Hair Fair Info

Hi all,

With Hair Fair 2012 starting tomorrow we wanted to share some information about the build as well as older tips and tricks from a previous post.

Every year we are lucky to join together for a two week event to raise money for the charity Wigs for Kids. Each year hair designers from all over Second life come together for this worthwhile cause. This year there are hundreds of NEW unseen before styles for you to enjoy, and each and every purchase donates a percentage to Wigs for Kids — the charity of choice for Hair Fair 2012.

A huge thank you to all the committee members of this years Hair Fair 2012 before Mel takes over this post with the new information.

Mel Vanbeeck ( Builder/Scripter)

Whimsy Winx ( Builder)

Ashia Tomsen (Photo Contest)

Gabby Panacek (Administrative)

Adorkable Peapod (Poses)

They are all incredible parts of this event, and I am honored to have them be part of Hair Fair 2012 each year. A big thank you also to all the bloggers that spread the word about this event leading up to and during…and of course the biggest thank you to the Hair Designers that give us their time, their talent and donate a percentage of their sales to help us help Wigs for Kids each year.

– Sasy Scarborough

Now to Mel Vanbeeck who loves to take over my posts and edit the hell out of them.

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First, I’d like to say that although Sasy doesn’t want me to put the spotlight on her, she has been a fantastic leader and coordinator for this event and deserves more credit than any of us for making this all happen. It’s no exaggeration when I say that without Sasy, Hair Fair 2012 simply would not have happened.

On the more technical side, I’d like to share a few of the things we’ve done to make Hair Fair run as smoothly as possible this year.

1. PHANTOM
   We have made nearly everything phantom in the sims, which cuts down on physics calculations for the sims which leaves sim resources for more important things. Also, you do not need to navigate around any obstacles other than other avatars. If you are trying to get into a booth,  just walk through the wall, or land through the roof/ceiling if the doorway is blocked by shoppers.
2. INVISIBLE SHOPPERS
   Using parcel privacy settings, we have made shoppers in adjacent sims invisible. This cuts down on the crazy amount of data you would normally be downloading constantly about the animations, textures, etc. that describe avatars in other sims. The exact performance gain from this is unknown, but if we’re right, it should make a massive difference.
3. TIGHT SCRIPTING
   The builds of Hair Fair only have scripts made by our scripter who puts efficiency at top priority. You won’t find scripted subscribomaticss, landmark givers, or anything of the sort. The only scripts given to designers are the scripts which handle the donations from their vendors. Any prim attribute that needs a script to be set has had its script removed once set. Visitors script permissions are turned off (as much as they can be turned off), so the overall sim load from scripts should be very low.
4. CONSERVATIVE DESIGN
   While designing the sims we always try to strike a balance between detail and reasonable load. Both in terms of textures and prims, we always try to do as much as we can with as little as possible. There should only be a few dozen textures outside of the booths to load at Hair Fair, and the ones you’re loading are all only as big as they reasonably need to be to cover their surface with enough pixels to look right.
5. LANDING POINTS
   Though our road layout is very similar to last year’s, the landing points of the peripheral sims have been moved to the outside edges to minimize the amount of information that needs to be loaded when teleporting to Hair Fair.
6. SIGN BOARDS AND HOVERTIPS
   We have created boards at the ends of each row of stores so that you can see at a glance the names of the stores you will be approaching. Each board prim is named with the store name, so if you have your hover tips activated you can read each boards description that way if the texture is taking time to load. The boards have been created using one texture for the whole board, so all should load at once.
7. LOW LAG OUTFIT
   Exile and DCNY have donated their time and trust to provide a FREE low lag outfit for all visitors to the event. People can deprim as much as possible without having to search for other items in their inventories. The boards are placed around the fair for one click ease.
8. POSEBALLS!
   Hair Fair is also lucky to have Adorkable Poses creator Adorkable Peapod providing the sims with fun photo oppurtunities in the form of her poses. She has spent days setting up at the sims, so keep an eye out for her poseballs all around the event. You can also use them as a quick sit teleport to get where you want to go if your camera happens to get lost from your avatar. Adorkable Poses also has a small booth at the event, where they are donating a percentage to Wigs for Kids.
9. REDELIVERY
   One thing that doesn’t cut down on lag, but does a lot to improve the overall experience at Hair Fair is the addition of a feature in the vendor scripts which allows people to redeliver hairs they purchased recently. The sims experience crazy amounts of stress during these events, so it is not at all uncommon for purchases to not get delivered on the first try. If this happens to you, just click the poster of the item you purchased and it will send you another copy (so long as you click within a reasonable amount of time after your purchase — don’t expect to be remembered days later!). Also, if anyone attempts to double-purchase an item, the second purchase attempt will be refunded and treated as a redelivery. This will save shoppers and designers alike the frustration of dealing with the hiccups that often occur in such crowded SL environments.
   
10. DEMO GROUP
    Join the “Hair Fair DEMO Group” and check out all the Hair Fair releases before visiting the event. They are available from archives if you are just joining. Not rezzing demos at the event will also help reduce lag, and your own mesh loading limits. The Hair Fair DEMO Group is listed in search, or you can copy and paste ( secondlife:///app/group/2e30d166-f3e5-e2de-ff72-b3da2d06ded2/about ) into chat and open history to click on the link and join.

              – Mel Vanbeeck

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From tips and tricks post:

The most exciting tip I have for you this year is one I use myself often when attending events such as this.

Get rid of the people

(You are there to shop, no one cares what you look like, and you definitely don’t care what they look like, so get rid of them, they truly will not care.)

1. Open your viewer and press Ctrl+Alt+D and make sure that you have the advanced menu at the top of your screen.
2. Click on advanced, then click your mouse on Debug Settings. A small grey box will appear.
3. Once you have that open, highlight the red text below, then copy it by pressing Ctrl+C:
   RenderAvatarMaxVisible
4. Paste it into your debug setting dialog in SeondLife by pressing Ctrl+V.
5. The bottom portion of the dialog should now say “Maximum number of avatars visible”. Yes this is the promised land.
6. Default is set to 35 , do you care about 35 other people shopping when there is hair to be had? I do not think so….take that bad boy down to 5 unless of course you are shopping with a group of more than 5 , but your friends probably don’t care when they have hair to buy too.
7. Be sure to remember you have done this when you leave, because you will want to put it back a bit higher! What it will do is select the nearest avatars around you to show. Those that are near you will fade in and out, it can be very tricky when you start hearing voices you don’t see.
8. If you see someone that absolutely needs to stay unrendered and your viewer allows it, right click them and choose “Derender”!

Graphics: who needs pretty skies when you have pretty hair?

Ctrl P will open up your preferences in an instant. Put your Quality and Performance slider to low, this will not help a lot but it will help if you are generally at high, mine is always set to mid, but it can’t hurt.

Click on custom box on the right hand side of the slider, this will open the graphics settings further.

Atmospheric Shaders and Water reflections HALLLLLOOOO HAIR, uncheck those.

Draw Distance: 64 – which may be as far left as it can go depending on your viewer. Hair Fair is four sims joined by a single road. If you follow the chocolate road you will end up back where you started, so you do not need to see that far ahead.

Max Particle count: 0 – left as far as it will go, turn those off, you do not need bling at Hair Fair.

Mesh Detail: your objects slider needs to be high, so that you see your hair demos as well as you need to, but everything else can go down down down.

Avatar Imposters: check! This means that any people around you you will not load at full capacity. YOU DO NOT NEED TO SEE OTHERS.

Now about ARC : do not yell about peoples arc at Hair Fair or any other event. It is rude and bullying. Not everyone reads blogs. Not everyone reads english. Give people the benefit of just being at a charity event and care about yourself.