I was at the Hair Fair...

Posted by Alpha Auer... :-\

Like most other females on the grid, all year long I live in joyous anticipation of the annual Second Life® Hair Fair. I am also experienced enough to know to detach every single prim on my body before I venture forth. Same this year. And not only did I divest myself of every attachment that I had but I also took Laynie Link's hair fair tips on avoiding lag at the location posted on the dedicated Hair Fair 2009 blog to heart and reduced all of my Graphics settings as well.

None of it helped. This was quite simply the laggiest Second Life experience that I think I have ever had. After arriving and realizing just how horriifyingly stuck I was, I also disabled all the render types from the advanced menu. All that I could, including rendering the sky! So, there I was painfully groping for prims to which I was getting stuck, completely unable to move, surrounded by a largely gray landscape which when it eventually materialized I was seeing with no shaders, no volume, under a pitch black sky. Granted I did manage to get about with the usage of the red locomotion boxes provided by the organizers but why would I even have wanted to move given that hardly any shop contents rezzed themselves? Nonetheless, I tried, I really did. I have lost count over how many times I crashed, but I was determined enough to log back in every time - until I eventually gave up...

I ran into several acquaintances while I was out there. Chatter was pretty much impossible due to lag but I did contact them subsequently to ask them how it had been for them. The answer was unanimous: Worst lag experience in Second Life to date.

I am writing this because I think I may have identified one of the reasons of the problem and maybe my two cents worth of input might help the builders of these very large scale locations which attract vast crowds of visitors, should they stumble upon this post: I believe the lag at the hair fair this year was due to an over abundant usage of sculpted prims. As I said, it was too laggy for me to be able to inspect the prims, the information as to who their creators were simply did not rezz, so I have absolutely no idea who the designers and builders of the 4 sims are. I am in no position to comment on their output either, given that I really did not "see" it. All I saw was a specter of a landscape devoid of all shading and volume. But I did manage to identify the presence of hundreds if not indeed thousands of sculpty prims through their highlighted contours when I right-clicked on the structures that they were embedded into.

I realize of course, that many of these sculpted prims were used repeatedly and that it can be argued that once one sculpted texture rezzes all of them will have done so. But, as far as I could tell, there were still enough individual shapes present to seriously undermine the overall rendering process. And also, even though in theory it holds true that once one texture is rezzed all identical textures in your location will also have done so, for some bizarre reason, in practice I find that this is not necessarily always the case.

All in all, I am wondering why far more minimalistic design strategies do not get implemented at locations where the primary objective is providing an easy access to the goods displayed therein. An excellent example of such a location are the Hairspray sims (as it turns out a particularly appropriate example in this case, given that our primary area of discussion here is in fact hair ;-). These sims are the epitomy of the maxim "form follows function", the function here being the showcasing of "hair" with no further obstructions from the surrounding environment. Indeed I would suggest that their huge success as a design system and their ultimate beauty lies in their designer Damien Fate's having diligently followed this very fundamental design tenet first coined by the great architect Louis Sullivan.

So, my dear friends, I did not really get to see the hair fair at all this year. From the isolated few stands, the contents of which I actually did manage to rezz (and where what I saw captured my attention), I have obtained landmarks and will be visiting their main stores in due course.

The Garden of NPIRL Delights is blossoming

There were about 40 content creators signed up nine days ago when Rezzable Productions made the four sims available for our joint effort - the Garden of NPIRL Delights - and the Not Possible IRL group's first-ever build festival.

That number has mushroomed. We had more than 40 people at a noon Town Hall meeting yesterday - our first - and today I think we stand at over 110 participating creators.


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Not all builds are in place and there is so much work left to do, but people are collaborating with each other at a furious rate. Just today, every installation got a prim bonus to blend their work with that of their neighbors.


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The "bonus and blend" idea came from a person who has contributed so much to this effort that even if she never does another thing, she's left a deep mark of goodness that none of us will forget: LittleToe Bartlett.


Beatrix Newt, Lauren Weyland, Pavig Lok, and the chillin' fridge is LittleToe Bartlett

It was Lag-tastic!

It stands to reason that a call for Not Possible in Real Life builds would generate a lot of scripty creations, and about four days ago, the lag got so bad, that one of the sims was disappearing off the map a few times a day. Sim crossings were laughable.

Pavig Lok studied the situation and alerted us to a few trouble spots. Miki Gymnast came in, fresh from knee surgery in Real Life, and worked with dozens of builders to optimize their scripts. I was worried that participants would throw up their hands or freak out and leave, but a funny thing happened... people started to really cooperate and collaborate, seasoned builders with newer ones, expert coders with other expert coders... and suddenly, you can breathe on all four sims. The lag is gone.


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There have been all sorts of heroes and heroines along the way. I still don't know how Beatrix Newt can take on so many responsibilities (site allocation, terraforming, parcelling, tour supervision, and much more) and still appear calm and in control.

And Lauren Weyland... will you ever forgive me? She needed bio input from every participant, so I helpfully issued a notice providing the wrong email address and promptly logged off to a busy Real Life schedule. Ouch. Sorry folks!

Ah well... these stories and hundreds more will only matter to those who are living them, very intensely, on four very special sims these days. I've had very little sleep, and I know I'm not alone in this, but when I look at the Garden and how it is blossoming, I wouldn't have it any other way.

The Garden of NPIRL Delights will open its doors on May 16th.