So here you are, new to the City of Lost Angels, maybe you're new to Second Life entirely, where do you start? How do you begin? Well we've got a few tips and pointers to get you on your way so you can get a start in the City of Lost Angels and CCS Community.

First you'll need to register an account with Second Life. Don't worry about it costing you anything, Second Life is free, though in time as you wish to personalize your experience it can cost money, but it doesn't have to cost you any more money than you wish to spend. So don't worry too much about needing money, all you need is an internet connection and a computer that was capable of playing games in the last five or so years and you've got everything you need to start!

Once you've registered with Second Life and chosen a starting avatar on the Second Life website, you'll need to download the Second Life viewer. But, the Second Life viewer is often considered confusing and annoying to use even by people completely unfamiliar with the older viewers Second Life used. So here are a couple of links to the more popular third party viewers available. A third party viewer is a Second Life viewer developed by another party using Second Life's open source viewer code base. And the ones I am recommending here are time tested and well designed.

Singularity Viewer - The Singularity Viewer is a strongly developed Second Life client using the 1.5 Viewer base in combination with Snowglobe with heavy graphical pipeline improvements which allow the viewer to perform extremely well under almost any hardware situation, its SSE2 developed though so single core machines will have issues with it, but dual core or higher will have no problems at all and experience a heavy performance boost from the viewer graphically. Singularity also integrates all the latest Second Life Viewer technologies and to top it off has inline CCS integration. The viewer of choice for people engaging in CCS Combat for performance and less lag, in general.

Phoenix Viewer - Probably the most popular and well known of the Third Party Viewers and potentially the most widely used of all of them Phoenix is a stable and well developed viewer and incorporates all of the Second Life viewer's technology updates and has quite a few features that are exclusive to the viewer itself. While lacking Singularity's overall graphical performance capabilities, Phoenix is very stable and is used by a wide percentage of the Second Life player base rather than the official Second Life viewer.

Now you have a viewer and you're logged in, what do you do from there? Well the first thing you want to do is come to CoLA of course! Click here to be teleported to CoLA! CoLA was Second Life's first established dark role play community that was developed under original game concepts and dynamics and has been in operation now for nearly six years. Some of the most experienced role players in the CCS Network play in CoLA or have played in CoLA at some point. But keep in mind, CoLA is merely the tip of the iceberg in the CCS Network in Second Life, there are hundreds of other sims out there that host their own role play communities and provide their own original stories that you can choose from if CoLA doesn't fit your cup of tea.

From there its all down to getting acclimatized to the environment, meeting the people and of course, making sure you're up to speed on the rules of the community, you can look those over at the following links:

• CoLA - Rules of Conduct
• CoLA - Weapon Rules
• CoLA - Comm Device Rules

Also to get a grasp of the world you're in and to understand the game, combat and role play in general I recommend reading the following articles as well:

• The End of the Beginning
• The Factions of Lost Angels
• RP Guides by Experienced CoLA Players

Now with all that you might still even be confused but we have an answer for that as well, for new players coming to the CoLA community we have a specific group you can join to get help and answers from experienced players that care about our new players. You can contact that group by following this link CoLA: The Future

And thats all there is to it, got a question? Find a GM or factional officer in the city and they'll be happy to help you with any questions you have! Welcome to CoLA, we hope you enjoy your stay. Try not to get eaten!