This is the second in our 'Adjusting to a New World' series of articles for beginners - although some intermediate and advanced Second Lifers are also finding little tidbits that they didn't know in them. Last time we talked about moving around.

This time, our topic is communication. You may not have come to Second Life to be social, but you need to know how to communicate. If you can't communicate, you can't get help, and you will need help at some point. We all do. Second Life is so communications-centric that today we'll be focusing on just chat. There's a lot to say.

At present, all the communication provided in Second Life is text-based. Voice chat apparently is 'coming soon', and we'll cover that when it happens. There are several forms of text-communication available in Second Life. The first, and most obvious, is 'chat'.


The Chat button is the second button from the left at the bottom of your screen. Click it (or press the enter/return key when no other window is grabbing keyboard input) and the chat bar opens.



Type some text into the chat-bar and press enter. The text appears on the screen of everyone within 20 metres. For people within 10 metres, the text appears white. For people between 10 and 20 metres away, the text appears to be grey. Anyone further than 20 metres away will not see the text at all. If you're talking with someone you should stay close. Many beginners make the mistake of asking a question, then wandering some distance away -- too far to hear the response. If you can hear and see someone typing, and when they're done, the text doesn't appear, try moving closer.

You'll also notice when you type into the chat bar that your avatar performs a typing motion, accompanied by the sound of typing on a keyboard. There are ways of preventing this, if it bothers you. Firstly, you can put /0 in front of whatever you want to say (forward-slash, then a zero, then a space, then your text). The /0 does not appear when the text is sent, and no typing animation or sound happens while you're typing. We'll talk more about that shortly. Another method is to get a scripted object called a typing overrider. They can replace your typing animation and sound with a variety of alternatives, add extra visual effects, or suppress it entirely.

If you want to be heard from further away, you can shout. Either click the Shout button on your chat-bar or press CONTROL ENTER instead of enter/return to shout. Shouts can be heard up to 100 metres away.

The text you type in the chat-bar appears on your own screen with 'You:' followed by your typed text, after you press enter/return. If you typed "Hello World." it would appear as:

You: Hello World.

Other people will see your full avatar name (first name and last) instead of 'You', and you will see their chat text prefixed with their name.

Emotes

Second Life also supports emotes (as distinct from gestures, which we'll cover another time). Emotes are short pieces of text describing actions, such as:

Tateru Nino smiles.
Tateru Nino rummages in her inventory, looking for something useful.

Emotes are done the IRC way by typing /me followed by a space, then your text. You can say much of anything you like. For example, /me smiles.

You should immediately notice that the typing sound and animation does not trigger when you do this. We touched on this briefly earlier. Lines of chat that begin with a forward slash '/' don't trigger the typing animation. The forward slash is usually located on the same key as the question mark, and leans to the right at the top. A back-slash is the kind that leans to the left at the top. Second Life has no particular use for those, and they have no special effect.

Chat History


The text that appears on your screen after someone chats fades away after a short time, or if the place you're in is busy enough, it might scroll off your screen. There are configuration options to help with that, but you'll almost certainly want to use the Chat History window from time-to-time.

You can open and close the Chat History window by pressing the History button at the left of the chat-bar, or by pulling down the View menu and selecting Chat History (in that menu next to the option, you will also see a keyboard shortcut. The shortcut varies from one operating system to another. You can also use that. Windows users would use CONTROL H).

With the Chat History window open, new chat text will stop appearing at the lower left of your screen, and appear in the Chat History window instead. It also contains everything that's been said that your avatar was close enough to hear since you logged in. You can scroll back through it, if you missed something, or need to remember what someone said.

You can also copy and paste text from the Chat History window using the regular copy and paste keys that your operating system uses. However, there's a better way to preserve your conversations using the chat and communications preferences.

Chat Preferences

Chat and communications generally are so important in Second Life that there's a lot of options available to customize them. Let's take a look at some of the preferences. We already touched on one of those last week.

Pull down the Edit Menu and select Preferences. Then select Chat from the column of buttons on the left hand side of the Preferences Window. There's quite a lot to see here.



The font size for chat defaults to Medium. Got a huge monitor or great vision? Consider using Small as an alternative. On the other hand, if you find the chat text too small for comfort, set the size to Large.

The next section allows you to select the colors of the text used by Second Life for different kinds of text.


If you're going to change any of these colors, make sure the Bubble color is a good contrast for all the others, as that is used as the background for all the other text colors on your screen.



The Chat Console section actually controls how chat text appears on your screen, how transparent it all is, how long it takes to fade away and so on. Generally there's not much need to change things here.



Chat uses full screen width is highly recommended, giving Chat text more of your screen to display in, and preventing it from scrolling off so fast.

Close chat after hitting return we spoke about last week. It automatically closes the chat bar after you hit enter/return to send.

Arrow keys always move avatar when chatting allows you to move with the arrow keys, even if you were in the middle of typing something. Otherwise the arrow keys allow you to move your text cursor in the chat bar for editing and corrections.

Show timestamps in chat prefixes each line of text with the time in SLT (Second Life Time, which is the same as California time).

Now one of the more unusual options: Chat Bubbles.



Some people swear by these. Some people swear at these. Setting this option only affects your own view of the world, so you can try it out and see if it works for you. This is something you need to form your own opinion about. if you have them enabled, chat text will appear below a person's nametag on the screen. Some people find it a lot easier when they're trying to keep track of one or two speakers in a crowded place, as they only have to make sure they're looking at the speakers to see their text. Try this. If you hate it, forget about it, but some people adore this option.

Communication Preferences

There are a couple more chat-relevant options that we'll look at. Select Communications from the buttons on the left hand side of your preferences Window.

We're not going to cover everything here this time around, just the items directly relating to chat.



Log Chat writes lines of chat to a text file on your computer, as they happen. Even if you crash one second later, there's a record.

The Change Path button selects a folder where your logs will be written to. I use P:\_logs myself, so my chat history is saved to P:\_logs\tateru_nino\chat.txt where I can refer to it later, if I need to.

While Show end of last IM conversation doesn't seem to be directly related to Chat, it does interact with the Chat History window. If you have this option and Log Chat both enabled, then when you log in, your Chat History will contain the last few lines of chat from the last session. This is really handy if your system crashes a lot. Highly recommended.

Join us again next week, where we'll look at other forms of communication in Second Life.