How to use animated furniture

For someone not used to them, animated furniture can be confusing.  Even if you’re quite used to the idea of animated furniture you might have forgotten just what happens when, so here’s the dummies guide to using animated furniture.

Types of animated furniture

First of all, there’s two types; poseball and poseball-less.

• Poseballs are easy.  The colour should give away who sits where.  Blue for boys, pink for girls..  you’ll sometimes see black or green for males and red or purple for females, any other colour just assume it’s gender or role neutral.

• Furniture without poseballs is a bit trickier as you need to either touch a particular prim or know which gender/role goes first.

Pro Tip:  With both types of furniture, try moving your mouse over the furniture before you do anything as there may be instructions in the mouse-over that pops up.  If not, you’ll just have to click on things until something happens.

Getting on the furniture

There are two ways to hop on furniture you either touch it if you see the hand icon appear or right click and select sit from the menu.

Pro Tip: If someone asks you to jump on some furniture or on a poseball that isn’t yours you may be in for a surprise. Mouse-over the ball or furniture first to see if it gives you any idea what you’re in store for.

Allowing the furniture to animate you

Some furniture (usually the type without poseballs or where the poseball is linked to the furniture) won’t ask you if you want to be animated.  They work on the theory that you have agreed to whatever the furniture will do to you because you sat on it.  So with these you’ll find the animation(s) start straight away.

Where there is just a poseball on its own or if it uses poseballs not linked to the item then you’ll find you’re just sitting there with your hands on your knees.  If you look in the top right hand comer of your screen you’ll see there’s a notice that asks you if you want the item to animate your avatar.   You must say yes for the animations to start.  If you change your mind you can click the stand button at the top of your screen.

Pro Tip:  Some viewers display the notices in a strange order, from oldest on top to newest buried last, so you may need to click through a few notices to find it but if you are just sitting there with your hands on your knees then you have to find that notice and say yes before anything else will happen.

Menus

Pretty well every piece of furniture will have a menu of some sort.  To access it, click on the furniture and it should bring the menu up in the top right hand corner.  If you are not allowed to access it, it should tell you in your chat history and give you a reason why.  The main reasons are usually only the owner or group can use it or you’re in a RLV trap and you can’t use the menu until you’re released.

Once you’ve got the menu up you’ll see up to four types of buttons:

• Menu Navigation:  These buttons will take you to different menus or let you move back or forward menu screens.  There’s always an ignore button if you want the menu to go away.

• Animations:  Clicking one of these buttons will change your animation.

• Configuration:   change the way the furniture acts.  The choice of buttons is down to the creator and there’s no general rule on what you’ll see.

• Actions:  With these buttons you can usually stop the object, stand up, swap avatar positions, shut down or reboot the item or get a prop or something else from the furniture contents. As with the configuration buttons, the choice of buttons is down to the creator and there’s no general rule on what you’ll see.

Pro Tip:  If you click a button on a menu and it either vanishes or does nothing then it may be that the menu has timed out.  Some menus will time out somewhere between 15 – 60 seconds after it’s first displayed to reduce lag.  It may tell you have long you have in the menu but if not, try touching the object again to get the menu trying again.

and have fun 🙂