The Most Heroic Second Life Fashionista in the Virtual World

Indie comic artist and illustrator Danielle "Nylon" Feigenbaum documents dubious adventures in SL, VRChat, and online worlds beyond for New World Notes. Her work has also been featured in Old Pal and the book Blocked: Stories from the World of Online Dating.  Follow her on Flickr and Instagram.

Comments

[Amanda Magick]

Maybe we all need to backup a slight bit in the SL fashion scene and see if it that helps the lag. But then again I know what will relieve some of it. Those people that go to events and are wearing several animated pets and balloons and ice creams all the while having dogs and cats or bats or whatever traveling with them for the shopping experience LOL

[Susan Wilson]

I never experience lag in SL. If I'm somewhere with a lot of avatars, like an event, I just ctrl+alt+shft+4 which toggles avatars off and on. No more lag. I do my shopping and go home and toggle avatars back on again. No way I'm going back to the ugly default body. Have we all forgotten that going places with lots of avatars was a lag-fest even before mesh bodies came along?

[Simple Lemon]

@Susan. Exactly. We were resetting dance sims 5-10 years ago when there was no mesh anywhere the lag was so bad. My FPS runs in the 100's most of the time and when I go dancing, I derender until I'm happy. I have no problem going anywhere and I'm mesh body and clothes. My bandwidth is nowhere near the higher western bandwidth but my PC is good.

[Luther Weymann]

"Mike" is a prim box? Lol.

[shave]

Isn't spiral torus hair THE lagmonster?

[Joey1058]

I had to lol @ Mike! XD

[Pulsar]

Of course the comic above is just meant to be funny, but reading the other comments, I'd like to point out at a couple of things.
To be fair, in the epoch before mesh bodies, you had a lot of server lag: avatars used to have 100s of scripts per hair, the sim had to process all the workload, texture backing was also inefficient.
Now sims are much less overwhelmed by scrips, moreover a big chunk of the workload has been moved outside the sim server (CDNs etc.), then since 2014 server-side-backing (AKA server side appearance) made showing avatars textures much faster... until mesh bodies defeated that entirely, let alone with multiple high res textures, but now here is BoM giving back some of that improvement.
Even so, now you have to derender all the other avatars around you, because else the client lag is so unbearable? Guess what kills your framerate. Furthermore, what's the point in going to a club - a supposedly social experience - to see only yourself in an empty club, except the text chat?

This doesn't mean that you have to go to an extreme to another, ditching mesh entirely like Jennifer or (LOL) prim-box Mike. That was so fun :) But I saw people wearing only an invisible layer to some event where there is a complexity limit. Well, you can have a fully dressed mesh avatar with a complexity under 25k and low poly too. Firstly, at least in those occasions, you can use Slink Redux (BoM) or the open source BoM Ruth instead of Maitreya or Belleza (or the equivalent for guys), then you can choose well made clothing and accessories. Even some jewelry is low poly and still looks awesome. It's also true that a well made and optimized mesh hair (e.g. Wasabi, Alice Project now Astrology, and others) are usually pretty much lighter than the old sculpt and prim or prim/flexy hairs.

[Flashing Merlin]

I gave up using mesh avatars and clothing long ago.

To many people showed up at my ASCI Metaverse Meetinga with avatars that never resolved properly.

I still use mesh objects in some of my builds where only I, and a few friends see them.