Today I thought I would put together a post containing some useful tips and tricks for SL Marketplace, the official out-world shopping site for Second Life. This will by no means be an exhaustive list, but it will contain a few handy things I’ve found out and will hopefully help you to get the most out of your Marketplace shopping experience.
Hop behind the cut!
Thanks to some fabby gifts on the grid right now, Mar’s slowly easing into autumnal colours.
First up is SF Design‘s gorgeous instore freebie for September: the Burgundy Leather Biker Pants. Male and female versions are available, so look in the relevant store!
Next up is the new freebie group gift skin from Al Vulo: London Piccadilly Circus (milk). If you’re not already a group member, paste this link into open chat and click on it to bring up the group-join window (the group’s free to join). Then, teleport to the Al Vulo store (it’s a good idea to be flying before you teleport, because the landing spot gets busy!) and – while wearing your group tag – click the ad on the back wall of the little wooden shack there.
Mar’s teamed these freebies with another from the Sn@tch Bargain Pit: the Way 80s Dress in cocoa. Follow the red arrow down into the pit and it should take you to the right place. I’ve put a screenshot of the exact location behind the cut.
Lastly, is Hoc Industries‘ latest release: the colour-change Platform Pumps. While not free, these are a great investment, as you get a ton of colour options (even more if you wear your HoC Industries group tag before wearing the HUD).
Hop behind the cut for more info on the items, where exactly to find that Sn@tch dress, and how Mar got her hair the perfect colour for this look!
One of the things about leading a freebie or cheapie life in SL is that, when a great new free/cheap skin becomes available and is blogged all over the place, you see a lot of people wearing that skin. And while it’s not as bad as turning up to a party where two other people are wearing the same dress as you, when a skin is quite distinctive and you’ve fallen in love with it and it’s just so you that you want to keep wearing it, it can be rather mortifying to find yourself looking at clones of you all over the grid!
The shape that you wear goes some way toward making that skin look different on you than it does on other avatars with different shapes, but there is a handy little trick that you can use to give yourself just a bit more individuality, and that is to try on different hairbases. Take a look at these pictures of Mar:
In each of those pictures Mar is wearing the same skin and hair, and no extra makeup. Yet she looks different in every one. Why? Well, in each picture she’s wearing a different hairbase.
If you’ve read this (or any other tutorials blog) you might know by now that hairbases get rid of the horrible default ‘grown’ hair (the stuff that looks like it’s erupting from your head like something you should go to see the doctor about!) so that it doesn’t poke through any prim hair that you’re wearing. But did you know that hairbases can also shape your eyebrows?
Most skin and hair creators include their own hairbases in with their wares, so if you’ve been trotting around the grid for a while you’ve probably acquired quite a few of them, and yet it’s something that many of us don’t think to change much. We were ‘born’ wearing a decent hairbase (at least, those of us who signed up after the old, original ‘grown hair’ avatars were phased out) and since it’s not an obvious thing to change, in the way that skins, prim hair, and clothing are, we don’t bother to try on different ones.
If you’re wearing a skin that a lot of other people are wearing, though, different hairbases can make quite a difference when teamed with unusual hairstyles and layered makeup; to the point where you can make the skin look totally unique! It’s worth having a go with different hairbases, just to see if you can give your avatar a bit of individuality and character. What’s more, if you don’t already have one you like you can even make your own hairbase!
There are, though, two things in Second Life that you will find called ‘hairbase’. Hop behind the cut for a guide to the difference between them and a quick tutorial for making your own.
There is a very large freebie culture in Second Life, and many blogs (such as this one!) are dedicated – or partially dedicated – to writing about it. There are also some unspoken rules – the do’s and don’ts of freebie culture – which most people in the ‘freebiesphere’ adhere to. However, a few do not.
Just because a rule is unspoken that doesn’t mean it should go unheeded. And, if you think, “Who is she to tell me what the rules are?” then I only have this to say: they’re not really even ‘rules’. They are, in the main, simple and common courtesy.
Hop behind the cut for a few do’s and don’ts: the basics of Freebie Etiquette :)
UPDATE: Since Viewer 2 is now no longer available, Basic Mode is no longer an issue (unless you’re using a very old viewer install, in which case it’s time to update!)
OK, peeps. I’m seeing a lot of search terms on the blog from people who are completely bamboozled as to where their inventory is on the new Viewer 2 for Second Life.
This is just a handful of the search terms I’m seeing:
– viewer 2 how do i look at inventory?
– access inventory sl viewer 2
– new viewer 2 no inventory
– how to go to inventory in sl
– opening inventory in viewer 2 sl
– second life 2 new inventory
– where is inventory in viewer 2
– sl new viewer inventory
– viewer 2 inventory
– inventory in viewer 2
– access inventory in sl viewer 2?
– inventory viewer 2
– inventory in sl
– viewer 2 inventory window
– access inventory with second life viewer 2
– sl viewer 2 no inventory
OK, I’m going to shout a bit here, in the hope of being heard. Non-Linden peeps might want to cover their ears…
Phew. Okay, now that’s over, here’s what’s happened and why you can’t access your inventory in the new Viewer 2. This new viewer starts you off in a mode called BASIC, by default. You have to change this, manually, in order to get to ADVANCED, which is where you can access your inventory.
Fire up your viewer and look near the bottom, where you log in. You’ll see this:
This shows you are in BASIC mode. Basic mode is pretty much nothing more than a glorified, visual chatroom. You are very limited in what you can do, and you cannot access your inventory. What you need to do is switch to ADVANCED mode. You do this by clicking that little arrow beside ‘Basic’ and selecting ‘Advanced’ from the dropdown menu, like this:
Now you have to re-start your viewer, so close it down and fire it up again. Check that little button. If it still says ‘Advanced’ then you’re good to go. You can log in and be able to access both inventory and all program preferences.
I realise that this is something of a reiteration of my post The Absolute Basics – Beginners – Preferences of the other day, but this is OLDER residents being confused, not just newbies! Older residents probably won’t even think to check a blog post that is aimed primarily at newbies, hence I’ve re-stated this section of that post on its own, here.
An open letter to Linden Lab
You really need to make things like this more clear, LL. We’re not just talking about newbies having problems; older residents are being completely confused by this new default Basic Mode – especially since it’s enabled by default and many people on updating their viewer would expect it to work as closely as possible to their old viewer. A change as big as this one MUST be highlighted visibly in the viewer!
For me to receive so many search terms for the same thing, in just a few weeks… well, I’ve been blogging for over three years and helping new and old alike for the same time, and I have never seen so many search terms for one thing. You clearly have a BIG problem here, and it needs to be addressed swiftly. It shouldn’t be up to bloggers like me to help newbies understand a big change you’ve made to your viewer, when you have the ability to highlight that change right there in the viewer so that they can check it. Also, not everybody reads blogs and forums – official or not – so there are a lot of people in the dark over this.
Also, calling it ‘Advanced Mode’ is a BAD idea. ‘Advanced’ makes people think it’s difficult, that maybe they need to know techy or dev. stuff in order to access it. By calling it ‘Advanced’ you could be scaring off some people who will never venture beyond Basic to find out the world’s true potential. Why didn’t you call the two modes ‘Beginner’ and ‘Experienced’, or even ‘Basic World’ and ‘Full World’?
Regards,
Mar
Ladies, do you ever find yourselves trying on skin after skin in the same designer’s line, because you can’t remember which one had that lovely greenish-blue eye makeup? Sometimes it can take several minutes for each skin to load, and then it rebakes, and you’re sitting there for simply ages, while you try to find that one makeup you need right now!
Here’s a quick tip to help you out.
Hop behind the cut!
Okay. I’ll be honest with you. This is the inventory-management post that I’ve procrastinated over the most, and I think you know why. Hair is one of those inventory things that we all accumulate at a frightening rate, and usually in such massive fatpacks that it’s easy to add thousands of items to your inventory in a single freebie hair spree. And then just the thought of sorting it all… well…
You’re with me on that, right? I hope so, because this post has now – finally! – gone into my draft post queue so that I can work on it. By the time you eventually read it, it will probably have been sitting there for a month or two while I polish it (or I may have been brave and just bitten the bullet in one go).
So anyway! Onward! Today we’re going to delve into the horrifying, tangled miasma of our hair folders.
Bear with me. Out of necessity this post will contain a lot of text, but I’ll try to put enough images in that your eyes won’t glaze over ;)
Hop behind the cut!
Welcome to Second Life, newbie! This Newbie No-No’s series is intended to be a light-hearted look at the don’ts of newbiedom in-world. Hopefully, the major don’ts are pretty obvious (don’t be a jerk, don’t grief, don’t be rude… well, all of those boil down to “don’t be a jerk”, really) but the lesser don’ts can be a bit of a minefield and it can be hard for a newbie to understand the various social mores in-world.
We continue the series with littering.
If your car broke down in real life, would you just leave it by the side of the road? Well, assuming you’re not one of the less-delightful itinerant types who frequently wreck greenbelt areas with knackered old vehicles and other junk when they move on, then no; of course you wouldn’t. If you buy something from a store in real life, would you unpack it and dump the packaging on the floor of the shop before walking out? I should hope not! And, if you buy fast food from a drive-through in real life, would you chuck the empty bags and cartons out of your car window when you’re finished with it? Well, if you would, then no wonder the city/countryside/etc is a mess…
But, in the main, if you wouldn’t do it in real life, there is no reason to do it in Second Life. Just because SL is ‘a game’ that doesn’t mean there aren’t other people in it: other people who have to bear the visual and aural annoyances of your littering should you choose to be a messy, thoughtless resident in-world. One of the unspoken golden rules of Second Life is: If you put it down at some point, pick it up when you’re done with it.
1. If you open a boxed item in a store because they haven’t set an auto-return time, then pick up the box (or delete it) once you’ve finished.
2. If you do #1 with a hunt item in a store then especially make sure you get rid of the box, or you’ll have hundreds of people coming in after you who think your ‘dud’ opened hunt item is the real thing. You don’t want to piss off hundreds of other people whom you may well bump into sometime in-world, right?
3. If the vehicle you’re driving/flying/piloting in some manner crashes and throws you off, go back, find it, and delete it or take it back into inventory. It will often have gone up into the air a bit, so don’t assume that just because that particle-spewing, roaring trials bike or monster truck isn’t on the ground where you last remember being it must be gone, because it isn’t. Take the time to fly around and look for it. If you didn’t get a chat message saying it’s been returned to your Lost and Found folder, then it’s still stuck in-world somewhere, and that ‘somewhere’ is probably right on the border of some poor person’s private land, where they can see it and hear it, but can’t get rid of it. And, dear newbie, karma is a bitch with a dry sense of humour, because one day that poor person with the spitting, roaring spaceship on their doorstep might be you…
Think you can get away with it, because nobody will know it was you that left it behind? Think again. Every single item in Second Life can be inspected by anyone, and it will bear the name of the last owner. So, if you don’t want angry IMs, and if you don’t want to be abuse reported for prim-littering (which, for many people, is the only resort when vehicles are abandoned near their land parcels), then pick up your mess!
Welcome to Second Life, newbie! This Newbie No-No’s series is intended to be a light-hearted look at the don’ts of newbiedom in-world. Hopefully, the major don’ts are pretty obvious (don’t be a jerk, don’t grief, don’t be rude… well, all of those boil down to “don’t be a jerk”, really) but the lesser don’ts can be a bit of a minefield and it can be hard for a newbie to understand the various social mores in-world.
To that end, we begin with bling.
Bling is possibly one of the biggest things that marks out a noob in Second Life, and that’s mainly down to the plethora of old, blinging items in freebie warehouses. While you can get the gentle ‘plink’ of subtle bling, the vast majority of bling items are an assault on the eyeballs. For every subtly glimmering diamond there is a pair of 2007 boots with a furiously-fast bling script in every single prim, and for every gentle glint at a female avatar’s corsage there is a ‘gangsta’ or ‘playa’ belt buckle that makes a newbie male look as though his crotch is throwing its own private little lightning storm (and no, boys; that’s not as interesting as you might think it sounds!)
In short: bling is Not Good. It’s all very well your using the /1 bling off command in chat that turns the sparklies off for you, but it still shows for everyone else (especially the older, poorly-scripted bling). Bling is a particle script, and while it’s possible for other residents to set their viewers to de-render attached particles, it’s something that many don’t like to do (we need to know, you see, if anything we are wearing contains bling, because sometimes creators don’t mention that it does).
Far from giving the effect of expensive diamonds, bling only gives a cheap headache. If your items are modifiable, then create a new script in your inventory, delete the text already in it, call it scrubber script, head to my Useful Scripts Page and paste the scrubber script text into it. Save the script, then edit your items. Check each prim (Edit Linked Parts) and whenever you see a bling script, drag the scrubber script in with it. Once you’ve done that, you can delete both scripts.
Another method you can try (if checking each prim is going to be a pain, which it is in high-prim footwear and jewellery) is to edit the item, then head into the Tools menu and check ‘Set scripts to not running in selection’. Again, this will only work for modifiable items.
Banish the bling!
Before I begin this post I need to add a caveat: I am by no means an expert on scripting in Second Life. This post comprises mainly a few things I have learned over the course of my three years in SL. If you are knowledgable in this area and spot any glaring errors then please do drop a comment. Yelling at me and calling me a ‘script nazi’ (among other things) will achieve nothing, whereas constructive help (preferably with links that will help both me and my readers to understand the issue better) is always welcome :)
Have you ever had trouble teleporting? I don’t mean the usual ‘teleports are down’ issues; I mean sudden and random inability to get anywhere at all, which inexplicably goes away after a thumb-twiddling session at home where you change your look in some way or another. Or are your teleports slow and your subsequent movement around SL bogged down (well, even more so than usual)?
The culprit is most likely some scripted item you’re wearing. More pointedly, it’s probably a script-resize item you’re wearing. The first thing to try when your TPs are failing is to remove/replace any high-prim script-resize item that you may be wearing. On the whole, these tend to be: hair, jewellery, and footwear. Unless SL itself is experiencing problems, you’ll find this usually fixes most no-TP and slow TP issues.
Hop behind the cut to find out why this is the case, to find out why this could potentially be very important to you very soon, and to find out what you can do to mitigate the effect that it has on you.