What's new at the hair fair?

Have you tried one of those handy dandy boxes they have to *drive* around the sims? It really helped my partner in her shopping adventures there. She would look and I would shove the box from store to store. Kept us together and she wasnt bouncing about the whole time.

wanna be my friend Jacksonn?

Whoever came up with the theme for this fair needs to be severely punished. What were they thinking? Can they not come up with a fair that is actually about the product? Why do I need to admire candy canes and gumdrops?

And the store owners, equally obtuse, jumped on the idea by bedecking their stalls with as many prims and textures they could possibly fit. No doubt at the cost of actually displaying merchandise as some shops are only showing three or four styles.

As a showcase for new designers, events like these just fail as people give up and leave, or don't bother waiting around for display posters to fully load. The established shops don't really need to worry since their "regulars" will find their new styles sooner or later. Shame, really.

And then there was this 6000 ARC idiot. This is nothing short of griefing, since he/she/it was merely sitting around in one place, waiting for people to notice.

I agree, why not go low lag and be on the safe side. People who load on every prim in their inventory just to go there, where no one's paying any attention to them anyway, are being a bit selfish.

Hi, prims worn do not count towards sim prim limits Oh and my ARC was 69

From the Wiki: Client Side Lag

Lag occurs most when
Your Draw Distance is too high
There are many physical (physics-enabled) objects nearby
There is a large group of people nearby
You are moving (and therefore loading new geometry, textures, and sounds)
You or other people are playing sounds or animations
When many objects are moving around nearby
You have "fancy" graphics features enabled (Local Lighting, Object Bump, Ripple Water, Shadows, etc)

omg what in all the name that is fashion is THAT!!!???


i do agree about the lag. but managed to see a few very creative hair pieces! my fave is Magica(sp)!! well it is casue it was the only one i could get into that rezzed right away and she had no gumdrop, candy cane prim heavy stall @_@. will wait til next week when it dies down a bit to explore more.

Ironically, the ARC info display can cause significant client side lag.

Well I made it thru relatively unscathed and came away with a couple cool finds. The travel boxes are handy....but I found mine liked to bounce back after I moved it

I agree the candyland theme is a bit over done. It would have been wise perhaps.....to use the same funky little build for every shop instead of trying to have 50 zillion unique candy buildings. Fun maybe, but convenient...no way. I was surprised not to find some of my fave designers tho....I might have just missed them......but I'm pretty sure I got around the entire track.

There's a couple things I might go back for.....one seriously frustrating issue was the demos not rezzing, which meant either TP'ing home and then back and finding the shop all over again.....or simply not buying. I chose not to buy. I kept some demos to review later.... but I was a bit annoyed that I couldn't see them right then & there.

I lost that vanity after my Gimpster classes that were EXTREMELY strict about ARC, including any HUDS, AO's, bling, etc. Many went bald just for simplicity, although, as I mentioned, I collected quite an array of cute, low- ARC skins, etc.

My instructor, a Master Jeweler, said that many jewelers don't wear hair while creating their wares. Not sure if it's the arc, or one gets a better look at the jewelry - earrings for sure.

I'm like you now, Milla, I want to just smack some of these vanity types in crowded places up the side of the head.

Brilliant! Thanks Skell! I'm not one for large gatherings on SL anyway and this one is sounding like a nightmare.

Kinda like what happens at some of the larger/crowded dance venues. Gah...it's like walking through molasses, if I can move at all. My draw distance is always at 64, I never wear bling, and since becoming aware of ARC have worked on lesser ARC hair styles as that is where a lot of it seems to originate. Even so, if everyone remains gray, and I STILL can't walk after about 10 minutes, I head to a smaller venue, which most times is much more pleasant anyway.

*BLINKS* Either this woman, or someone wearing that exact style came into my store the other day.



I was upstairs but often cam down if someone enters the shop to see if they're just passing through or if I can help. I HAD to take a pic of this doosey. Since I'm in a Steampunk sim I figured maybe she was "in theme", but I've since decided it's just....strange.

Exactly! So, what do you think happens when you push a sim well beyond its limits?Yes, this is good information regarding client-side lag. But what is going on at the Hair Fair is not client-side lag; it is server-side lag. The clearest signs of this are when the sim's time dilation and FPS drop to nil, and it doesn't matter how you set your graphics settings.

It's from Pandora Wrigglesworth, her shop is Curio Obscura. Awesome stuff - steampunky novelties and curiosities is the only way I could begin to describe it. She also has a similar, slightly smaller, hair called "Let them eat cake off your head".

Here is some of her stuff on xstreet: https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&MerchantID=119482&&sort=age&dir=asc

Has anyone done any kind of performance comparison between a region with 50 avatars with an ARC of 1, and 50 avatars with an average ARC of 1000?

Probably not. One has to have exclusive access to a sim that is pretty close to its prim limit for the test to be meaningful.

Thank you Skell for the suggestion. I am on Xstreet looking now. Even see a few styles that may interest my hubby.

I'm betting Ann O'Toole has

If anybody has exclusive access to a full sim that has used at least 75% of its prim allotment, and would like to conduct such an experiment, let me know! I would love to be a part of it!

Another useful test would be to determine if having 50 avatars already "dressed for the event" showing up is easier on the sim than having 50 fully-loaded avatars "dress down" on-site. My theory is that changing on-site would actually make things worse, at least temporarily, as the already-overburdened sim would then be forced to recalculate and update everyone's clients of the newly-removed prims.

It would probably be easy to find some place appropriate on the beta grid.

A necklace is a one piece object. So i an simply wondering where you have ever seen someone year a 500 prim one?

What I mean to say is that, that is just as much blown out of proportion as the actual relevance of ARC is. 256 is the linking limit in sl.

If I would replace my 150 prim hair with one 256*256 texture, with a single box using 6 different 1024*1024 textures, the ARC would drop drasticly. But Trust me, you are not gonna be happy with that.

A little pedantic, are we? Yes, I know you can't link 500 prims together, so the 500-prim necklace was hyperbole... But you get the idea.

It's not the texture loading that is critical here. Yes, the textures are important when someone first appears on the sim, as the sim has to load every texture the person is wearing; but once loaded, the sim has nothing else to do with them until another agent requests them. However, each and every prim the person is wearing has to be tracked. Unlike static prims, such as buildings, street lamps, and things that don't normally move, prims that move are constantly talking to the sim, updating their positions, which in turn causes the sim to send the positional updates to all other agents in viewing range - constantly. How else do you think your client knows that, when I move, the necklace I'm wearing, with each of its prims, is supposed to move with me?

This is why the anti-ARC theology is bunk; because it fails to take into account how the sim and all connected agents are supposed to know when prims move with an avatar.

I can relate to the omg why did they do that, for the decorations....

I actually started to feel sick because of the garish and loud textures from all the colors of candy... candy? I thought it was a hair fair...

then add to that the many many sculpts that need to load UGH...

Someone who has actually gone to hair fairs and knows how bad the lag is, should be the ones setting it up, because obviously they did not think it through.

If I were to organize any kind of fair, be it hair, shoes, dresses, whatever... it would be nice grassy ground texture, something we are all accustomed to seeing, plain simple buildings, no sculpts, minimal prims, and especially minimal textures. That way, folks coming would be able to rez decently quickly, and the merchants would all be on an equal footing for displaying their wares in a tasteful low rez fashion. Sure it would be basic and sorta plain, but... do we go for the decoration? or do we go for the products that the merchants will be promoting?

I go to see what new designers are out there, but when I stand and wait for 30 minutes and Still can not see the vendors and most of the buildings are still rezzing, those merchants just lost a chance at someone seeing their products.

(also I recently discovered a way to minimize load time for ads in my store, still keeping quality, and also minimizing cost of uploads for ad textures. I put 4X512's on a 1024 size texture.. sure the 1024 is a little more to load, but less load than 4 separate 512's PLUS 4 ads rez at a time from each texture rezzing, which also reduces the amount of textures that I need to have rez at the store.

I am slowly switching over to that method...

Now, as an organizer I would pass this tip along to the merchants that would be in the ______ fair, thus helping to reduce the lag just a little more. (being most folks tend to use 1024 as their ad size already, this would greatly help them)

I agree, the landscaping there is rather garish and an unnecessary use of especially sculpty prims; but I found a more fatal design flaw, and this one rests with the individual designers: The sim is a no-rez zone (and rightly so); but I have come across several vendors that dispensed packages I have to rez somewhere to open them so I can get at the actual product I bought. Now, this isn't so bad for full-version hair I bought, but is a really bad idea for demo packages. If I "buy" a demo, I want to be able to wear it on-the-spot so I can determine if I want to buy the full version. I do not want to have to teleport home, unpack the thing, wear it, decide I like it, teleport back, and move through the treacle to get back to where I bought the demo... Unless the hair is absolutely phenomenal, I'm not going to go through the effort.

I agree - the "candy-sweetie" theme was overdone, but I did go round yesterday. It was a lag fest, but I managed by cutting down the graphics preferences to a bare minimum and muting everyone whose ARC was not in the green - and am pleased to say that it was worth the effort as I found lots of hair I liked. I just wish it was not so very laggy as many exhibitors had made beautiful presentations and it would have been nice to view them in high res.