KjartanEno

I went ahead with outfitting one alt using Slink Physique Original (Redux), including Petite and Homme chest add-ons. Might as well go all the way, right? Two things occurred to me: First off, there's far too many clothes already available for me to ever run out of outfits as long as I'm sane. Second, to benefit from the Redux body, I did make some alpha masks for several clothing items, a process which I'm sure very few residents want to attempt. In a pinch, loose fitting clothes for Lara can be worn, but I've not seen the need to do that yet. Also, a peek in my inventory showing all I've gotten as group gifts and purchases in less than 2 weeks for Slink Physique Original...

I see a lot of guys on Flickr with Legacy. I've tried the demo and have no desire to use a media-on-a-prim HUD. I'd say to Legacy: "Make us a proper HUD, and I might buy your product." I bought Davis knowing that the clothing market is biased towards Legacy. But then again, I'm making my own look, not copying what everyone else is doing.

I get hair from Vango lately. As for Avarosa head skin, I'm using Neels (Browless) - Moon 'over' Velour Eros Body Skin for Signature / Slim (Moon). I don't use any neck blenders. I'm not sure what happened in your picture. But here's a closeup of mine using CalWL for clarity:

Thanks for the compliment! I've had Jake far longer than Davis (and Slink far longer than any other), but I never found a shape setting that could fix Jake's upper arms to my liking.

A couple of quick pictures of my Signature Davis body with Lelutka Logan head, Velour "Eros" body skin for Signature, and Avarosa face skin for EvoX... The shorts for Davis are by Totally Wicked Store. (They come rigged for Davis, Jake, Kario, and Legacy, btw.) The casual suit is by Signature. I find my current outfit setup split evenly between Davis and Gianni fit clothing at this time, though I'm sure that will lean more to Davis gradually. I'll support quality clothing makers, but there's only just so many pants, shorts, shirts, tank tops, and jackets a guy needs.

Signature's new-ish Davis body includes an extra Gianni-fit body. Davis is slightly leaner than Gianni, and there are some clothes for it at events along side the usual Gianni fit clothing. I've set up an alt with Davis, and I used the included Gianni-fit body to wear many of the clothes I had purchased in the past that included Gianni, as most clothing vendors often support multiple popular bodies. After much careful consideration, my purely subjective opinion is that I like Davis' shape a bit more than Gianni and Jake (having purchased Jake when it went on sale a while back). The extra cost of Davis+Gianni was worth it to me, though Gianni by itself is less expensive, and Jake is certainly a good deal now. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Jake to someone just starting out. As for clothing at events, I'm finding they're quite a mixed bag lately. It's not uncommon to try demos where the pants and shirts just don't fit the body well at all, or the textures are poorly done. All the best quality clothing makers already have plenty of excellent clothes made for both Gianni and Jake. My search for clothing to fit Davis has brought a few new excellent clothing makers to my attention, but it has also made me wary of several others who seem to be throwing out things for events that haven't been tested beyond the designers imagination...

I tried some demos, including Slink Physique Original. I never attempted to put together a female avatar before, but my curiosity got the better of me. I wanted to like Lara, but those shoulders kept bothering me. That could be something to do with my male AOs. Should I go all in on a female avatar, I want a tomboy, so the male AOs would still be used. In fact, here's what I threw together with the Kaya head from Lelutka (last year's holiday freebie) and some 1 L$ clothes found in the marketplace. I have no doubt there's plenty of clothes out there still around for Slink Physique.

I don't get it. My avatar is over 2 meters (prim size and "height" according to Firestorm) tall, my height slider is set to 60, I use a male shape, and yet people would THINK that's being into AP (which seems to be a censored word)?? My RL height is 5 feet 6 inches and I'm over 50 years of age. Is there something seriously wrong with you people even considering a height setting of 100 as Necessary to be considered an Adult? Be what you want to be, but don't go making silly assumptions about others who refuse to be giants.

Which is why I say in my profile: "Setting your height slider to 100 doesn't give you an A+, it just makes you a giant."

This might not be the problem being experienced by the OP, but I'll put it out there anyway. Ever since Firestorm added the 'flexible' VRAM code, I experienced occasionally a situation where my system would run out of memory. This is on Linux with 16 GB system RAM and an 8 GB AMD RX 580. Disabling that option and setting Firestorm to 2 GB for texture RAM fixed it for me. It may not be OP's issue, but maybe try changing that option in the graphics preferences and see how it works out. Frankly, you'll never notice any degraded textures with 'just' 2 GB texture RAM setting. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that AMD is perhaps borrowing code from the open source Linux drivers now, granting Windows users that OpenGL speed boost which we've enjoyed on Linux for years, and just maybe there's something in the FS flexible VRAM code that's making it blow up? Pure speculation on my part. It sort of fits, but nobody will know anything unless enough users start comparing notes.

The fix for the heads is great! I've only noticed one thing that seems out of sorts in the new version, whether it's related or not, I don't know. The water is now more transparent than the "legacy" version, which allows me to see the edges of the land underwater no matter what setting is used in ALM. There are times when pretty water doesn't matter, but on those occasions when it does, seeing sim edges pop in under the horizon destroys the illusion of boundless seas.

Thank you Henri. I did more testing, and indeed it is only some Lelutka heads, not all of them. Kane, Logan, and River (it was a great sale last Fall!) work just fine. I also want to say that I really do like your latest version. It looks great, and it is fast on both AMD and Nvidia. I sincerely appreciate your work!

Your "Legacy" viewer 1.28.2.81 in either WL or "Extended Environment Shaders" still renders these heads correctly in ALM or non-deferred. Fix it, or don't. *shrugs* 🤷‍♂️

I've seen this issue with Gen, Ford, and Eon heads from Lelutka (yes, I loved the sales last fall and so did my alts). Deferred: Non deferred: I should point out that I had opened the "about viewer" before I teleported away from home, not that it matters.

I tried the latest Cool VL Viewer on both my AMD Ryzen 9 3900X + RX 580 system and Intel i3 6100 + GTX 960 system, both running Linux. Nice framerate on the Nvidia system, btw. Even an older card such as the GTX 960 is just fine as long as the texture memory is set appropriately and shadows are off. However... ALM seems broken with Lelutka mesh heads. The eyebrows are mesh and they simply don't show up in ALM mode. A "baked" set of eyebrows could be used. However, Lelutka mesh eyebrows have position adjustments (scripted to move the textures around by small increments) and bump & specular maps. Grab demos from the Lelutka store and see for yourself. Use the EvoX head UV and set the eyebrows using the HUD. But don't wear any eyebrow system tattoo layer since it wouldn't necessarily align with texture position adjustments made via the HUD.

This solution may or may not apply, but I'll post it here in case others experience sim crossing issues in boats/vehicles even after having followed Odaks' excellent advice. Many boats and other vehicles use AVSitter scripts, including some very popular ones by Bandit, for example, that have not been updated since the products were released. There is a bug, apparently, that causes issues with the current sim crossing process on the server side in older AVSitter scripts. Now, you may use one vehicle/boat that works just fine, and the next time use another which fails and fails over and over again. You can decide not to use the one that fails, but what if you spent thousands of L$ on it? If it is modify, you can probably fix it. There is an AVSitter script that has been changed to work around this specific issue in sim crossings. You can find it free in marketplace here: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/AVsitter-129-fix-for-vehicles/20869617 I have used it in my sailboats from Bandit/TMS, and now I have fewer issues with sim crossings. Nothing we can currently do on the user end will make them seamless or hazard free at this time. One last point I'd like to add with regards to AVSitter scripted vehicles: The system allows people to save avatar position and rotation changes. As far as I can tell, these adjustments are stored as part of the script memory. If you have made a lot of adjustments using the pose menu or a pose helper, then the script's memory will become more and more bloated, potentially causing issues with region crossings. If you are like me, you might go through your most used poses for your own avatar and try to get the adjustments to look good. The only way I know to do that without causing script memory issues is to edit the AVSitter notecard directly for each pose you want to change. Make a copy of that notecard in your inventory and take a copy of the boat too.

I've been working with the 8 heads rule-of-thumb for a long time. Search for "shape tools" in the marketplace, and you'll likely see a free product that comes with a few items, and that's been my main guide for a while now. The Nanogunk product caught my eye yesterday. There's no demo, and I don't like buying things untested. I went ahead and bought it. It's great! Not only does it help with the height proportions, but the shoulder and hip width guides are also good. But what if the aesthetic is based on a perspective that distorts one's perceptions with a wide angle camera placed above a natural viewing height and most shapes are made to compensate for that default view? I'm sure psychologists could comment on why certain body parts get enlarged on males and females as well...

Here's a lovely stop along the Zany Zen Railway. I took a couple of screenshots on my Intel i3 & Nvidia GTX 960 computer with Cool VL Viewer running Ubuntu. Notice that there's no water around, but the location isn't in a skybox either. This isn't about who has a "better" computer. It's about relative performance with ALM enabled, shadows off, and water set to opaque vs reflective/transparent, as I suggested in my previous post. Reflective Water: Opaque Water: I like the Lua scripting option provided in Cool VL Viewer. A few of my sidebar buttons toggle depth of field, shadows, and water reflections. One-click does the trick. Setting the viewer to opaque water gave a ~20% improvement in framerate with the shadows turned off. Similar results were obtained with other viewers and my AMD Ryzen/Radeon computer. Does the Performance Project viewer give similar improvement by changing water to opaque in this location?

I can't meaningfully run the "Performance" viewer since both of my computers run Linux. One is a Ryzen 3600/Radeon RX 580 system running Linux Mint 20.3 Una with the 5.13 kernel and Mesa 21. The other is an Intel i3 6100/GTX 960 system running Ubuntu 20.04.3 with proprietary Nvidia graphics drivers. Running the "Performance" viewer would require use of WINE, and my framerates would be meaningless to any discussion. Look up Alchemy project's Discord channel and try out their "Agile Akita" beta viewer. The devs are very Linux friendly. Do NOT bother with the old windlight-based viewer on the Alchemy project web site. Alchemy is very fast and looks great with its unique CAS (Contrast Adaptive Sharpening) not found in any other viewer at this time. I have to wonder if that is really so? You might be right, but then again... The major causes of slowdown are draw distance, shadows, reflective water, and LoD. When comparing two different viewers, it's a good idea to turn off shadows (while keeping ALM enabled), set water to Opaque, and manually set RenderVolumeLoDFactor, which you do. I believe that Firestorm often gets an undeserved reputation for being slow because people will use the Phototools floater to improve the shadows and water reflections, which naturally makes the framerate drop. Then they'll try some new viewer which by default has lower quality shadows, 'medium' water reflections (or set to Opaque), and LoD of 1.125. All of a sudden, they've got terrific framerates! Nope, that's not how it's done. Take the Opaque water setting, for example. You can be in the middle of the mainland far from visible water, but the water setting IS having an effect on your framerate anyway. Only compare viewers with water set to Opaque no matter where you do your test. Fortunately most viewers have nice looking opaque water, so you might even keep that setting most of the time. I don't use the computer with Nvidia GTX 960 as often to log in to Second Life, and it's connected to a fixed 60Hz monitor. Vsync and Nvidia have never gotten on too well in my experience, at least on Linux. Either there's micro stutter or screen tearing. I can't stand either. My RX 580, on the other hand, is connected to 2 adaptive sync monitors. One is 144Hz and the other is 75Hz. There is NEVER screen tearing. Period. And Vsync settings make absolutely NO difference in performance with ANY viewer. In fact, Alchemy 6.5.2.1342 feels smooth even at lower framerates, meaning that frame timing IS important.

https://beqsother.blogspot.com/2021/09/why-crowds-cause-lag-why-you-are-to.html When I go to a store and have to blacklist the mesh bodies that are the worst offenders on Beq's list to get single digit framerates back up into the 30s, and then people ask for recommendations in some groups for a body type and get recommended THOSE SAME laggy bodies... Anyway, thank you Firestorm devs for your hard work! (and other viewer devs too!)

I've noticed this issue when testing demos for face and body skins from some stores. I don't care how detailed the skin might appear to be on the surface, a permanent 'shadow' asymmetry on the body isn't desirable and on the face is an absolute turn off. It is not an issue with the Lelutka EvoX heads themselves. I've got so many of them now from last year's freebies to this year's freebies, and several bought during the Black Friday-Cyber Monday sale. When looking at skin demos, type CalWL into your inventory search and right-click & "apply to myself" for a good even light source. ALL skins I've tried from Stray Dog were like this, so I avoid that store. Skins from Avarosa, Not Found, and Velour are pretty good.

I can understand this problem. You may need to adjust Eye Bags and Puffy Eyelids on your shape as well. This seems to be a common thing for Lelutka male heads. I don't know if it affects the female heads.The eyes are not lined up with the system eyes, so some of the shape sliders affect how well the eyes fit in the sockets.

You can try a demo of my body here: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Paradise Hills/234/193/3498 Flickr here (NSFW content warning): https://flic.kr/ps/3TPKta It's not "popular" but might suit you.

I visited the location mentioned before. My result in Alchemy isn't too far off what I could get in Firestorm or any other viewer. With ALM off I got 103 fps. I tried to frame the image as closely as possible to the one uploaded by @1Arden using the region/parcel environment.