Installing SL twice on one computer

I am wondering if it is possible to install SL twice on one computer with out one affecting the other. I have one other perosn that uses my pc to play SL. And they have purchased the Advance Second Skin ( the other perosn is female ) and every time that I get into SL I have to unistall the Second Skin stuff so that my avator does not have the girlie bit on it. I really would like to know if anyone has done this before and if so what they did to get it to install.

Under windows you can create different accounts and log on using different names. You may be able to install a second instance that way but I am no expert on this. Something to look into..

I don't think it is possible as the SL installer does not give you a choice to install to a different directory. Even if you were to log in under different Windows accounts, you would still be sharing the same SL installation.

Tito

Hey....as info....I have two computers and I have SL installed on both and have been used at the same time....as my computers are networked together. Not sure if that helps you any, but it seemed to be ok, when both have been used. I don't see what the difference would be if you opened another account as mentioned and then use both....but of course, I am not that computer tech oriented. Good luck with it...hope you can do it.

All of your inworld information in Second Life--appearance, inventory, etc.--is NOT stored on your computer; it's all on Linden's servers. As a result, if your friend is changing their avatar under their own account, it won't affect your avatar on your account at all, even if you're using the exact same machine.

I've used several accounts across several computers and haven't ever had a mixup.

The scenario you describe almost sounds like you're both playing the same account. Is that the case?

Heyo Valdimir, this is something additional to look into! Logging in as multiple users using shortcuts may be an option if you trust who else is on the same computer -- or if you have multiple logins for Windows, you can set up a shortcut for each as appropriate.

Basically, what you need to do is find a shortcut of SL, get PROPERTIES, and under the SHORTCUT tab look for TARGET. Then enter something like this:

"C:\Program Files\SecondLife\newview.exe" -multiple -login Torley Torgeson watermelons

"Torley Torgeson" being my first and last names and "watermelons" being my password. Not my current one, of course.

This is the way I have it set up, and it logs me into SL automatically. If I wanted to set up more accounts, I could do it easily as making a copy of the shortcut and just modifying the data for more users.

Then, logging into SL is as easy as double-clicking.

More info on these command line switches is shown here:

http://secondlife.com/badgeo/wakka.php?wakka=newview

and they can be *very* handy for various situations. By the way, the "-multiple" switch makes it so you can open, yes, more than one instance of SL on a computer at once and log in as TWO or more separate avatars simultaneously. Although, don't be surprised if the speed crawls.

Hope this helps... cheerio!

But the other player uses Second Skin, which replaces the actual files on your hard drive, no? So all these fixes wouldn't apply.

It's not a matter of in-world sliders.

The only thing I can think of is to get a male skin for you to wear that would cover the girly bits

Do you have a second partition or drive?

If you do, then you can install twice, 1 on C drive, other on D drive...but will use same cache, etc..but the game files will be different...

Valdimir, I would recommend you consult Namssor Daguerre, who makes the Second Skins. She might have some good ideas for you

If I am not mistaken, "Second Skin" skins, as opposed to other skins like Chip Midnight's, have to be manually placed in your hard drive somewhere in the SL installation directory, that is why Valdimir is experiencing problems. When the other person logs on, those skins are loaded off the hard drive, not SL servers.

Lo is right. Probably the best person to ask would be Namssor directly.

Tito

Ah, I hadn't realized someone has done a traditional "mod" for SL. Interesting...

During the DOS days, I used to write batch files for this sort of thing... rename the file you don't want to use, load the program, then press a key in the DOS window when the program's done to rename the file back... That way, you don't use the mod, and the other person can.

Short answer:

Yes, you can install SL twice on the same system (C drive, and D drive) assuming you have 2 or more partitions/physical hard drives. You will need to reconfigure the shortcuts after the second install to correct the overwrite that the SL installer does on the first shortcut. The skin installers can then be set up for each instance (female on the C drive, default on the D drive, or Male on the D drive). After that, just log in using the correct shortcut. One minor detail you will need to address once logged in is going into appearance and "Saving All" to trigger a sever update. Without that update your avatar will carry the same skin that you last logged out with on that account.

Long answer:

I have 2 other methods of dealing with similar situations documented in the skin manual I distribute with my skins, but I don't have the multiple SL install method in the notes yet. TY
Michael for contributing to this discussion I will be adding this method to my notes for future releases!

Thanks for all the info, that did help out a lot.

I have a dual boot pc with win xp installed on both partitions(dont ask..lol) and second life installed on twice also-one on each partition and it seems to be running good.Altho im no computer geek so not sure if there is any corruption or anything but it works fine for me.Never noticed any bad effects in game.In the explorer window you will see that windows recognizes the two versions and denotes the second version as Second life (2).

Well, dunno if this has been said, didn't have time to read all the posts... but each account under Windows has different entries in the registry. Therefore it IS theoretically possible to install more than one instance on the same machine and have them seperate. That is as long as under each account information the path for SL is stored differently. As in... make an account "X", login to it... install SL, tell it "C:\Program Files\Second Life X" (I thought the installer allowed path selection, but now I can't recall), then login as "Y", do the same with X replaced with Y in the pathname. (Similar to how some programs like Quintessential Player [mp3 player/winamp alternative] have a "install for all users" option. However, if no choice exists to specify a path... the manual root to doing this would be to copy the whole of your SL directory to a different directory, rename it, and modify registry keys to reflect the changes, as well as shortcuts (however only advisable if you know what you're doing!!). Then under the other account install it normally. Only downside is going to be when the updater only updates one... then have to copy all the new data from the updated over the unupdated (won't effect account or storage at all since that's all server-side). Again, this is all in theory as I haven't tried it... but just a suggestion, hope it helps.

PS - only overlaps I can imagine would be stuff that's being executed by SL internally, like the log storing... your logs would be merged into the one default file, as would the cache I believe, however the rest should still work. (As long as SL doesn't have a built in directory structure check or file location check on launching). Also, as I think I saw someone else suggest, they mentioned multiple partitions... one install per drive going this route should be possible as well I believe. (And hopefully SL is written so it looks at local directory... if it looks at default install directory for data, yours might still have the new skin... probably best to make the other install the "alternative", and your install the "main".)

LOL, I tried this on my Mac last night out of idle curiosity......

Just copied the SL application straight into another folder, on a different partition (though that probably wasn't critical)

Then fired up both instances and hey presto, had two lots of SL running with two different avatars - gave myself a hug Cool !

Ran extremely well on a dual processor (G5) machine actually, alternating between one window and the other. Not too much noticeable slowdown either, although I could see that both CPU's were being heavily utilised.

Only point of concern was that I was starting to get occasional tearing type horizontal scan flashes across the SL viewer.....

Perhaps if doing this I should alter each instance of SL to use half the graphics card memory so each instance only grabs 128Mb rather than the whole 256Mb available on the X800 card (or would that only mean that both would just share half the VRAM) - or is it actually possible that two SL's running could overheat the graphics card ?

Just wondered - it's kinda fun