes, weapons, animals, plants, avatars and avatar attachments such as hair and jewelry.

Rez is the act of placing an object in the Second Life world. When you logon, your avatar rezes in SL and so does eveything else in the environment around you - it's like a 3D internet page building itself. Incidentally, the day you joined SL and your avatar rezd for the first time, we call your "Rez Day" - analogous to Birthday - and yes, you've no doubt guessed, you can have Rez Day Parties.

You got to be kidding Age Of Conan is worse than WoW

You can meet the weird people from this forum in the Forum Cartel Hangout, a nice place where a lot of these weirdo's hang out

As for prims, a prim is still one of the most important units in SL. One region, about 65000 virtual square meters, holds 15000 prims, which equals 15000 basic forms. With those, our virtual world is created, and the only limts are the creators creativity, and the amount of prims used. If you buy/rent 512 m2 of land, you only have 117 prims or so to work with, so you can imagine how creative content creators have to be

Rezzing is simply showing the object in-world. If you land on a place, things around you are rezzing and it takes some time for you to see it all. When I am building, I rezz forms to work with, by using the building tools.

For me, building stuff and setting up a business was the thing I liked. For you it might be roleplaying, socializing, the possibilities are endless. Which makes it difficult to get an overview, that is for sure

yes. "Sky Joust", with giant flying ostriches (well, I think that's what they are, I'm no ornithologist) as the mounts.

You need to understand two things...your Inventory and the Appearance menu. To access inventory, click the button at the bottom right. There are two main folders, Inventory and Library. Library does not change; it contains all your "basic issue" stuff. You can find some clothes and other avatar parts in the Library/Clothing folder. The Inventory folder is where you will keep everything else that you buy, acquire, or make. To put on something from your inventory (either Inv. or Lib. folders), drag it onto your avatar, or right click it and select Wear.

To access the Appearance menu, right click your avatar and select Appearance from the pie menu. There are tons of sliders here to alter your height, weight, facial features and other appearance parameters. I suggest saving your appearance from time to time as you work, so you have a fallback position if you mess something up.



There are about 28,000 regions, or "simulators (sims)" in SL. At any given time, there are maybe 60,000 people on line. That's an average of about 2 avatars per sim...but clumped up at events and popular places, which does make for a lot of empty real estate.



Get used to it. While SL is not all about sex, there IS a lot of it going around...much like the Internet itself, and its endless porn sites. You can minimize your exposure by sticking to sims that are rated PG rather than Mature. But just because the avatar next to you is showing a lot of skin is no reason to get all twitchy, IMO...unless the skin in question is his Johnson, which is just plain rude.



Clusters of green dots can mean several things. 1) a lot of bots (avatars run by software rather than a real person) put there by a merchant to make his traffic numbers look good; 2) a lot of campers...avatars who may be live people or may be bots, paid by a merchant to make his traffic numbers look good; 3) a lot of avatars at a public sex area (hey, sex sells, what can I say?); or 4) a lot of avatars at a non-sex-related location or event...a performance, a concert, a class, a party, or a store sale. Dot-hunting can lead to fun discoveries, but be prepared for disappointment at least 3 out of 4 tries. A better way of hunting might be to search this forum for threads on "Favorite Places".

Your specs are awesome...you should be able to run SL with no problems. However, as others have said, SL is slower than other MMORPGs, because all the textures have to be downloaded to your machine. It's hard to tell whether the lag you're seeing is just the difference in performance between SL and what you're used to, or if it is really some sort of system problem.

Some of the default avatars have skins which can't be altered and, if you have one with prim hair rather than system hair, nothing you do in Appearance will affect it. Play around with the avatars in the Library section of your Inventory...at least two have tintable skins. If they don't work for you, you'll either need to hunt down some freebies or invest a little cash in the game.


The current default animations tend to be less than attractive. The majority of SL users have either a walk replacer or a full blown animation overrider which changes ALL of the animations an avatar uses.


Cat-people with boobs are ever so much better.


With the exception of places like NCI and The Shelter, most of the newbie areas suck in general. Drop by the Forum Cartel Hangout in Allana and you're sure to get lots of help. If it's empty - as it sometimes is - try back a little later or join the in-world group and give a shout out. There's also a HUD (heads up display, which attaches to your screen) on the shelves on the porch which will tell you when people are around.

Also, feel free to IM me is I'm around. Of course, I'm trying to get my Belf her stupid chicken mount, so I haven't been in-world as much lately...