Second Life

[yendi]

I finally logged in a few times to my Second Life account and slogged my way through the tutorials. Can't imaging using it often (especially given how slow it is even on a wired connection at the office, as well as how much of a memory hog it is), but it has some neat potential for education.

Other than the Bantam Dell Island and Harvard's Berkman Center Island, what places are actually interesting on SL, for a value of interesting that doesn't include having bad virtual sex or mindless chat that would be faster (and just as mindless) in a traditional IM client.

Oh, and I'm Pel Blackadder there. Can I say just how much I hate the "you must use one of our pre-determined last names" naming system?

Comments

[themaskmaker.livejournal.com]

I gotta agree. I have absolutely no patience with how slow it is.

And I think the last name rule is asinine.

[fiddledragon]

For all that I'm rarely online - I'm Fiddleine Oceanlane over there - and songwind is Songwind Apogee

I'm 99% of the time hanging out on Free and Open Island - mostly because I don't know whereelse to go *chuckle*

[merrick42.livejournal.com]

Pel Blackadder? How...Yendish of you.

[kyranjaye.livejournal.com]

If you're looking for interesting conversation, I recommend the Shelter. Actually, I recommend the Shelter for just about anything, particularly if you're new to SecondLife... it's a newbie-friendly PG club that's almost always full of interesting people (tho the number and kind of interesting varies a bit, with people's schedules and stuff, but there's a huge cadre of regulars, most of whom are Very Nifty People.) Another point in its favor is that there's a ton of volunteers who are willing to help AND who keep the peace, which means a minimum of griefing/troublemaking - someone starts up, they tend to get corrected (or booted) PDQ. I'm one of the volunteers, which means I have all sorts of useful helpful information that's come my way; feel free to hit me up if you want me to pass anything along. (that's what I do in SL, mostly)

I also have a number of interesting places to explore, but don't have access to them at the moment... more for wandering than hanging out, but there are some REALLY nifty sims out there that people have created. I can drop the landmarks on you in-world if you'd like.

When I started in SL I learned a lot by reading this Newbie Starter Guide (http://www.mermaiddiaries.com/2006/11/natalias-newbie-getting-started-guide.html). She also has a great list of interesting places (http://www.mermaiddiaries.com/2006/11/siteseeing-and-exploring.html) to visit. (Warning: her spelling and grammar are mediocre at best, but if you can ignore it, the info is great)

As for the client, yeah, it's a hog, particularly on older machines, but it does tend to get better with time as your local cache builds. Also, you might consider downloading the Windlight First Look client - technically a beta, but it's live grid, and a lot of people have said it actually runs faster than the regular client.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

You have left a lot open there. There are clubs with live and canned music, games of all sorts, places to learn how to do the building/coding parts of the experience, etc. Do you have anything in particular you think you'd want to do?

Have you played much with the video settings? Also, the performance improves once you have enough of the textures cached. The freeform nature of the world is really apparent from the fact that all the objects and textures have to be downloaded.

[underpope.livejournal.com]

The pre-determined list of last names doesn't bother me too much. I think part of their reasoning is that they don't want people impersonating celebrities in SL. I think if you really need your own last name, you can pay for it.

I'm Zoe Compton in SL (Yes, my avatar's female... these things happen). I do enjoy going to various music venues in SL, particularly the jazz and 80's clubs, as well as the Blarneystone Pub in the Dublin sim. The folks at sLiterary are putting together a recreation of the Globe Theater from London as well, and are working on ways to present Shakespearean plays in SL. They also had a lot of support for NaNoWriMo participants during November.

Also, October Country has streaming old time radio and audio dramas almost all the time, plus costume parties every Saturday night. I enjoy the costume parties; there's a lot of creativity that goes into them.

[brak55.livejournal.com]

I tried Second Life a couple of times. I found it was too close to real life to be enjoyable. Basically, everything was about either money or sex (and the sex part was really bad).

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Blackadder's a good one though. *G*
I did have an account there but after they lost everyone's credit card and personal info, I was unable to log in again. Whatever.

[muse0fire.livejournal.com]

I tried Second Life (also picked Blackadder for my last name) and got tired of it after about 20 minutes. Ah well.

Stephen (as in my Beta Husband) is very into Second Life and spends a lot of time there - name is "Is Koba" if you want to say hi.

[amokk]

I set up a long time ago, hardly ever use it. It's great potential and all, but I just don't have the patience for it.

[yendi]

Thanks -- once I got past the grammar and spelling, there were some good links there.

What's the Windlight client? Since the "real" SL client locked my machine up last time I tried it, I'm certainly willing to give something else a try.

[kyranjaye.livejournal.com]

Windlight is the new rendering engine that Linden Labs is working on... vastly improved graphics capabilities, among other things. It IS a beta, so there are bugs, but it seems to be pretty stable for most things at this time. Can't guarantee it'll fix the problem, but you never know. There are other third-party viewers out there too, but I don't know much about them. (OnRez is the most popular, thanks in part to the branding from the CSI:NY episode a month or so ago, but that's about all I know about it)

Here (http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/12/04/super-cool-new-windlight-first-look-viewer/#more-1447) is the most recent blog post on Windlight, with links to system requirements and download.

Also, I don't know what kind of Mac you're using for SL, but I do know there is a disastrous vid driver glitch in the MacBook Pros produced this year that causes all sorts of memory leaks and glitchery when SL is run... JUST those machines, it has to do with an updated vid card that Apple apparently never got the OpenGL drivers working right on. (And still hasn't fixed in Leopard ::grumble::) There is a workaround, but I haven't tried it - I'm SLing in XP using BootCamp, partly because it prevents me from going in-world when I need to be doing other things. If that IS your problem, I can link you to the workaround. If you're on an older box with less graphic memory, I'd highly suggest reducing your draw distance to 64 or so, it really helps. (Under preferences>graphics)