Jump to content

Penny Patton

Advisor
  • Posts

    1,743
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Penny Patton

  1. I said all I wanted to say about the practical reasons a general "scaling down" of avatars and environments providing a better SL experience overall, and debunked all the arguments against it. However, I came back because I did want to reiterate the most important reason I brought up. If you make your "human" avatar 7-9' tall as so many guys do, you will never, ever, know the joy of a giant monstergirl MILF resting her chest on your shoulder as she leans down to speak with you, like our human sized gentleman in these screenshots. And in a world of imagination, where almost anything is possible, why would you rob yourself of giant, big tiddy MILF monstergirls?
  2. Breaking my long Forum silence for a rebuttal to this, there are several practical reasons smaller avatars are better for SL. It is literally impossible for women to have proportionate avatars at unrealistic sizes. Some bonehead early on at LL decided that women have proportionately shorter arms than men (they do not). So if you use a woman's shape and set your arm length to 65, it will be much shorter, proportionate to the rest of the body, than the same setting on a male shape. Women need their arm length in the 80-100 range just to have proportionate arms in the 5'5"-6' range. For men this problem is less pronounced but still, once your avatar is over 7' tall it becomes increasingly difficult to have human proportions. This is part of why so many men (the vast majority in fact) have tiny heads, short arms, and stretched out looking bodies. Smaller mesh objects tend to use less Land Impact. This means if you build to scale, you can literally build larger, more detailed environments regardless of the amount of land you own. My current avatar is a 7'2" fantasy character, (I have to use several proportion tricks that won't work for human avatars to minimize the aforementioned proportion issues) but I still build close to real world scale for that reason, as well as the reason below. When everyone has nearly maxed out height settings, nobody is "tall". In SL you can create shapes between 4' and 9' tall. This should mean you could have (proportion issues aside) a Lady Dimitrescu sized dommy mommy towering over most people. However this is not the case as most SL men are between 7 and 9' tall. (Also the same bonehead responsible for the arms decided women are not allowed to be as tall as men so maximum height for women is shorter, but still a fantastical size compared to human proportions.) Sorry guys, but if you're a typical SL man then you will never have a giant woman sit on you and you will never experience Snu Snu. You have only yourself to blame. Smaller environments encourage avatars to mingle closer together. For a club this means more people will be in chat range of everyone else, rather than being out of chat range from people halfway across the dance floor. For other types of sims, such as RP sims, this means it becomes far easier to use environmental tricks to guide visitors towards communal areas rather than having them crowd up at your landing point/foyer. My own current sim has a 10x10 foyer with a ceiling design that makes it feel more like 5x5. Not enough to drive people out of the sim, but enough that they never linger at the landing point and instead continue into the sim itself. There are also "travel tunnels" connecting to other sims, which are 11x4x3.5m. Large enough to easily navigate without issue, but small enough no one lingers there either. Everyone winds up in the communal areas as intended, leading to a more active sim overall. I do want to address the issue of building to exactly 1=1 scale. Phil is quite right, you shouldn't. Even with my adjusted camera settings a 1=1 scale room will feel cramped, unless you're in first person mode or VR. Let's be honest, SL's first person mode sucks, always has, and VR will remain impractical for SL until LL finally addresses the optimization issue (don't hold your breath). HOWEVER that does not mean SL's typical stadium sized environments are the answer. Instead build sensibly for a third person camera. That means furniture, cars, etcetera 1=1 scale, but scale up building interiors slightly and deliberately for the camera. Ceilings, specifically, should be a little taller than 1=1 scale. The average ceiling in the average American home is 9 feet or 274cm high. As a practical matter I would push ceilings up to 3 or even 4m high and I wouldn't make your average room smaller than 10x10m. This is still far smaller than what I typically see in SL, and doesn't look out of place with 1=1 scale furnishings. Remember to keep windows where they should be for 1=1 scale buildings, though, otherwise your avatar is staring at the wall, wishing they could see the outside world. I have gotten away with 3x5m bathrooms and 5x5m rooms, but those should be an exception. Bathrooms, closets and small structures like sheds where you'll only ever have 1 or 2 avatars at a time and limited against-the-walls furnishings to leave room to walk. If you plan to host jacuzzi parties in your bathroom, plan for 10x10 at least. And content creators remember, you can make smaller doors that any avatar can fit through simply by making the wall above the door phantom. Use all the suggestions I mention plus this door trick and even your average 8-9' tall goomba guy can fit into and comfortably navigate your environments. Also, just want to add that my camera placement HUD remains popular and I receive positive comments regularly from people who use my camera position settings and advocate them to their friends. At one point LL was planning to include my settings as one of the selectable presets, but according to one Linden who shall remain nameless, this was overruled by some Linden higher up the food chain. Probably the same Linden who said "rigged mesh will never catch on", "fitted mesh will never catch on and is a waste of time", "there is absolutely no reason anyone would ever want to hide part or all of their system avatar" and "Moving pictures are just a fad. Radio is where it's at!" (All of those except the last one were actual, official, LL company policy at one point and stymied SL's development for years as a result.) Want to try my camera? Check out the links in Nalate's post here. Goodbye for now everyone, and remember these are only suggestions. Enjoy your SL how you choose to! There's room for everyone. (Just, you know, knock it off with the false "child av" accusations at everyone shorter than 7' and boobs smaller than an H-cup, ok?)
  3. That's good information that I wasn't aware of!
  4. Not quite what you're looking for, but Black Dragon viewer let's you hold down the rightclick button on your mouse to move the camera around. Or toggle a third person mouselook mode by hitting the "v" key, so SL controls more like a third person videogame. A couple of really great features that I'd love to see other viewers pick up on. Speaking of third person view, LL apparently was at one point going to add a new third person camera view that was more like what you see in the majority of third person videogames made since 2004, but someone high up at LL overuled the idea. So instead we only have front view and side view camera presets that I wager almost nobody uses except for maybe people who don't know how to alt+cam. Then again, if you don't know how to alt+cam you probably don't know how to change your camera presets, either.
  5. I use the kemono base for a number of anime, furry, and even normal human avatars. It's a great low complexity alternative to the other mesh bodies out there. And good news, if you use any Utilizator head, or any head with a standard SL avatar neck size, there are neck add-ons for the base avatar and some of the popular body mods like the fitted torso.
  6. In addition to the points made by others, a mesh plain will be lower poly than a prim cube. That's fewer faces and vertices for your videocard to render. Optimization is always a good thing if you value framerates, even for simple objects like that.
  7. That door swings both ways. I know of some furry/anime places that discourage or ban regular human avatars. I know a role-play sim that requires everyone have a realistically sized human avatar, dressed in theme for the setting, so your average 8' human male avatar isn't getting in. None of the places I'm thinking of are particularly anti-anything, they just have themes that they try to maintain and the dress code is a part of that. People go to these places because they enjoy the themes and immersion. Not because they're anti any particular group of avatars. I have human, furry and anime avatars. I have fantasy, sci-fi and modern avatars. I typically dress for my mood at any given moment, and go to sims where I can immerse myself in the theme I've chosen.
  8. Both my realistic and anime style avatars smile often. I use the facial expressions HUD from Happy Dispatch, which has a large variety of expressions. It allows you to choose eye and mouth expressions individually, and set the strength for each expression. This helps a lot in avoiding the "creepy smile" look so many avatars have. I think, and I'm guessing here, but at least part of the issue is that a real human smile is not just in the mouth. It's in the eyes, too. Plaster a smile animation on an avatar's mouth but not their eyes and it's going to look weird. The other thing I think causes the "creepy smile" look is the strength of the animation. If I overdo the strength of an expression in the Happy Dispatch HUD it does end up looking a bit maniacal.
  9. I'm not saying it would be perfect, but it would have been a helluva lot better than now where people are pushing a million tris each.
  10. Ditto. As an aside, hair that comes in multiple styles chosen through a HUD are real framerate killers. I tried out some hair this morning that, by itself, pushed my avatar over 1 million triangles. I literally detached everything else and just wore the hair and that alone was over a million tris. Luckily the hair was mod. I was able to unlink the 8 or so alternate hair meshes and only use the version I wanted to use and that was a much more reasonable amount of triangles. I look at it this way. SL is nearly 20 years old. Mesh in SL is about ten years old now. If LL had capped us at half a million triangles back when mesh was introduced, most content at the time would have been unaffected and we'd be in better shape today. If LL capped us at a million triangles TODAY, 4/13/2021, then most content would be unaffected and we'd be in better shape ten years from now. Maybe not great shape, but our hardware would at least have ten years to catch up without the goal posts continuing to shift.
  11. Right. I'm just saying that as far as nail shapes, feet positions, neck sizes, etc could all be alternate attachments rather than every single version all worn at once. The Kemono has like 3 or 4 different necks, two competing brands of feet that each come in like 3 different positions, and at least two different brands of nails (I think they come in different sizes but I'm not sure and not able to log in right at the moment to check) but they're all different attachments that can be worn individually. So I'd only include the variations I'm wearing at the time in my total triangle count, because that's all my hardware needs to worry about. And, again, I'm not trying to prop the Kemono up as an alternative to the Lara, just using it as an example of a different way creators could approach building out their bodies and features in a more render-friendly way.
  12. I'd still count them in the overall triangle count, where I would not with some other bodies, because they're non-negotiable. You HAVE to wear all those additional invisible pieces when using the Lara. That's one of the reasons why I find it easy to believe you could have a very similar body, with identical features, for a fraction of the triangles.
  13. The thing that's not obvious about the kemono avatar I shared is that there's a whole bunch of superfluous triangles hidden from view. The upper torso and nearly the entirety of the legs are are duplicated by the mods I'm using. If I were to take the time to rip apart the base kemono and remove the redundant pieces then the tri count would be even lower. I also included the eyes, head and both finger and toenails in the total triangle count which probably aren't included when we talk the total triangles in the Maitreya body. Maybe later when I can log in I'll tear down a copy of the kemono to see what the triangle count is with just the visible body parts. Speaking of, when we're talking the Lara body being 176k tri, what exactly are we talking about? Are hands and feet included in that?
  14. To a degree, you can have multiple suns and moons. Make one large texture that has multiple suns or moons on it. Also consider that you don't need to use the sun or moon as a sun or moon. Here's a screenshot from an anime night sky I threw together. The moon is actually the sun, and the moon I used to create a Milky Way star field effect.
  15. And a limit on textures. I'm seeing more and more avatars pushing 500mb-1GB of VRAM. Some of us were begging LL for such limits back before mesh was released to the main grid. The Lindens at the time were confident content creators would be sane and responsible. Our mutual acquaintance in the other thread illustrates how wrong they were. ETA: And the breasts are less torpedo-like out of the shirt, but had to keep it forum friendly.
  16. On an alt I've been using the Kemono body+Rei's Chest2 mod+Glutz Leg mod+Utilizator's Normie head+finger and toenail mods+prim eyeballs. All that is a grand total of 39k triangles.
  17. What's untrue is your assertion that performance is dictated solely by the code. Any game artist would tell you that's absolute nonsense. If performance was entirely at the mercy of the code and nothing else then optimizing a game's art assets wouldn't be necessary at all. Retopologizing mesh made in sculpting programs wouldn't be necessary. Normal maps wouldn't be necessary. LOD wouldn't be necessary. These are all tools to optimize art assets for realtime 3D rendering. At the very least now I don't have to point at other threads for an example of the kind of nonsense I described in my original post.
  18. Which part? That people say and believe those things? Or that content in Second Life is really that badly made? Look, I'm just about the furthest thing here from an LL apologist. I'm sure that there are issues with SL's code that could be fixed to make it run better. But I'm also a graphics professional and know for a fact that badly made content creates another bottleneck. SL can, and already does, run much, much better when you optimize the content you build a sim with, and you don't load up every avatar with a million triangles and a gigabyte of textures. And SL's performance problems will not magically go away if you ignore the way content in SL is being made, and blame it all on "bad code".
  19. You should be aware that many people have no idea how tall their avatars are, or they believe themselves to be shorter than they actually are. The reasons for this are that in the official linden viewer, height is reported as being half a foot shorter than your actual height, and the same can be said for many of the scripted height measurement tools in SL. In Firestorm's appearance editor height is correct to within a few inches. The only way for 100% accurate height is to manually measure yourself using a prim. Also, shoes can add a significant amount to height. Especially women wearing heels and platform shoes which can add up to about half a foot of height.
  20. I wholeheartedly disagree with those who say BlackDragon isn't suitable for casual day to day use. I prefer it over Firestorm in all ways except one: BlackDragon is lacking in quality of life features that other viewers have for builders. Like being able to rotate an object at it's root. So I switch to other viewers when I'm doing extensive building in SL. As for people who keep crosshairs visible to see who is looking at them, they're crazy. I hate that Firestorm made it so easy to do. That's creating drama.
  21. This is the issue, yes. But it's really the fault of LL for expecting content creators, largely amateurs with no experience outside of SL, to be responsible and optimize their work like professionals do. Most SL content creators don't even understand the need to optimize. You see it a lot here in the forums. People stating, without irony, that modern videocards can handle 10-20GB worth of textures without flinching. Laughing at the idea of limiting the triangle counts on avatars. Many of them honestly believe content isn't the issue and all of SL's woes could be solved if only LL would finally "fix" SL's code. These people will never change their bad content creation habits unless LL steps in and makes them change. Which LL will not do. They've had several opportunities to do it without affecting existing content, but chose not to. I have trouble imagining another opportunity coming by any time soon.
  22. The trouble with using BOM for clothing comes down to what materials, if any, you have applied to your mesh body. If your body uses materials, then to anyone with materials enabled your clothes will look painted on to your skin.
  23. Ayashi still sells their fatpacks as mod, last time I checked. The individual colour packs they sell no-mod. KoKoLoReS, Action Inkubator, and Beusy all have modifiable hair in their marketplace stores.
×
×
  • Create New...