Orwar

Not really a meme, but, eh. The average conversation when trying to chat with somebody 'looking for friends' in SL:

I'm a little curious about that myself, especially since both Rowan and I tried the demoes and had no seams on our ends. But, as long as it's fixed. Throws confetti!

Peeve: pretend-bibliophiles whose passion for books comes off akin to the 'tea lovers' who briefly dangle an artificially dingleberry-flavoured Lipton bag in a gallon mug mostly filled with milk and sugar. Things don't magically become valuable because someone bothered to put it to print. A twenty-umptieth edition of Dickens is likely to be worth less than its weight in toilet paper on the market. I've got several dozens of shelf-metres of very chuckable literature around me. And a short stretch of stuff I'd give first-hand demonstration of how an anthropodermic binding is made to anyone touching uninvited.

How are we ever going to survive? Won't anybody please think of the children?! People seem to be in such a hurry to don their tinfoil hats these days. Scoffs.

They already did. Their last releases were just for Lara/LaraX, Legacy, Reborn, and Kupra (although with petite/perky/waifu options), but that part doesn't make it 'more difficult', it adds a bit of time (although not a huge amount of time in the grand scheme of things). As for whether it's been profitable lately or how SL compares to Roblox (or any other platforms) is something we can only speculate about. Not even a month ago, they released their new 'colour packs guide for 2024', which makes it seem as if their decision to pull back from SL came quite suddenly. I highly doubt 'too many bodies' was it.

Grabbed a demo for the skin (using the Frost tone though, as that's what I have the body tone for), and I'm not seeing any similar issues. Nam's Optimal Skin and Prim Midday And CalWL So, what I'd have people do at this stage is to start stripping off layers. No eyebrows, no makeup, no nothing; just the body and head skin, to exclude all possibilities of there being something else causing the issue. At that point, try the different neck sizes in the Maitreya HUD - you've got two different types in there, and if I recall correctly Type 1 is the 'universal neck' option which should have the materials aligned with Lelutka heads. Type 2 (or 1, if I got them backwards) is the 'original' Maitreya materials, which may work better for some older heads. If that doesn't do it, make sure you're using the material options that came with the body; on the LaraX HUD, go Skin/Base - Advanced - Material Presets Skin - Option 1 or 2. In the EvoX HUD, go - Skin - Material - Young - Classic or Glossy. Next, compare the sliders for the settings between the EvoX and LaraX HUDs, the glossiness and intensity should be near the same point of their respective sliders (environment you'll generally want to have at 0), also make sure that the tint of the materials are white (or, if you want them a colour, be the same colour). Also ensure that the LaraX isn't set to full bright (same place as the material settings), it doesn't look like that's the issue, but it can be hard to tell with pictures sometimes. The skins are also modifiable, so one other potential problem is if you've tinted the BoM layers - right-click and edit them, and make sure the colour/tint is white: To make doubly-triply sure there's no issue with the skin, here's the demo of both, using the Maitreya version of the skin, and sun kissed tone, on LaraX and an EvoX 3.1 head: Now, there is about a 1.5 pixel gap in the neck, and if you look really closely you may notice that the resolution scale changes (it's a 1024 texture for the entire top body, and a 1024 texture for 'just' the head, so the 'noise' in the skin goes from a little sharper to a little blurred), but as far as SL goes, that's pretty decent (a BoM neck fix, such as those from Izzie's, can help mitigate that transition through elimination of texture detail - the included neck fix BoM layers still have a slight resolution discrepancy which leaves a visible transition line). Sooo. Yeah. Something of the aforementioned should fix it, but if nothing does, there's one last thing to try. But I shan't bother writing it out unless it turns out it may be necessary!

Well, those are the two best ones. Volver also has a few neat things and are pretty much there in terms of quality. Depending on the style you're going for, Ascend and Legal Insanity may have a few good pieces too.

It kind of depends on what it is, and how the pricing model looks. If a mini-pack of 3 colours cost as much as 3 single colour purchases otherwise would be, then I'd rather just buy the single colour(s) I'd want individually. As for patterns .. It really, really depends on the patterns. If I want 1 pattern out of a bunch but have to pay more than I would for buying a single colour/pattern, then the fact that I have to pay for patterns I don't want may go on the list of reasons why I'd not make a purchase (same with prints, I like the idea of prints, but 97.3% of the prints I've seen have been bad graphics or awful puns, or the tired, over-done 'brat'/'babygirl'/'princess'/'queen'/'b!tch' type stuff worn by degenerates and riffraff). I think my dream scenario for a clothing store would be to sell you the mesh copy/mod, with UV maps (which come full-perm), so that you can just add whatever patterns/prints you'd want, and then have premade solid colours or patterns to buy either individually or in small packs (like, 'grayscale' or 'earth tones' etc), which you can then tint and tinker with the materials yourself to get it looking how you want it. You could still charge about L$250 for a top and then L$50 or so for small colour swatches - and, it might even let other people make designs to go for your tops, which could potentially help increase demand and thus let you sell more units. And, sure, we already sort of can do that with prefab meshes, but then it's a whole thing where you need to shift a bunch of goods to cover the price tags of those. Annnd the good quality ones tend to be really quite pricey (although not so much so when comparing to fatpacks and megapacks and all those shenanigans). Kind of like .. Teegles. Or vehicles. But for clothes.

Meh, that's not just SL. It's the whole Internet. And who cares if they get proven innocent? That's a process that takes time, and most folks have the attention spans of-- Ooh, aeroplane ..

Yes and no. If you dislodge a shoulder in order to hold a coffee cup, it's a bad animation. If even a slight rotation of your thigh causes a jagged bulge to appear in a mesh (which doesn't happen with all clothes, or with the body alone, even if it's a common issue for clothes for that body), it's a problem in the rigging. But yeah, I agree - a lot of creators do the bare minimum work to spit out as much product as possible for profits.

Some poses and animations - a lot of them, in fact - are just badly made. Especially the shoulders seem to be something people are quite happy to wring totally out of position as a shortcut to get hands/arms where they want them.

I demo stuff with my AO going, I'll only T-pose if I want to look at the textures more closely or play with the materials (wiggling a light source around). Mesh clothes are generally designed on a T-posed model, it's their 'default' look, so being T-posed shows nothing of the actual rigging, just the fitting of the 'base' mesh.

You don't actually believe that I'd believe you didn't, right?

Resilience is booting SL back up after you've been TP hammering into an event for 3 hours and, when you finally slip in, you get a TP crash. Nods sagely.

Pfft, what did you do this time?

Clothing with lace/transparency will often get clipping issues in more 'lively' animations, even when using Lara it was a frequent enough issue that I'd avoid anything that was tight-fitting (but also loose-fitting transparent stuff because of how two transparent faces on top of each other creates strange dark near-solid edges). What I find the most annoying with LaraX and rigging is the pelvis area. Not sure if it's because creators try to follow the shape or if there's something else going on, but some trousers may look fine when T-posed, but the moment your AO has your thigh turn just slightly, it protrudes into a jagged bulge, as if you've got a Big Ben statuette in your knickers.

Also true - and on that, US women are shorter than European women on average. Sooo .. Not a favourable argument against what I just pointed out. Easier to just look at world BMI data - US ranks higher than any European nation. And this is also true, which is why I personally don't much like using BMI as an indicator. It doesn't take shape into account, those of us with broader skeletons just kind of look like we stepped out of a Gulag if we're too low in the green.

In America. The average weight of women in Europe is 70.8 kilos (156lbs), in America it's 80.7 (178lbs) - in Asia it's 57.7 (127lbs). In Europe 55.6% of women are obese, in America it's 73.9%. It's also not really representative of 'what a person looks like' to go by averages, if you take a 75 kilo woman and a 150 kilo woman and go 'oh the average weight is 112.5 kilos so that's what I should aim for to look 'natural' is completely off the mark; if you design an avatar intending to look like an average, non-obese woman 165cm tall the weight is likely around 55-65 kilos. If someone wants to make their avi bigger than that, that's absolutely fine, but the world averages are a whole lot lower than that of the most obese places on earth (62 kilos/132lbs, world average - also note that average does not equate medically healthy either).

Really? I had the complete opposite experience. LaraX's butt is massive compared to Lara and Legacy. Even with throwing a bunch of deformer trickery on LaraX it was barely tameable, with Legacy I can have sliders that still have numbers in them, and no deformers, and achieve a dainty rear.

Well, it seems there's no appropriate bones to deform to achieve a tighter waist with on most bodies, someone even looked at it in Avastar for me, sooo .. If you want a tight corset, I guess you'll just have to buy a tight corset and use an alpha, lol.

Shallow compliments - how vain do you think I am?! Huffs.

LaraX pretty much killed support for Lara it seems, I tried to switch, but much too much of my wardrobe for Lara doesn't work with LaraX, and switching between those two and being limited to which parts of the wardrobe works with which pieces felt really annoying. So I've gone Legacy, it shapes more like I want my avi than LaraX does, and the majority of my old wardrobe is compatible with it, and it's pretty much always rigged for in new releases. It's a shame really, I really like the features Lara has, and I really dislike some of the features with Legacy, but having access to clothes, old and new, outweighs the downsides I see in it. So, right now I rather feel as if there'll be few if any times I'd wear Lara when I've set up Legacy in its stead, thus me thinking I might as well just clear it out of my wardrobe and move on rather than having a bunch of duplicates I'll never use all over. I've got backups if I'd change my mind, so I'm leaning towards going that route - easier to just do it as I rebuild the wardrobe rather than rebuilding it and a few weeks down the line going through it again just to clear it out again.

Just being a wall-fly for the moment, been having much too much to do and much too little time to do anything lately. Aside, of course, from the mandatory shopping and inventory sorting, and the occasional selfie. Haven't even done the grid drives for a few weeks now!