New and need help

Sorry if this has been asked alot of times.. I'm new and need some help and didn't know exactly where to look lol...

Me and my hubby just got SL and I'm wondering, can we not play at the same time? I ask because we have 2 computers on a router and most of the night we've been able to log one on and not the other.. We get the verifying protocol.. If we finally do get both on.. The one that was on first locks up and to others it's shows the toon offline.. To us it shows the toon there but can't do anything or talk...

Is there something we need to do? We have the firewall for this game off! If we can't play together then that's really gonna suck cause that's why we both got it, lol... Help would be so much appreciated! Thanks a bunch!!

You should be able to play together fine. Here are some possibilities you should check:

1) You don't have enough bandwidth to share without impacting one another

It is possible your bandwidth (how fast your connection to the Internet is) is lower than you would need to share the connection to something as data intensive as SL is.... this was the case with my partner and myself. We were on 512k DSL (which split was effectively halved for gaming) and were forever bumping one another offline or crashing one another with time outs.

We upgraded to 1.5m DSL and it is smooth as silk for the most part, though on occasion there are still issues (if I'm doing a lot with clothing or textures and partner is doing a lot in another game).

You may wish to confirm how big a pipe you have to the internet. If it is under 1.5m or (shudder) dial up, you probably want to upgrade to play SL.

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2) Your shared connection setup is somehow misconfigured

It is possible that you have managed to connect your systems in a fashion that results in one or the other impeding things instead of sharing gracefully. You would need someone who know about networking to test/trouble-shoot this for you.

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3) You're both trying to log into the same account at the same time

I doubt this is the issue, but it is possible I suppose... so I'm tossing it out here. I remember a friend and his wife spending three days on something similar to this and when I arrived to help and asked them to show me how they were trying, I discovered they were both using the same account instead of one using one and the other, another. -chuckle-

Anyway, hope this helps!

You should probably check out this page on the wiki for some helpful tips.

My girlfriend and I had issues with trying to be on at the same time way back, but most of those problems have gone away. It used to be that transferred objects intended for one of us would go to the other, IM's would get misdirected, and several times a day one or the other of us would get stuch in place.

I wish I could tell you what we did to fix it, but the answer is nothing. It started working reliably about the time of the 1.4 upgrade so that might have been the fix, buit I can't say for certain. All of a sudden it was just better. We still get the occasional router/modem hiccup that kicks us both off, but that's a infrequent enough not to be a problem.

If it helps, we're using a Linksys router, and a Westell DSL modem. Linksys routers tend to be the most widely supported. They're cheap enough you might want to give one a try if you're using something else. I recommend not going wireless if you don't have to, by the way. If you ever need tech support from your ISP or for any web application, and you mention wireless router, they tend to blame everything on that. Buy it at Walmart, CompUSA, or an eqivilent store so you can take it back if it doesn't solve your problem. Good luck.


Oh, and by the way, just so you know, I noticed you used the word "toon" a few times. By this I assume you mean your character on the screen. Just so you don't confuse anyone, the term people use for this in SL is "avatar". Slang is "av" or "avie". If you use any other word, there's a good chance people won't understand you.

Thanks for the help ya'll

I have a cable connection, the modem is a webstar and have a Linskys router .. Couldn't tell ya the speed of the cable hook up or the bandwidth lol.. Have to wait and ask the hubby when he gets home..

We each have our own account so I don't reckon it's that.. Or I don't think anyways hehe!

And thanks for the tip about using the word toon! I'll have to remember to use avie!

We'll work on figuring it out and take your advice! Hopefully it'll work for us sooner rather then later..

Again thanks for the help, I so much appreciate it!

I can't recommend a Linksys router, as they're typically the ones with the greatest problems with SL. You SHOULD be able to get around the problem by specifying the port used on the clients, but I'd still look at something by SMC or possibly DLink over Linksys, personally.

Just wanted to say thanks to all! We have our problem solved!!! Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!