The question of how to run multiple instances of the Second Life® viewer appears many times in the SL forums. Here’s a way to do it that is apparently not well known.
With a current SL browser, you can set an option in the Advanced, Debug Settings dialog to allow you to run multiple avatars at the same time on one machine. The option is called “AllowMultipleViewers” . Set the value of “Allow Multiple Viewers” to TRUE. Once you set this value, exit Second Life. You should now be able to run Second Life with one account, and then start the program again and run a different account while the first instance of the program is still running.
This eliminates the need to mess around with your Second Life shortcut.
March 11, 2009 at 6:03 am
I tried that and wasnt sure if debug permissions had to be checked or not so i tried it both ways ( and TRUE was already selected when i looked in to the debug settings). But…I had already added the -multiple in the short cut porperties and had been running multiple vieweres fo r aobut 2 weeks no problem…. BUt it stopped working : (
Now when i try to run the secont viewwe when i pu tin my password and attemp tto log on i ger CRITICAL ERROR grey box reading Network Error: Could no testablish connection, please check your network connection. Error 3 and a QUIT botton. However, It cant be my connection as I hav edual monitors ( running Vista Home edition) and ill have interne tiwndows opn and SL running…. so how can my netowrk be up but i have a netowrk error?
Please Help me ge t back to Multiple vieweres runnin again
Una
March 11, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Sorry you are having a problem.
You say that TRUE was already showing for AllowMultipleViewers. Thus, you wouldn’t have needed to change a value to TRUE. Perhaps you changed the value to FALSE instead?
You already had multiple viewers working with the shortcut. What prompted you to change what ?
One can certainly get an error message saying you have a network connection error from one program while other programs are connecting to the internet just fine.
Did you modify the shortcuts?
Did you try changing the AllowMultipleViewers setting to FALSE?
Have you tried reinstalling Second Life?
This is not the best place to troubleshoot an SL problem. You’d do better to start a thread in forums.secondlife.com, in either the Resident Answers forum or the Technical forum.
March 20, 2009 at 12:43 pm
I was usinig SL 1.21 and win XP pro and running multisession only with shortcut change (-multiple). Had to change to WinVista and SL 1.22 now cant run multi, has same message network connection. Error: 3. Tryed cahge allow and re-install and same error. Can be Vista?? or 1.22?? I build and script and to test some stufss only av to av and now i can lol.
July 22, 2009 at 10:34 pm
THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH!! Finally I can do this.. Thanks to you……….very hard to find this answer, but very easy to apply…..
August 31, 2009 at 12:41 am
I have also changed the target line to -multiple it worked for a few times then stopped working…Gave me ” Second Life is already running, restart pc if this continues” Ive tried that still nothing….how do I find this debug setting?
August 31, 2009 at 12:50 am
Never mind found it lol….but if that dosent work any other way to fix it?
August 31, 2009 at 1:34 am
You might be better of asking your question in either or both forums.secondlife.com or the Second Life Answers part of the blog at https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/answers/technical_questions
Try putting two dashes in front of multiple instead of one, i.e., –multiple instead of -multiple.
If you are using third party viewers, rather than the standard Linden Lab provided viewer, they might work a bit differently, or have problems I’m not familiar with.
But seriously, there are better places than this to ask for help with problems with Second Life.
Here’s a thread from SL Answers: https://blogs.secondlife.com/message/6309#6309
Here’s a Knowledge Base link: https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417&task=knowledge&questionID=4246
Here’s a Torley Linden video on it: https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/features/blog/2008/01/10/tip-of-the-week-17-how-to-run-multiple-viewers-at-the-same-time
Here’s the wiki page on the topic: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Help:Running_multiple_instances_of_the_Second_Life_client .
The wiki page on client parameters: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Client_parameters . http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Client_parameters
Here’s a forum thread: http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=310856
and another forum thread: http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=316734
June 23, 2010 at 12:56 pm
Go to http://inflife.net/ and get the SL Pop Viewer! Best viewer I have EVER used! You’ll be VERY happy with it, and you’ll never have to deal with those pesky slow logins and load times. Go get it now!