There are lots of OpenSim users with top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art machines with a high-end Nvidia gaming graphics card running Windows 11 who complain about Firestorm 7 being terribly slow. In comparison with Firestorm 6 even.

I have hardware that was upper-mid-range in 2018 with AMD graphics running Debian GNU/Linux. I've got nothing to complain about how Firestorm 7 is performing.

This either means that I've hit a sweet spot in combining hardware and software. And that the combination of a top-range Intel i9 CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Ti and Windows 11 is actually objectively slower than the combination of an eight-year-old six-core AMD Ryzen CPU, and AMD Radeon RX 590 and Debian. At least when running Firestorm.

Or this means that everyone else considers a two-digit frame rate a slideshow whereas I've happily capped my frame rate at 30.

What I can comprehend even less is that single-threaded Firestorm 6 is supposed to be faster than multi-threaded Firestorm 7 on a CPU with 12, 16, 24 or more threads.

So AWS was offline for a couple hours?

Looks like OpenSim users are getting increasingly anxious that e.g. Mississippi and UK law enforcement will kill every last OpenSim grid on the grounds of their age verification laws, what with none of them having verified the real-life age of all their users. Even if a grid runs in Kazakhstan under a Russian domain with a Kazakh and Russian admin team.

"This will so totally happen!"

The self-same people, however, appear not to be afraid at all that Linden Lab and SL content creators will kill ANY OpenSim grid on the grounds of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, what with almost all of them blistering with stolen Second Life content. Not even if a grid runs in the USA under a US domain with an all-American admin team.

"This will so totally NEVER happen!"

Pray tell, why should the former wipe OpenSim out in no time while the latter hasn't even happened to one measly OpenSim grid in over ten years of copybotting tons of expensive premium luxury content in Second Life and offering it in OpenSim as full-perm freebies? Not even after these announcements by Linden Lab themselves from early this year?
https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2025/01/linden-lab-sl-ip-rights-protection.html
https://avadelaney.co.uk/musings/a-message-to-sl-content-thieves/

Oh, and OpenSim cannot survive without selling the most private personal data of every last one of its users to some big, commercial, corporate age-verification service? But at the same time, OpenSim cannot survive either without breaking international copyright and intellectual property laws left and right?

Oh, and by the way: The most that Mississippi and the UK can do against a grid is try to fine it. The most that Linden Lab can do against a grid is Cease & Desist it out of existence.

I begin to understand why most dance balls are still entirely filled with classic non-mesh avatars. And that isn't because nobody wants to donate their own avatars as NPCs nor make new ones.

It's because an NPC would have to work under any given condition with no clipping. But no matter how you approach alpha-ing, it's potentially unreliable.

Alpha cuts have the disadvantage of requiring scripts to work. I mean, they don't even always come with you when you Hypergrid or when you simply teleport to a place on a different region server. And what do you know, your whole body is visible again, and you can't even change that without detaching and re-attaching it which makes certain imported SL bodies blow up. And I'm not even talking about sims that don't allow avatar scripts yet.

Alpha masks are more reliable because they don't require scripts. However, they only work until some region server decides it's a good idea to change the alpha mode of your body from alpha masking to none. This is nasty on avatars already. Ruth2 v4 and Roth2 v2 let you restore the alpha mode with the HUD, but only if avatar scripts work. The same will go for the Max bodies in development. As for everything else, you'd better have backups with an intact alpha mode. But if this happens to NPCs, no chance to fix them.

If you want NPCs to be reliably devoid of clipping under any given circumstances, you have to build them from components that won't cause clipping. If you want such NPCs for a dance machine, there's the extra challenge to make them believable dancers. Easy for beach parties. Even easier for nudist places. Very tricky for ballrooms. Unless, of course, you reject a decade of avatar advancements and go for classic content on the system body.

Juno is occasionally working on NPC versions of herself that are made of content which suits today's general tastes more than what she uses herself, like a Simona body (sorry, no Legacy, you can't really dress a Legacy avatar like Juno), an EvoX head and an EvoX skin (sorry, no Doux hair because Doux themselves have never released a short bob, so the unrigged Paige hairstyle is the closest to Juno's hairdo in SL mesh). She's doing that to have something to donate to reduce the lack of newer NPCs. But her NPCs will have to rely heavily on auto-alpha. Testing them could be interesting, much less actually deploying them.

Good news: Invisiprims are coming back to at least Firestorm!

Better news: They don't need a script anymore. They're activated with a checkbox in the viewer.

They're already available in the current public beta. Here's proof:

Sexiness does not equal as much bare skin as possible, classiness even less so.

Likewise, going bare-legged in winter is quite a bad idea.

Dare to wear BoM nylon, ladies!