[How does your avatar look today ?]

Pretty vanilla, but I like how this came together.

 

[Franks/Privé closed and gone ...]

Well, I had no idea all that ugly drama had happened, but I guess it's good to know why one of my favorite dance halls has disappeared without a trace. The hosts at Frank's were really wonderful, Laura Azlee in particular really helped me get started with good freebies.

[Can you tell me about mesh body history?]

On 7/27/2022 at 5:48 PM, skepwith said:

Tonic also offered (and still offers) the dev kit for their bodies to anyone willing to spend L$100 at their mainstore, no application necessary. Open dev kit availability, I have been repeatedly told, is the key to success for anyone trying to unseat Maitreya. You can see how well it worked.

I think the barrier to entry is too high once a body has market dominance to just be "similar, maybe a bit nicer in some ways." Tonic Fine is a very nice body, but its shape isn't that much different than Lara, especially with Petite out, at least not different enough to have a whole different market identity like Kupra does.

[Can you tell me about mesh body history?]

16 hours ago, skepwith said:

Lolas Tango were add-on breasts for the standard avatar. There was also Phat Azz for the other side.

Tonic and Eve probably didn't catch on because none of the big original clothing names got behind them. I think Tonic did a bit better because mesh template makers got behind them for a while (at least Meli Imako did), and the dev kit is easy to get. Both bodies still seem to have small but dedicated communities, though not much in the way of new clothes. I don't know if you can really say Maitreya Lara beat them out in the same way that it beat out Slink Physique Original, which was really the only competition early on.

Ocacin seems to have been supported heavily by template makers, Meli Imako in particular who did a video on setting up BoM for it. I suspect what did it in was the availability of free bodies like the old eBodies and Meshbody Classic, which have easier BoM activation (you have to actually edit the Ocacin standard to turn on BoM).

So would it be fair to say that Eve and Tonic were me-too bodies that didn't bring anything new to the market, where Lara was already pretty well #1? Why do you think Slink Physique fell by the wayside? It seems like HG has gotten beat by Kupra and Reborn because they do the super-curvy looks better.

[Can you tell me about mesh body history?]

I have a bunch of questions, just to satisfy my curiosity!

Lolas Tango - what was it? I occasionally find something that has "Lolas Tango Appliers." It doesn't seem to be around any more. Was it a mesh body?

What happened to Ocasin? What was the deal? Was it briefly popular and died? Never got off the ground?

Why did Maitreya Lara completely beat out Tonic and Eve? Those seem like pretty nice bodies, but obviously there aren't many users.

 

 

[Oh my Gawd! - Totally unOfficial Pet Peeve Thread.]

My biggest pet peeves:

• Patterns in the fat pack. I want this top in exactly one color, the houndstooth you have in the ad. But what's this, I can only get that if I spend 1299 for the fat pack? Sorry, no sale.
• Monochrome outfit singles, you know, where I can't buy the white top and aqua skirt, i have to either buy white top & skirt, or aqua top & skirt, or both if I want to mix colors. 
• Hair with 500K vistris. Learn to simplify your models. Please. For the love of God and the fans that send my computer into fits. And not just for me...I love seeing everyone's avis! But I can't when your stupid hair is killing my computer.

[Belleza Update]

On 9/8/2021 at 10:07 AM, Coffee Pancake said:

Oh absolutely, it's not free at all. We should always strive for better and more optimal geometry and object construction.

But in the context of the SL viewer, focusing on geometry and GPU rendering costs is like emptying your cars ash tray because your car is slow ... on a 30 mph road, during rush hour, in a school zone.

The SL viewer is a garbage truck with a fueled and ready to launch escape velocity capable rocket engine.. that it's towing behind it on a trailer.

 

Sadly there isn't much we can do about this. Games don't need to do all the processing the SL viewer needs to do , so the GPU becomes the bottle neck. For SL, a single CPU core is the bottle neck, a fancy pants modern GPU barely gets out of bed.

The GPU can be a bottle neck on lower end or compromised systems (laptops).

 

On paper at least, SL presents a perfect storm for a fully threaded vulkan render pipeline, but that greatly depends on how deep into the viewer such pipelines actually go.

 

BUT (and there is always a 🍑) should we ever get a magical fully threaded vulkan render pipeline that gets all our modern CPU cores out of bed, a high FPS environment will hang a massive lantern on all the other bottlenecks inherent to SL's base architecture.

Right now for example, we don't notice moment to moment just how much round trip latency impacts avatar and vehicle motion, the moment we do ... it's gonna make our eyes bleed, perhaps to the point of nausea for some users.

If the poor framerate were driven almost entirely by network latency, then turning off advanced lighting wouldn't cause a massive jump in FPS depending on where I am.  Disabling advanced lighting doesn't change what's happening server side; it's *entirely* a client-side phenomenon, and those effects are all being done on the GPU. If they were being done in software, they wouldn't work in real-time, not even on a 5 GHz Xeon. A lot of that stuff is done purely in screen space, but plenty of it needs set up calculations done in vertex space first.

I mean, yes, the renderer is obviously hot garbage, but LL is doing themselves no favors. They neither want to write a better renderer (I'm using this term loosely to refer to the entire pipeline that starts from primitive data and gets you to pixels) nor take any measures to control asset complexity.

 

[Belleza Update]

On 8/30/2021 at 5:35 PM, Coffee Pancake said:

You are reducing the poly count .. but in this exercise, you are also cutting the number of rigged mesh objects, that's where any performance gains will come from.

More polygons = more transform & shade ops for your GPU cores to do. Granted, recent GPUs can handle a lot more geometry than they used to, but transforming, lighting, texturing, and shading two million polygons per avi isn't free.