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.