Viewer Tutorial

Second Life: The New New User Tutorial

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Hamlet is on about a video that shows the new user experience. I find those interesting. You can see Hamlet’s comments here: Second Life First-Hour User Experience by Returning SLer. I have the video just below. It is an hour long. Sheeeesh. Will anyone watch the whole thing?

Beau Hindman (YouTube name) made the video. He says he was first in Second Life™ (SL) in 2004 and has not been in SL for some years. So, this is a semi-new user experience.

Beau rambles a lot and stumbles on what he wants to say. He keeps his umm, errr’s to a level I can tolerate. The first 10 minutes is more just telling us what SL is than it is a logical ordered tutorial.

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Second Life: Smile Shape Tutorial

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Alicia Chenaux has made her first video tutorial. It is a pretty neat idea that she presents. You can see it here: Smile Shape Tutorial. Iris Ophelia pointed me to this from her article in NWN: Learn How to Make the Perfect Smiling SL Avatar Shape With This Video Tutorial.

Doing a Smile Shape
Doing a Smile Shape

If you have ever used the built-in smile, you know it is pretty hideous. But, Alicia shows you how to fix it by adjusting your shape. In her tutorial she demonstrates how to fix the built-in smile emote.

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Firestorm TTT – Clean Install 2015

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Hopefully by now you know TTT is Firestorm’s Tool Tip Tuesday. This week Jessica walks people through the process of performing a clean install. First step is backing up your Firestorm Viewer ‘s chat logs and settings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gc0dBfVGJ0

None of the steps for a clean install are technically difficult for the intermediate computer user. However, if you are not used to working with files and navigating the hard disk, I suspect you will be in over your head. Copy-Paste, Move, and disk navigation using the Windows File Explorer (and Mac equivalent) are required skills.

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Education in Second Life

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Virtual reality/worlds have extensive possibilities for education and training, we all know that, I think we do… But, I suspect most are like me and think little on the problems educators have using virtual worlds as their classroom.

SLeducate - University of Western Australia (UWA)
SLeducate – University of Western Australia (UWA)

If I think about it even a little I realize the first problem is just getting a student into the world and to the right location. The University of Western Australia (UWA) has an article up about those challenges. See: Eliminating a headache faced by all SL virtual educators!

Experience has taught us over the years that existing Learning Islands in Second Life™ don’t really get people new to Second Life to a level of usability needed to take a class. Often people are still figuring out how to use the viewer rather than focusing on the lesson. 

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Debugging a Second Life Region’s Lag

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I suspect many of us have visited a region and had our FPS (Frames per Second) rate drop to low single digits. Innula Zenovka is managing a region that has the problem and started looking for help figuring out what was wrong with it. I suppose managers like Innula get handed some real messes to deal with.

Innula says her viewer usually runs at about 30 FPS. But, in the problem region it drops to 2 to 3 FPS. I hate it when that happens.

See the thread: Advice, please, on reading consoles and debugging a laggy sim.

There is some good information and tips in the thread.

Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T Read Out
Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T Read Out

One tip is to select an item you think may be using a number of large textures. A simple right click on it will do. Then press Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T. This will send a series of notifications. You will get a list of the textures used in the item as a list ordered by each object in a link set. The notifications tell you the size of the texture and which face it is applied to.

You can see the result in the image: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T Read Out. 

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New Second Life Viewer Pipeline

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As reported before, a new viewer pipeline with various release candidates is coming online. It is mostly in place now. I don’t see where any recent announcements have been made by the Lab. Inara over on Living in the Modem World, has written about it. But, I think we are all a bit unsure how things are going to work. I know I am. I’m experimenting with things now.

I’ve updated my machine to use Win 7-64 in a dual boot scenario. This gives me a clean starting place for experimenting with the new viewer pipeline. Until today the only viewer I had installed was the main SL Viewer. I have all the other viewers on the other side of the dual boot in Vista 32. So, I can get to them. But, not from Win7.

I have clean AppData folders as a new Win7 user. Plus caches and log areas are new and fresh. 

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