I'm New To Second Life (Kinda)

[OichiKazama]

Well i played a long time ago and remember some stuff still . I decided to play this but i would like some questions answered if nobody minds .

 

1. Whats avatar shapes ? I was looking through the avatar mall and saw ( Under Avatar Appearance ) Avatar shapes .

2. How big is the game client and what are the requrements ?

3. Is the game even compatible with windows 8 ?

4.How to stop the game from lagging ? (If it laggs )

5. Can you make your own room and will it requre payment ?

6. How do you earn " L " ?

[Amethyst Jetaime]

Welcome back to SL.

1. Whats avatar shapes ? I was looking through the avatar mall and saw ( Under Avatar Appearance ) Avatar shapes .

You wear them to make your avatars body shaped a certain way.  You can buy them or make them yourself.  Shape plus a skin governs what your avatar is going to look like.

2. How big is the game client and what are the requrements ?

T

he size of the client, called viewers in SL, depends on the one you choose to run.  There is the official one but there are also a number of

third party viewers

.

Firestorm is the most popular viewer in SL but you should try a few to see which one you like best and runs the best on your machine. 

Here are the system requirements

3. Is the game even compatible with windows 8 ?

Yes

4.How to stop the game from lagging ? (If it laggs )

Some lag in very crowded places or on poorly designed regions is unavoidable.  However how much lag you experience will depend on how good your machine is, your graphics card and your internet connection.

5. Can you make your own room and will it requre payment ?

There are no rooms like in IMVU.  However you can buy land ranging from a small parcel to an entire private island (aka sim, or region)  their is a monthly fee which is your proportionate share of the server costs and overhead for running the sim

. 

Here is a link explaining the basics

. 

6. How do you earn " L " ?

By getting a job in SL or by creating things or providing a service to sell to other residents. 

Most jobs pay only in tips and people do them not only for the L's but for fun because to earn enough to pay tier on a modest property you will have to work a number of hours a week.  You can actually do better just giving up something small in RL , such as buying lunch once or twice a week, and use the money to buy L's or getting a part time job in RL for a couple hours a week..  Of course how much you need depends too on how much you need for your lifestyle in SL.

You can also earn lindens by offering a service or creating something that other residents are willing to pay money for.  This is the way to earn the most money nut it takes talent and skills that take a long time to learn, unless you already have a skill such a 3D mesh modeling.  Some of the best content creators make enough money that it is their RL job, however most don't.

 

[Syo Emerald]

In addition to what Amethyst said:

How big is the game client

Somehow this question makes me think, that you think of SL as something compareable to WoW and similar MMORPGs, which require to download multiple GB of data. Second Life is not made that way. You have a software (called viewer), which enabled you to acess Second Life and that one is downloaded and ready within minutes, because (if I remember it right) its not even the size of a whole GB of data.

 

Can you make your own room and will it requre payment ?

Second Life is an open world, we have no such things as "rooms" as in IMVU. Besides buying your own land, its also possible to rent land from other users. Some run big estates and offer every size of land from small parcels to whole sims. There are two things you want to pay attention to when decieding what land you want to buy: How big it is and how many prims are allowed on it. Both will define what you can place on it.

 

[Pussycat Catnap]

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OichiKazama wrote:

1. Whats avatar shapes ? I was looking through the avatar mall and saw ( Under Avatar Appearance ) Avatar shapes .

Basically a person selling what they dialing on the body and face design sliders. Almost all of them are pure crap that look like stretched out super skinny things with no curve to the spider long legs, funky t-rex arms, and either no butt, or a butt the size of Texas. And the expressions on the faces are often... special...

I recommend NOT buying a shape. Just learn to dial the shapes yourself. I have a guide in my sig on proportions that can help. Also look up a user named "Penny Patton" - she has a like guide written from a different perspective.

Both of us have 'normal sized' avatars - which is only about 20-30% of people in SL (and growing, when we started our guides we were probably a 5% minority) - but even if you go super tall, our advice can help you do it without looking like a freak. And freak is the ONLY thing you can find for sale in the shape seller community.

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OichiKazama wrote:

2. How big is the game client and what are the requrements ?

Its very small. I forget exactly, but maybe 30mb or so to download. Last time I downloaded it the download was done before the HTML on the page it was on had finished loading in my browser...

This is because 99.99999% of everything you see in SL is downloaded when you encounter it, or pulled from your cache where it might have been placed the last time you saw it, if it hasn't changed since. That is the major reason for slowness in SL - you download everything on the fly. That is because everything is changing constantly as its almost all user-made.

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OichiKazama wrote:

4.How to stop the game from lagging ? (If it laggs )

You really don't. But you can do some things to lesson the impact.

In my getting started guide I cover the preferences I recommend. Short version is go light on your preferences at first. Keep your max bandwidth medium low, you cache medium high. And don't wear too many scripted items.

meshmaxconcurrency between 1 and 8 (default is 16 - which means mesh can 'choke' and get blocked like two people trying to get through the same door at the same time).

texturefetchconcurrency between 1 and 8 (default is 0 which is extremely bad - it means when in HTTP mode, textures do not download, and this means people think they have lag when in reality their systems just stopped loading stuff).

rendervolumelodfactor 4 (default is 1 which means everything further from your nose than your nose itself will look like random triangles - /facepalm)

- All of those are values in the advanced - debug menu. Which new people are not usually able to find...

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OichiKazama wrote:

5. Can you make your own room and will it requre payment ?

Yes, if you have land you can make your own anything. I built myself a home on the side of a cliff. Land requires payment. Either to Linden Lab, or to another person who is also "playing / using" SL and is just renting you their place - but be warned about renting... lots of people just take the money and then kick you off the land. If you choose to rent, check the reputation of the landlord first. If you can't find their reputation easily... then its buyer beware.

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OichiKazama wrote:

6. How do you earn " L " ?

On the upper right of your 'game client' there's a button that says "Buy L$". Click it. - Any other method is most likely a waste of time, or requires a LOT of experience in making custom items: advanced knowledge of photoshop and/or 3d modeling.

[OichiKazama]

Thank you all very much \o/ I'm such a noob but learning quickly  

No rooms ? I see :0 , There is no lag like i thought it would be , A job ? How do you subit items btw ? 

I wanna sell a shape i made .

[Freya Mokusei]

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OichiKazama wrote:

How do you subit items btw ? 

I wanna sell a shape i made .

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You don't need to. You can sell anything to anyone for any amount of money - there is no reviewing of items for sale and Second Life operates a Buyer Beware policy, exempting users from refund or support in the case of trouble.

You can set something to sell just by putting it inside a box, which is set to sell a copy of itself for however much you want. Just rez this box on the ground and other people can buy it from you.

You can also set yourself up as a 'store' in Marketplace, which is similar to the IMVU catalogue - but you don't need to do this in order to sell.

[rockerX0X0X]

Avartar shapes you can edit to make your avatar look the way it does or look like the spitting image of your real life self.

 

Secondlife is compatable with windows 8 i have it on my laptop.

 

You can rent land for so many lidens a month or get a membership they give you a house with so many prims plus you can buy land as a member.

 

Ways to earn lindens Create Clothing to sell, Build Houses/Furniture to sell, win lindens from club contest and photo contest

 

Lastly theres no way to perminantly stop lag because even if you are not running high scripts etc. You could be in a club or place that's crowded and if everyone has their ao's turned on all in one area that's a possible lag creator also also jewlry and hair if the risizing scripts are not deleted from them that can cause lag because of each strand of hair / peice of jewlry has a resize script.

So many different variables that could cause lag you can have the most bad@ss gaming pc and still lag that's just how it is.