Newbie questions...

Hi all! I'm a brand new member of Second Life and haven't gotten on too much yet, so I have a few questions.

It seems a little awkward to move around. The default camera view (where you see your avatar's back) feels a bit strange to me. My avatar sometimes covers what I want to look at, and he never seems to move exactly where I want. I prefer the Mouselook view, but you can't access all features in this mode. Why? Or am I missing something?

I'm also running at 1600x1200 and it feels a little laggy. I may reduce my resolution to see if the "feel" is better. Does resolution affect the laggy feel?

That's about all for now. I'll log in later and play around some more. Hope to see you all online!

Driftwood Nomad

Hey, welcome to SL! Hehe, actually I'm fairly new myself, been here for less than a week, but I'm learning quickly.

When you talk about laggy movement, I'm assuming you mean just plain old net lag. SL is run across several servers and as you move it has to get information from all those different servers at once. As you cross boundary lines, you even move completely off of one server and onto another. What this all adds up to is a jerky feeling when one server is a bit slower to catch up than another. Lagginess is also caused by having to constantly download geometry, textures, sounds, etc, as you move through the landscape. Once you've been in an area for awhile, it should calm down a bit.

The controls take some getting used to, but once you understand how they work you should be pleased. The 3rd person view allows you to move around while using the mouse to interact with objects, while the 1st person view is designed to give you more fine control by using the mouse to rotate, which is why you can't use it to click on things while in that view. You can simply roll the mousewheel forward or back to switch between views as you need to.

While in 3rd person, you might feel like you can't look around. This is far from the truth. Not only can you look where you're going, you can zoom in on anything in the immediate area and rotate your view around IT. To do this, just click on an object or area of the screen and select Focus On. Then use ALT + mouse to zoom into or rotate around the object. ALT + CTRL + mouse rotates around the object at a fixed distance. And ALT + CTRL + SHIFT + mouse allows you to pan your view. Any time you want to adjust your focus, just click on a different object in the viewer. (Press ESC to exit focus mode) You can also use all of the ALT controls while in default camera (i.e. focused on yourself) to allow you to look up down, or sideways from where your character is located. If your character is getting in the way of an object, use the mousewheel to zoom out further and get a larger view, or simply rotate the camera a bit until you can see the object. You can then Focus On the object and look at it from any angle!

Like I said, it's tricky, but once mastered it's a very powerful system for viewing the world.

welcome to SL!

as far as your resolution, unless you have a GFFX5800, 2GB PC3200 DDR, and an AthlonXP 3000+, i would suggest dropping it. you may also find it useful to work in a window (non-full-screen), as you can have notepad, photoshop, and other tools at your fingertips when creating content for the world... it'll take a while to learn how to do some of the stuff (scripting, clothing, etc.) but when you do learn how to do it, it will have been worth the effort

have you tried either dropping your draw distance or your network setting yet?

Thanks for the replies! Yes, the mouse movement and zoom controls are starting to feel better. Just takes practice. And it seems less laggy now that I run in a window and tweaked my graphics settings a bit.

See you all in SL!

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Driftwood Nomad