Thecla

I'm pretty sure the reason people do that relates back to one reason why high heels became popular in the first place. They make your legs look longer and the shape of the foot is more aesthetic than just a flat foot on the ground. So, people like that "elegant" look even if it is preposterously unrealistic, because there is plenty of preposterously unrealistic stuff in SL...that's a highlight of being there lol. If I go to the beach in SL, I switch to flat bare feet or sandals. Except of course when I wear high heels to the beach, which I do on occasion because I can.

I turned voice on at The Chamber once. The room was full of extremely attractive well dressed avatars. Well what was going on in voice was the exact opposite. It was like a middle school recess or something. Last time I turned on voice.

It's possibly getting moved to a layer under the skin. Right click on yourself, select "Appearance" and then "Edit Outfit". You'll see a list of worn skins, tattoos, etc. in the order in which they are stacked. If you highlight one you can move it up and down the stack with the arrows on the right. Make sure your skin is as close to the bottom as it will go.

I have two bodies I switch between depending on the clothes I'm going to wear. I just have two "base" outfits, one for one body and one for the other with shape/mesh body/hair/skin/etc for each. Just choose "replace outfit" and presto you're done.

The bottom line is that LL has thrown a wide spectrum of perks into the premium basket for the simple reason that people are here to do many different things. There is no "one size fits all" collection of perks they could offer because there is no "one size fits all" to begin with. I find enough benefits in being a premium user to continue. The stipend, the free uploads, the increased groups, the ability to get into full sims, and the amazing sandboxes that you have access to. For others it's their linden home...I have one but have only been to it once lol. Obviously there are people for whom the perks don't line up with what they do in SL. That's inevitable.

Highlighted a key word for the OP. If it were "all" then we would not have a problem. But it's not. And I'm afraid no amount of "I'm not a pedo dammit!" protestations, while (mostly) sincere, seem a bit shrill in the face of the evil that underpins this issue.

Well you ARE clearly someone for conspiracy theories because your backing one right now. You think LL would give store owners advance notice of something? What possible reason would there be for that which would not end up as a clusterf**k for LL? And there have always been store closures, and there are not more of them in the recent months than usual, they have just fallen victim to social media's tendency to blow everything out of proportion. For example, Marco is closing Clef de Peau because he's burned out and doesn't want to do it any more. He says as much on Facebook. Stores come and stores go. I had one here 15 years ago, quite successful, and I burned out and closed it. Life happens.

Yeah if you mean the Premium member sandboxes when you say VIP, I would not worry about it, you were basically being griefed. As Ceka says it's unusual to see others in those sanboxes at all when you go to them, and I can't figure out why because they are awesome and huge. I've never given a thought about what I was wearing, or not, and have never had an issue.

I'm also seeing my CPU work much harder than my GPU in demanding environments. I was also at a party last night and saw pretty much 99% of my 32gb of ram gobbled up. I noticed that because I was talking to someone with 64gb of ram and said "pffft how can you need all that?" and then checked my ram usage. So I guess my next update is going to double my ram...

Ok just set the group object to "none" which of course leaves the root as prim and changes the rest to none. That dropped it to 3 LI. All in all, a very strange experience.

That did not happen. I set the hollow prim to "none" and the LI of the linkset remained at 117. However, I think you've hit it on the materials in a linkset accounting.

I don't think that is it, because alone the hollow cube is 1 prim and when linked with the coin plane with the materials textures removed from it, it's 2 prims. But to me sure I'll test again. EDIT: Tested, that's not it. It seems directly related to the materials textures. I'm wondering if it's a "bug" in the re-designed Blinn-Phong materials. I've only tried this in Firestorm.

If you're ever going to use the laptop literally on your lap at all, I suggest you get a ventilated "lap table" for it, preferably one with fans powered off USB or you will literally burn yourself, even through clothes. In fact, I would get one of those anyway. I have an ASUS ROG 15" and it gets HOT running SL and anything else remotely demanding.

I created a dance floor out of five simple prims, textured using Blinn-Phong. It is a 7.5 m square. The central coin floor has normal and specular maps. Three of the prims are projector lights to highlight the depth and specular effects.The black border is just a flattened cube set to 95% hollow. When I link the five prims, the LI skyrockets to 117 LI. When I link the central coin floor prim with ANYTHING, it leaps to 117. However, if I remove the normal and specular maps, it drops to 2 LI. I don't ever recall materials textures having such a dramatic impact on the LI of linked objects. Did I miss something?

Gotcha, thanks Monty

OK I have an add-on question to this, in my never ending quest to make my sim run as well as possible, which largely concerns scripts. At a given moment, the server stats panel says script time is 12-13 ms. However, if i go into region debug and run Top Scripts, it only shows 3.x ms total for all running scripts. Why are these numbers not the same, and what accounts for the significant difference? Also, for anyone interested, a friend gave me a script that once put in an object, puts the object's scripts to sleep after 600s and then will wake those scripts up if someone approaches within 30m. It works remarkably well (although not for moving objects, depending on how their movement is scripted).

I don't think there is much you can do about the FPS hit of mirrors other than adjusting down the settings in graphics preferences for resolution and update frequency. I did a bit of testing when I made my first mirror and there was a pretty direct correlation on those things to frame rate. And it makes sense that it taxes your viewer; you're asking it to take a snapshot and then "paint" it on a surface. That said there are odd exceptions. I put this humongous mirror in the tattoo parlor on my sim and my frame rate does not budge whether it's there or not. Weird.

FYI the need to retoggle "Select Reflection Probes" each time you start your viewer is annoying but necessary since for routine navigation and object selection they can be a total PITA since they can take up a whole room and be sprinkled lots of places.

I took a closer look at the "Quick Start" circle at the Welcome Hub. 12 out of 14 avatars there were advertisements for a particular sex sim. Some of them were standing directly in front of and intentionally obscuring the panel on how to move your avatar. The sim description? "BDSM babygirl daddy sex hentai cuck xxx paypig breed lesbian stripper ***** mistress horny bbc porn femdom findom hooker edge joi milf ***** slave sub sissy simp freelance adboard lovense cam voice text fintopia domme ***** kink fetish strip money goon" How does LL let this happen? Why is there not someone there to moderate this? If this is your first experience when trying to figure out SL...well, I don't think I need to say more.

Anyone who says the economy is not responsible for the continued viability of SL doesn't know much about economics. LL makes collects approx $3.3 mm in region fees each months, against total revenue of approx $6.6 mm in memberships and transaction fees. In 2021, the creator community cashed out $86 mm, roughly equal to or more than LL annual gross revenue. That number will have gone down due to land owners having the option of paying region rent in Lindens beginning in 2023, but it points to how much economic activity there is in SL. That activity gives people places to go, stuff to buy, things to do, etc. It's the difference between nothing but a barren mainland and a vibrant, extensive, diverse grid. Yes there will always be a large number of free-to-play users who run around in default avatars and don't give a fig about how anything around them looks. But economic activity in SL rises year by year despite the concurrent user numbers staying relatively steady (and yes it's down post-pandemic, whatever). As for what to do to improve SL? Beats me lol. But I have one thought... If you search for a user in-world under "people", you will get a HUGE list of accounts. As you click through them you will find that approximately +95% of them are blank profiles. That's abandonment. Yes some are alts, and this and that, but the fact remains that the vast VAST majority of people who create an account visit once or twice and never return. It's not like LL is unaware of this problem and has wrestled with it in various ways over the years, but it's still the #1 barrier to growth. Simply converting an additional 5% of first time users would likely lead to significant growth. EDIT: I just visited the Welcome Hub, and a good percentage of the people there were shills for adult entertainment sims. Dear lord, keep those people out! If I was a new user and was immediately approached by some sleaze bag hawking something I would not return either. What would I do? Immediately after teaching someone how to simply walk in SL, I would take them on a guided tour of amazing sims. Show them right away what SL can be and THEN bring them back to a NOT overwhelming and confused new user center that does not look like something out of the Jetsons where you're not immediately trying to upsell them on land and premium membership. And I would have an employee dedicated to curating that tour experience, adding new sims, taking out ones that close, You can argue that the Destinations tab provides that, and that might be a good place to start with the effort, pulling out the best from that for inclusion. But in my opinion it's usually populated with a good number of sh!tholes.

I would qualify this by recommending that people without prior experience building their own machines stick with example builds that others have done and posted online for their component lists, at least as far as motherboard, CPU, and memory are concerned. It's not unusual to run into incompatibilities in the territory of mobo, CPU, and memory, even where you're using "the right parts". Cloning a confirmed working combination that someone else built can save you some headaches. It will also save you from having to learn about and navigate socket types, memory speeds, etc. Also...take note of the dimensions of any higher-end video cards you're looking at. Some of them are huge. My 3060 died of corrosion and the 4070 I ordered to replace it fits with literally millimeters to spare.

Excellent point. Yeah, I'd hate to have new users who selected an "adult content" radio button when creating an account rez into some simulacra of 1980's Times Square. Not to mention "adult content" means different things to different people. I'm sort of wincing at the thought of LL being in charge of this experience. Ever been to the regions only accessible to premium members, one being an airport and the other a racing dirt track? They are so pathetically lame that it's comical.

I think there are more "professional level" content creators than there were before. I had a successful business here creating role play content back in 2010 and was making on average 1mm lindens a month, so about $4k US/month and was considered a high-end creator, but that was pre-mesh with everything built in world with a few sculpies thrown in. There were quite a few of us in my segment doing very well. Certainly in the general market there were a lot of hair/skin/shoe/clothes creators who were clearly making a decent living. I ended giving it up because managing sales channels (vendors) back then was a huge PITA, and the constant drive to create new content wore me out. On the clothing/furniture front, the market was not as crowded as it is now. Don't forget, there are quite a few creators who are creating content for multiple games/platforms. And now with GLTF those creators don't have to have as specialized a workflow for SL content creation. It may well benefit dedicated creators as well as customers, we'll see. That data is interesting but the segments are frustrating. For example, the gross revenue segment of "10,000-50,000" is incredibly broad, and spans "living in poverty" to "getting by OK". Would like to see it finer grained. Given the recent DRD ruckus, the staff data is also frustrating, with the smallest segment being "1-3". Certainly would be interesting to know how many are at "1" and also "2-3".

Well that "perpetual" license only gives you updates through 2024, and it's $200. Monthly from Adobe is $20, so if you're not sure if it's the right software for you, I'd go that route. Development on the app has slowed to a crawl since Adobe acquired it, and most of the work seems to be compatibility and integration with other Adobe products...to further entangle you in their evil web. That said, one of the main attractions of Substance is that it's EASY. Like almost push-button easy. Texturing in Blender using nodes will make your brain hurt, for a long time, until you figure out what you're doing. But ultimately you can accomplish the same things, to a degree.

Gaslighting lol. Modern day GPUs have built in protections against overheating, which is the only thing (other than overclocking) that will shorten the life of a video card. If your computer has adequate cooling, you can run your GPU hard all day long and and it won't measurably shorten the life of your card. And don't throw a bunch of YouTube video's or Reddit posts with anecdotal nonesense back. Technical data only please. Oh, and because you keep misusing the word: "Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse where a person causes someone to question their sanity, memories, or perception of reality. People who experience gaslighting may feel confused, anxious, or unable to trust themselves." The most frequent use is to describe someone who is responsible for some bad behavior convincing another person that it is that other person's fault. I think the words you should be using instead are "I don't agree with you and I'm going to tell you why."