Hello everyone!

I just thought I'd introduce myself. I'm a soon to be "ex" The Sims Online player, and a former EQ player. I was just invited to the beta yesterday and got online yesterday and created my avatar.

From the little I was on, this seems to be like a mix of EQ (the avatar graphics and terrain is very EQesque), and what I think TSO should have strived for.

I learned about Second Life prior to my involvement with the TSO beta, but with the familiarity of The Sims and me already being in their beta, I elected not to come here, BIG mistake. I think this is a bery ambitous project Linden has taken on here and I am very anxious to really sink my teeth in.

I downloaded and read the pdf file and I didn't really get much out of it, I still have so many questions. Is the in game help/tutorial worth going through the entire thing? Also, so technical questions:

I have a P4 2400 with 512mb RAM, a GeForce 4 Ti4200 with 64MB DDR RAM, a Soundblaster Live, a cable connection and plenty of hard drive space. Even with just a few people around, the lag was something else at times. Reminded of my beginnings in EQ when it came out on my old PC. I have gotten spoiled since I got this PC and have not had any problems in any game/program I have tried yet. I also am not getting any sounds besides wind and some other sounds. I read the knowledge base article about installing latest sound drivers, but I have the latest drivers for everything. I did find an article regarding my sound card that I will try out, but I'm not very optimistic about it.

So, I guess my question is, to those of you that have been here a while, what do you suggest I tweak to get better gameplay, game options and PC options? I have chosen to give the game a gig cache, and then selected the rest of the options based on my PC.

I also wanted to thank Char Linden for a really cool pair of tennis shoes last night, big kudos to you. And Misnomer, Sleeper, Dave and I'm sorry, I forgot your name, you all were very helpful and pleasant last night. It's very appreciated.

I'm at work right now, so I'll end it for now, but I'm sure I'll be back.

Trysten

Hey yeah, good to see ya last night Yes just like you I am rather spoiled about my nice and shiny home-built computer, and I too was dissapointed at the lag. But hey, it's BETA! Woohoo!! Nothing set in stone! Yeehaw!

What helps me the most with the lag are 2 main principles that pretty much make you angry but are awfully helpful when you're tryin to have fun on your own.

1: I set the draw distance to the smallest possible (64) and that clears up like 2/3rds of the lag. This is mostly to displace for Object and Texture settings being on max (I feel they are the 2 most important graphical options in the game, next to, of course, the 1024x768 resolution )

2: Stay in the same server and don't move! Yes this is the harshest one of all, but if you just hang around the same place with all the already-loaded textures and objects, the game runs great. This is mostly perfect for having fun creating objects, training yourself with the tools, and building really cool stuff Also if you actually STICK to this rule, you can pretty much forget rule number 1 and go ahead and extrend your draw distance to watch for people comming your way

I'm sure there are other options but I haven't really fooled around with them too much. I just do what works for me (until someone tells me of a much better way haha). Just remember, there's a fine line between server lag and between graphical lag. I still dunno which is more affecting me! (probably server lag though, just my guess).

Ok, I feel like a heel... What server are we on? I did not realize there was more than one, I figured it was all one big test server, but the more I read these forums, the more I realize there are others, was there an option at sign up I missed or something?

There are currently 20 different servers. You can see which one you're on in the lower right corner of the screen -- there'll be a name down there, and that's the name of the server you're currently on. Pull up your map (ctrl m -- or hit the Map button) and hover your mouse over an area of it. A tooltip will pop up with the name of the server (sim) that the mouse is currently over. Move the mouse to another square, see the name of that sim. There's also a Map (not the same as the map button / ctrl-m) in the client that you can pull up and download to your system if ya want.



Yes. As long as you do the things in the tutorial, it's worth it. If you're as impatient as I am, and simply skim the text, you probably won't get too much out of it.

Welcome to Second Life! Hope to meet you in world soon =)

#!

The game is on one giant mega-server, which happens to be made up of many physical machines. Each named "acre" (Thema, DaBoom, Freelon, Lusk, etc) is a different "sim", but when everything is working perfectly you shouldn't care which sim you are in or when you cross from one to another. (Except for navigation purposes).

I imagine that much blood, sweat, tears and more blood went in to the (usually) seemless handoff from one sim to another.

Welcome, Trysten! You're in for some fascinating and fun discoveries

I'm putting a free SLotto ticket in for you for Saturday's lottery drawing.

Holler if ya have any questions, or just wanna hang -
Kerstin

Dude... it might be your cable connection... I have that sometimes, when everything wants to load! Oh ya.. some servers are really bad! Um... go really west or east and there is NO lag! stay out of the middle.