steeljane42

Or just do things your way and if you encounter someone who reacts weirdly - you just saved yourself a lot of time, because anyone who freaks out on a harmless IM will freak out on other harmless things as well, like something you do or say, just the matter of time when you find that "something". That's I've been doing for a long while by now. I also do read profiles, though. So if someone has the "don't IM me unless you know me", then same thing as above applies - I just don't talk to that person at all.

If people can harm others with a usual kitchen knife it's not a reason to ban knives sales in the entire country to prevent it. Because then you'll have to ban forks, spoons and all the rest. Stupid people will still report "problems" to LL and they'll still complain about them on the forums without even bothering to check if it might be something on their end first, so nothing will change, just reasons will be different. Before it was convenient to just open stats tab and check if regions runs on main channel or RC without having to go and check those messed up release notes with obscure numbers. Reasons? To help self-diagnosis in case of a problem, to know where to go during tuesday rolls and then wednesday rolls, instead of jumping between regions comparing those numbers (not all regions stay on one channel forever). At the end of the day everything is still the same as before (until someone in LL decides to hide all information entirely), except LL made the change that wasn't needed. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Old saying, but still true.

You did answer your own question then. Different reasons and different defintion of "public". If I go to some public place it's most definitely to not see the lively interactions, but to see if there's someone who might interest me (good avi and filled profile helps) for whatever reason I might have, sometimes just to see what's going on. It just happens that popular places have most people around at any time and best place to find people if I feel like it, otherwise I wouldn't leave my region other than for shopping/visiting friends reasons. It's pretty much same as in RL. Even if you go to a busy club/venue you most likely don't want to interact with just about everyone who is around, which is often hundreds, if not thousands of people. It's just RL doesn't have 20m "chat range" and you can have somewhat private conversation on public, but in SL - not so much.

95% IM, 5% local chat for me. Local only if it's a group of people I know and want to interact with at the same time, usually at either my or their places. In any other case I don't even look there anymore after all these years. Most of my reasons already mentioned in this thread, but here: I'm not a big fan of small talk in general, RL or SL, if there's no actual conversation then I'd rather not talk/chat at all. And something more usually takes longer and/or might touch some non public-friendly topics, so IMs just work better for this. I or the person I talk to can also do something else meanwhile if conversation is in IMs, rather than standing/sitting still at one place for (sometimes) hours. Usual local scripts, objects etc spam was already mentioned, but I'd also add another thing to it - multiple "chat groups" within chat range. It's a nightmare, really. Like a few (or even two, if they are not terribly slow at typing) groups of people talking about their stuff in local. So instead of trying to sort through all this stuff that you're most likely not interested in, why not just stick to IM?

It certainly is. One of my favorite creators in SL only for about 5 years (or at the very least started to create here since that) and based on very low amount of "likes" on their flickr for the first couple of years and way lower quality first items (compared to now and even a couple years ago), it wasn't just some rebranding of an old store, those are very obvious. And now you can see his stuff at many big events, each flickr post has thousands of views and favorites and I see people wearing his creations everywhere. I believe he also runs some region business where he mostly rents parcels for stores to other creators. It's all about making good and also popular things as well as branding, promos and some other ways to make yourself known, then if you keep up with quality stuff then most big events will ask you to be there by themselves, since it will benefit them greatly when a "fanbase" will rush there to buy your newest release and could as well buy something else. I know the "good and quality" are entirely subjective, but you gotta know what sells now in SL, what's always on demand and what is very niche. And don't take it personally, but I remember your posts in mesh part of the forums and more, about some very light meshes, optimisation, the eternal fight for "light SL". I think I won't be too far if I'll say that "it's not what sells like hot cakes in SL these days". People already deal with countless limitations in RL, in SL they want pretty things on themselves and around them, the rest is way less relevant. And those who are stuck with ancient computers and could actually benefit from lighter meshes and less textures are most likely not having much (if any) money to spend on pixels either, so shouldn't be the target userbase when it comes to creating anything at all.

"Better system" is very subjective. I was around for a couple years before mesh bodies became a thing and had plenty of experience with alphas, because after checking the horrible system clothing it was mesh all since then. I did and still do think it's an awful system and prefer the alpha huds to it, by a lot. Same goes for makeup layers vs huds, like I already said before (in some related thread), one hud with 15-20 makeup with previews vs digging through folder trying to remember what is what. No alpha cuts support on BoM bodies and half of decade worth of clothing made for those also mean that many people including myself (I have other reasons, too. like the lack of materials support) are unlikely to drop the non bom bodies anytime soon. And no, the pack of FP alphas from MP won't do it as the replacement for alpha cuts. It's fine if all you wear are jeans and tops with long sleeves, then yeah, it might work (or might not, because even jeans do vary a lot, high and low rise, some with cuts etc), but for anything slightly more unique you''d need to either make alpha yourself or hope creator will release it; in first case - no thanks, I don't have time or any desire to try and make alphas for several thousands of clothes and in the second - almost no chances creators will bother to update years worth of content.

Yep, besides even with other big features others got it right as well. For example bento hands took Slink, Maitreya and even some smaller brands a few months after full release (from 1 to 5) and there weren't really any bugs. Same took Belleza 1.5 years. And they still got Jake's hands wrong, even after 2.0 update (december 2018, so 2 years after bento release): despite adding idle animations to hands they still "spray" into default pose for other people (i.e. if look from the side/other viewer), unless the user uses bento animations for everything, including sits/ground sits. This update to male body actually broke previous bento content for that body, too. So yeah, if there's any creator who always gets it wrong, while also taking their sweet time, it's Belleza's.

Probably same kind of the harm as not making items no-mod. It's also one checkbox in perms, but for those who do it... I guess they don't really care about a few lost sales caused by "needy customers". I heard many reasons why people do this, including the need to replace (or explain how to use redelivery system) broken items, so "better to just leave it no-mod" and "don't want people to mess up my creations using them for non intended purpose", so could be the same case here.

For every lost sale caused by those bulletpoints there's probably at least 5-10 lost sales caused by people (usually ones who already have troubles with any tech related things and never heard about linkset resizing either) not wanting to deal with anything, but "wear and forget". Besides most rigged things are rigged for the mainstream bodies/heads, which together have lion share of the market. So it's very same as not rigging your products to some niche brands - it may cost you a sale or two, but nothing to be concerned about. So I only somewhat agree with short hairstyles, but even then thanks to very old attachment ghosting bug (that's on LL for not fixing it for years), rigged ones have one big advantage, I can attach them to an odd attachment point and reduce "ghosting ratio" by a lot. Same for the necklaces, too, actually. If spine/neck already have other attachments, then adding necklace there will most definitely cause something to be killed by server on teleport, especially if region was slow.

In some cases it's snobbery, but in others it's not. For example the longterm RP. From my personal experience (yours or others' experience may vary, of course) the week old NPIOF accounts (usually wearing all latest mesh/skins/aos) are way more likely to disappear without a reason/warning, than established ones (year+) with payment info. A cookie cutter new account is around 10-12k L$ if you don't try to save up and get cheaper alternatives for the body/head/ao. 40-50$ is not too much for some people to make those what I call throwaway accounts all the time, on weekly basis. In cases if it's a random chat or random *anything* for the night, I don't really care myself, as long as I like the avi, RP/emoting etc. But if it's something that requires more investment from my part, time and efforts wise, then yes, I'd rather not deal with those throwaway accounts myself. Of course there's no guarantee even with old accounts, that it's not *aged throwaway account* that someone remembered about recently and there are always other factors, like RL, PC/internet issues and more, so sometimes people vanish anyway. But again, from my experience it's the "noob accounts" that tend to do it lots more often.

WASD, always. Can't remember when was the last time I did use the arrow keys anywhere. Keybinds, macros and movement is all under the left hand that way, so I can have it rest on keyboard as I always do. And being right handed I find it easier to move my right hand between mouse and keyboard for chat (when needed), than to move my left hand around keyboard too much. And yes (for statistics), I'm also a gamer and has been playing games for decades.

And tons of users on potato PCs with 20k limit won't see you anyway, users on text viewers won't see you either. Can't please everyone, nor should you. I won't even mention that what you (I or anyone else) consider as vanity might be epitome of ugliness for other person. ---- As for the answer - no, I don't care one bit, even though majority of my outfits are below 80k (not a fan of jewelry). And I did turn off notifications about someone not being able to see me the day FS with jellydolls feature was released. When I go shopping I turn on friends only mode anyway, because I'm there to get new stuff and not to look at other people, especially ones who stand in front of the vendors blocking the view. And parts of SL where I'm often when I'm... let's call ot "socializing", are render cost heavy anyway, with 200k+ being normal.

Some people just can't help, but to protect their favorite toy (game/feature/company) at all cost, they are often known as "white knights" in the community. On the other comment in this thread about some other concerns, like BoM not having materials and as far as I know not even having some plans to add them anytime soon (and we all know, that by LL standards soon is 1-2 years, so yeah, materials are not happening for a long time, if ever) we got a very mature reply below. --- As for myself, I already said in the past - no materials = not interested. I can't quite remember if we had materials already when I just started with SL in 2012 or not, but in 2014 we already had them. So now after many years we're getting the downgrade without materials, which will make it useful only for stuff like tattoos and makeup. And even that is not fully, lately various body shine appliers got quite popular and those are all based on materials. Sorry, can't help and to be excited about getting feature that was worked on for years that is just for makeup and tattoos. I mean, yeah, it's not bad, yay for whoever might save a couple FPS here and there, but all that development time that went into it. *shrugs* And because (partially at least) of the lack of materials, onions are not going anywhere, at best I can see mesh body creators including 2 copies of their bodies into the pack after/if they will update them; one with all the extra layers and one without. Alpha cuts through hud are also here to stay I believe, no one is going to update all their old releases to "old school alphas" and I highly doubt updated bodies won't have alpha cuts/hud either, since it'll make those thousands of thousands clothes from 2014/2015 (when most of the current mesh bodies were released) to now, entirely useless to your average SL user, which won't (and can't) make own alpha for them. I also very much prefer the HUD approach when it comes to makeup and alphas myself. Although I'm not sure if makeup via BoM can be done through HUDs with picture or not. But if not... no thanks, I'd rather wear the HUD that contains 5 to 25+ makeup options with pictures, than try to remember "the hell is that *Brandname_Makeupname_color* thing or which exactly from that list/folder was the one I wanted to put on now.

Nah, it's just a myth that lives on from very old times. "You must join our mumble/teamspeak (and now discord) for raids, casual pvp and to listen some self-proclaimed team leaders". Been there, done that. Aside from the very top of the top skill level wise, which is for pve is racing for some world-first titles/achievements and for pvp is at least semi-pro competitive level of play in games with relatively high skill level cap, that's pretty much pointless. In mentioned top level of play, yeah, voice is a must, but that's probably not even 0.01% of players that need that. For the rest voicing or at least listening won't make them better players, because there's a big difference between just listening and actually being able to follow the plan (having good enough skill set to do so etc). --- Either way, to answer the OP's question. Nope, never in SL. For many reasons that already were listed above, but most important ones are: "muh immersion" when it comes to RP and just annoying sounds from everywhere during exploring/shopping/checking social places. Same goes for most casual games with online modes that I play sometimes these days, voice is the first option I look for in settings to disable it.

Same can be said about appearance (and many other things), though. In RL you might not want something or want to do something the best way possible for social and other reasons, to achieve some possible benefits (health, wealth, career, social status and tons more). In virtual world said benefits can also exist, but pretty much meaningless from RL point of view. But here we are, in SL, where majority people care about their look, their words and other things (and ones that don't are usually not welcome pretty much anywhere, because no one likes a naked noob avi that acts like he/she is the king of the world and has right to do anything they want). Why their private virtual property must be an exception again? Also I'd argue that not even letting randoms into your place is way better than suddenly logging while they are in the middle of... let's call it *something* on your favorite couch and either telling them to pack up and leave or just ejecting them.

If you use firestorm you can inspect your own wearables through area search, just check attachments to show up in search and put your username into owner tab. P. S. At least bento heads made it better. Feel free to demo older non bento catwa heads (like "destiny", for example), they are over 1.2m triangles, so if go with your x6 formula they are around 7.5m of complexity. Those are still the only attachment to this day that made my old PC go to single digit fps on "inspection" (with highlight lines on at least), even belleza bodies weren't as bad.

Ah, I see. That makes sense. But yeah, it also makes sense why some people might think SL should be less demanding, or rather how new hardware should have much easier time with it and how every modern PC from the last 5 years could run it with a few hundreds of fps regardless of scene's complexity. Which is sadly not the case and won't be, not until LL somehow manages to write a new viewer so it would take advantage of all those extra cores we've got since 2003 at the very least. Which probably won't be happening anytime soon, if ever. I doubt they even started to work on the cache changes that I heard about a year ago (give or take a few months), which also completely kills performance. I'm still very much against the "putting all the blame" on creators or forcing some silly limits, though. It's the wrong approach. Actual fixes first, the rest (if fixes weren't enough) second.

Depends how you look at it. Should SL be that demanding? No, probably not. Then you are correct, it's not the PC, unless it's some ancient machine. But yes, it is that demanding, in this case the "horsepower" helps a lot and budget mid-range PC from 5 years ago will be a lot slower than a higher end current gen ones. For example going from overclocked 2500K@4.8GHz with slow (1333Mhz) DDR3 RAM to OC 9700k@5GHz on all cores with 32GB of 3600Mhz DDR4 (still working on lowering the timings or pushing 4000+Mhz, need more testing to see what works better with my kit) gave me roughly 50-60% fps boost depending on the place (GPU is an overclocked 1070). And while 2500k is pretty ancient, the 4.5Ghz OC of it is comparable to stock 6600k in most tests/games, which is a mid-range CPU from 3-4 years ago. Note: no, I'm not stating that high-end reqs hardware should be normal for SL, just saying that if you happen to have one, then even with all bad optimization and the rest it'll be pretty smooth. At least how smooth you can expect the nearly 100% user created platform with downloadable assets and terrible cache system that relies on constant decoding to be.

There's no win-win about it in the virtual worlds (games suffer from this too). Different hardware, software and settings. I saw quite a few of 1/5 star reviews on MP where people said "it's nothing like on the picture!", while ad pictures were from SL for sure, but they were taken on high-ultra settings with shadows and ALM on. Turns out if you run SL on a toaster in 800x600 window without ALM you won't see anything close to it. Who knew? Windlight and local lights also make drastic difference. And you still better check the demo to see how well it's rigged, textures/colors and other possible options (if it's wearable) or go to in-world store and see it in person (in case of rezzable things), to check textures, LODs, animations in furniture etc. ---- I personally can't stand the "demo in world" type of demos (for wearables, obviously). Like... why? Do they really need that 1 point in traffic that they will get if someone teleports there, grabs a demo and teleports out? In 99.9% of cases I won't even bother, unless item is truly something unique.

It does matter sometimes. You might have a few (or even a lot) friends that you enjoy having at your place and happy to allow them to use it for their needs even if you're not around. You probably don't want some random trolls to drop on their heads harassing them/forcing them to leave, do you? Two solutions are: orb with access list, where you add friends as "guests" or orb without access list, but you add every single of those friends as admins, so they'd be able to eject unwanted visitors. I would say that first way is way easier and safer. And yes, some people are easier about their virtual property than others. So if you don't mind your place being public, it's your choice and right. I, personally, do mind. It's maybe virtual and pixels, but it's my home and not some public club/bar/playground for people I never seen. So until I got my region (which is also not public and never will be) and I was renting parcels in private islands, I always had orb on. Get the orb AND use banlines if needed too. Decent, but pricy orb is caspersafe. It keeps the track of all visitors, returning visitors and more on the webpage. It also has other good features, which you might or might not need.

That's true, I remember seeing some demo eyes like that too. They had demo text on the inside, but on visible part they were purely functional/normal, just one color instead of 25+ in full version. Either way, seems like script killing for such demos won't work anymore anyway. Now if only LL fixed the ancient bug when scripts are set (sometimes at least) to not running state if you're kicked from somewhere and your home place is offline or doesn't exist anymore... Which in case of no-mod stuff means either a major inconvenience caused by having to setup a fresh item(s) or even loss of something, in case of no-copy/no-mod things, like some gachas.

Full version. I remember seeing a few people in clothes like that, when I did like what they were wearing enough to inspect it and then found it's the demo, without any visible demo signs. Most fun part is that they had good avatars, with one of popular mesh head brands, mesh bodies and good bento AOs and those clothes weren't on the expensive side either. And unlike with copybotted gachas we can't even say that they "didn't knew", because buying non legit gacha is fine from that aspect, they might not have time or even want to research, not like it's a normal procedure for using a MP or a gacha yard sale, so they can be totally innocent. But asking a region owner to kill the scripts in the timed demos... it's 100% intentional. 1st hand experience is more important in my opinion. Research can heavily reduce the number of options, though, I'll give you that. But you literally can't make a shape for the mesh head without putting it on first. But props to you if you found the perfect head and made shape that you're happy with in 5 minutes plus some research time. I also know what I'm doing, especially with mesh body parts, but far too picky when it comes to details, so things like measuring distance between eyes by moving slider 1 digit at the time and other nonses like that takes a long while.

If you mix and match clothes it can take a while to see if they work with what you had in mind. For example some over the pants shirts can work well with some pants, but will heavily clip with others. Unless you have like a couple of pants you want to test it with, it'll take way longer than 5 minutes to check. Same for shoes and pants. Depending on pants' length and shoe shape (length, straps, other details) some will work nicely together and some won't. And don't know how you were able to spend less than 5 minutes on demoing the bento head (if you did). Unless you're perfectly happy with some premade shape from the MP which had a stylecard, of course. Because if not, then messing with sliders can take a long while to even see if you can possibly achieve what you want to with "this exact' head.

To read it while not being there in person, I believe some of those things can send local chats to email. Although even in kinky community it's pretty rare that someone bothers with that, in my experience at least. Control is nice and all, but if you don't trust your sub enough to "spy" on their chat to know what they are doing when you're away, then you won't believe them that they just don't log other avi anyway, which makes that spy thing pointless. it also can be used in certain RP scenarios (not necessarily kinky). For example some police/detective RP with such listener sending "records" to the remote object or other person.

Their shape is different and I don't mean the "sliders shape". In a way they are like bento heads, all react to the same sliders (more or less), but initial rig/shape does matter a lot. That being said, I also think 3 bodies for one brand is an overkill, but I can understand the creators. Their first body was Venus, which is similar-ish to Maitreya and had pretty rough start with some random DMCA and some ugly issues (which took them forever to fix). So their re-start already had isis and Freya to get their share of the market without competing with Maitreya as much. I guess they didn't want to drop Venus too, despite it being almost neglected by creators then and now too. So yeah, most creators rig to the most popular ones: Maitreya, Belleza Freya (and often Isis too) and Slink Hourglass (often with petite chest addon. which, I think, is one of two reasons why Hourglass got its popularity to begin with, other is same as Freya's - curves). Now some also rig to the scammy TMP Legacy body too, which is in my opinion a waste of resources and time, it's like the worse version of Freya without omega, but with terrible web based hud. But I guess it's the only "big" new mesh body release in years, so they are trying to get their money from certain fashionistas who would buy it just because it's "something new".