In this post I want to share with you some tips and tricks for Second Life, as well as features that might be easily missed.
Perhaps you knew about all of these already.
Perhaps you're finding out something you never knew, even after years of being in Second Life.
Even I'm still learning new things after over 15 years, and whenever I'll think of a new tip, or remember something that I should point out, I will add it to this post.
These tips are mainly aimed at use of the Firestorm viewer (www.firestormviewer.org), as this is what I'm using on a daily basis, but most of them should be applicable to the official viewer as well, although UI elements may sometimes be in different locations.
I will not be covering the UI of the Black Dragon viewer here, as it is drastically different, but I may do so in a separate tutorial in the future, in regards to using it for photography.
As for the video tutorials you may want to watch them at at least 720p to see the UI clearly.
Onward to the tips and tricks!
Did you know...
...that you can locally restart animations by pressing Ctrl+S?
This will make them start from their beginning again in your own viewer, which is helpful in the case of couple animations being out of sync, without the need to switch back and forth between animations, or the use of a scripted re-sync option.
(If one of you suddenly isn't being animated correctly anymore after resetting the playback this way, they may have the sitting override of their AO (Animation Overrider) turned on, and you could kindly ask them to disable it. )
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...that you can adjust your eyebrows via the sliders inside the hair item?
These days we are wearing that item with its simple hair set so short that it's hidden inside the head for use with modern mesh hairstyles, but there are actually 4 sliders inside its eyebrow tab which can still be of use today!
These are the "Eyebrow Size", "Eyebrow height", "Eyebrow Arc" and "Eyebrow Point" sliders.
They will alter the height and shape of the eyebrows and may alter the shape of the eyes a little, even on a modern custom mesh head.
The shape and position of the eyebrows influences your facial expression, so it's good to know that you can tweak your eyebrows to that effect.
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...that if you've made a severe mistake while editing an attached item and forgot to make a backup, you can rescue the previous state of that item?
Now, there is an actual undo function by pressing Ctrl+Z of course. This covers the last 20 changes made to size and position of the item, but it doesn't cover all changes, such as to the color and texture for example.
If you have forgotten to make a backup copy first and you've exceeded the undo limit, or if you've made changes that can not be undone, there is an alternative option to revert your mistakes!
Just don't take it off yet!
This is a case of "It's a feature, not a bug", rather than intended behavior, but because the servers save changes to items only once they are being detached, or once you relog, you are able to revert your mistake by copying the item while you are STILL wearing it and pasting that new copy into your inventory.
That new copy will be in the state that it was BEFORE you last put it on and does not contain your recent changes, as long as you did not detach the item since the accidental changes were made.
(This trick does not work if you happen to be using the Black Dragon viewer, because the ability to copy currently worn items is being blocked in Black Dragon.)
Bonus tip:
If you've made significant changes to an item that have taken you a lot of work to do, you may want to detach the item after you are done, to make sure that the servers DO save your changes.
This may prevent loss of your changes in cases of the servers acting up or if you suffer a crash. It can be frustrating to lose all the hard work and have to do it all over again if the changes were not yet saved to the servers permanently.
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...that you can auto-replace all instances of an item in your outfits to make updating them easy?
To do this, you first look for the copy of the item in your inventory (You could right-click on it inside of your outfit listing and click "Show original"), then you right-click on that item to bring up the context menu and there you click on "Replace links".
This will open a new window, where the item is already set as the "Old" one, and then you just have to drag the new version, or other item you want to replace it with and then click on "Start".
It will find all instances of that copy of the old item inside your outfits, and replace them with the new item, without you having to manually go through each individual outfit swapping out the item and saving it again yourself. Very handy!
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...that you can change the order in which your clothing and tattoo layers are being baked onto your avatar? (I've managed to overlook this feature for years.)
If you right-click on one of your saved outfits in your outfit list, you have the option to "Edit Outfit", which switches to a window that at first may seem redundant compared to the usual outfit listing (as it did for me), but you may notice the up and down arrow buttons towards the right side.
With these you can sort the order of your worn layers to make sure that your makeup / tattoos / BOM clothing overlap in the order you desire.
Sort the layers the way you want them to bake, bottom to top, as if you are layering a cake, then click the back arrow button at the top left of the window, and then save your outfit to store your new baking order.
This can be used to fix issues, such as a skin details layer baking on top of your makeup for example, by putting those tattoo layers in the correct order.
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...that if there are objects that are refusing to load, you can sometimes force them to do so by toggling wireframe mode for a moment?
This does not always help (Sometimes meshes are simply stuck not having loaded at all and you may have to relog if they refuse to show up correctly even after minutes of waiting for them to load), but if it's only the "interest list" acting up, which determines which objects should be loaded into the scene first, you can override that prioritizing by toggling wireframe mode for a moment.
To do this you press Ctrl+Shift+R to turn wireframe mode on and then off again. Be aware that your performance may be much worse during wireframe mode because more geometry may be rendered.
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...that if your avatar is ever stuck being only a particle cloud, even after a long period of trying to load your assets, you can reset to the default avatar to try to get things unstuck?
This option can be found in Firestorm under:
Avatar -> Avatar Health -> Reset Default Male/Female Avatar (Character Test)
It will change you to the avatar that you had picked during account creation and after that is done, you can try to re-equip your own avatar's outfit again, to see if it will load now.
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...that sometimes after a crash, your avatar may still be inworld?
If you have ever or will ever crash and find yourself unable to log back in because the viewer is saying something along the lines of "You are already logged in from another location", your avatar is actually still standing around inworld without you. (I will add the exact error message here for clarity, once I'll see it again myself.)
There is a way to fix this issue immediately if you either have an alternative account available, or you have access to an SL friend of yours to ask for help from outside Second Life.
Either log into your other account and send your stuck avatar an IM, or ask your friend to send an IM to your avatar.
(If they already had an IM window to you open though, they have to first close it and open a new one for the server check to kick in.)
The servers will then check and realize that nobody is actually connected to the avatar anymore and will log out your avatar properly, allowing you to log back in as normal.
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