Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Suppress the Typing Animation [Level 2]

Xubi likes the typing animation, she says, becauase it lets you know when another avatar is preparing to say something in Chat.

Chey hates it because the thinks typing in the air makes her avatar look like it is putting quote marks around everything.

You can buy typing animations that replace the default typing anim with laptop animations or particle effects, and some animations suppress the typing anim; if you put the latter in your AO, you will not type, so long as the AO is on. Which it often won't be.

With our special investigative powers, we have figured out how to permanently suppress the typing animation! Woo hoo!

Go to the Client menu and select DEBUG SETTINGS (if you have no CLIENT menu at the top of your screen, CTRL-ALT D on the PC and CMD-ALT-D on the Mac).

Click on the little down arrow and scroll down to PlayTypingAnim and set it to FALSE.

Done.

No more typing animation, even after relog.

If you want to turn it back on, just reset it to True.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Does Your Sim Have Class? [Level 2]

Our home sim of Forsaken is laggy these days. We’re been suspecting Linden Lab swapped servers on us, and, indeed, they did! We’re running on a crappy Class IV box, which smokes and throws sparks on its rack at the server farm in San Francisco.

Server farm! Doesn’t it just fill you with images of crops in long rows, ripening in the California sun?

If that were the case, Forsaken’s little Class IV, with proper fertilizing, weeding, and watering, would one day grow up to be a fast Class V, and Kitto Flora’s little steam train would run happily around Pele all day long instead of requiring us to update the “Accident-Free Since…” sign hourly. Sigh.

Chey called Kitto out last weekend to look at another of his creations, a way-cool monorail. It had been behaving badly. Kitto fixed the problem, but told Chey Forsaken was running way slow.

“Prove it!” she said. No, she didn’t. She knew it in her heart.

Kitto told Chey one problem was that Forsaken was running on a Class IV server.

“How can you tell?” she asked, and he told her.

And she told Xubi, and now we are telling you.

You must promise not to ever ever ever tell anyone else.

Just kidding. It’s no big secret, it was just unknown to us.

Go to the HELP menu at the top of the screen and select About Second Life.

The fourth line (counting the blank third line) reads, on our screens, something like this:


sim330.ani.lindenlab(64.154.221.15:13006)



Sim330 is the number of the server on which Forsaken lives. It was the 330th box placed by Linden Lab.

Kitto told Chey that numbers over 1000 are most likely Class Vs servers, and numbers below 1000 Class IV. (Class III servers have all been retired).

So if your sim is laggy, it may be because it’s on an older, slower server.

Kitto told Chey sim owners can upgrade from Class IV to Class V servers for a fee. But mean old Anshe Chung hasn’t done that yet. She’s too busy counting her Lindens. Reminds us of a virtual Scrooge McDuck. But then again, old Scrooge was virtual in the first place, wasn’t he?

OMG. Xubi! I’m so sorry! You didn’t know?

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Chey's Posts on Graphics and Audio





Cheyenne has posted two articles, one on the difference a good video card can make, and one (after a rant by a guest author) that talks about sounds and how they can can increase the level of your immersion in Second Life. She will soon add a post about local lights.

You can view the posts in question by clicking on the links.