How to Customize Your SL Camera So It Looks Like a Modern Videogame

Longtime master SL content creator Penny Patton, who is a professional multimedia artist IRL, recently posted this great tutorial to totally customize your Second Life camera perspective, so it looks like what you're seeing above. This is an updated tutorial for updated SL viewers, which I first read about in Penny's classic 2012 post explaining why this camera perspective is so important to make Second Life seem much less dated:

[The default view] takes the person out of Second Life. They are not the one exploring this virtual world, they are merely controlling that tiny person they are looking down upon from above. It also creates a problem where environments must be huge and open to accommodate the camera. Any ceilings must be 5-10 metres high and 20-30 metres wide in all directions. For comparison, the average ceiling height in your average home or office is about 2.5m. Camera placement in third person videogames has been steadily improving since the 90's, it's long past time for LL to join the modern era of third person virtual environments and improve the SL camera.

Five years later this is still true. Linden Lab developers, I know at least some of you are reading this, so why not visit Penny's blog and consider introducing a "videogame camera" as an easily choose-able option?

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Comments

[a]

on a side-note, your new webpage skin makes my webbrowser very very slow.. something is not right here :/

[Marianne McCann]

"why not visit Penny's blog and consider introducing a "videogame camera" as an easily choose-able option?"

Seconded! This is great stuff.

[Wagner J Au]

"makes my webbrowser very very slow"

Sorry about that! Using Safari? Other readers have told me that's a problem. Firefox and Chrome work well (at least for Macs).

[a]

using firefox, since on big screen i also use it with 150% zoom! Page becomes unresponsive, and very often i have to kill the browsing process to actually get back control. Now what once was a fast and pleasant experience - became slow and crashy one :/

[a]

oh, and i would also take a look on optimization, your header pic alone is 701kb, which is huge, without losing significant quality - it can be brought down to 24kb, and that's only the header pic.. Loading time and performance is what makes a good page great! Let me know if you need a helping hand! :)

[Brookston Holiday]

Having the camera set lower also would allow buildings to be built to real world scale. When I build a yacht, it's impossible to use real life plans as a guide because I have to make all the rooms twice as tall.