Second Life: Typing Animation

Second Life: Typing Animation

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I've just started using Second Life, and one of the most annoying things about it, is the default typing animation, that everyone starts with, when inside of Second Life. The first question posed is, "How do I remove the typing animation in Second Life?" Well the answer's remarkably simple, because it's just a command inside of the Second Life viewer that's set to "true".

1) Open the Second Life viewer, and log into Second Life.
2) Once inside of Second Life, if you press Ctrl+Alt+D, you will get the Second Life advanced menu, appearing at the top of the Second Life viewer.

3) Click on the Advanced menu, and then select "Debug Settings" near the bottom.
4) You should now see a small box appear within the Second Life viewer, called Debug settings. If you click the drop down arrow in the first box, you will see a large collection of Second Lifes commands, but for now the only command we're interested in is "PlayTypingAnim".

5) Once you have located this command, you will see a breif description of what the command does, and the word "TRUE", which if you now change to "FALSE", and save. You will see that the typing animation in Second Life will now be stopped.

So jump back into Second Life, and have fun. My avatars name is "Nightfaller Aeon", for those who wish to know.

Currency Trading - Second Life

Second Life: Currency Trading
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Ways to make money in Second Life: Currency Trading. Like real currency that you can hold, Second Life Linden Dollars hold real monetary value, which means the more you have, the more you can exchange into USD.

The idea behind currency trading is that you buy more for 10 dollars than you sell, so lets say you have 10USD, and you get 5000L$ for it, you then want to sell either 4000L$ back for 10USD making you 1000L$ or you want to sell the 5000L$ for 11USD. Either way that you do it, you’re making money.

There are aspects of currency trading that you must account for and it is for this entire reason that most people will never venture into it. You have to place an order for the currency, and then only once the market hits the value that you want to buy or sell for, will your order to be completed. Within a virtual economy like Second Life, this becomes something that you could be waiting a very long time for, if your orders are set to values very high or very low, because the Second Life economy is very stable and does not significantly fluctuate.

If you’re interested in the idea of trying this then you will need to learn how to place “Limit Buys” and “Limit Sells” within the Second Life Lindex. Instructions are as follows, and quoted from the Second Life Wiki.

“Limit Buy allows you to specify the amount of Linden dollars and the minimum exchange rate you are willing to accept. LindeX automatically matches up sell offers as they come in. In order to activate your option to perform Limit Buys, you must set your Linden Dollar Exchange Settings to Advanced. You must have sufficient US$ credit on your Second Life account to completely pay for the buy order.

1) Go to https://secondlife.com/currency/buy.php
2) Under Buy at a Specific Rate, enter both the quantity of L$ you wish to buy, and the exchange rate you wish to buy at.
3) Click Offer to Buy”
Reference:
Second Life Currency Trading Link

If your order is taking a long time then you may wish to cancel your Second Life limit buy or Second Life limit sell. You can do this by following the information below, which once again is quoted from the Second Life Wiki.

“You can cancel a Limit Buy Offer in progress on the LindeX: Transaction History page. You may wish to cancel a Limit Buy in order to alter your desired exchange rate, or if you change your mind about the amount of Linden dollars you wish to purchase.”
Reference:
Second Life Currency Trading Link

Second Life Viewer 2: Are you a cloud?

Second Life Viewer 2: Are you a cloud?
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So do we all have those days where we just don't quite know what to wear, well why not simply be a cloud?

A new Viewer, brings only one thing, problems. A lot of people have been contacting me saying that they logging inworld with Viewer 2.0 and that they're simply a cloud, nothing more. This means that inworld. inside of Second Life, none of your inventory is rendering. There is a few solutions to this problem so read below.

Second Life cloud solution 1:
Log into Second Life and select the main menu "me". select preferences and thego to the graphics section. Once here, you should try dropping all of your settings to the lowest possible options, so slide that bar right down there to "low".

Then down the bottom of this little window, click "Advanced", don't worry though, it's not all confusing, although yes this new window is badly designed and looks like information overload, for new users to Second Life. Set the "Mesh detail" options all down to low, and then also do the same for "Draw distance".

Hit save and you should be all done, now in all fairness, if your graphics card is good enough to handle Second Life at high quality, this stuff won't do crap, but it was worth trying. Solution 2 will though!


Second Life cloud solution 2:
This will reset your avatar to that horrid default avatar you had when you started Second Life, but hey it does resolve the issue, so lets give it a go.

Open the Advanced menu inside of the viewer by presssing "Ctrl+Alt+D" (On a Mac, press Option+Control+D). Then inside of the "advanced menu", if you click the option "Show Develop Menu", you will see another menu appear.

With the Show Develop Menu, if you click on "Develop", then "Avatar", and then "Character Tests". You will see two further options, "Test Male" and "Test Female", select the sex of your preference, and hey presto, your avatar should re-appear.

Second life for the win.

Not Authorised? Update Pending? Sound familiar? Second Life

Not Authorised? Update Pending? Sound familiar? Second Life
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Do those messages and the website Second Life, sound like something you hear a lot of? Well if they are then read the following for a guideline on what may be causing this problem with Second Life.

From personal experience and assisting residents for a long time, I've discovered a few things with payment methods and these are the guidelines for the official Second Life website www.secondlife.com

Gift cards & Prepaid cards:
Gift cards and prepaid cards, they simply do not work! If you want to use them try www.xstreetsl.com or another third party seller (e.g. me for me, you must speak to me personally first).

Not Authorised:
If you're receiving a "Not Authorised" message, then this is stating that your bank or credit card company is blocking the card from working, and Second Life test your card to make sure it's valid. Second Life send you a 1$ test charge which they usually refund within a 24/48 hour period, where if your bank or credit card company block the charge, second lifes system will block your payment method from working, until the block is lifted.

Normally you'd be advised to contact your bank or credit card company, but to be honest their customer service agents will be useless, you actually need to speak with the risk/security/fraud department to make sure they did not block a charge from "Linden Research","Global Collect", "Wells Fargo", "Linden Lab" or "Second Life". If they did, ask them to stop the blocks from those places and your card will work on Second Life.

Update Pending:
Just read the "Not Authorised" section, because lets face it, Second Life has error messages that usually mean the same thing expressed in a multitude of ways. Yay Second Life.

Known list of accepted payment methods:
- Credit cards
- visa Cards
- Visa Electron
- Amex
- Discover
- JCB
- Paypal

Rock on peeps. Second Life is the future.

Second Life - Update Graphics Card Drivers

Second Life - Update Graphics Card Drivers
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Is your graphics card upto date?

First of all some software is very sensitive to how updated your graphics card drivers are, and I know first hand that Second Life can be a bugger with this, so what we're going to do is highlight what your graphics card is, and how updated it is.

If you are running Second Life on a windows operating system (Windows XP, ME, Vista or 7), press the windows key on your keyboard plus "r", and you will see a small command box pop up. This new box is called the "Run..." window which allows you to type in a command and it will run it.

You need to type in "dxdiag", and then if you click "Ok", you will see the run box dissapear and a small pop up asking you if you want to digitally assign drivers. Click yes at this point. Once you have clicked yes, you will see the Dxdiag window appear with more details. For this article, we will be looking at the tab called "Display" or if you have two monitors/graphics cards it will be named "Display 1".

If you have clicked on the tab, you will see a few bits of information. The information that you need is as follows...

Device section -
Name: This is your graphics card name.
Manufacturer: This is the creator of your graphics card.

Drivers -
Date: This is the last time your graphics card drivers were updated. If this is longer than 4 months ago, I'd advise looking at updating these drivers.

To update your drivers, locate the manufacturers website, and then you will see the option on their website to update your drivers.

Good website links:
http://www.nvidia.com
http://www.amd.com
http://downloadcenter.intel.com

Rock on peeps.

Second Life Process Credits.

How do I sell L$?
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First of all you need to make sure that your Second Life account has a billing age, which is an age that starts from the moment that you first make a financial transaction.

So if you have bought L$ through www.secondlife.com, have a premium membership or placed a positive USD balance "credit", onto your Second Life account you should be able to sell your L$ and process them.

The process is relatively simple. Go to www.secondlife.com, and if you log in, then scroll half way down the page, you should see your L$ balance on the left hand side. Just below the L$ balance, you will see the options "Buy L$" and "Manage". If you click "Manage", you will see a collection of options drop down, with the title "Manage your L$".

You will see the option "Sell L$", if you click on this, you can see the opportunity to place the amount of L$ you wish to sell. You will see the fields "Estimated Value" and "Estimated Proceeds". The finance you will receive in USD is the "Estimated proceeds" value. Linden Lab take a small portion to help maintain the servers and technology that allows you to make the L$, that you're current selling, so don't worry.

Once you have sold the L$, if you go back to your "Account Summery", you will see half way down under the title Linden Dollar Summery, the field "US Dollar Balance", where you will see the USD that you have just been given.

Do you remember that section of links under "Manage" ? Well if you go back to them, you will see the option to "Process credit". If you click the link, it will take you to the appropriate page, with details and information of how to transfer the USD balance to a Paypal account.

At the bottom of the page you will see the "Paypal" written in green, in the table. If you click on it, you will be taken to the page where you can enter the Paypal address and the amount of finance you wish to send to the Paypal account you want.

Is it really that complicated? Yes.

Rock on peeps!