Tutorial: The Advanced Menu

The Advanced menu in Second Life is one, often ignored and misunderstood, incredibly useful tool. There are so many things at your disposal with just the click of a button including: turning that annoying camera sound off when taking snapshots, disabling your camera's constraints, making your avatar's lips move when using SL voice, turning various parts of gameplay off (such as particles, trees, sky, water, etc), damning the man and flying where flight has been disabled, even enabling in-world shadows. So many things that can be of so much yes, yet because it is housed under the "Advanced" name, it is considered very intimidating to a lot of people.

Today I'd like to take the time to point out a few of my favorite choices in the Advanced menu and what they do. But first, let's start by activating the Advanced Menu. For the sake of this tutorial, I will be using the latest Second Life Release Candidate viewer.

• To activate the advanced menu on a PC, press Ctrl+Alt+D on your keyboard.
  
• To activate the advanced menu on a MAC, press Ctrl+Option+D on your keyboard.

Note: On some operating systems, this function is already taken over by another application, so you will need to press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+D instead.

Now, let's take a look at some of my favorites. Please click the image below for a larger "map" of what we will be looking at. They will be explained in numbered order by menu, in hopes of easier following along. *wink* Again, please note that there is MUCH more to the Advanced menu than I will be explaining here... these are simply my most used and favorite ones.

The Main Advanced Menu -

1. High-res Snapshot - When checked, it will automatically cause your snapshot tool to take a snapshot at double your normal screen resolution.

2. Quiet Snapshots to Disk - When checked, the snapshot sound and animation (that annoying shutter sound and animation that plays simultaneously whenever you take a snapshot) will no longer play when you take a snapshot. Ninja snapshots, FTW!

3. Limit Select Distance - When unchecked, this will allow you to right-click and edit/move objects from very far away. This is especially useful if you are editing objects across a sim.

4. Disable Camera Constraits - By default, your camera is constrained to zooming away from your avatar at a very short distance. Checking this option will allow you to zoom MUCH further out (I've captured photographs of ENTIRE groups of sims by checking this option).

5. View Admin Options - Oddly enough, selecting this menu option will allow you to fly where ever flight has been disabled.

Advanced > Rendering Menu -

1. Hide Selected - Activating this option in the menu will allow your avatar to hide from view any object that is being selected. This is especially useful when taking a snapshot of a location where you'd like to hide certain things from the snapshot you are taking, such as poseballs. Read Prad Prathivi's how-to here for more information on how to do this.

2. Wireframe - Activating this option will switch your view from normal to wireframe mode. While this is not terribly useful unless you are a content creator looking to view the vertices of a sculptie, it DOES make for some beautiful snapshot effects.

3. Rendering > Types - This menu is incredibly useful. By checking or unchecking any of these options, it will essentially allow you to hide or show whatever you like from this menu. I often find myself using the Rendering > Types > Particles option whenever I end up in a club with a blingtard. Sometimes, the eyes just can't take all those jumping lights, man! Unchecking "Character" from this menu will hide avatars from view as well. Note: Another useful thing to hide from view is the Rendering > Features > Foot Shadows, which will disable those pesky and inaccurate footshadows from beneath your avatar's feet.

Other Advanced Menu Options -

1. Advanced > Character > Rebake Textures - If you ever hear anyone asking you to rebake, this is what they mean. This will force-reload all of your avatar's textures (skin, clothes, etc).

2. Advanced > Character > Character Tests > Go Away/AFK When Idle - Unchecking this will disable the automatic logging out of your avatar from Second Life after 30 minutes of being idle.

3. Advanced > Character > Enable Lip Sync (Beta) - This will cause your avatar's lips to move whenever you speak into your microphone using Second Life's in-world voice system.

That about sums up the easily-accessible advanced menu tips and tricks! There are tons more, one more of which I will cover here for you.

Enabling Dynamic Shadows in the Second Life Client

Note: I do NOT recommend attempting to do this unless you are POSITIVE your computer can handle the load of Second Life rendered shadows. You can EASILY lock up and crash. Make sure you have a Direct X 10 compatible video card at the very least (i.e. nVidia 8 series or newer).

1. In the advanced menu go to Advanced > Debug Settings.

2. Type RenderUseFBO into the dropdown box.

3. Change value to TRUE.

4. Type RenderDeferred into the dropdown box.

5. Change value to TRUE.

This last step will fully activate dynamic shadows in the Second Life client. To disable them again, all you have to do is change RenderDeferred back to FALSE. Please note, your computer very well may slow down or even lock-up by activating dynamic shadow lighting. It's lovely, but I do not recommend attempting it unless your computer can handle it! But if your computer CAN handle it, you will be able to take snapshots with fully rendered shadows, such as this one:

 And that wraps up my post for today! As usual, I will do my best to keep an eye on comments. See you all next week!