Penny Patton

There's really only so much LL can do with lag. The problem is that SL went about 8-9 years with no way of checking how much sim resources scripts were taking up, now we have a population used to being able to wear the laggiest things they can get their hands on and blaming the lag on some vague "other" that the Lindens need to fix. Meanwhile they continue to run around with 60MB of script memory, they continue to create no-mod attachments filled with laggy re-size/re-texture/re-colour scripts, and complain about the lag like they've nothing to do with it. Not to mention the use of bandidth sucking bots instead of proper NPC objects, people running around with their bandwidth set as high as possible, people filling sims with bots to drum up traffic at the expense of not only the sim they occupy, but every other sim on that server. LL's biggest fault is that they took so long to provide us proper tools to see how we affect lag ourselves. They've still yet to impose any kind of limits on how much sim memory a single avatar can eat up. Yes, LL needs to do a lot of work in reducing the lag problem but we also need to take a look at our own products and avatars and figure out if we're a part of the problem.

If moving to an empty sim and using ctrl+alt+r does not work there is something else you can do. Press ctrl+alt+q to reveal the Develop menu at the top of your screen. In the Develop Menu go down to Avatar>Character Tests and select either Test Male or Test Female. This will switch your avatar, outfit and all, to one of the Linden default avatars. It should de-cloud you, but you'll need to manually set your avatar back up. If you have an outfit saved to a folder or in the Outfits panel in Viewer 2 then even that will be easy.

@ Gadget Portal Absolutely nothing happens to existing content. It would be slowly phased out over time, like pre-sculpt attachments that were replaced with better, nicer looking sculpted attachments. This is not a problem you can fix overnight. @Chosen Few It IS a bug according to Nyx Linden, who stated that AgentHeight (the number shown in the SL appearance editor and returned by many scripted height detectors, is actually supposed to be your height. That it is not correct means it is a bug. (The forum isn't letting me embed links right now so here's the Jira where, in the comments, Nyx stated AgentHeight is supposed to be avatar height but isn't correct: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-7253 ) If AgentHeight were not intended to be avatar height then its use in the Viewer 2 appearance editor would be a mistake. So either way you look at it there is a bug. Either in AgentHeight itself, or in the Viewer 2 appearance editor. Gadget Portal Gadget Portal

I've considered this a big topic for years. The lack of consistent scale in SL has been a huge detriment to SL's graphics, the level of detail, and even the amount of content we can fit in a sim. The problem is compounded by the confusion surrounding avatar scale, leading to further building issues as well as problems with attachments, furnishings and even animations. It is extremely difficult for the community to solve this issue with no support from Linden Lab. This is a problem LL really needs to address. They can do this very easily by making a few changes. LL needs to provide accurate height information to residents who are editing their shapes. Currently, LL shows incorrect height information. The height displayed in the appearance editor of LL's own viewers is off by about half a foot or more. LL is aware of the bug, they simply have yet to correct it. Second, LL needs to provide new residents with properly scaled and proportioned shapes. The shortest of the current starter avatars is still 6'8" tall. That's pretty mammoth considering that "short" avatar is a woman, and average height for an American woman is 5'5". Shorter in many other parts of the world. The avatars for men just over 7' tall. Some of the older starters I believe were closer to 8' tall or more. So, the starter avatars are giants, until recently LL provided residents with no information on height and now that they do the height they provide is wrong. In addition, avatars can be anywhere from under 4' tall tto just shy of a full 9' tall. It's really no wonder there's so much confusion running rampant. Bigger avatars need bigger builds, most people eyeball their avatars and build around them, with several feet of height difference between the average avatar that makes most content in SL way out of scale with each other. Then there's the BIG culprit, the SL camera. SL's camera placement is terrible, pretty much requiring people increase the size of their builds to double scale. Whe you make a house double size, it takes up 4 times as much area. So, your house requires 4 times as much land. In addition, with current restrictions on prim sizes, those 10x10m rooms are now 20x20m. A 7 prim 10x10 room winds up being 16 prims at 20x20m. So you need more land space and more prims! Here's a forum post where I explain how to fix SL's camera placement. If you own a full sim, building like this means you're basically paying for a full sim but only using it as if it were 1/4th of a sim. That's a fairly substantial waste of money, wouldn't you agree? So yes, most definitely scale is important and there are many very real benefits, for everyone, inbuilding to scale.

Another idea related to land. Like some content? Why doesn't SL have the equivalent of a "Like" button to promote content in SL? Like a sim? "Like" it! Like an object in that sim? "Like" the object! Using this to boost a sim or obect's search rating is problematic if people can just create endless alts, but clamp down on that problem and you open up some possibilities. In the meantime, other people could possible see what an avatar has "Liked" recently, pointing them in the direction of the person, place or object on the recieving end of those adulations.

While I may disagree with some of WCMedows specific ideas, the general suggestion is correct. SL needs more social networking tools. Providing options to link content to Facebook is the wrong approach, what we need are ways to link Facebook to SL. SL users typically do not want to link their SL avatar to their real world profile. LL also wants people coming into SL, not looking elsewhere for their social fix. So, what LL needs to do in terms of Facebook is to promote SL to Facebook users instead of promoting Facebook to SL users. In any case, marketing SL needs to take a back seat to making SL marketable. Otherwise they're putting the cart before the horse, which only leads to an injured horse and a damaged cart. LL has done this in the past and it has bitten them hard for it. The burst of the SL hype bubble left much of the world soured on SL. It will be difficult to get those people and companies to ever come back. LL could have avoided that, but what's done is done and now they should focus on not repeating that mistake. More control options are nice, I like "click to move" as an option I can toggle on and off, I also like the idea of holding down a mouse button to move. These are nice things. Most of the time, however, I prefere the WASD controls. WASD movement controls are very common in videogames. They're more exact, giving the user a greater deal of control over click to move. Saying "change movement to click to move" will not make SL any easier for new users. Great as an option, but it's not a solution. So what is the solution? Well, let's look at the problem. New user retention is abysmal. People complain SL is ugly, difficult and they can't seem to meet friendly people or find anything to do. Ok, now we have some goals. SL is ugly? Make it pretty! No, sorry LL, Mesh alone will not make SL pretty. You need a creative staff. You need some creative talent at LL who can create good looking infrastructure content, provide internal feedback on the content tools and finally provide quality control on content contracted out to resident builders. Why? Well, let's look at the SL starter avatars. They're terrible. Yes, I'm talking about the current set. Sure, in many ways they're huge improvements over many past attempts at starter avatars but LL can't afford to be "better than how bad they used to be" , they need to aim for "marketable". The current starters are all about 7' tall, with stubby t-rex arms and tiny pinheads. That's not marketable. Oversized avatars also contribute to poor building habits among residents and lots of animation problems. The starter environments are no better. Worse, even. The current orientation and starter areas are entirely fullbright, this looks terrible! They're not even consistently fullbright, a number of prims in the builds are not set fullbright, meaning they stick out like a sore thumb. The Welcome Areas, like Ahern and Moose Beach are not exactly awe inspiring. Inefficient use of prims, tonnes of scaling issues and a general lack of detail set of my designer OCD whenever I visit. The locations SL residents first visit, from tutorial to their first steps into welcome areas or select resident made locations should set the bar high. Don't worry about the content creation community, they'll rise to higher standards and others, put off by the perception of SL's poor graphics, will be inspired to join them. Fix SL's camera placement! Remember when camera placement was a very volatile topic for early 3D videogames? A game's camera could make or break it. Well, videogame developers found the "sweet spot" for third person camera placement years ago, LL was not paying attention. SL's sky-high camera which looks down on our avatars forces builders to over-scale environments, limits our options for more creative environments, forces us to waste prims and space leading to smaller, less detailed environments and generally makes SL far less immersive than it could be. Improve SL's default Windlight settings! The default windlight settings are terrible! They seem designed to make SL look flat and uninteresting! Never finishing the windlight tools has made this problem worse. Improving the SL sky settings can be the difference of night and day between making SL look great or terrible. Ok, so we make SL look pretty, what's next? SL is difficult? We make it easy and intuitive! SL needs a good new user orientation. SL has always had terrible orientations for new users. Clunky, passive, boring. A part of the problem is that the tutorial relies entirely on in-world content. There's no client side part to the tutorial. The tutorial should come up and greet the user, not the other way around. The first thing a new resident should see upon their first log-in is a prompt to set their display name. Dismissing the prompt would result in an "Are you sure?" message before letting the person proceeed, accepting would result in the client interface walking the user through the proceess, from opening up their profile and setting the display name, to saving the change. That should set the tone for the whole tutorial. After setting a display name a new user would be presented with options for their movement controls. Click to move and WASD, followed by prompts to move to a checkpoint with one control scheme, to another with the other option and then letting the user select which one they prefere. Everything from camera controls and flying to inventory and outfits would be covered in this way. A user could stop at any point in the tutorial with the option to return and continue their tutorial from the beginning or where they left off. Upon leaving a new resident should be offered a selection of Linden Welcome Areas and select resident builds, or prompted into SL Search to find something specific to their interests. It's amazing how many people spend months, even years in SL without ever learning how to use search. One reason for this is that SL's tutorials have historically skipped over the topic. Also, certain elements of the interface can be greatly improved. A client side AO can be made to make custom animations a simple, intuitive task for even the newest residents. I can think of many changes that could be made to the appearance editor which would make it so much easier for residents new and old to crat the exact body shape they want! The Outfits tab is a great addition to SL, a step in the right direction, I think the concept can be taken further to help residents new and old in keeping their inventory smaller, making it easier to wear, mix and match outfits at a whim, etcetera. Ok, so we made SL a bit easier and more intuitive, next? People can't seem to find friendly people or anything to do in SL? Well, here is where we tackle WCMedows suggestion, that SL needs more social networking features. Except, instead of linking SL and Facebook, I say SL needs more self-contained social networking functions as more of a priority. Linking people already in SL with other in-SL people. This requires LL to rethink profiles, groups and even land information windows. I was excited by the move to web based profiles, but extrmely disappointed in the execution. LL basically shoehorned the old profiles into a web based format, losing some features and reducing the usefulness of others. In my mind an SL avatar's profile should be the equivalent of an avatar's own Facebook page, with multiple ways of connecting people through profiles. It seems to me that LL never looks at how people use profiles. They should. See how residents commonly use their profiles and get some ideas. People want to link with each other through profiles. Moving profiles to the web also provides a great opportunity to make a person's profile their own personal portal to SL when they're otherwise unable to actually log in! You can already display your groups and a handful of locations you enjoy in SL, but people want the ability to connect their friends to their profile, currently impossible without hammering it in to another profile category, look at how many people use their Picks tab to list their friends and other information! And how about groups! Again, the Facebook comparison is useful. Other than land rights, group chat, and titles what are groups good for, socially? Why can't we more directly link a group to a location? As in a button on the group info tab which takes you to that group's "home"? Just like profiles, why can't we set up a "wall" for people to leave comments on? Why can't various groups be linked like some sort of network? Why is it that when a group is closed, that group name is lost forever, unavailable to anyone ever again? Why can't groups have better moderation tools? Say, when you ban someome from a sim, you have the option of banning them from the sim's group as well and visa-versa? Also Land! Why can't land be linked more directly with groups? Why is a land information page limited to one screenshot and an all-too brief description? Why can't we have a section for meta tags? This is one reason why so many land descriptions are a word salad of search terms. Events need a huge revamping too! As it is, they're worse than useless. Have you tried searching events lately? Or ever? Eve nsearching for specific search terms you're unlikely to find what you're looking for, instead getting plenty of entirely unrelated results, results that often do not even contain your search terms anywhere in their name or description. Why is that? Combined with actually explaining search to new residents, these changes could be a huge boon for residents new and old alike in connecting with each other, finding new and exciting locations and hooking up with groups in line with their interests.

@Calina I may be able to toss some shapes at you this weekend if you're interested. It is definitely possible to maintain adult proportions with shorter shapes. The shortest adult shape I've made so far was 4'11". I'm trying to make an even smaller shape for building attachments around (to avoid the problem of scaling down a too-large attachment we've all run into at some point or another). I'm planning to start selling a line of properly scaled and proportioned shapes in the near future, since I've only seen one or two people selling shapes like that.

The orientation doesn't really give new users much, well, orientation. It helps to think of SL as one part chat room, one part videogame mod, and one part 3D internet. You can "do" practically anything. Want to build your own MMO? Buy a sim and start building! Want to meet new people to chat with? Find a club or three! Want to see what other people have been building? Open up the search engine and type in whatever strikes your fancy! There's castles, cities, derlict space ships, floating islands... Want to role-play with others? Same thing, open up the in-world search engine and type whatever theme you'd like to role-play in. Want to play an elf in a fantasty kingdom? Want to play a gruff, heavily armed space marine? Want to play a werewolf in a modern day city? There's RP sims for all this and more. Actually, to start off and give yourself an idea of what's out there, here's a few places you can go exploring at. You should be able to visit these locations by clicking on the links. If that doesn't work, just type the link in the chat window and it will appear in chat history as a link you can click. INSILICO - A futuristic sci-fi metropolis. Forgotten City - The ruins of an ancient city. Airships float near the docks high up in the air, rusted clockwork robots stand frozen in time everywhere around the city. Doomed Ship - A horror-filled derlict spaceship. Japan Kansai - A trip back to feudal Japan! There's also all kinds of clubs, groups, events, you name it.

As cliche as it sounds, try clearing your cache. You may also want to check your network settings, do you have a firewall active? If all else fails file a trouble ticket with Linden Lab.

Except the current starter avatars are actually larger than the previous starters.

Did anyone else notice how we temporarily gained, and then lost again, the ability to search Japanse kanji in the SL search engine? During the brief time we were able to this made it much easier to explore Japanese sims. I noticed we'd lost the ability to search for kanji just the other day when the urge to go exploring hit. Anyways, more on topic, I've enjoyed wandering around this sim lately. http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/JAPAN%20DREAM%20KENJIN/128/128/2

I did this up, using the screenshot I took for my forum avatar, in the style of promotional wallpaper art for a videogame.

I should also mention that while sims can support up to 100 people the estate owner can reduce the number to something more managable. Beyond about 30 people a sim becomes extremely bogged down. Most mainland sims are set, I believe, for 35-40 people maximum.

Actually, that's an interesting point. Taller avatars are definitely more likely to be out of proportion. The arm slider is a good example. For women of realistic height, the arm slider must be somewhere between about 90 to 100 to make the arms proportional to the body. (Proportional being that the length of your outstretched arms measured fingertip to fingertip should be about equal to your height.) Sometimes, with a properly scaled and otherwise properly proportioned shape, having the arms at 100 still leaves your arms a little on the short side. Stretch your avatar up to 7-8' tall and your arms don't automatically get longer to match. So if your arms are already a little on the short side at 100 when you're 5'5", they will be even shorter if you're 7' tall. This is likely just one contributing factor towards the trend of "T-rex arms" in SL.

I'm more than a little biased but I have to go with Doomed Ship. It's huge, you can literally get lost for hours even tho it's only a single sim. There's multiple paths to get to any location and dozens of unique spots to find. It's incredibly atmospheric, floors and walls creak. Metal stress whinges through the walls. Machinery thrums. It's probably the only sim with as much thought and effort put into sound design as an actual videogame. It's interactive! Animated computer terminals will react to your touch, activation machinery, opening doors, clearing out flooded chambers. Some controls are even more detailed, with individual buttons that react and change when clicked. The control panel near the bridge entrance is a good example of that. The whole build is about as close to walking out of SL and into a videogame as you can currently find in SL.

Marc is somewhat incorrect but it's understandable considering how LL has handled adult content. Ages ago LL deemed having payment information on file and having purchased L$ constituted "verifying" as far as accessing adult land. This will allow you to access most any adult sim and should allow you to search for adult content. You do have to set this up manually after you've met the criteria, tho. Press ctrl+p to open your preferences, just below language it says "I want to access content rated" and has a drop down menu. Set that to General, Moderate, Adult and voila! There is one small problem, however. LL left a separate tag for those who verified through their never completed identity verification process. If someone who owns land sets their land to only be accessable by those who have verified (separate from the sim rating) then you will not be able to access if you're verified via payment information. Thankfully very few people do this, and most who have done thios change it the moment they realize all it does is kill their traffic. Unfortunately, this problem extends to the newer search. If you're using the new search (the only search option available in Viewer 2) then you may find yourself unable to search for adult only content. The entire rating system is borked in search, because you'll still see adult content if your search for all ratings of content. It only stops you when you single out adult content. Still, tho, I'm verified through payment info and I've had very few problems.

This is difficult to answer without knowing what the problem is. If your avatar is not "rezzing", meaning you are stuck as a cloud, or with the wrong shape and no textures, then the best way to fix is it to go to an empty sim (I prefer one of the various mainland ocean sims for this) and do the following. Press ctrl+alt+q to make the Develop menu appear at the top of your screen. Under Develop go to Avatar and then Character Tests. Choose Test Male or Test Female. A word of warning, this will dress you up as one of the default starter avatars, you'll need to change back to your usual look yourself. However, if you're stuck without your avatar loading properly this is the most reliable way of fixing it. If your avatar is stuck in a pose or animation go to the Me menu at the top of the screen, from there go to Movement and select "Stop Animating Me". I hope one of these two suggestions help. In the future I'd recommend being more descriptive about any problems.

Sims have a hard limit on the number of people they can support at any one time. For full regions I believe that number is around 100 and for Homestead regions the number is around 20. There is no way to "offset" this.The only way to prevent it is through sim owner intervention, such as a sim covenant forbidding clubs and such. Some private sims do this to keep their land "residential". This is one of the problems with mainland, there's no covenants, no zoning. You could find a spot you're happy with for years, then one day a fly-by-night club moves in, sets up laggy zyngo machines and gets a hundred people piling into their club (or uses bots to try and make it look like they're the popular spot in town) and suddenly your land is useless. If you're renting land from a resident, let them know this is a problem and see if you can arrange to move elsewhere. They may own land in other sims and be happy to let you relocate. If you own the land directly (as in pay tier directly to LL) then you're a bit stuck. You'll have to see how often this happens and decide whether or not you want to stay in the same sim. I personally prefere private estates for this, and other reasons. Although, even there you need to research who you rent from, some landlords will bend over backwards to make you happy, some will take your money as long as you give it to them and ignore any complaints.

Here are some websites with templates; http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLPages/AVUVTemplates.html http://gwynethllewelyn.net/2005/01/22/a-template-for-clothes-design/ I use the Chip Midnight templates, but I'm having trouble finding those online. Getting a good look at the templates helps to give a good idea on how to put together shirts, pants, skins, etcetera. It can also be used to put together alpha masks to hide sections of the avatar.

Here is what I do to get my avatar to rez when I'm "ruthed" or stuck as a cloud., it may help. Press ctrl+alt+q to make the Develop menu appear at the top of your screen. Open that up and scroll down to Avatar. From Avatar you should see "Character Tests". Click "Test Male" or "Test Female". If it works your avatar will appear as one of the default starter avatars. You'll need to either use outfits or manually change your avatar back, but it may resolve the "invisiblity" problem. If that does not work I'd file a trouble ticket with LL. Be sure to include information about your computer including the video card. As others have stated there is apparently an issue with a recent nVidia update. If it is a driver issue then it may take some time for LL to resolve the problem. Things like that have happened before, it does get fixed it can just take a while.

But again, the height displayed in the official viewer is wrong, telling you that you're much shorter than you actually are. Even more frustrating, LL acknowledged this as a bug before they implemented the feature in viewer 2.1, and it still hasn't been fixed!

My own avatar is 5'7", which you might be refering to as "child like" and "inappropriate". I could not disagree more. The height issue in SL stems from a lack of design experience and foresight among the staff at Linden Lab and it is a contributing factor to many problems in SL. Ever had an animation not work correctly? A stand pose that leaves your feet either floating over the ground, or sinking into it? A sit pose that leaves you buried? Ever tried to hug or otherwise interact with another avatar via an animation and it just looked awkward and clumsy? Ever had trouble adjusting an attachment to fit? Ever wished you had more land? Ever complained about sim crossings? Ever wish you had more prims? SL's scale problems are directly related to all of these issues and more. Ideally LL would have had an in-house creative team right from the beginning and avoided all of these issues. Instead, it has fallen to the community. So you have a slow, slow trend towards shorter avatars as more content creators come to understand why that is better for their business and their ability to create, while some people pull in the other direction either due to social pressures (their friends are all 8' tall and they want to fit in) or due to weird uniquely SL issues like the "age-play' hysteria. The topic of how large environments in SL are built are a very good example of why this is a problem. Those who claim smaller avatars "break content" because environments are built for larger avatars need to take closer look at the environments they're referring to. In SL, due largely to SL's poor camera placement, environments (including vehicles, furniture, etcetera) tend to be scaled up to about double-size. Avatars are not scaled up nearly this much, the average avatar is scaled up by about 1/3 larger in scale. So they still look tiny in those huge rooms, they still look like a child in those oversized chairs.Shrinking an avatar to a more realistic size does not make this any more noticible than it already is. Few builds in SL are even very self-consistent with scale, let alone consistent with avatar sizes. Not to mention even among the average avatar there's a height difference of about two feet.Avatars between 6'8" and 8'4" are very common. Women tending to be substantially shorter than men. There's also a lot of confusion regarding height even today. I noticed a thread earlier on claiming heights for LL's starter avatars being arounf 5'7" for one of the woman avatars to 6'5" for one of the male avatars. Most likely they were drawing these numbers from an SL attribute named "AgentHeight" which is actually about half a foot shorter than your avatar's actual height. Case in point, the shortest female avatar LL has provided to new residents was 5'9", very few, if any, male avatars have been under 7'. None of the current starter avatars are under 6'8" (the height of the shortest woman starter avatar). Now, to keep things clear, this really should not be a resident problem. Just as it's wrong to call a shorter avatar "inappropriate" because 5'2" seems "childlike" next to a 7' tall avatar, more realistically sized avatars have no business harassing taller avatars. It only makes people more defensive about their avatar choices and solves nothing. The problem lies with LL. They need some professional designers on staff making appropriate decisions in terms of starter avatars and the tools we use to create and customize our own avatars. In the mean time we should all go with the avatars we are comfortable and happy with. If all your friends are 7' tall or taller and you're not comfortable being "the short one" then don't! Stay with what works for you! If you're not worried about fitting in with your 7' tall friends, maybe your bigger concern is getting the most out of your land, or being able to buold larger, more detailed builds in SL, then you'll probably be happier with a smaller avatar. I do think it's a topic worth talking about. There's a lot of confusion, a lot of misunderstanding. Also, LL has made no moves toward addressing the issue, which is going to continue to hurt them as time goes on, whether they realize it or not.

I never offer unsolicited criticism or advice for other people's avatars. Some might appreciate it, but others would just get offended. If someone does ask I will be very honest and as constructive as possible. I do sometimes stop by newbie help areas to see if anyone is looking for help but, again, when I'm out and about I don't just offer advice to people who aren't looking for it.

Definitely a growing (pardon the pun) trend towards shorter avatars. It's a slow movement, but it's definitely happening. I suspect a part of that is due to most TPVs displaying avatar height in the appearance editor. For the longest time hardly anyone on the grid had any idea how tall they were and few people realized they could measure themselves with a pose stand and a prim. The official viewer shows height now, too, which contributes even more, since that is what most people will see when they first go to customize their avatar. Unfortunately, the official viewer displays incorrect height, telling you you're much shorter than you actually are. Still, where most people used to be 7, 8 or even close to 9' tall, being 6 and a half to 7' tall is still shorter. I do think a part of it is social, too and that's why you see scaling down done more by women, who aren't insecure about their height, as opposed to men who may get insecure about being a midget compared to the 7-8' tall giants wandering around. Even women get insecure about this, in large part due to the "age-play" hysteria of years past. Few of my friends would shrink smaller than myself when I was 5'10". When I shrunk down to 5'7" many of them shrunk down, too. A couple even mentioned that they felt odd being taller than me so that's why they shrunk. These days you see more and more shorter avatars, so more and more people feel comfortable making their own avatar that short. The biggest non-social obstacles to shorter avatars are attachments made around large size bodies, a difficult and obtuse appearance editor and the fact that the starter and default shapes LL provides are all around 7' tall and very poorly proportioned. As far as attachments go, any content creator should be designing attachments for the smallest body shape they can manage. It's extremely easy to scale a small attachment up for a larger avatar, but it can be practically impossible to scale an attachment made for a larger avatar down without forcing the person to practically rebuild it entirely. Not to mention I've seen maybe one or two shops selling properly scaled shapes. I've seen plenty claiming to sell shapes at 5'5"-6' tall, but upon buying the shapes or trying the demo you then find that they're either half a foot taller, meaning they were measured incorrectly, or they are the same typical 7'-8' shapes we're used to, meaning the creator didn't measure them at all, but just made up a number (why would anyone do this?). These days, when I build an avatar, all of the attachments are made around a shape that's under 5' tall. I then scale them up for the shape I include with the outfit. The exception being things that shouldn't be scaled. Things like guns only come in one size. If a small person is holding a large handgun it SHOULD look oversized! I also only know of two full sims designed to scale. Berlin Project, a historical recreation of early 20th centure Berlin and Doomed Ship, a sci-fi/horror roll-playing sim. These two sims do demonstrate how much "larger" a single sim can be when everything is build "smaller".

Another vote for Berlin Project. It's not only interesting from the historical or role-play perspectives, but it's really interesting to see how much more you can put into a sim when everything isn't oversized to SL's usual standards. Because Berlin is built to scale I recommend taking a look at this thread on fixing the SL camera so low ceilings aren't a problem. If you're looking for role-play, you should check out Doomed Ship. There is pixel bumping there, but it's not the theme of the place. What poseballs there are tend to be tucked in side rooms and darker corners of the ship. It's probably the only other "to scale" build in SL besides Berlin, so the camera adjustments above will help here, too.