Bustin’ a move on the virtual dancefloor and losing control is all fun and games — until you try to stop and yet your avatar just keeps on doing the electric boogaloo. When you find yourself in such a socially awkward situation:

1. Go to Me menu > Movement > Stop Animating Me

 

FREEZE. This applies to all animations, not just dances: if you teleport and find yourself magically-yet-uncomfortably sitting in midair, that’s another opportune time to use Stop Animating Me. (Although I see that less than I used to, let me know what your experiences have been.)

Context:

• Normally, you can click a Stop button in an animation window or command an inworld object (like a dance ball) to cease. If all else fails, you have Stop Animating Me.
• This feature has moved various places over time, but in 2.4, Linden Lab decided it was useful enough to bring out from the confines of the Advanced menu, so here you are.

Then, get back to intentionally dancing.

Do you find yourself bothered by too many notifications? Do you want to hide instant message popups without having to go into Busy mode? There’s a preference that can help with that in Viewer 2.4 and newer.

 

For text instructions and more details,

see the “incoming chat popups” help page

Running multiple Viewers has become more accessible thanks to an easy checkbox in Viewer 2.4 Beta.

If you run multiple Viewers (what are the official Viewers?) — for example, you prefer building in 1.23 but want 2.3′s communication enhancements, and are also testing the Mesh project viewer — certain aspects can conflict, especially if you’re running them at the same time.

For example, each Viewer refers to a cache folder which stores info about inventory, textures, sounds, and other previously-accessed data for quicker retrieval. Having a bunch of Viewers using the same cache folder is like a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos™* — they clash for resources OM NOM NOM and oddities like perceived inventory loss (never fun) and corrupt textures (that sucks too) may result.

However, you can change your cache location for each Viewer.

1. On the Viewer’s login screen, choose Me menu > Preferences. (In Viewer 1.23, it’s Edit menu > Preferences.)
2. In the PREFERENCES window, click Setup tab. (In Viewer 1.23, it’s Network tab.)
3. Click the Browse button. (In Viewer 1.23, it’s the Set button.)
4. Use the file browser to choose a different folder, or create a new one. Then choose it.
5. Quit the Viewer (as changes won’t happen until you restart it), then repeat the above for each Viewer.

Thanks to cheery Sylvan Mole of our Linden Department of Public Works for suggesting this tip!

What tips do you have for using multiple Viewers?

* The hippo analogy is even more funny when you realize hippos are SL’s unofficial mascot.

If you ever mess up your avatar appearance, don’t worry. You can easily reset your avatar to a default one, including the avatars available when you first signed up for Second Life.

This video shows you how:

 

For text steps and more details, go to the wiki help page counterpart.

This is another one of those “Mmm subtle” kinda tips. You may already know that with Viewer 2.x, we’ve superbly integrated SLurls (web-compatible links that teleport you to a specific Second Life place, as used in the Destination Guide), and that pasting a SLurl into chat shows it in brief.

Side tip: Pasting a SLurl can be a quicker way of broadcasting it to nearby friends while traveling as a group, instead of having to drag a landmark on each person or send individual teleport requests.

Did you also know that SLurl-pasting works the same way in your profile? Watch this video to see how you can easily include a favorite SLurl or more in your profile, so others can come visit.

 

What’s your fave creative use for SLurls that more Residents should know about?

One of the new features we’ve introduced with Viewer 2.3 Beta are “hints“, little text bubbles that come up and tell you more about a feature when appropriate. You may be familiar with this convention in other apps. For example, if someone types to you, you get a prompt on how to text chat. And there’s one for the new display names feature too.

You can click the “X” to hide a hint, but if you’d rather globally turn them off, just disable Help menu > Enable Hints

Skip if you already know this — apparently it’s been around for awhile and I had no clue.

You can drag an open texture preview onto any applicable surface, whether it’s a prim face or a profile picture.

 

This may be a quick shortcut if you’ve already got a texture open and were under the assumption (like me) that you had to drag it from the PICK: TEXTURE window or from your inventory.

What’s a Second Life trick that you wish you discovered earlier, because it seems totally obvious in hindsight?

(Don’t be shy, there’s always something new to discover in Second Life, and I encourage this curiosity! The only wrong answer is not learning.)

What if I told you that

you can get less lag in seconds, with a few simple clicks?

No, this ain’t a scam, but like some infomercials, it’s completely risk-free. Y’see, I love “smart” defaults because they help give us a better experience out of the box, whether we’re new to Second Life or doing a fresh install. But I keep coming across Resis who, despite having a fat broadband connection, feel “laggy” because they didn’t know they could up their Maximum Bandwidth.

GOOD GOSH. SPREAD THE WORD:

One of the not-so-bright defaults, as I griped about with you guys some time ago (the Internet never forgets), is the default Maximum Bandwidth setting. It defaults to 500 kbps, which makes no sense because HELLO WE’RE NOT ON DIAL-UP ANYMORE.

But srsly, like Geordi La Forge said on Reading Rainbow, you don’t have to take my word for it. Try it yourself.

1. Go to Me menu > Preferences.
2. In PREFERENCES window, click Setup tab.
3. Move Maximum bandwidth slider all the way to the right… yeah, crank that baby!

(Supposedly years ago, setting your Max. Bandwidth too high would result in bad packet loss and overall decreased performance, but tell me if you still notice that. It may not even be true anymore.)

 

Links to followup on:

• How to open the Advanced menu (so you can see the STATISTICS BAR in the video)
• “Default Bandwidth Setting Too Low bug – VWR-21872, which you should vote for if you care… and see my comment in there, more history

Jack Linden recently announced “Viewer 2.3 Beta Available Today With Display Names and More“! In response to hot Resident requests, we made a bunch of design upgrades so that it’s simple to do some everyday things you’ll be using often.

Question: “How can I grab a complicated display name made out of characters I can’t even type?”

Answer: We’ve added an easy Copy To Clipboard button. All you need to do is open a Resident’s profile, which is is accessible in many places via an inspector (green circle icon with an “i”).

Just click Copy To Clipboard, then Ctrl-V (Cmd-V on Mac) to paste both the display name and unchangeable username in any standard text field, including outside of Second Life. This video shows you how in action:

 

Remember, this is currently only available in the Viewer 2.3 Beta, so be sure to get the special Viewer and go to a supported region like this:

Because we need to ensure that Display Names operates correctly, we will  not enable Display Names for the entire grid immediately. Today, it  will work in a few thousand regions; once we see how it performs,  we  will dial that up over the next few weeks until the whole grid is  enabled. If you want to try using Display Names, then head to Blake Sea  and Bay City, as those areas will be enabled first.

Learn more about display names in our help pages!

^ I was writing these but have been transitioning them into the care of Bea Linden, feel free to comment and let us know your suggestions.

Do you want to have Second Life instant messages forwarded to your email address when you’re not logged in? Or do you get many IMs and find them spammy? Whatever your choice, you can

toggle offline instant messages (IMs)

^ As that help page explains, you can do it from Account > Contact Information in your secondlife.com Dashboard, which is handy if you’re somewhere you can’t login to Second Life, or would rather not bother logging in. (I love convenience, don’t you?)

While you’re at it, you can also change your email address on the same page.

No matter how much changes here, some things are still around. Among them, classic clouds.

Do you turn classic clouds on or off (or switch depending on context), and why?

Also relevant: if you didn’t know you could turn them off — maybe you’re a new Resident — you should try and decide for yourself!

After my last post on skyboxes, classic clouds is a natural followup topic: the ground, water, and clouds are so much of what you see in Second Life, so changing their appearance (or entirely removing them from view) can have a massive effect on your inworld experience. Think about the real-world and how even hearing rain results in, uh, a certain urge.

I show you how classic clouds affect performance here:

 

And there’s…

More on the “Classic clouds” help page

I keep seeing Residents (and my wife) wonder what happened to the “New Inventory Window” and other options in Viewer 2.1, since the My Inventory sidebar tab no longer has a dedicated top menu. Part of why we removed this was because there was unneeded redundancy where similar items could be found in two places. Oh… what’s that at the bottom?

The gear (“more options”) and + icons are un-obvious at first, but CLICK THOSE to get to inventory commands you may’ve been used to seeing elsewhere, including New Inventory Window to pop open a second (or third, etc.) inventory window. The gear and + are found in other sidebar tabs, too.

ALSO: there’s a HIDDEN SHORTCUT. I’m actually not sure if this is intentional ‘cuz it’s weird, but Ctrl-Shift-I opens a floating inventory window, even if the sidebar is closed.

(It’s funny to see New Inventory Window still around — after I popularized it in 2006, I didn’t think it’d have the longevity it has as a workaround for multiple inventory views. Commence discussion for how this could be better.)

By the way, those of you wondering what I use to get these images up so quickly in my blog and forum posts, it’s the elegant Skitch with an awesome workflow. Makes it super-simple for me to snap, annotate, upload. Mac-only, alas, but on Windows, you can try Jing.

In case you were wondering… your Transaction History, found in your Account section on http://secondlife.com, shows “your Linden Dollar (L$) transactions for the previous 30 days”. You can filter by date range and export your transactions for  record-keeping purposes.

What do “MKT2″ and  “MKT” mean?

Since your transaction history includes Second Life items you’ve  purchased on the web, “MKT2 Item Purchase” refers to items purchased  from the Second Life Marketplace, which will eventually replace Xstreet (the old marketplace), whose purchased items are shown with “MKT Item Purchase”.

To see exactly which items were purchased, go to Marketplace Order History (still in-progress so stuff may be missing) or Xstreet Order History.

Here’s an example of what it looks like:

Keep up-to-date with Marketplace & Commerce news!

I’ve put the above info on a wiki help page. More video tutorials coming this week (Yoz got videos working on the blogs again, yayzerama), stay tuned fellow avatars.

Last time I covered something quite misanthropic in nature, so this time I’m gonna do the opposite and show you how to use EMOTES to express yourself when socializing.

While communication is an essential part of the Second Life experience, even though there’s voice chat, you may prefer to show how you feel in text chat. That’s cool, because /me , /shout , and /whisper are pretty much self-explanatory ways to do what they — ahem — say. By using them in natural conversation, you can add greater dynamic range, entertain your friends, and have more fun. And who doesn’t like fun? (That’s a rhetorical question.)

Check out a video and tips on using these emotes!

 

I guarantee your conversations will never be the same again.