Grace under pressure?

I don't have much in the way of photographs from the Caledon Anniversary Ball, I'm afraid.  The reason for this is pretty simple - I have a home computer which is very much at the low end of performance, and when I'm on a busy sim, with lots of people coming in and out, mostly wearing extravagantly gorgeous outfits - as you might expect from a "do" of this magnitude - well, it takes a lot out of my clapped-out little lappy!

Now, some people might find this frustrating, and indeed I often do, myself!  It would be really nice to have a draw distance above the minimum, and be able to use atmospheric shaders and shadows and lighting effects and so on, and as soon as RL permits me to get myself a better computer, I will be retiring this one and embracing the new possibilities with gusto. 

However... there is a peculiar advantage to running up against the limits the way I do, and that is, you get to know where those limits are.  And if you know what the limits are, you can plan accordingly.  I have learned to be very chary about things like script times and particle effects, and other such stuff that can cause client-side lag (more so, even, than server-side).  The outcome is, I tend to build stuff that will look - and work - reasonably OK on my ropy old equipment, so I can be pretty confident it will be reasonably OK on anybody else's, too.

As a habit, this carries over into SL in general...  I popped over, earlier today, to the "Festival of Sin" fashion show, where at least one commentator - I forget their name - had already objected to being caught at the entrance by a script counter, and not allowed to proceed until they'd done a "script-tease" of their scripted attachments.  Well, here's how I looked when the counter flashed green and let me walk through:-

Pretty much the usual me!  You can see from my stance that my AO  is still on, and you may be able to make out my discreet facelight... and those are the only scripted items I wear, most of the time.  (And, really, I should get around to making a "dumb", non-scripted, version of the facelight, sometime.  I hardly ever bother to use its scripted features anyway, so why not cut them entirely?)

It's just a question of being aware of my limitations - because I know I can stress out my own client with all too much ease, I tend to refrain from making too many demands on either client or server.  I have plenty of heavily scripted items - HUD-controlled shoes, resizable clothes (though, since I don't change my shape - as readers may well remember! - I delete resizer scripts whenever I can, as soon as I'm comfortable with the fit of clothes), various scripted multi-tools.  But, by and large, I only take these things out when I actually need them.  Most of the time, I tread fairly lightly on the face of SL, and my SL experience is enhanced by that, at least if you take "enhanced" to mean "not crashing so much".

(I might add, though, for the record, that - in my possibly biased opinion - myself and my scrumptious date were absolutely the hottest thing on the dance floor last night; and we went on afterwards to a quiet and non-laggy sim and... no, this is still Not That Sort Of Blog.)