Penny Patton

LoveAngeL Lyre wrote: Hello. Have you problems with other adult regions? If you are "Aged Verified" (Age Verification) you have access in all adult regions. If you are "Account Verified" (Payment info on File) you have access in most of Adult Regions but you haven't access where the estate owner restricts access only to residents who are verified with age verification. This is not entirely correct. Firsxt of all regardless of how it's labeled, "Age Verification" is not what you are doing through the SL website, that is "Identity Verification", which is a subset of "Age Verification". "Payment Info Used" is the other form of "Age Verification", this is why both types of verification allow you access to adult sims. Down to a parcel by parcel basis, a landowner may restrict either Identity or Payment info verifications, requiring you to have one, the other or both.This is regardless of the parcel/sim's rating. Due to LL's horribly confusing implementation of these features, some people mistake "Identity Verification" as an adult rating for their land. Some mistakenly believe it is the only "ager verification", some believe they are required to restrict to users using "ID verification", and others mistakenly believe that resitrcting to "ID verification" grants their parcel an adult rating even if it's in a "Moderate" rated sim.

@Void Last names weren't removed, they were improved, however the implementation of Display Names could be much better. Primarily, there is no reason that both usernames and display names are shown by default. It's the same sort of baseless paranoia that kept LL from implementing alpha masking for so many years due to people crying, "but invisible avatars could be used for griefing!" If LL were truly concerned about display names b eing used improperly (and they clearly are,m seeing as how they won't let you use 'Linden; as a part of your display name) then they should have limited display names so that people could not use existing user or display names. Second, new users need to be informed about display names from the get go. The moment they log in, setting their display name shoulkd be the first thing they're instructed to do.

Techwolf Lupindo wrote: While this was something that LL should have done years ago, this is welcomed progress. :-) Both phoenix and firestorm viewers will still support parcel windlight sence I have heard of no parcel windlight in LL roadmaps anywhere. Much moreso than parcel level windlight I would love to see windlight, as well as other visual effects, as scriptable visual properties. I added a Jira about the concept here. With this we could carve out 3D areas of space with unique windlight settings, such as a building where every room has its own windlight settings. Every floor could have it's own unique settings despite being on top of other floors with their own settings. Windlight changes could be triggered by in-world occurences. Throwing a switch in one room might turn off the lights (and alter the windlight settings) in another.

I do use Kirsten's viewer now and then, it does not support any of the features I'm requesting here. No viewer does, except that you can script windlight using RLV. But this should be a standard feature, not something relegated to a TPV patch that many want to avoid due to security concerns. When machinima creators add these effects, it is done via manually set up windlight effects, utilizing RLV to script windlight changes, and through external post-processing of video outside of SL. That's not at all what I'm looking for.

This has to be one of my favourite viewer upgrades. Been using it for a week, it works extremely well. Estate owners can set single windlight settings or full custom day cycles for their sims. Yes, you can override this in your own viewer. In fact, not only can you override estate settings, but you can do so with either a single windlight preset, or a full day cycle of your own. Plus, your override is persistent! Meaning you don't have to change your windlight settings every time you log in. Not only that, but after nearly a decade, LL has finally fixed the broken day cycle editing interface, or rather replaced it and fixed the features that had been broken in the old. You can now save and load from multiple day cycle presets. This will be a HUGE visual improvement for SL, especially when windlight as inventory finally arrives. My advice to LL at this point would be to take this opportunity to provide improved windlight settings for the default day cycle, and include the old day cycle as a "classic" preset.

Agree 100%, been saying it for years. New residents need a more engaging tutorial/orientation when they first start. One that leads them through certain tasks, in turn teaching them to head out on their own. When you first log in to SL, the first thing you should be greeted by is an in-viewer pop-up right in the center of your screen, telling you to set your Display Name. From there you shoudl be given an opportunity to fill out some basic profile information and then sent out into the starting sim. LL tried something like this with one itteration of the New User Orientation, but it was clumsy, relied on a HUD that didn't quite work, and the goals didn't really help a new user all that much. LL needs to do more with interaction between the viewer itself and SL, as far as tutorials go, or they need to fix content creation to the point where such orientations can be done well with scripted HUDs and triggered events.

The one thing I have issue with in that list is the request for new sim sizes, the implication being you'd like to see larger sims. I agree this would be a fantastic feature, but it would be wasted on SL, where rampant scale issues make sim size meaningless. Sims are actually about 4 times larger than most anyone in SL uses them. When you make buildings and avatars and everything else larger, you are making sims smaller. It just seems wasteful to even consider larger sim sizes before encouraging better use of scale in SL.

Naiman Broome wrote: Not many want a new terrain system? I disagree with this statement, it implies people are aware of, and disapprove of, alternatives. More likely, people are unaware of how much better they could have it. Painting persistent ground textures would be a huge improvement, the big thing I'd like to see is caves/tunnels.

And a Jira entry.

In addition to the need for improved camera placement in SL, I firmly believe it is in LL and SL's best interest to provide content creators more tools to create increasingly engaging content in SL, giving us almost video-game like options for atmosphere andf environment (which will also benefit other uses for SL, such as social, casual, educational and marketing). To that end, I'd LOVE to see LL finally give us scripted camera controls. I'm not talking scripted camera placement and positioning, we already have that via scripted attachments. What I'm talking about is visual effects. The TPV "Singularity" has "post processing" effects, such as a "night vision" filter and a "blur" filter". SL should have such effects standard, as scriptable visual effects we can call up. You know how ctrl+8/9/0 affectsw field of view? Creating a "zoom" effect or a "fisheye" effect? We should be able to control that via scripted attachments. Imagine wearing an sim's scripted bit, then wandering around the sim. You find a security camera station you can sit at. Sitting down psoitions your camera as if you were looking through the security cam, the script calls up a grainey black and white post processing effect and increases field of view to give a "fish eye" effect. Imagine a combat sim where you pick up a sniper rifle and some night vision goggles. Turning on the night vision goggles triggers a scripted post processing effect that makes everything green and grainey, but brightly lit even in a dark sim. Triggering the scope on the sniper rifle decreases field of view, "zooming in" where you aim the rigle. Imagine being able to trigger windlight settings defined by 3D zones "carved out" in space in a sim. So individual rooms could have unique windlight settings to those wearing the scripted bit. Imagine wandering through a haunted house near Halloween. Attaching the scripted bit automatically gives you a hint of the fisheye effecf, just one level of it, subtle but noticable. Wandering through the dark halls of the haunted house, the fog picks up. The lighting goes red, everything goes a bit hazy, and the field of view increases to a more dramatic "horror" look as a ghostly figure appears floating through a door just down the hallf. It turns and looks at you for a moment, suddenly a wailing noise is heard all around you as all the doors in the hallway. which start open, suddenly slam shut. a moment later all the windlight/post processing/camera effects return to normal and the ghostly figure is gone. All the doors are shut and locked, except the one at the end of the hall, where the ghostly figure had emerged from. These are just a handful of the ways we could use such features. It would be easy to implement them (RLV already allows for scriptable windlight, but such features shouldn't be limited to TPVs) Other than the post processing effects all these features individually existi n the stock SL viewer, we just need a way to make use of them.

Meanwhile, Cassini sends us these images from Saturn;

PeterCanessa Oh wrote: Or are LL saying they don't care about paedophiles, etc. - only about IP Wow, what?Making absurd comments isn't helping your argument here. PeterCanessa Oh wrote: However, it seems I am the only on here in favour of free accounts/ Making incorrect comments isn't helping your argument any, either. You don't have to pay for a "Payment Info on File" account. They're free.

I am perfectly ok with the arrangement LL is going with. In fact, it's pretty much exactly what I proposed way back when mesh was still private beta with a nondisclosure agreement so I'm happy to see they've shown some very good sense. Ideally there'd be no restrictions whatsoever, however there has to be something in place to prevent people from anonymously uploading IP infringing content and as sculpt/texture/sound uploads show the honour system simply doesn't cut it.

Phil Deakins wrote: Jessika Rang wrote: I think one of the biggest problems in SL is avatars with weirdly short arms. I totally agree! And I'm told they exist in the Library too. The trouble is that arms don't "look" too short on an avatar when they are seriously short, and would look really weird, in RL. Actually, they really do look too short in SL, it's just that short arms are so prevalent in SL that it's the avatars with correctly proportioned arms that stand out. Not only do short-armed shapes exist in the library, but every single female starter avatar LL has porvided to new users has freakishly short arms. Male avatars are better about this because the arm slides on men are skewed towards long arms whereas the arm sliders on women are skewed towards short arms. Actually, for the typical 7' female avatar it is impossible to get correct arm length because you'd have to go higher than 100 on the slider. For a realistically sized female the arms should be anywhere from about 90 to 100.

Hee, if only everyone had a proportions guide, unfortunately nearly every avatar in SL has weirdly bad proportions because the appearance editor itself lacks basic tools for achieving good proportions. If you are serious about achieving good proportions you'll need a basic understanding of human body proportions, a pose stand and a place (like a sandbox) where you can rez a bunch of prims. I'll try and lay out proportion in a way that is good for creating an avatar shape. Keep in mind that all of the measurements provided in this guide can be altered by about 2-3 inches to achieve desired body types. All typical human bodies conform to these proportions regardless of height, weight, etcetera. Only when you get into exceptionally short/tall or deformed individuals do you see greater discrepency. For example, the average person is 7.5 heads tall. The world's tallest man may be 9 heads tall and the world's shortest only 3 heads tall due to their respective heights. These proportions also reflect adult shapes, there is plenty of material online describing how human proportions change from baby to adult. You will also notice that to achieve correct proportions often requires extreme slider settings at either end! To be realistically sized, your height slider should be pretty close to 0. Correctly proportioned arms need to be around 90 on the arm length slider. "50" is not supposed to represent "average" on any of the sliders. Here is an image of a "T" pose, an "arms at sides" pose and how I use prims to measure myself and my proportions. Hop on your pose stand. You'll want one that gives you a classic "t-pose". Legs straight up and down, arms stretched out to either side. __________________________________________________ First thing you want to start with is your height. Don't worry about being exact, just more or less around where you want your height to be. rez a prim, align it with the top of your avatar's skull (remove your hair!) and stretch it down so it is flush with the button of your feet. Look at the height of the prim, that is your avatar's current height in metres, which you can convert to feet and inches using Google. You'll note it does not match what the appearance editor says. The height shown in the appearance editor is broken. The real world average height for a man is 5'10"/1.78m and for women the average is 5'5"/1.65m. Most women avatars are around 6'8"/2.03m and most men avatars are anywhere from 7'/2.13 to 8'/2.44m or taller. This is due to a combination of social pressure/insecurity and the fact that the male starter avatars provided by LL are 7' tall. It is more likely to see a realistically sized woman avatar than a man.In fact, it's becoming more and more common to see realistically sized women avatars. There are significant benefits to having a smaller avatar (especially if you own land) but it is up to you and your social circles. Large or small, choose an avatar size that works for you. More important, for getting a good looking avatar at least, is proportion! So once you have your avatar at about the height you're aiming for (again, does not need to be exact yet, you'll be messing it up as you change individual proportions) you want to get your head size. __________________________________________________ To get your head size, rez a cube, line the top of it up with the top of your skull, then stretch the other side until it is flush with the underside of your chin. That is 1 head length. drag another copy and line it up with the button of that first prim. Keep doing that until you have a line of boxes from the top of your skull to at least the bottom of your feet. It's okay if the last box extends past the bottom of your feet. Count the head length boxes. That is how many "heads tall" you are. You should be anywhere from 7 to 8 heads tall. No more and no less for an adult shape. 7.5 is considered average. 7 to 7.5 is considered "realistic" and 8 heads tall is considered "ideal". 8 heads tall is for super models and other idealistically shaped bodies. 8 to 8.5 would be the realm of super heroes with large, muscular bodies that make their heads seem small in comparison. This is well outside the realm of reality and if your body isn't proportionate it risks making you look pin-headed. If you're aiming for attractive, I recommend aiming for 7.5 to 8 heads tall. This is a bit tedious but re-size your head and re-size the prim/repeat the head measurement until you get where you want to be. Once you are an appropriate number of heads tall (you'll notice this leaves you with a larger head than you're used to, SL avatars tend to have tiny pin heads) you'll want to re-check your height and adjust the height slider as necessary. Still does not have to be perfect, but try to keep it round about where you'd like to be. __________________________________________________ Next, we check leg to body ratio. Your legs should make up half your height. Stretch a prim from the bottom oif your feet to your avatar's crotch. Drag a copy of that prim to stack on top and see how it measures to your upper body (including your head). The top prim should be more or less flush with the top of your skull. If not, you'll want to shorten your legs or increase your torso length. Leg length affects height, torso length does not, but stretching your torso too much can leave it looking oddly stretched. Try to strike a balance. If you are a woman and want to achieve that "long leg" look, allow your legs about 2-3 inches over your upper body (the top prim coming to about 2-3 inches (0.05m to 0.07m) over the top of your skull). This may not seem like a lot, but it has a greater effect than you might imagine at first. After you get your leg ratio to where you like it, check your height again. __________________________________________________ At this stage we want to check the body width. Take your head length prim and make sure the head length is applied to all sides. You'll need to switch to an arms at sides pose for just a moment as your upper body should be approximately 2 head lengths wide from the outside of your arm to the otuside of your other arm. A difference of 2-3 inches can achieve a "slender" or "broad shouldered" look but don't go too far beyond that. __________________________________________________ Now, we want to check the size of your hand. Your hand should measure, from the base of your palm to the top of your middle finger, from your chin to halfway between your eyebrows and hair line. Place a prim near your face and measure that area, then move that prim over one of your hands. Adjust hand size until your hand fits in the prim defined area. __________________________________________________ Once your hands are the right size we can check arm length. On humans, our arm length, fingertip to fingertip when stretched out to either side, should match our height to within 2-3 inches. Most avatars have scary short arms so having correctly sized arms may seem odd at first, but it quickly becomes natural as it matches what you see in the real world. Since your arm length includes your hands you can't skip the hand size step first or it will skew the results. Take your current height prim, the one that stretches from the base of your feet to the top of your skull, and drag a copy of it. Centre it with the pose stand and flip it on its side. Level it with your arms and then begin adjusting your arm length until your fingertips reach each end of the prim. You'll notice if you switch to an "arms at sides" pose that your fingertips will now reach to about mid-thigh, which is correct. __________________________________________________ Now that we have properly sized arms we can adjust the foot size. Now, I know that most people shrink their feet to the smallest size to work with too-small no-mod footwear. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a world of people with freakishly small feet. In reality the length of your foot should match the length of your forearm, when measuring from your elbow to the base of your wrist, not including any part of the hand at all. If is perfectly fine to mask out feet for footwear, but avoid no-mod footwear. You'll want your shoes to be large enough that properly sized feet coujld actually fit inside of them. You can also re-size prim feet to match this size guide. __________________________________________________ Congratulations, your avatar is now proportional! Make any find adjustments to height and physical characteristics at this stage. Not only do properly proportioned avatars look better, but animations are more likely to work better for them as most animations are made in third party programmes which use correctly proportioned models. I recommend not going with 0 body fat. You want at least a little muscle and a little fat to round out otherwise harsh edges in the mesh. Extgreme body shapes (obese, hyper muscled) are difficult/impossible to pull off with just the avatar mesh and may require prims (or in the future, avatar meshes created in third party programmes)

Randall Ahren wrote: Cathbodva Clarity wrote: That is why i like phoenix i can put my AO in the built in AO and reduce my lag to almost none!! Is that really true with the built in viewer AO? Doesn't the built in AO simply load the animations out of your inventory that a wearable AO normally has and stream those to other avatars in range as it cycles through the animations? Both need to stream the animations. You would not see any animations if they were not streamed to your computer. That adds to latency, the lag you experience due to SL contenet taking a long time to stream through your net connection to your computer. However, a client side AO contributes absolutely no script burden to the sim. So it's slightly more efficient than a ZHAO-II (and way more efficient than some of the heavier scripted AOs out there). Also, it's exactly like Osprey says, it's not that we need to get rid of ALL textures, scripts, animations, etcetera...it's just that we could use them better. Animations are small files, everyone can have unique walk animations, a few stand poses, and all those other animation slots available to scripted AO users without it causing problems. I only mentioned animations because there are people running around with like a dozen different spastic stand poses. It's like building. Do something that saves you only one prim and you have one more prim to devote to detail later on. Do a dozen little things that each save you a prim, and you have a dozen more prims to work with for adding flavour and detail. Efficiency comes from thinking this way. Single script re-sizers that can be deleted after use, as opposed to "script in every prim" re-sizers. Using 512x512 textures instead of 1024x1024 (and 256x256 instead of 512x512 textures, and creating efficient texture maps that combine textures for multiple pieces of an object rather than unique textures for every prim in an object). That space marine in colour/texture change scripts in every prim of their armour in addition to the re-size scripts probably never uses these features, but yet they still contribute heavily to the script load on any sim they're in because they are carrying around those unused scripts. And really, I do think this is a problem LL has created and could do so much more to help fix. They really do need to make it easier for people to make better judgements in scripting, texturing, purchasing, etcetera. It's horribly irresponsible to create an environment like SL and just expect your userbase will ALL approach it as if they were pro videogame developers.

Kasya Sciavo wrote: Yes, possibly so, Penny. But. Whilst no silly apologist, you do have a slight tendancy to let LL wriggle off the hook. The grid performance should be better. Far better. :smileyvery-happy: You should see some of my posts where I really take LL to task. Usually about the scale issues, the lack of content creation tools and/or features, their abysmal marketing and their poor handling of the new user experience. I doubt any Lindens who read those comments think I let the company wriggle off the hook.

Randall Ahren wrote: What about dancing? Practically every club or hangout place has a dance ball. Doesn't streaming the dance animation to every surrounding avatar cause substantial lag? Couldn't clubs eliminate a lot of lag by getting rid of the dance balls? Not really. An animation is streamed to every avatar in rezzing range of the avatar being animated. If a dozen people are all using unique dance animations, each and every one of those animations must be streamed to every avatar in rez range. If a dozen people are all dancing the same dance provided by a dance ball, only one animation is being streamed, because you don't need to download the same animation over and over again for each person being animated. At any rate, SL will always be a balance. An SL were we all wear system skin, plain clothes, no attachments and have no scripted toys would be a boring place indeed. The trick is to find really awesome fun stuff that is also very efficiently made. Like I said, my own avatar is fully animated, loaded up with scripted features, and decked out in the best clothes and attachments I've made...but only adds maybe 17 scripts using a total of 500-600kb to the sim's load. And while I may be in the minority, I'm not unique. There is great, efficiently made content out there! It should be easier to see when objects are so poorly made they add significantly to sim lag. LL only recently gave us the ability to script objects that can measure script memory use. We should have had that built in as a client side feature ages ago. LL should have been encouraging shop keepers to advertise the script counts and script memory useage of their creations since the beginning. It really is unfair to harass people who simply don't know any better in these circumstances, but at the same time people should be provided this information.

Kasya Sciavo wrote: Nice post, Penny. As always you are often the voice of reason. However, what then is the solution if - as you appear to imply - the SL grid is simply great, and we all need to be like noobs to move freely in a virtual world some of us pay a fair bit for that privilege? No, this is not the case either. There ARE great shops out there selling well made content that does everything you'd want, and does it well, without hogging sim resources. As people have pointed out, there are single script resizers with delete options. There is moddable hair, shoes, etcetrera that can be resized without scripts at all! You can put together a fantastic AO that doesn't cycle through a dozen unique standing poses, a stock ZHAO-II AO only adds like 14kb of script memory to your script use. My usual avatar has about 17 scripts and uses around 500-600kb of script memory compared to the average avatar who uses more like 5,000kb, or the problem avatars using 10-60,000kb. I think 90,000kb script memory was the most I've seen worn by a single avatar. In the case of most avatars, this script hogging is being done by scripts the person may be entirely unaware of! Unfortunately, that means trying to be aware of these issues, learning what shops are good, which ones to avoid. Avoid no-mod items, avoid bling scripts and scripted items that have you say commands out loud so everyone can hear. I agree that it should not be this difficult for the average user, there is plenty that could be done to make this easier. LL seems to be making a lot of strides lately, maybe this will be on their agenda? I can think of plenty LL could do to help even the most casual of SL users make more informed avatar/shopping choices.

Kasaya, You are right that it's a ridiculous situation, no argument here. But the comments in this thread that have you so riled up are actually spot-on. There actually is plenty of extremely well made contenet in SL that does not suck up sim resources, the problem is that few people are knowledgeable about these issues, what to avoid and where to shop. To correct your "refrigerator" analogy, it's as if you bought a fridge which seems to do everything you want it to, but ever since installing it your power bill has quadrupled. When you call the power company to ask about it, they send someone over to inspect your house for problems and discover the fridge using so much energy wastefully and suggest you replace the fridge. At that point, is your quarrel with the power company? The inspector? Or maybe the person who made such a power hog of a fridge when there are other refrigerators out there that do the exact same thing without raising your power fil?

Kasya Sciavo wrote: Well, now.....is that right, huh? The people who spend money on nice, fairly expensive avatar accesories are to blame? Am, I getting this right, here? No, you actually got that extremely wrong. The analogies were way off base, too. The problem is that there's not really enough information presented to SL users abotu a host of things. Over-use of scripts causes problems. Right from the very first day LL oepned SL to the public, this should have been made clear, with content creators encouraged to pose the memory useage of their scripts on their advertising images. SL should have a built in way of seeing script counts in avatars, individual avatar attachments, and individual objects around them. Tools should have also been provided to help scripters create more efficient scripts. These tools should have been improved over time. IF all that had occured, then it would be up to the userbase to be smart about their purchases and script use. It still is up to regular users to a degree, however LL has not made it easy for them, so most are entirely oblivious to the issue. Similar note, overuse of large textures causes both framerate and latency issues (another form of "lag), yet people use 512x512 and 1024x1024 textures for practically everything! The rampant up-scaling of content in SL causes similar problems. Since it takes a lot more prims to create a house at double scale than the same house at 1=1 scale, you basically get a less detailed SL with many more polygons being rendered than that same house done to proper scale. But people are forced to up-scale by LL starting everyone with misshapen 7' tall giants for avatars, and then hoisting the SL camera up a couple metres over our heads. AO sets with high numbers of animations lead to latency issues, too, since every new animation needs to be streamed to every avatar around you. Particle "poofers"? "Bling"? Poorly scripted items that listen to chat channels thus needing to run every time something is said in chat? All these things contribute to "lag". in one way, another, or several ways. It's ridiculous that LL just expects everyone to be aware of all this. Definitely a failure of the "fast, easy, fun" ideology Philip espoused a year ago. Hopefully they'll begin to correct that eventually, in the mean time it helps no one to get defensive when presented with these hard, inarguable truths.

While I agree with the sentiments about scripts (avoid no-mod attachments with re-sizer scripts, they are a plague), it's also just a fact that if there are a lot of people in a sim, even wearing no attachments, scripted or otherwise, the sim will get laggy. The overuse of scripts just makes it worse. Actually, my understanding of it is that scripts do not contribute to the particular type of lag where the whole sim seems to slow down. Instead, when the script is bogged down scripts simply stop running until processing resources are available. Script heavy avatars instead prevent scripts from running correctly, contributing to a "script lag" which causes all scripted items in the sim to be affected and slow down or stop working altgoether. Is that correct? And, of course, the framerate issues that people mistakenly label "lag" are caused by the number of particles, large texture maps, and polygons your computer has to render. If your framerate is suffering it's because of the number of prims and particles on screen, not any number of scripts.

 Dana Hickman wrote: ... One thing I noticed however, is that during all these comparisons made between graphics of this game and that game, NObody has given weight to the fact that everything you see in SL has to come down the ethernet cable before you can see it. That is NOT SO in every game mentioned or compared to so far. ________________________________________________________________________________________________ This doesn't affect performance so much as load time. There's certainly a CPU hit as streamed content is processed, but it's fairly minor compared to other issues. ________________________________________________________________________________________________ With all the talk of non-professionally made content in SL, you'd think that it's a pro game design firms worst case scenario, when in fact such cases of gross / widespread ineficiency and misguided use in SL are pretty rare. Of course one can point to an example of such here or there, but that in no way indicates that all, most, or even a lot of the content in SL is to blame for ones poor performance. ________________________________________________________________________________________________ Actually, no, inefficiently made content and misguided use of content is extremely widespread. A part of that is merely the way SL is made. Using prims to construct environments is horribly inefficient compared to creating an environment with mesh, and most people use prims in an extremely inefficient way, using far more prims than they need to achieve a level of detail well below what they could. Go check out the sim Doomed Ship some time. It's a huge sim, easily spanning enough area that one could be forgiven for believing it's 2 or 3 sims in size. It's also fairly well detailed; There is maybe only 200 prims visible in this shot. When you wander the sim for an hour or so, realizing you haven't yet seen the whole place then here's another tidbit. The actual Doomed Ship build uses only about 2/3 of the sim's currently used prims. In contrast to that, most people up-scale their builds by about double scale. Houses and other already large structures beging to soak up prims when you scale them up that much. A 2 prim wall may look the same as a single prim wall, but it is twice as many polygons you are rendering A double scale house also takes up four times as much area. This means you get a less detailed environment, capable of holding only 1/4th the amount of content, but takes four times as much processing power to render as the same environment constructed efficiently. ________________________________________________________________________________________________ The differences to be had by eliminating much of the user-created inefficiency you see is not as large as some may think, ________________________________________________________________________________________________ Correct, they are much greater than most people imagine. ________________________________________________________________________________________________ Two terms... zoning & world space occlusion. Everyone else has them, and has had them for at least 10 years... SL does not. ________________________________________________________________________________________________ Actually, unless I'm mistaken, SL has had occlusion for some time now. This is why in places like the above mentioned Doomed Ship, you actually achieve greater framerates despite the level of detail in the environment. Zoning would be a fantastic addition, tho. ________________________________________________________________________________________________ . Don't blame peoples inefficient content, because you're yelling at the tip of the iceberg on this one. I agree there are technical areas that could be improved, but you are severely underestimating the impact of just how poorly most people, even some otherwise really talented people, tend to build in SL. When you use several 512x512 textures for an object that should be a single 256x256 texture total, that's a processing hit. Fill the world with such objects and that processing hit becomes huge. Using 2, 3 or 4 times more prims than you need to achieve a level of detail and that's going to be a huge hit to performance and a huge hit to SL's overall visual quality, yet this is how nearly everyone, even many of SL's most talented builders, work. I'm not laying the blame for this entirely at the feet of eager SL hobbyists, LL could have done a much better job with many of the content creation tools which have, due to many cases of short sightedness, wound up encouraging bad building habits.  Brynn Ametza wrote: Hi Deej, I'm a huge fan of improving the avatar mesh. trust me, I would love for it to be more detailed. There is one small problem with "simply" increasing the counts in key ares. You'll render (no pun intended) a vast amount of clothing unwearable. You have to remember that those amateur content creaters spent a good bit of time trying to make that texture look as good as possible on that mesh. Change the mesh..change the texture. Brynn The thing to remember is that LL should not remove the old mesh, they should provide a new mesh. We should be able to switch between new and old meshes just like we can currently switch between the male and female meshes. After the new mesh has been available for some time, LL should begin to start off new users using the new mesh.

I would recommend selling things as modifiable, copyable and non-transferable. SL differs from IMVU in that we have an extreme amount of freedom in creating our avatar. If you created a pair of boots that fit your avatar perfectly, chances are they will not fit most other avatars without some amount of modifying beyond simply re-sizing. Maybe your avatar has very thin legs, someone with more natural legs would need to stretch the boots out in terms of width, rather than grow them in all dimensions. Hair often needs modifying to fit people's head sizes and shapes, and will always need modifying if someone wants to wear a hat or other headgear with your hair. A prim coat doesn't just replace an avatar's torso, it actually needs to be fitted to the avatar's existing shape on a case by case basis. No-mod severely limits what one can do with a product, to the point of making no-mod attachments unwearable for most people who care about detail in appearances.

>Someone requested photos. ok. Seen while generally exploring. While they do have child av groups, that avatar is clearly adult. "Short" for SL, but she has exaggerated super model proportions. Her dress isn't really child-like either. More 80's looking than anything else. A good rule of thumb is "without any height context, just this avatar by itself, would a reasonable person consider it "child-like?" There are no rules against someone going to kid-av places, wearing a kid avatar, then turning around, wearing an adult avatar and heading to an adult rated sex sim. LL does not need to "put a fine divide" between these activities and have people "make up their minds to play one or the other". Personally, I find this sort of "thought crime" mentality far more disturbing than the issue at hand. On the ither hand, I'm not dumb. I know there are people out there using SL's scale issues as an excuse. Avatars running around in clearly child-like avatars claiming to "just be short". Usually avatars that look 15-16, but dress like a five year old. And it doesn't even have to do with height. I've seen avatars over 6' tall who were clearly trying to make their avatar look like a pre-teen, they just weren't very good at it. I wouldn't worry about the "on the line" stuff. If it's not entirely clear, there's no issue. If it makes you uncomfortable, go elsewhere. Let the Lindens and sim owners police their own policies. If seeing even a clearly adult avatar woman come up to only the navel on the typical 8' tall SL guy makes you queasey, rather than harassing the person who has a clue about scale, complain to LL that they need to stop encouraging 8' tall avatars by starting new users out that way and stop letting bugs like AgentHeight persist.