steeljane42

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.

You're not a terrible person because of that by any means, however it's still difficult. For example you might be happy to just know their rl gender. Sure, it's (in most cases anyway) pretty harmless thing to know or to share. But plenty of people take it much further after that. They begin to wonder if you're single, age, location, ask for that lame "voice verification", pictures and more. Which is already pretty sensitive information for many people and they like to keep it private. So in a way it's easier to just not share anything at all or to tell other person what they want to hear (i.e. female avatar = female ), than share a bit and open the room for further questions later. In the perfect world people would make it obvious that they don't want to share anything, instead of lying, but it's never perfect world, even in second life. But yeah, all people in SL are different and have different needs and wants. For example I'm free to mix both lives as well, happily single in RL and living on my own I don't have issues with privacy either. But I choose not to, because it's not what I need or want from SL. I do make it obvious in my profile, though, so people who are after some RL-SL mix can save their and my time.

It's difficult to decide what is better and what is not for someone else. I did switch from Simone myself, after it was my "main" for over 3 years. Try the demo and some skins, play with sliders and see if you like it more yourself? If it's a definitive "yes", then it's worth to switch, if not, then it's not worth it. That's how I felt about their 2nd line of heads (Aida, Piper, Vera and Korina). I did like them, but not more than Simone, so after playing with demos for a week I decided to stick to Simone. This time it was a 100% "yes", so... Not sure about why it makes heard much darker for you, though. It does go darker for a few seconds while applying materials, but then should be back to "normal". I'm not using BoM on my body, though, but it shouldn't really cause any difference.

So dislking a broken product with a broken demo (all those glorious seams at 1k+ altitudes and a few smaller one at ground level as well) is hating? That issue alone makes it probably the worst body on market, it's even more obvious above 3k metres. I thought it was more of "letting people know", about issues as well as about the store's shady practice, not everyone had a chance to demo it properly, because they keep relisting demo on MP (against ToS, which only points towards bad business), since the "experience" in-world store makes it close to impossible to check for that stuff. It's been ~9 months since it was released and it's still not fixed. I wouldn't be surprised if it stays the way it is forever, just like old TMP body never got fixed after 5 years. Sure, some other bodies and other things had/have their own share of issues here and there, but it's a critical issue, since only reason to even have a mesh body is to look better and those seams make it look terrible.

A decent house that doesn't counts for your 351li tier would be good enough reason why some people would choose to live there over a random parcel on mainland. I think traditional, or whatever it was called, house is around 250li alone. Which is too much for a house of such size, but even in best case you're still looking at 50-100li for the house alone, means you have less li left for everything else. And you don't have to buy a parcel, so if for some reason someone is not happy at their current region, then it's just abandon>grab another available (assuming it is, not sure if that "no premium homes available" thing is still going on) one with no monetary losses. --- More on topic - no, never did even when I had them. Only exceptions were when I was renting parcels and sometimes said neighbors rezzed things too close to the border, so parts of their trees/walls/etc ended on my parcel, so before bothering estate manager I always told them to fix it and most people did.

My favorite heads since release of Simone 2.0 (by Lelutka as well), especially Nova. The material effects (first icon, under the LeL one that gives you link to the website with FAQ) are amazing, especially first 3 (2 versions for each, plus another 3x2 for mature ones), teary and wet effects are a bit overdone in my opinion, might look good on static pictures, though. Make sure to use windlight that doesn't butch all material effects (like CalWL does) to get a better look at them. HD eyeshadows and HD lips are very nice, too. Comparing side by side to older heads... they really do look better. HUD is easy to use too, less flashy than old Lelutka one, though. Only downside in my opinion are moods compared to first two lines of Lelutka heads. I'm a big fan of very subtle moods myself and most new ones are a bit overly active for my tastes, 3 were pretty sublte to keep on, though. But it's just 1.0 release, so I'm sure they'll add/change/improve things over time, original Bento heads went a long way since Simone's release in december 2016. Going to play with it a bit more and send feedback to them later.

WOWMeh was pulled out for DMCA, it happened around summer 2014 I think, before belleza's and maitreya's release. But I don't think it would have held the ground anyway, compared to other bodies. Not sure which world or part of SL did you live in around maitreya's release time, but it was anything, but ignored. It took me a full day just to get to the sim to buy it and it was lucky, some did wait for 4-5 days of non stop attempts, worse than shopping events these days without premium account. Clothing support started shortly after, too. I'll agree about weird thing on Belleza's part, though. Now to your 2nd point, which I saw a few times on forums and elsewhere. There was/is no actual proof, but speculations. Besides if you bother to check some stores on MP, even blueberry, that theory just crashes hard. Their oldest available clothes of theirs are usual standard sizes, next to them are venus and physique sizes on top of the standard ones, then standard+venus/physique/maitreya. And no, blueberry wasn't as big back then to get some exclusive treatment either. Now to what's crap and what is not, it's the matter of preferences. I'm pretty happy maitreya user since its release and while, like I said, I'd probably use venus instead if I could, it's not that much different in my opinion (smoothness of venus is purely because of all those extra triangles). Then again I have pretty average/small shape, would I want something extra curvy I'd totally go for freya instead. Maitreya's physics has breasts and belly ones, but no for butt. Speaking about business and tactics, I actually think TMP are good at it. I mean they managed to squeeze into the market so late with pretty much broken product that is not fixed since release (and knowing TMP it might never get out of that "beta" stage either) that cost 2x+ over any competing brand. Plus they have "awful" feet, which alone have 211k vertices more than whole belleza body combined (they can be resized via shape slider, though).

I don't have a brand loyality either. I might have a severe dislike towards certain RL and SL brands, though (not slink, if you wonder, I even have ancient versions of physique body and their hands/feet somewhere, which I didn't use once since 2014), which I won't support for one reason or another. But I found it funny enough that you really thought it must be some "manipulations", which was quite popular topic around 2015-2016 (I don't post whole lot, but I do lurk around forums enough to keep up with stuff). It were mostly belleza users then, that were all sad about not getting certain exclusives. In a way it's a bit of a vicious circle, though. Maitreya (could be any other brand, would things align for them, for example belleza venus not being broken forever) got popular and such popularity made it so certain creators with limited amount of time for rigging decided to rig only for it, because of one simple reason: time-money ratio is better that way. It made body even more popular and appealing, because... well, more content made for it, which did push other creators to focus on it as well. Not everyone can afford to hire a rigger, like some big and well know brands do and from what I know, it's very time consuming (and boring) to do it right, so I can totally see why creators would rather release 2-3 different things rigged for 1-3 bodies, which cover 75-85% of the market, than one thing for all existing bodies just to have possible customers from those last 15%. I actually seen a store that did drop Freya in favor of Legacy recently, because of the rigging, so... P.S. Didn't meant to be all that snarky. But I'm glad you found some points I made somewhat useful.

They got two conflicting dates. One in blog is *The contest will run December 16 through January 15th* and the wiki link with contest's rules is * The Contest begins at 12 noon Pacific Standard Time on December 16, 2019 (the “Start Date”) and ends at 3:00pm Pacific Standard Time on January 6, 2020 (the “Deadline”). *. I guess it's the former, since it's still active.

You're at least 4-4.5 years late for that "hate train" and conspiracy theories. "But the body I like is not supported well enough, must be evil manipulations!". Except while Maitreya was a known brand before they made the body they got as popular after they made the body and it got its numbers. I'll remind you that physique was out (by almost half a year) before maitreya and before belleza venus, slink was also known for years before as creator of most popular and used mesh hands and feet, which you could see on so many people before (and even after) full mesh bodies became a thing. They lost all their popularity since then, except for the hourglass. I don't think I ever saw their bento heads in world, not even once. Must be evil Catwa, Lelutka and Genus for cutting them from the competition too? Except they don't. Brands just come and go, I'm sure you can remember of countless other big stores and brands that got less and less popular over the years with the raise of alternative and (sometimes) change of tech. Good example would be Lolas (mesh breasts). When better options became available - people forgot about them in the matter of months. Sorry, but that's how it works. People buy what they like. And even very questionable Legacy body from a creator with very shady history is way more popular and supported than physique just after half a year since release, while physique is out for 5.5. Partially it's good PR, partially it's agreement between body and clothing creators (that's why you can find plenty of said legacy body booths to purchase in popular clothing stores), partially it's because some people actually like it, despite it being a broken mess at high altitudes and little lesser broken mess at the ground level. I know it sucks when body of your choice is not supported. I'd probably use belleza venus if it was even support accross all bodies, but it's been neglected even more than physique since release of Isis and Freya in 2015 (Isis is also being phased out now in favor of Legacy). But that's how things are. Besides, even if someone (for example TMP) pays a whole lot for other stores and bloggers to promote their body or even to create things for it. It's still a free market, those creators and bloggers are not LL employes and they are free to do/create anything they want to and reasons why they do is no one's business.

It's the drop in the ocean performance wise, like I already said the single hairstyle with a few styles is many times over of what you can expect to be improved by 10 people using body with just one onion layer instead of usual 3 now. And then someone with 1.5m triangles interactive outfit or ancient non bento catwa head teleports in and... you get the point. I guess it depends where/with what kind of people you hang out with, too. But most people I meet make their avatars good for themselves and their close ones, which will always render them fully regardless of complexity values. And while I don't think I have a single outfit over 125k with current ACI/complexity calculation formula, I honestly couldn't care less if someone can't see me because their have lower limit. And it won't change later either. I mean, there always will be someone on potato PC from 1.5 decades ago that will always run SL on lowest settings. Last thing I think about when I use SL is how my avi might look for that someone. So, no, I didn't miss the point. However it's really almost nothing in the grand scheme of things. And we'll have to disagree on alpha layers. Maybe I'm not around for as long as you are, but I had enough time to suffer through alpha layers from 2012 until late 2014 when modern mesh bodies were released. Alpha cuts is a godsend compared to often badly made and not matching alphas. And yes, I also disagree on it limiting clothing designers, it's been pretty much 5+ years of alpha cuts and content created for it, can't say I did notice any limitations myself, nor I heard even once about any designer complaining about it. At worst the part that can't be alphaed can be rigged the way it doesn't need alpha at all, after all there's plenty of clothes that don't require alpha cuts at all, all the matter of rigging. And yes, I'm going to enjoy alpha cuts and not planning to switch. I believe it was maitreya CSR who said that auto-alpha/alpha cuts will continue to work as they did and even better, when maitreya releases an update. Plus I believe some male body already fully updated to BoM and maintains all alpha cuts from before, I think someone posted that if alpha masking is set to anything other than 0 it just works, but I'm not 100% sure I got it right. Making own alphas is not what you can expect of average SL user either, they need "wear and forget". I'll also disagree on many not going to buy outfit because there's no alpha in it, especially if alpha cuts will continue to work.

And you won't. BoM is not a killer feature people would change much (or anything) for. I'd argue that only real benefit is being able to use tattoos under clothes with alpha blended parts and/or long hair with same alpha blended parts. And many people, including myself, prefer alpha cuts through HUD, too, compared to old school alphas. So aside of method how you apply skin/layers/alphas etc and slightly lower triangles/vram usage, it's the same body. If it wasn't popular before, then being first to adapt BoM, especially in such radical way, is not going to help its popularity one bit. Physique is an old body, it was released before maitreya and belleza venus and when those two became available people started to drop the physique. If it wasn't hourglass, you probably wouldn't see slink's presence in-world at all. But hourglass has its niche. Example of a "killer feature" would be bento, where people did rush to buy first available bento hands on the market made by Vista, while body creators were taking their time to make an update. And no, I also don't think that slightly lower triangles/vertices/vram amount is anything most people care about. Funnily enough, I've seen a few who care, but they are totally fine wearing new hair which usually have a few styles built-in. Those sometimes reach higher values in vertices and triangles than any mesh body on the market, even more than belleza's (which are ~2.5x heavier than maitreya and many times heavier than slink). Clothing is usually a bit better, but also can reach higher values than bodies themselves and sometimes (in case of interactive clothes), they can be times more than that. Heads and BoM is another story too. Nalates already mentioned, how having layers is way better for makeup. Transparency control is very important and gives you way better results than just on/off. Only thing I have add to it - things like HD lips for Catwa heads and now HD Lips and HD eyeshadows for Lelutka's newest lines do exist, those can't be BoM for obvious reasons (custom maps, materials, transparency) and some heads use materials based effects for better look as well. So only thing BoM does there is applies skin via baking vs applier texture and saves very negligible amount of resources. That "HD stuff" simply looks better, so we can probably expect further development of it, too. I also don't believe one bit that ARCtan is going to kill content that was made in the last 6-7 years, it would be commercial suicide for LL if they did try to. Most likely it's just going to be an actually working complexity system, something like jellydolls 2.0. Maybe a system that calculates complexity based on triangles, vertices and vram? Which will help in a way, to see who's actually "heavy" and who is not (unlike now, where something like non bento catwa head, which can be as heavy as 3-5 modern avatars combined, has 15-25k complexity), but it's just a recommendation anyway, which you can ignore in favor of having a better look.

And not having any land is even cheaper! On the serious side - depends on your needs. Some are happy with those 60L skyboxes, others manage to make pretty decent and "usable" place out of new LL homes and some of us are greedy and wouldn't fit even the living room into such low land impact. Here's some basic math on it. 99$ a year (no discounts taken into consideration, since only LL knows when/if they'll have another one), 260L$ per $. So should you just buy 99$ worth of L$ you will get 25.7k at this rate, which is 494L$ a week. Premium stipend is 300L$ a week (I'm aware about some people having 500L$, but it's probably small enough percentage of people and not available anymore), which leaves you with negative ~194L$ a week compared to simply buying L$. if you want/need to have rentals/land, then for 194L$ a week you are probably looking for something like 225-250prims in residental zoned estate and a bit more in mixed/commercial estates and/or mainland. Compared to that you probably should get a bit more with 1024sqm free tier, be it LL homes or random lot on the mainland (price of a good one can be quite high, though), so you're saving a tiny bit vs what you'd pay to have 351prims rental elsewhere. I personally don't like mainland at all. Be it Bellisseria with its covenant or chaotic "old mainland" where someone can just put a breedable farm, 30 of overscripted babies or a million of rezzers and make region close to unusable and LL won't do anything about it. So considering that land (and well, SL overall) is pretty much just for an entertainment, I choose to pay a bit extra to make sure my entertainment is not spoiled too much.

You don't have to be a premium to have own private region, the premium part only applies to mainland.

Text. I have voice (well, media/sounds as well) disabled completely, so not even listening. I had my fair share of chewing/sipping/heavy breathing/vacuum cleaners/barking dogs etc "experience" during mmorpg days already, where I also found it close to being pointless at best and distracting at worst, but it was actually "new thing" back then, so I gave it a go. Helps to save a lot of time, too. I found people who "demand" you to voice to be the worst, even worse than ones with random pixel sex "offers". The latter are (usually at least) are fine with getting a "no", while the former will often get quite aggressive. So if it comes within first few minutes of chat - I'm quite happy to close the chat or just block them if they keep going with their nonsense.

Good looking mesh, although less flexible when it comes to sliders than some other heads. Tons of skins, especially for classic and babyface. And millions of makeup, probably even more than for catwa now, for some reason. And that's probably all good I can say about it. Animations are awful, like "turn them off completely" awful, probably even worse than on Catwa's v1 Bento release (those were quite bad, but got completely redone in 2.x update). There's a reason why most people with genus heads that you will see in world have completely static faces - it's because of this. 3rd part animations can help to mitigate it a bit, there's a face AO (or two now?) from Vista and some more, but can't say I was all impressed by any of them. Besides when it's a premium priced head, then you shouldn't need to buy 3rd party AOs to make it work. I personally would rate animations for mesh heads in that order: Lelutka>Catwa>LAQ>no animations>Genus. I didn't bothered to test Logo or GA.EG bento heads, since I don't like how they look at all, so can't say much about theirs. Eyes are very bad too, which was already mentioned. HUD is clunky and most unintuitive one I've seen in a while, not just when it comes to mesh heads, but for all HUDs. You can still get used to it, it works, but doesn't makes it any better. My personal opinion on them: if you love the way they look and either fine with having a static face or mostly intend to use it to take pictures (for blogs, flickr etc), then go for it. But if you are mostly after "everyday usage", then I would look for something else, at least until/if they update them. I personally decided against getting it even for half price during blackfriday sales, when I gave their demos another go.

I remember seeing some "exclusive" and "semi-exclusive" FP templates in limited quantities. They did look mediocre at best and price was way too high, so no idea if it's just greedy people trying to play the exclusivity card, like "go grab it fast while supply last!" or it's a real deal, though. Probably the former. I also seen some limited quantities promo sales, where only first X items would be for promo price, then it would became normal one. But both of those cases are very rare from my experience, so I say it's for greater good and next time big gacha event happens it won't turn into pages and pages of same items if you sort out by newest items first. P. S. LL, next please add the "blacklist", which would completely hide all results from the store on that list from showing in search. There are quite a few stores that I'd like to add to that list, mostly ones that put out unreal amount (often 100+ listings in a row) of low quality items that we have to scroll through.

You can always use ublock or adblock in your browser (in fact - you should, and not just for MP) and manually block it. " marketplace.secondlife.com##.ui-corner-all.ui-widget-content.ui-widget.ui-menu.ui-autocomplete " should get rid of suggestions (and autocomplete with it) completely.

I think it might be a side effect of some rendering changes LL has been doing for a while, possibly pipelining ones too. I did notice it started to happen from time to time in places with a LOT of stuff (after teleporting there), after upgrading to latest FS with BoM, which has latest "love me render" stuff from LL along with other "fixes". Whole cache system seems to work a bit slower compared to older (6.0.2 and below) releases too, if open texture console it's quite obvious there are small delays sometimes before viewer starts to load things from the cache (no clue why, though. they are very inconsistent). It's not very visible in everyday usage, but if zoom all over the region with lots of objects in it, then difference is there. And if go even before that, then on FS 5.0.1 it's even faster to rezz the same scene. Same hardware/software and conditions (my own region with just me there), so can't really be anything, but some viewer related changes. Too bad 6.0.2 is needed for animesh and latest one for BoM, otherwise I'd stick with 5.0.1 despite it "being blocked" it works as good as it ever did, except those new things.

Still better than "I'm really new and looking to explore this world!" on 1 day old avi without payment info, fully "equipped" with most trending mesh body, head, hair, eyes, AO and outfits from most recent/ongoing events, while visiting some place with group only (paid) access. And then they just stand there while casually switching between 30 to 50 different hairstyles to see what fits their outfit better. It's actually pretty valid reason why some people put that into their profiles until those new avis "age enough". By doing so you let a few helpful (or "helpful" ) people to know (assuming they read profiles that is) that you are not in need of a freebie mesh body and a LM to "freebies galaxy", nor do you need a crash course about viewer settings or basic functions. --- But yeah, both of those cases can raise a red flag, one is obviously lying, other is "yet another alt that cheats on their partner/friends or a drama maker that needs a refresh" in most people eyes. Oh and if you won't put any of that, then those people just going to assume something anyway. I guess it's pretty rough to actually be new in SL these days.