by Kurt Mckelvey

Created on: September 23, 2009

First, it may be important to figure out what you want to do with a program like second life. Some people are introduced to the program as a means of communicating, others are shown that it is sort of like an open-ended game. Some are using the program to make designs for clothing, shoes, and other articles of fashion wear, while others are using it as a playground for building and programming things. The potential for the things you can do in Second Life are almost limitless. Think about what you would like to do in the program, and if you know what you want out of it, you should have an easier time getting acquainted with it.

Go to secondlife.com and register for an account, type in your information and once you are done registering you should download the Second Life Viewer from the downloads page and install it. Once installed, open the program and enter your username and password in the login screen. Once you are in Second Life, you will probably be taken to tutorial island where you will be shown how to move around, how to communicate, fly, message people, and do the basic functions within second life. Just for the sake of your convenience, I will briefly go over some things...

if you want to walk, press up, down, left, or right. you will walk forward, backwards and strafe left and right respectively. if you would like to fly, you can push the letter "e" on your keyboard which raises your altitude and makes you fly up, and the letter "c" on your keyboard, which lowers your altitude and makes you fly down.

Moving the camera around is a bit tricky at first, but once you get used to it, its easy and you should be very effective in getting the camera exactly where you want it. What you do is you hold down SHIFT, or SHIFT+CTRL, or ALT with the mouse. basically you use one of these combinations and then hold down the left mouse button and move the mouse, and the camera should move according to your mouse movements. SHIFT alone will make your camera rotate around, while SHIFT+CTRL will make your camera move up, down, left, and right on the relative axis you are on. ALT will zoom in and rotate.

Also, you will learn about your inventory and how to use objects in the inventory. You can attach objects to your avatar, use them, drop them, give them to others, attach them as a heads-up-display or "HUD". You can also create objects in your own inventory, edit the objects you created, script them to do what you would like, and later on you can even sell it. I will get

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