steeljane42

Yeah, so all those companies that provide servers I mentioned above, are doing it for no profit whatsoever, right? They also have quite a few things that cost money. Electricity, server "farm" space, traffic and other bills, staff to pay, hardware upgrades and replacements, legal expenses, ads/promotions expenses as there is some good competition, DDoS protection, etc. The only difference is LL have some developers and staff to work on viewer and/or server code, but they also do have other sources of income as well, unlike server hosting companies. Other than that's it's just a hardware running a certain type of software (SL), with exactly same expenses for physical maintenace as would any other servers have.

They'll have less income either way. If/when people will start dropping their land or whole regions because they have no spare money for SL. We will have to see the statistics for the next 2-3 months to see actual numbers for regions at least, but considering there was a small drop in regions numbers "as is", it's safe to assume it'll only be larger now. --- I personally think "regions" are very overpriced in SL anyway (even if I still keep one myself), so LL could easily drop price if they wanted to. After all what is a "region"? It's a server's 1 CPU core, some drive space and some RAM, homesteads are even less so, since they share 1 CPU core between 3 of them and have less RAM available. No server with such specs costs 200$ a month to run, not even close. For ~100$ a month you can get a 8 Core Xeon CPU, 16GB DDR4 RAM and ~240GB SSD for your server that also has 99.99% uptime and live support (that is not limited to just a few hours like LL one is). However high "land" price is a vital price of SL's economy, so I don't see them dropping it to "actual value" levels, it would simply crash the entire economy. What LL could do - If they had plans to drop prices for land/regions for SL's 17th birthday, like they did for 15th and 16th ones, then it's really good time to do it now instead of waiting for early-mid June. It could help some people to keep their places through those pandemic times, while by June (if tier drop happens), it could already be too late for that. We don't know if LL planned to do another tier drop, though.

And it's entirely up to them. You/we might agree or disagree with their business model, but if it works and customers are happy, then their business model is better than 1-2 releases a month. Pressure part is there as a downside, but it's still up to them to decide what is more important to them, additional income or less pressure. And again, what is right or wrong is very subjective. SL is not the place for "best quality" content, nor vast majority of content creators are even capable of doing this, since it's just a hobby for the most. Introducing severe (and I'd even call them crazy) limits will just hurt already declining SL. Way more than not having a few extra people on ancient netbooks around, that would be possible if SL was the best optimized thing ever. Increase after moving to cloud with (hopefully) better hardware is more likely. We already had one in 2016 when full private regions went from 15k to 20k and homesteads from 3.75k to 5k, as well as ability to add extra 10k prims for private regions for the total of 30k. Next step is 25k/37.5k (upgraded) for the full regions, probably. Unrealistic, based on how popular events remain to this day (except cases where their own management and mistakes of people in charge did hurt their popularity quite a bit), especially during their opening days. It pretty much shows the demand of majority. A few unhappy, but loud people won't make creators do anything. Same for the gachas, sadly. I personally despise them, but I know some people who burn through 70k-100k L$ on every big gacha event. So I can see why creators keep doing those, even ones who don't exactly "need" extra cash. Why sell 1 item in popular color for 250L$ if you can sell same 1 item in same popular color bundled with 10 others for 750L$?

It's mostly big events that give such pressure. And a lot of creators have various reasons why they attend those events. For some it's exposure/promo reasons, some trying to catch up after taking a hiatus to remind their (not so) loyal customers they are back, some see if they can make their brand bigger and more well known. And those events are usually monthly as you know, sometimes they also align with quaterly ones which those creators also want to attend. So in some cases it could be up to 4-5 releases a month, sometimes even more. Now if it's clothes and rigged to at least top 3-4 most popular bodies it's a lot of work and thus pressure. Lots of creators don't care and do it for fun mostly, some are already large enough to not need this, since they did build a large enough fanbase, but the "upcoming" ones do have such pressure for sure. I'll also disagree with you on whole loyal customers thing. Sure, they are some that loyal to brands, be it RL or SL, but vast majority is not. If you (as a creator) don't create, people will buy things at other places especially with such amount of alternative as we have in SL for most things. There are a few exceptions to the rule, like mesh heads/bodies, which do have alternative, but far from hundreds of options, but usually if someone's "favorite" creator didn't create a spring outfit that is available in exact time frame, then that someone just going to grab it from someone else who did create it, thus 1st creator is losing money. Same story with most seasonal stuff. --- Anyway, I do agree with what was already said. SL is not the place where one should even expect content to be the same quality as in AAA games made by professionals developers. And like market shows, it's not needed or desired by most SL users either. It's pretty, it sells, it makes money to people and LL. Of course there always be a few "purists" who can and willing to invest tons of time to make "better" content and then get offended it doesn't sell as well and insist on crazy limitations, because "everyone must play by their rules". To which I'll always say - let market decide. If better looking, but less optimized content sells better than your good optimized one... then perhaps it's the wrong platform for you to create for to begin with. But instead they keep ranting with their "suggestions" here and on some other places (one individual from this thread does it for a while already, so nothing really new).

And it always will be the case, even if content would be better/more optimized. You simply can't compare games made by professional developers with multimillions budgets that went through some (or lots in some cases) QA to stuff people made at their PC for fun after work. And if someone does compare... it's their own problem. You can also expect a budget car to be as good as a business class one would be, but it won't make it true. Besides SL works okay on pretty old systems as long as they are "decent". Before the upgrade my internet/SL machine had Intel 2500k@5.2GHZ (9 years old quad core by now), 16GB DDR3 RAM and GTX1070 for a long time and can't say I had any complaints of how SL works on it. Obviously it was worse than on my main PC, but even at my own region which is pretty loaded with heavy mesh I had >70fps on the ground level without shadows, ~45 with. Restricting creators and (like in your suggestions) viewers/users to adjust setting based on hardware is a terrible idea. If someone with netbook from mid 2010s, that has no dedicated GPU and CPU that is only good enough for videos and web games will connect 4k screen to it and expect it to perform well (in games or SL)... it's also their problem. You can't and shouldn't hold their hand by "restricting" settings. Also, as Coffee already mentioned, LL should rewrite viewer first to actually use modern hardware. Something that modern games do, but SL does not. But yeah, same story as with script hysteria that I did seen in a plenty of places. "Oh noes, you have whole 20 scripts, it's bad for the region!" kind.

In some cases it's very difficult to notice, as the seam can be pixel wide and only appear from the certain angle(s). In other cases they are more obvious, for example check legacy body demo (if they didn't unlist it on MP again to avoid new negative reviews) on 3000m and above, especially lower half of it from behind, it's the "seam city" ever since its release (10 months or so now). But nothing that can't be fixed if creators know what are they doing and someone actually reports it, so it's a good idea to send a report to Maitreya's CSR.

You either overestimate the impact of it adding up or underestimate the impact of what people wear. Clothing, shoes and hairstyles with 500k+ triangles each do exist and are very common, people wear those "pets" and other fancy things all the time, they have their bits on, but hidden; the effect of making it inconvenient for many people and in some cases making it a pain to make clothing made in 5+ years work, is simple nothing compared to possible benefits. Even onion layers, which have more impact I believe, are nothing compared to the rest. I don't like to repeat myself and I already said same thing in similar thread, but think of it as percentages, instead of just "it adds up". Because, yeah, it might add up, but the drop in the ocean, if your scene with mid sized party already has 20m triangles in avis alone (and that's without anyone wearing heavy bodies, like belleza's or legacy). and, then you add the rezzed things, particles, etc. Do you really think you'll get any visible gains performance wise? Assuming you get 60fps and get whole 5% increase by magically removing alpha cuts, which is already unrealistic(I'd bet on 1-2% at most), that's 3 frames. If you're close to having a slideshow with 20fps, then 5% would get you 1 extra frame per second. Do you think you'd actually notice it in SL?

That's a lot and way more than I usually see. But I suppose it does depend on which parts of SL you're around. Absolutely average outfit from my collection, with a few accessories and ~20-25 attachments points used, is around 2.5mb in total, more fancy ones with sci-fi or magical things a little bit over 3mb. With zero manually descripted items and with a few unnecessary things, like a mesh head HUD for expressions and a couple more other huds. And 768kb of that is for AO from one known animations creator, simply because I like its functions and ease of use, would I be fine without some of its functions, it would be even lower. 8mb is more of what I see in some adult/kinky places, but it's other kind of attachments that inflate their numbers, not clothes or bodies/heads. For the sake of testing I did put up a few "generic" outfits that I see everywhere (think latest releases from known clothing/hair creators), again with zero descripted items and a few accessories (also scripted for texture changing), but without my AO and those extra huds and number is around 1.6mb, like expected. It's mostly "adult" stuff that pushes up numbers so high for many people I think (and related HUDs), which people tend to wear all the time for some reason.

Whole body uses 4 scripts now for the grand total of *160 KB allowed memory size limit, 0.003392 ms of CPU time consumed.* at the time of checking. It's a bit higher when it starts or/and after the teleport, like any other script. Now if you are one of those who descript absolutely anything and everything, like clothes, hair, accessories and even mesh head, uses server side AO etc; then sure, that's "whole 4 scripts". But that's really nothing, one piece of adult furniture (with extra scripts for various systems) is usually over 0.01 ms (when not used. when used they go up to 0.07-0.08) with 15-20 scripts running, one overscripted "baby" monster (like zooby and similar) can be over 0.2ms alone, so are certain breedables. I won't even bring up certain badly made pathfinding things and how much server time (physics one, which takes priority over scripts) they can use. I mean, sure, by all means, remove your scripts if you want to, just don't have any illusions it actually does anything to prevent the simulator lag caused by scripts. Your few scripts won't make any difference, nor would even a few hundreds of them, if you have a "scriptless party" with like-minded people. Full 20k prims residental/mixed regions (actually used ones, not mostly abandoned) usually run from 6k to 9k scripts in total just for the rezzed things, sometimes over 10k, if it's 30k region, then it can be 12-14k easily. Yes, like with wearables that number can be easily reduced, you can remove scripts from landscape things and much more, but imagine having to rebuild your (big one. if it's something like LL home, then it's easy) place at least 4 times a year if you like to have different seasons, instead of just wearing a few huds and selecting textures for other seasons. I, personally, don't have time for that and I spend a fair amount of time in world, it's just, you know, I'm here to enjoy my time, not to constantly work on optimization, be it my avatar or my region. Also (not really directed at you, just in the same message), we shouldn't look for workarounds for LL's laziness. It's 2020, many hardware generations has changed, while scripts in SL did stay the same for the most part. But somehow regions still can't handle even 6k scripts while staying at 100% scripts run. We can't even blame "lazy creators" for that, since it's entirely server side.

Oh please, you perfectly know why they are there. No need for that kind of comments to try have your way in discussion. But for the sake of others, who might not know, I'll answer anyway. Seams are there on places where alpha cuts are. But no, it doesn't mean that alpha cuts are bad and must be eliminated at all cost; for example your favorite slink used exactly same system for 5+ years and they didn't had problems with seams, even on high altitudes. But If go with this logic, then any badly made alpha layer from the glorious days of "standard sizes" means the alpha layers are bad, every badly rigged/fitted mesh clothing means that painted system clothing is way better, because they always fit and every badly scripted plane means that people who enjoy using said vehicles better just fly on their own instead. It only means one thing - the creator is incompetent at what they do. Big surprise (not), knowing their history.

Oh, we can tell for sure. Just compare how well supported and popular slink physique vs how popular a total disaster of a body from one shady store, that is cost twice over any other one and most new on the market. Yeah, that's what market wants, because it looks prettier. Until you zoom closer and see those seams that is. That's how a certain mesh head creator got their (now dwindling, though) popularity pre-bento days. Those things were over 1.3m of triangles despite low complexity, but were on high demand (they did cost even more than current bento ones, if count all animation addons), so creator kept releasing new ones almost every 2 week at its peak. Big stores are ones like Blueberry, Addams, Scandalize and other shopping events (like c88, k9, fameshed and many more) regulars. And never said about following anyone or anything. Do it the way you like it. I would personally just skipped the update if it didn't had working alpha cuts myself, no matter how popular it would be. Or would use the nom bom version of the updated body, assuming they'd include it like slink did. Not as old as regular alphas, that's for sure. No, reintroducing the old method, which is regular alphas, doesn't make it new or any better.

If it's unrigged hair you might have attached it to the wrong attachment spot, so when your avatar moves - it moves the hair, too. Try to remove it, then right click it, select "attach to" and select skull.

More like followed the market's needs and wants. And market didn't want to reinvent the wheel, especially if it's a square one. Like already mention earlier in this thread, it's the forum regulars who like to discuss complexity and how to do it more "right". Alphas, in a way they used to be, are gone for half a decade, at least for those who didn't held to the classic SL avatars forever for one reason or another. And don't think I've met a single person in world that would be missing them since that. But Ive met quite a few "mesh ruined SL!" type of people, who are stuck with their pre-alphas avatars, using painted on clothing and sleeves/collars made of prims, plus glorious shoes that use invisible prim and don't render with ALM on. Now you or others may argue that "market is not right", but don't what is right and wrong is subjective. I'm personally happy with alpha cuts and never missed using alpha layers since 2014. With that update the options for both, alpha cuts and alpha layers are back. How/if creators going to use them is up to them. You can always send a suggestion/request to the your favorite clothing creators. But don't think I've seen any alpha layers in any "big store's" releases since slink's redux update. And no, I don't agree with your previous message how users can create their own alphas. Most actually can't, they have difficulties in just using SL as is and you want them to learn GIMP and create own alphas? Also don't forget that many people use SL for just an hour every few days, sometimes just on weekends or free days. They need convenience. Alpha cuts and further development of it - auto-alpha, and, now even auto-feet, are the parts of this convenience. So no, I see it the other way around. It's the Slink's creator who did rush and made it all wrong, without any consideration of their market/users. Signature, who are the market leaders for male bodies (they have Gianni and Geralt as well as not very supported female body named Alice) have it the same way and they updated before maitreya. Pretty safe to say that Belleza will not going to have any radical changes whenever they'll update, too. Probably just going to separate layers and call it a day. Nothing to do with monopolies, just actually knowing their users' wants and needs, unlike certain creators. Edit: But yeah, this does reminds me a few discussion with "old-timers" I had, shortly after just starting SL and through the years. They desperately wanted their "old methods" to stay around no matter what and blamed LL for changing anything at all and creators for following the trends. First it was the mesh in general, then mesh body parts, then mesh bodies, then mesh heads. And I wouldn't be surprised if before same people argued about sculpties being bad, while prims should be the right way to go. If anything, this update added ability for such users to have it their way. Want to use alpha - use it. Forcing everyone to like it and saying it's the best way, is rather unwise.

I know it's sarcastic and all, nor do I care about the region in question (first time I heard about it). But they already do, it's called mainland, especially water regions with zero residental areas. LL pays for the servers running it, so people who care about sailing/flying can go there. it's not any different, especially for those of us who do not enjoy such kind of activities.

Imo, it's for the best. I also remember having to block their (and some others') updaters for a bit, while I was manually updating my outfits/saved copies. Like.. I don't want a new box on every outfit swap. And yes, I usually keep quite a few copies of the bodies, because I can't be bothered to re-apply skins/appliers, it's easier to just save an outfit with different "ready to use" body. --- As for the rest. Can't say I'm too hyped, mostly because v4.1 already does everything I want, but seems like it's going to be a good and solid update, so I'm happy. And yeah, alpha cuts are here to stay, which was already known, though. Guess it'll be only slink (and maybe some other, almost never used/seen bodies) that went with "old school alphas" way, pretty sure Belleza also not going to get rid of their alpha cuts whenever they'll release an update. Yep, I did use non BoM FS for the most part (with rare exceptions) until release of new Lelutka heads, which can be used without BoM too, but I figured I might as well upgrade, sooner or later the fabled EEP going to be released, which means updating anyway. And even in busy regions I saw maybe 1-2 people with BoM stuff, often no one at all. Pretty much all existing/modern bodies and bento heads can use it, but the question is... why? System clothing looks awful on the skin layer, despite what some people want to believe, they are painted and flat. So only good for tattoos pretty much, to avoid alpha glitching with long hair or some clothes that use alpha blended parts. Pretty much this. I don't socialize all that much, but when I do and there's some talk about avatar appearance/bodies/heads/etc, it's always about looking better. Not sure I can remember meeting at least one person who gave a damn about complexity, even when they fully understand how it works. Attachment point limit thing is pretty valid, though. I did manage to hit it a few times while making some sci-fi based looks, there's a lot of small things to add, which are not even heavy, but each takes 1 attachment point. if they are mod and rigged, then can be linked to save an attachment point, but if either not rigged or no mod, then not much can be done. P. S. Still wonder why Maitreya never released other body, to compete with freya and hourglass. Not that I'm after those kind of look myself, I like my slim shape, so Lara or Belleza Venus (if it would be supported) are perfect for me, but seems like a wasted opportunity considering the market.

I know plenty of creators, too. No one really cared too much and most continue as is (most are very unhappy about 5>10% on MP, though, but that's another story). Doom and gloom is quite popular topic at any given day, but at the end of the day Tilia is LL and companies change ToS from time to time. I do hope people get their money out of Sansar before it completely dies, though. Which, I also hope, is soon. I guess it'll be a sad day, for a very few people who actually did enjoy it for their reasons, but companies of LL scale can't afford to just burn money on nothing forever. Google can, Amazon can, Microsoft can, but not smaller ones.

Clear benefits are HD eyeshadow/lips and materials. If your current lipsticks came with layers/bom, then you can disable hd lips anytime and use that, not the old appliers, though. Not sure what other benefits you've expected or wanted. it's the same as with any other mesh heads, they are new and you can achieve different look with them. Do you like it more than your current one or/and see yourself using it? Buy it. No? Don't buy it.

I'm aware. For example a model of Kratos (GOW on PS4) is only 80k polygons in total, 32k for his face. It's not the most detailed character ever made, but serves a good example I believe. However we are discussing SL here and performance boost that can be made by reducing onion layers, not the "games that are made by professional developers with multimillion budgets vs hobbyist creators making stuff in/for SL, often just for fun". Apples vs oranges. So, no, it's not a false-equivalence, no matter how much you want to believe that. That's just basic percentages. If whole scene has 500k triangles (for example), then you can expect a good boost by reducing triangles amount by 250k, especially if your machine struggles with 500k because of bad/old hardware and/or bad optimization. But if whole scene has 10m triangles, then removing 250k will do close to nothing to performance/fps. Add bloated VRAM usage to the picture, ancient and ineffective caching system that consumes large chunks of CPU time, unless your scene is completely static and you really won't see any difference whatsoever, with or without onions.

Vertices/triangles wise it's pretty minor. Someone posted slink's numbers in similar thread, it was 20k less vertices and 30k less triangles or so. For old vs new Lelutka heads it's 28k/53k to 16k/30k and actually higher VRAM usage 28k to 41k, thanks to those new HD additions. In theory heavier bodies like belleza could lose way more triangles, though. But having 3 different chests in one... hard to say. So let's say you have a mid sized private party or something, with 10 avis. All using same slink redux bodies and same lelutka heads. You are saving 320k of vertices and 530k of triangles that no need to be rendered now. That's roughly 1-2 of hairstyles with "styles", which is pretty much all what most popular hair brands are doing for the last year or two and less than one "fancy-interactive" outfit. It's roughly the same as one belleza body at its current state, it's less than one legacy's body feet alone, it's less than "fuzzy' mesh sweater/dress that are so popular this season. And it's certainly less than some decor/furniture items you will have around as well, just 1-3 of them. Unless it's your own place and you were choosing the well made mesh yourself. Even LL doesn't seems to care that much on some fronts. Did you seen how much VRAM traditional LL homes use? Over 250mb. Vertices/triangles numbers on them are not bad, but assuming someone using official LL viewer with 512mb texture memory... that's half of it, for one LL house. I remember reading how LL didn't expect mesh to be used the way it is, like clothes, or later - body parts. I think it's the same for their other projects, including recent ones, animesh and bom. Those are mostly sidegrades, than clear upgrades. Example of clear upgrade would be bento. It did replace static or frame-by-frame animated heads, tails, ears etc (not counting those who are going to stick to old things for their reasons). On example with tails, it also did improve "lag" situation a bit, as those ancient tails often were a total disaster, while new ones are light on mesh and scripting parts.

I did read this thread (and plenty others too), too. I know what BoM can do and what it can't. Onion layers>BoM for materials, any day. Based on updates and even freshly released products, I think majority agree with me. https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/443980-bom-needs-to-auto-calculate-normal-and-spectral-layers-like-sansar/ What I'll agree with is obvious benefit of tattoos with BoM compared to onion layers. No alpha blending issues that way. So bodies can easily lose 1 onion layer in future updates without downgrading the experience of the users. Or like Marianne said above, partial layers (that's only for the heads, though. bodies need a full one anyway) is a way too. But they are still there.

Did anyone expect something else? No transparency control for makeup, no materials based effects, no nothing. Turns out people don't want to downgrade visuals for a minor performance boost. Don't blame the creators, blame the LL for making it the way it is.

Because no one ever seen full product in-world either, right? I mean it's not the most common body, but you can see it around here and there. And yep, it's as broken as the demo is, in the exact same places. You don't have to buy a faulty product to know it's faulty, be it SL or RL, if you do your research. It's the best to learn on mistakes, especially if it's mistakes of others. But hey, white knights gonna whiteknight, it's always the same and should someone say something bad - it's the haters, always. Have fun with your broken body, I'll use something that is not as bad looking for the time being and will give their demo another try if they ever fix it.

Hard to say about this one. When I just started I remember almost all clothing stores in-world had those afk "models" showcasing outfits, sometimes just 3-5 and sometimes like 15 of them. Now there's literally none, sometime a lonely group/greeter bot at the entrance and even that is a rarity. I don't argue with the fact there's a decline, it's obvious. But it's a natural decline that happens to all products. If compare to games, then certain mmorpgs also used to have much higher numbers, then as games got older and older, despite of new changes/content, numbers kept dropping. In some cases they did shrink to like 1 server with 2-3k concurrent users on a good day, sometimes just closed. Difficult to say what LL could do at this point to get new people that would stay. Depends on who they see as their target userbase. It's obviously not 10m of Fortnite kids, unlike certain delusional users like to believe *coughs coughs*, it's not "gamers" in general either, as they are busy with their new shiny games and new gen consoles coming out later this year (although there are exceptions to that, including myself). Maybe people in their 40s or even50s-60s, with a bit of extra time and money to play that virtual dressing room with home building/decoration simulator... I wonder if dropping land prices by a lot would help, like to "normal server prices", which are times less than what we pay here for "land", which is essentially a 1 core of CPU+some RAM and HDD space, if a full region would cost 25-35$ a month and parcels would be pennies, it would definitely bring more people to try it. But it could as well just crash entire SL's economy with it, so not sure LL are willing to try such experiments.

You contradict yourself already, for the sake of arguing. First you say shame on people who bought it without checking demo carefully and now apparently you say that demo is just a demo and if someone didn't bought a full product (but shame on them for not checking a demo anyway) are haters, it must be only owners of "full product" that have right to dislike it. 0/10. But it's okay, I get it, buyer's remorse can be strong.

Those skins you posted below are all from glam affair, you can find them at their main store. There's also 3 more from GA on recent events (C88, K9 and Access). Moods are a bit overdone, yes. Definitely going to send them a feedback about that sometime soon, since they ask for feedback anyway. Most calm/idle mood is awake, it's close to old neutral and sublte ones. "Lively", "coquettish" and "looking" moods can be combined with eyelids in norm position for somewhat subtle mood as well, since eyelids animations are higher priority than moods ones.