AyelaNewLife

They assume it's dead because their friends list is mostly inactive, most of their bookmarks no longer work, and their groups are long abandoned. What they're actually experiencing is natural churn. People leave, places close, but new people and places replace them on a daily basis. Active participants can keep up with said churn, but if they're inactive or only partially engaged, they have to go through the new player "explore and meet people" phase all over again. But that requires a hint of self awareness. Better to just moan on the forums instead.

The phrase I tend to use in these situations us "the problem lies between keyboard and chair".

Pro tip: don't rely on complexity limits to improve performance. Complexity is near useless at measuring actual performance impact in the days of mesh, and allows high-impact avatars to have a deceptively low complexity. Over-reliance on complexity is a reliable indicator of when someone has idea what they are talking about. So instead of relying on a flawed metric to produce ugly jellydolls; simply set a non-imposter avatars limit. An imposter avatars will look like a low-rez 1 fps copy of the actual avatar, and the selection of imposters dynamically changes based on your camera view. There's no reason to have this above 10 in most situations, and will dramatically reduce the rendering cost of avatars you aren't even looking at.

Bonus points if the landmark is in the group description, about half the notice log and also a group message sent four minutes previously.

HUDs are fine, the panic about them is mostly hysteria. You may wish to remove unnecessary and/Or complex HUDs when going anywhere resource intensive for the sake of your own performance, but that's pretty much the only thing you need to worry about. OP: correlation is not causation. Something else is the cause of your performance issues, there is no reason to downgrade to an objectively more resource intensive older version of the body.

I took a short break from the photographings, but I is back! (Feed me arbitrary internet approval points etc)

I have some category ideas and titles for each winner, let me know what you think: Running competition, with the winner called "Coursing River" Wrestling competition, with the winner called "Great Typhoon" Weightlifting competition, with the winner called "Raging Fire" Smouldering competition, with the winner called "Dark Side of the Moon" What do you think?

This isn't a horrendous idea at all, but it will depend entirely on the implementation. This would need to be done to fit the existing system as much as possible. You'd need the body, head and hair as separate pieces, with either HUD driven or detachable foot shapes, and with a "starter pack" of hair bases, hairs, makeup tattoos, and both mesh and layer clothing. The starter avatars you choose from are nothing more than a selection of these components pre-attached for your convenience. This would allow new residents to swap pieces in and out as they grow, rather than being faced with a solid wall of "all the starter stuff and freebies (and often cheap purchases) are useless, throw everything away and buy everything from scratch at once". Would creators support this? I don't know. Maybe. They don't currently support the free or noob-bait cheap mesh bodies, so possibly not.

Part of the problem here is that Bakes on Mesh should have been a Day One feature when mesh was released. Can you imagine how smooth the transition from system to mesh bodies would have been if skins etc could still be used, with no need for appliers? Instead SL spent many years learning how to function with a system built from duct tape and cable ties; yet still radically different from the system avatars experience everyone begins with. And now that consensus is being partially demolished once more. So no, I don't think avatars are getting more complicated; but they are forcing many residents to go through a learning and adaptation phase once more. And not everyone likes that, or can adapt quickly.

I once helped a resident work out what was pushing her script count above 9mb, and thus triggering the bot at a sim we both visited. The culprit was a certain brand of talking ladyparts (which she was wearing but had hidden), with everything else she was wearing coming in at below 1mb script usage in total. This is what I meant about effort vs reward. Is it worth taking the time to identify which attachment is an obnoxious script hog, and either fixing or removing it? Absolutely, that actually can make a difference, and is something that everyone should check for. My little sandbox platform has a set of "script scales" rezzed for this very reason. But removing stuff like auto-hide scripts (or Maitreya's new foot shape scripts) is the equivalent of arguing over pennies on a mortgage - it's a waste of everyone's time, and will make no noticeable difference.

It boils down to effort vs reward, for me personally. Sure, I absolutely prefer the homemade burger; but I'm sitting next to an empty pizza hut box because last night I barely had the energy to shower, chat for half an hour then pass out. And I make a damn good pizza base myself. For me personally, the performance benefit from stripping out auto-alpha scripts from my clothing is unnoticeable. The performance benefit from not wearing the three applier layers on my body is also unnoticeable. However, the latter is something I can do once (by detaching them) and can undo as and when is appropriate near instantly, thus it's worth my time to detach said layers whenever I'm not using them. Marginal impact, but marginal effort. But going through my wardrobe and manually creating a bespoke alpha layer for each, even if working off templates, for a marginal gain? For me personally, that is not worth the effort. Everyone's approach to this will vary, of course.

I have 700-800 bits of clothing in my clothing folder. About a third of those are in trash subfolders, a further third may have been worn once or twice; but that still leaves 200+ alphas that I'd need to manually make just to make my wardrobe usable. While I fully get your point about the tech ineptitude of your average SL resident - just watching some of my larger groups today has aged me, I truly do know your pain here - there's also the effort barrier to consider for others. I have a job, and an hour-long commute; life's too short for some things.

I get what you're saying here Scylla, but I think your point would be far stronger if Maitreya's update could not make use of an alpha layer. It can. Which means a creator still has to choose between setting up auto-alpha scripts for every individual body they choose to fit to (as well as tweaking the fit itself to coincide with the alpha slices as best as possible); or making a single alpha layer. There's no disincentive towards creators including alpha layers with their products here; it's both less effort and creatively liberating for them to do so. I get that removing alpha slices entirely would be a powerful incentive for creators; but that comes at a cost that is unjustifiably steep, given the alternatives available.

Whoops, my mistake - out of pure illogical habit I use the menus instead of ctrl+shift+x, so was running off memory for that shortcut.

Your argument assumes that applier layers are now obsolete, and that system layers are all you need now. Which is objectively false. In part because of the immense backlog of content which cannot (legally) be converted by the user to system layers, and in part because of the glove/sock/clothing layers which cannot be replicated by bodypaint-esque system layers. Hence why insisting that well over half a decade's worth of content must now be thrown out when there exists a perfectly reasonable and proportionate alternative is puritanical. Because it is puritanical, valuing philosophical purity over practicality and presenting that as the only option.

The first tip I'd add is easy; ctrl+alt+f to freeze the frame. It does what it says on the tin; freezes all avatars and most world objects in place, which makes taking a shot of a particular frame in an animation far easier than refreshing the snapshot tool and praying. Note that this also freezes your huds, and does not freeze particles. The second is a way to avoid hassle with focus. Ctrl+alt+x moves the camera focus point to under your mouse; move your mouse to the subject's face/focus target, and hit shift+alt+x to lock the focus point in place. Tada! Feel free to rotate the camera around some chair in the background, as focus won't be affected. The third is to do with the alpha overlap glitch. Whenever you get one alpha layer, such as between hair strands, overlapping with another, such as a bush or tree, you get an awkward graphical issue in the affected area - see photo 1. There's an option under the Depth of Field settings in the Machinima Toolbar called "Alphas into depth". Ticking that box applies a Dof-style blur to the 'front' alpha layer as if it were at the distance of the 'rear' layer, which can hide the overlap glitch - see photo 2. However this brings in different problems, as now a portion of the layers in question look out of place. My solution? Take a snap with the setting on and one with the setting off, then layer them in editing afterwards. My default is to layer the former over the latter with 60% opacity, tweaking as appropriate - see photo 3. It's not perfect, and it's not a fix; but it is an improvement, and with relatively minor overlaps that don't take up too much space on your canvass, this is a quick, easy and reliable way to render them all but unnoticeable.

This approach to BoM is pretty much ideal, to be honest. I know it will fall short of what the fundamentalists have been demanding for the last year or two, but this will deliver practical rendering weight savings without stripping the user of features. It's a fantastic compromise, which makes Slink look amateurish in her puritanical approach. I'm ambivalent on the attached hands/feet issue. It's nice to remove the subtle seams (yes, they were there; and oddly more visible on low graphics settings than high), but removing the ability for people to mix and match brands isn't ideal. No real strong feelings either way, from me. Feet autoselect is a nice QoL addition, however. And the auto-alpha logic upgrades are great, as is the splitting up of the layer sections into smaller chunks. So yeah, all in all this sounds like a great QoL update; no reason not to upgrade, bar a tiny handful of fringe exceptions.

I'm just glad I'm not the only one that turns off tip-toe feet when barefoot

It was pretty obvious, given the context of this thread, that Tolya meant "find a way to reduce lag at busier sims without dropping graphics settings". And that would make a pretty significant impact to "improving" SL, without a doubt. Perhaps not feasible; but it doesn't have to be, this is a wish-list thread.

People that carpet bomb the forum with (almost always short and inane) replies. Sometimes you get people with their heads so far up their own backsides that they legitimately believe they have the divine right to push a topic they dislike off the page through sheer volume of nonsensical spam. Other times you get people who somehow think four word replies to each of two dozen posts in the space of many twenty minutes is a good use of everyone's time. In either instance, it's obnoxious and needs to stop.

My condolences.

How's this as an unpopular opinion: Ketchup is the most overrated condiment or food of any kind. The taste is garbage, it's somehow simultaneously bland and overly-sugary, and it makes everything it touches taste worse. We're stuck in this sort of cultural sunk cost fallacy loop, where everyone is convinced that everyone else loves this garbage and so goes along with it to fit in. It's madness. And for every single dish that people use ketchup with, there are a solid half dozen + alternatives that are objectively better.

This. And what's worse, they replaced the potentially tricky decision-point with an outright fabrication. The process tells you to pick something, but not to worry too much about it because you can always change the name people see at a later date... which works to get people past that initial hurdle, but then they quickly find out that the throwaway account name you chose will be visible above your avatar forever. By the time a new resident's 'funky' account name becomes a problem, people are usually either too invested in SL to start over or are at the point of quitting regardless. To this day I don't know if this was an act of utter incompetence or malicious deception on the part of LL.

I respect your opinion, but your opinion is wrong the correct answer is indeed mayo, but ideally not some supermarket bottle nonsense. Belgian style mayo - if the recipe doesn't involve mustard, it's wrong - is the way to go here. I use whiskey stones for almost all cold drinks I have at home. Don't care if people judge me, I know I'm right here. Only exception is tap water... for obvious reasons.