Fantasy Faire, like any busy event in Second Life, can be a troublesome affair, the lag, the bumping into things, the sims being reset. However if you take a little care, you can have a far more enjoyable experience. The first thing to remember is that we all contribute to lag, some more than others it has to be said, but we all contribute and we all add load. Now we can’t all be invisible, but we can pack lightly.
Yes I know, it’s Fantasy Faire and we all want to look awesome, wear our wings, hit people with wands, strike others with a curse of doom, but there are plenty of days for you to do this and you don’t have to do it all in one sitting.
Scripts, there’s always controversy about scripts at busy events, there are tools that inaccurately reflect resource usage, but scripts, like everything else, use resources, so if you are going scripted, try to be lightly scripted to avoid disappointment.
Taking photos, now this is tricky. There are other people there for a start and when you’ve played with your windlight settings, tried to ramp up your graphics and finally got the perfect angle, don’t shout abuse at people who wander into the shot. Unlike real life, in Second Life people don’t realise you’ve been piddling around for twenty minutes trying to get the best shot.
Also, don’t shake your fist, curse and roar with anger when you try to save a snapshot to disk and the viewer crashes .. maybe that’s just me.
Also when it comes to snapshots, remember that Second Life has improved in the last year. The graphics capabilities you experienced last year may not cut the mustard this year, indeed you may find your graphics settings have mysteriously been lowered, this is called progress folks.
Experiences from last year are consigned to the dustbin of history, don’t expect to see the same. For example, don’t head for The Dwarfins store and expect to get steaming drunk with The Dwarfins crew this year just because you did last year, there’s no bar in The Dwarfins store this year.
However there may be dragons there …. they don’t appear to be guarding treasure but maybe I’ll find that later.
There are a lot of sims and a lot of stores. There are also a lot of events, don’t try and do everything in one sitting. Patience young padawans, patience. Although Fantasy Faire is all too short, there is time to enjoy the ambience until May 11th. Take your time. Also take notes because you may not find that place again.
Don’t try and tickle the statues, particularly don’t try to tickle Fenn MacMoragh of MacMoragh and Muse fame. It’s also advisable not to try and make Fenn blink, a startled statue with a big sword is not something you really want to face!
Thanks for the post and yes they are awesome dragons at Dwarvens
I beg to differ; The designers of the builds need to stop building to the capabilities of their systems and instead build with consideration to what an average user might have at their disposal, such as a 3-5 year old laptop with an entry-level GPU. Penny Patton has been trying to tell content creators for so long to stop overdoing it with the 1024x1024s, but everyone ignores her, opting to splash 1024x1024s all over the sodding place.
I was in Medhir Woods using SL Go, and half of the region’s builds did not render (I spent half an hour there), and the textures were all blurry. Even considering that SL’s infrastructure may still be recovering after last night’s troubles, this is beyond unacceptable, and the blame lies squarely with the builders, like it or not.
Builders – and, in our case, the builders for Fantasy Faire – should quit building to the maximum of their systems’ capabilities. As Inara Pey put it in the conversation we had…
“X buys a new machine and builds to its capabilities, without thinking about the machines Y or Z may have. Improve X’s machine to the power of 2 or 4, and Y and Z, and A through W, are left wondering ‘WTF?'”. And she’s 100000000000000% right. Sadly, Medhir Woods is entirely unusable. Even on SL Go.
Whereas I agree with the thrust of your point and I’m a big fan of Penny’s techniques, I’m not sure about the 1024 x 1024 textures in Medhir Woods, I’ve been there and I can’t find them but I haven’t checked all of the textures.
However I am on a graphics card that pretty much grinds to a halt on higher settings, so maybe the low settings I have are helping me there, SL Go would have much higher settings than me.
To check a texture, select a face and press ctrl,alt,Shift,T ,… that should give you a size.
With 13 avatars on Medhir, most of the builds refused to render and those that did remained grey and untextured for the thirty minutes I could be bothered to wait there. On SL Go, which uses high-end machinery.
I’ve been having difficulty in getting avatars to render at the Faire, I wonder if it’s related, it looks like an old bug I saw with Dwarfins.
In this post : http://sl.governormarley.com/?p=3936
The first picture, the legs on that avatar would not render. I tried to teleport to Medhir Woods and three times in a row I was kicked out of SL when trying to TP, so I logged directly in to Medhir Woods, then teleported to the boat and the avatar then rendered correctly.
On the same boat last night there were a number of avatars and many of them simply would not render correctly.
The main reason for Sl lag on textures and mesh is not user side, is that LL tried to reduce servers costs packing more regions per server, if they do a simple rule, a region = 1 cpu = 512mg, as they did long ago, i doubt any of us would see the lag as much.
Besides, with SSB introduced, loading times for all to show are much bigger now and Linden lab trees are the worse.
I agree that if all follow penny rules, lag may be mitigated, but that is not a excuse for the degradation of SL.
LL needs to cut costs, so we had tio deal with this reality.