Tag: My SL

I’ve made mention a few times that my PC has not been in the best of health. I’ve had a range of issues with SL and other applications which have been steadily increasing over the last couple of months and which finally pushed me into taking the plunge and getting a new machine after finding a rather spiffy-looking UK on-line supplier.

Even so, I confess I dithered over actually buying a machine – so much so that between first finding the box I wanted and actually placing an order, the price went up (a whole £12.00! Eeep!). Part of the dithering was because I really didn’t want to get a new computer purely for SL (which was having the greatest number of issues with the old machine); part of it was also because if I was going to get one, I wanted to make sure I got the right balance of performance / price / degree of “future-proofing” (if such a thing exists in computing) without spending silly money. This latter point also involved me in going out and doing a fair bit of reading to make sure my choices were reasonably well-informed.

Given the budget I’d set, and the fact I really don’t play games on the computer (Patterns and backgammon is about as far as it goes for me), I wasn’t looking to go all bleeding-edge ultra-high spec. In the end I opted for a what I think is a really nice set-up – particularly when compared to my old beast (A Q6600 2.4 GHz CPU locked to a 4 GB (max) motherboard with 3GB installed, Windows 7 32-bit, and a 1 GB Ge9800 GT).

The new machine is built around an i5 3570K on an Asus P8Z77-V LX motherboard (which was recommended to me), and with a 2GB GTX660 GPU (the new spec is in the column on the right). I wasn’t actually sure what kind of performance boost this might give to my SL experience, and the pessimist in me kept saying, “not a lot”. If I’m honest, I was half-expecting it to perhaps double frame rates in ALM + shadows on compared to the old machine (so getting into the high 20s / low 30s at ground level).

Was I ever wrong on that.

While my tests have so far been limited to a handful of regions split between mainland and private islands, I’m still bowled over. My average fps with ALM + shadows and 2-3 other avatars in the same region hass been somewhere between 60-70. Disable shadows, but keep ALM on, and fps tends to jump to between 110-120 fps. I’ll be interested to see how it performs at the Simulator User Group meeting…

What’s more I can take snaps at a resolution of 3500 pixels across without issue (and possibly higher – I have yet to check, not that I need to go massively high). Compared with the fact that the old machine had reached a point where it wouldn’t keep ALM on with the snapshot floater open when saving to disk (reducing me to screen caps), I’ve had a fair few jaw-drops in the last few hours!

I’m not entirely sure what this means for my in-world times, but just being able to walk around SL and know I once again have all the viewer’s bells and whistles available, and to be able to turn them on and not immediately see textures being discarded due to lack-of-memory, or have ALM getting thumped by the snapshot floater or end up crashing after the 4th or 5th snapshot when I can actually use the floater & have shadows available… Well, it’s a revelation.

Suffice it to say I think my SL hiking boots are going to get a lot more use!

Not long ago, Honour posted a piece on how, in order to get things done in-world, she sometimes resorts to using an alt. Doing so allows her to focus on what she’s doing without the distractions of IMs, people dropping in or whatever. Last on, she followed-up with a piece commenting that despite the fact she does use an alt – she doesn’t consider the alt to be “her”.

I know what Honour means.

I’ve had an alt since 2008. (Actually, I technically have 2 alts – but one is located on a Destination Island, where I use it to see if there have been any tweaks to the in-world side of the sign-up process, so I ignore it, as it’ll never see serious use anywhere else). She was created after my main account appeared broken, and i needed an account simply to be able to get in-world while my main account was “fixed”.

Fortunately, the account issues were resolved after a few days, and so the alt disappeared into a box, making only occasional appearances in-world. More recently, she seen rather more use, as I tend to use her to fiddle with project and experimental viewers, a move which prompted me to dub her my “Crash Test Alt”.

Over the last few months, this use has grown to include me sometimes using her to attend in-world Lab meetings (generally as a result of me already being logged-in with her & being to bone-idle to swap accounts / viewers), and occasionally slipping in to scout-out regions I might blog about at some point. Even so, through all this time, I’ve never regarded her as “me”; in my mind she is always, “her”, “she” or “it”.

My reaction probably isn’t that unusual; many of us have a particular avatar in SL into which we pour not only a lot of creative effort, but also a lot of our own personality as well, so much so that there is an indelible line which connects us in a very personal and unique way to that avatar which goes beyond matters of money spent or inventory built up.

Even so, I find my lack of identification with my alt interesting. Other than tweaking her shape and getting her a decent skin, I’ve never seen the need to invest in any clothes or shoes for her. To this day, she’s still wears the outfit she was wearing when first rezzed. It’s not that I can’t define or afford a look for her; I simply don’t see the point of doing so. She doesn’t even have a profile picture of herself.

My inability to identify with her manifests in other ways as well. As I mentioned above, I sometimes use her to slip into SL to scout regions I might blog about. But then I do this, I find that I have considerable difficulty in taking snapshots using her; I can’t settle on camera angles or decide on appropriate windlight settings or the best time of day to frame a shot. Then, even when I do eventually land a series of snaps, I’m completely dissatisfied with them and end up deleting them and swapping back over to my main and starting again. I may be far from the top-flight photographers who inhabit Second Life, but it’s almost as if what abilities I do have when it coming to taking in-world photos is wholly invested in Inara Pey, and it is only with her that I have any confidence that what I’m trying to frame may be worth showing to others.

My alt isn’t hard to spot. Not only is she still in 2008 “female musician” threads and boots, her group tag tends to read “Inara Pey incognito”, which is a bit of a giveaway, I know. I created it to try and make me feel a little easier with using her; not that it seems to be working.

So if you come across her meandering around, and conversation seems odd or awkward when chatting, don’t worry. It’s not that I don’t want to be disturbed or that I’m trying to avoid contact.

It’s just that I’m borrowing someone else’s body for a while, and it doesn’t quite fit.