Orwar

I don't know if it's all their system skins, but I picked up the old system version of a skin I used for my mesh body, and paid L$1 for the BOM fix for it, it was very cheap (can't remember how much exactly).

... ... Yes. Yes! What we need is a Latin taxonomy, á la Linnaeus. As a Swede, I believe the duty is mine - let's see ... Skin applier: 𝕬𝖕𝖕𝖑𝖎𝖈𝖎𝖕𝖚𝖘 𝕯𝖊𝖗𝖒𝖆𝖋𝖑𝖎𝖈𝖐𝖎𝖇𝖚𝖘 ... This would probably be easier if I'd actually studied Latin at some point ... Promptly throws in the towel.

I mean, perhaps they were closet-nekos?

Nah. I mean, old-timey avatars weren't always all that simple either, there were features I didn't know about for ages before someone pointed them out (like, system layer order). The learning curve for new things in SL is often steep, and sometimes as new features are made possible, it's something we all have to go through. By the time I got my first mesh body I was fairly on board with most things of the old system avatars, I think - and then I had to start over, but with it being a new thing it wasn't difficult finding help. New people in SL finding mesh stuff 'difficult' to work with, well, they never had to deal with the old stuff that was often as difficult, if sometimes not more so. The amount of people showing up at Oxbridge wearing 13 pairs of shoes and 8 hairs all attached to their butts back in the day ...

Given that a lot of clothes work with the same alphas though, you could relatively easily just have one folder for alphas (with sub-folders for specific areas) where you keep a selection of alphas that could correspond more or less to the alpha slices (not individually, but say you make one folder for 'sleeves', and have 10 different sleeve lengths in there), then whenever you buy a new piece of clothing and find it would benefit from an alpha, try the ones you have out to see which one suits best, and just make a link to that alpha in that folder. Yes, life is too short for a lot of things, but wasting time on lagging is worse than setting yourself up for a more enjoyable experience. Do you prefer a McDonald's cheese burger because it's quick and easy or an actual burger that takes a little bit of time and effort to make, but tastes better and is much healthier? People have different preferences, but personally I haven't stepped into a McDonald's for years.

Yes, but that's something else. If you are in Second Life, you are by default at a computer (or phone) and have an Internet connection, and know how to open a web browser. Making an alpha is something that you have been able to do in SL pretty much 'forever', so there's no shortage of guides and how-to's - and the content of them boils down to 'download the image of the avatar's UV map, i.e. the map of what goes where when using a texture on it, and paint white whatever you want to disappear, upload it into SL and make an alpha with the texture'. I don't mind people asking questions for what they don't know or understand, I don't assume that anyone has any given knowledge inherently - but when the attitude is 'You ruined it for ME - I'm taking my business elsewhere' rather than 'Oh, you've changed how this works to promote better performance for everyone - I should look into how that works', it's an attitude issue, not a skill issue. I would always (and will, now that it's a possibility) wear an alpha rather than an auto-hide script. Whether the script is running or not, most meters count the amount of scripts and their latency; and if your top, bottom and shoes all have alpha slice scripts in them, that's just a bunch of superfluous scripts. Whether it's heavy or not, superfluous scripts are just that, and even if each individually doesn't do much, the fact that the vast majority of attachments these days has scripts in them that you can't remove (because nothing's modifiable these days), it all adds up, and if you have an event where you've got 10-20 people hopping in and out at any given minute, it's just an unnecessary strain. It may be the only downside to the update so far - if footwear now is going to contain a foot shape changer, that's more scripts that are a quality of life for an instant but in the end probably do more bad than good, then it's better to just set your foot shape, use the save stick, save your outfit with it, pop it on, click it to adjust your body's settings, take it off, and you're good to go.

So far I'm not seeing any downsides to the update. It took me 10 seconds to set it up - most of which was spent toggling through the HUD tabs to find the 'BOM' button; with that one click it was back to operational. As far as outfits and changing the body goes, this wasn't really any news for me - I often have to update them to accommodate a more up-to-date shape and changing hairs, rings, nails, etc. But, with the Save Stick, using outfits should be quicker and easier now, if you want to save alpha cuts and body shine or whatnot. The way I usually do it is open my 'Current Outfit' folder, marking all the things I want to detach (ctrl + click to mark them all quickly), detach the lot in one go - open the Appearance, scroll to find the outfit that I want to wear / update, select the relevant attachments in the drop-down and add them, then delete that outfit and re-save it. I'm also very pleased with the HD nipples. It wasn't a feature I had looked at much in the blog, or 'hyped' much about - but when I tried them on and saw the difference .. Darn, it was like comparing Minecraft to-- Whatever game is cinematic. *shrugs* They look good. Too bad I can't show a before and after shot. I'm very pleased with the update. Personally I wouldn't mind if it had gone the 'Puritan Slink' route as I've gone all in on the BOM and don't have the slightest issue with using regular alphas (it's so easy a 5-year old could make their own alphas - if only the SL userbase on average wasn't more tech-inept than 5-year olds ... *sighs dreamily*). But I think that out of a business perspective, Maitreya did the right choices through and through.

It's not easy being dim and impatient.

... ... Ugh, seems I need to re-do my inventory sorting system as well. Begins torching stray landmarks and scripts.

Consider this my toned down version of my response.

Double negative - you boozer, you.

It's an abomination, and a blight upon our society.

As far as BOM goes, I personally don't hype about being able to wear ancient system clothing - but one of the things that I always was bothered about with Orwar was that I had to choose either body hair or tattoos - with BOM I can have a tattoo without looking like a manscaped muscle-baby. It also makes the makeup game a whole new one; the one thing I missed most about Catwa after going Genus, was the ability to blend two layers - now you can essentially have as many as you want. Another two things that I got really happy about with Neph in regards to BOM was that now she too has some body hair, and since she's been working out so hard in her gym HUD game, I got her a muscle definition tattoo. Some skin brands did/do offer toned and curvy variants of their skins, but this will work on any skin I want. I was pretty reserved about BOM for a long while, but as soon as I started playing around with it I was really pleasantly surprised. When it comes to avatar complexity though, yes; alpha'd mesh still adds 'weight' to your avatar, hence the hype about being able to opt out of wearing the three body-duplicate layers (tattoo/underwear/clothes). The hands and feet being attached to the body is something I'd consider positive, in general - yes, it does mean they'll still add that weight even if you're wearing boots or gloves, but fewer attachments, fewer scripts (presumably), and overall less time spent scrolling around my inventory when picking out an outfit. Whether the forum community is more conscious of avatar complexity than the SL community at large, meh - fact is, if you're pushing past 350k complexity, you're going to be a jellydoll by default for most people. It seems a bit contradictory if you're gussied up to go clubbing and put all your prettiest-looking pieces of jewelry and clothing on, if they end up making it so that no one can see you. Sure, if you want to dress up for your own pleasure, knock yourself out - but I ain't taking the strain of even a 150k person lagging down my experience, and yes, how I interact with people depends on how I perceive them; if an avatar looks like a potato then I don't expect any of our SL interests to overlap, and I certainly wouldn't be interested in flirting with them - if it's a jellydoll with an insane complexity then I'll just assume you're a completely ignorant moron, and the same will apply. And yes, I know the complexity system is far from perfect (chortles), but it's what we've got. If a region is full of jellydolls (which sometimes causes more lag than actually rendering the avatars), then I'm more likely to start completely derendering the red and orange ones before raising my limit. I may well be a minority in doing this, but I just can't rationalize accommodating lag-inducing narcissists; what your complexity is at in a private setting doesn't bother me, but if you're at a shopping event or a club and completely disregard not only your own experience, but that of everyone around you, I'll simply remove you from sight and mind completely. /rant But yes, no. I highly doubt that Maitreya will do any changes to shape or physics that would risk making the entire inventory and market up until this point completely unusable (that'd be handing the crown to Legacy - and don't get me started on Legacy). There were rumors of a curvy Maitreya in the works, but this has been found to be just rumors - and would it fare any better than say, Signature Geralt or Alice, that most people don't even seem to know exist and hardly any creators rig for? I expect that if you dislike the shape of Maitreya in its current state, this update won't change your mind about it. We're probably going to be stuck with the current hierarchy of popularity until the 'NextGen' of bodies arrive though - when and what that'll be, we'll see when we get there.

We'd all end up carving our minds out with spoons to stop the howling silence in our skulls. What if gladiatorial sports had never been abolished?

Not sure, for me it's been my Bloodlines nexus and Signature body telling me there's an update when logging in - but I think both of them are limited to 3 reminders before they shut up.

Yes, you'll now be able to wear tattoos on arms, hands and feet separately.

No clue, I'm afraid. Didn't see anything about it when skimming over the features. I don't think so? I'm not sure though, I tried to remove the scripts a while back and failed - maybe there's a button for it somewhere.

Why are there no threads on this yet? Maitreya's version 5 update is coming out 'in a few days', and so far I'm really liking the features they've brought up. Auto-change foot shape to fit shoes as you put them on, wearing tattoo/underwear/clothing layers is now optional, script removal features, save sticks, etc. On a scale from 1-whut, how hyped are we?

I used to just have a small skybox. Then I got my Bellissiera home. Whilst I adore the Victorian houses, the neighborhoods are pretty laggy - the houses feel strangely poorly optimized for SL. Neph got a Traditional home in a much less laggy region, just next to the train station, so now I spend most of my time there instead. The roads around there are easier to drive on, too. Still trying to figure out how to furnish it though, even the smallest houses are so much larger than my old 2-room skybox that I occupied for nearly 5 years (and only actually furnished one room, for most of that time). It doesn't have the same gothic flair, so it feels less like 'me', but it's nice to have an exterior and it's really fun to drive around the continent.

... ... Or, you could make a prim in either 1:1 or 4:3, put the appropriate texture on it, attach it to your skull and just make it float over your head. Win-win!

Check the skin creator's store, many of them have released BOM-compatible tattoos that fix the fingers and toes of their system skins (both the skin brands I checked the other day had them for all of their skin tones - for free). If not, there are tintable ones available at various stores (Izzie's also has one for free).

Profile pictures' aspect ratios varies from viewer to viewer. Firestorm uses 4:3, which is what people usually put their profile pictures in. You also don't generally want to go too high on the resolution as it's largely pointless; your profile picture will be a small image that people see when they open your profile, or on rare occasion enlarged - 512 x 384 is plenty (the adverse effect of using a too high resolution being that, especially in crowded / laggy sims, the image may be slow to load or completely fail to load, at which point it'll just appear gray, which may cause people to think that you simply have left it blank). Also note that textures in SL are always uploaded as squares. So if you want to upload a 512 x 384 image, first stretch it to 512 x 512 in the photo manipulation program of your choice (Gimp, always should be Gimp!); SL will then push it to fit the 4:3 field and display it as a 512 x 384 image - SL does a poor job of scaling and stretching textures in general, so it's preferable to resize it first so that you only get that treatment once.