Second Life: What is the BEST use of Outfits?

Best Use of Outfits

Basic Outfits

There are probably great ways to use outfits that have yet to think or hear of. But, here is what I do…

I have some base outfits that I use as a starter outfit for new outfits. So, I have a nude classic outfit. This was my first base outfit. It is skin, shape, eyes, and other classic basics. As time passed I got Slink hands and feet. Then I made a Slink nude with classic body, skin, eyes, Slink hands and feet, and my favorite AO of the time. More recently I have made a full Slink nude with body, hands, feet, shape, skin, eyes, AO… you get the idea.

Base Outfits !!Named

Base Outfits !!Named

In the future I expect to get a Bento style mesh head. My hope is it will be much lower ACI than many of the heads around now. I think the ACI viewers will hopefully have impacted the mesh body makers by the time Project Bento completes and rolls out.

I also have a basic low complexity (15K) and low script count outfit for events. Classic avatar, skin, pants, top, hair, and AO.

To start a new outfit I REPLACE whatever I am wearing with one of the nudes. Then build on that for the new outfit.

All of these base avatars are named in a special name format: !!Nude 2016 Slink All 25k. The ‘!!’ forces the outfit to the top of the alpha sort. ‘Nude’ being the first part of the name sorts all my nude outfits together. The 2016 tells me when the outfit was made and sorts the old ones to the top. When I think they are old enough I can delete them. The rest is just for my information. The 25k tells me the ACI of the outfit.

Classes of Outfits

The My Outfits panel does not allow me to create folders. I understand some third party viewers do. I often change back and forth between viewers so, I avoid making outfit folders. To overcome that limit I name my outfits with a special format: ![Class] – [year] [Mesh, Slink, Classic] [description] [ACI]k. That may look like: !Dress Short – 2016 Slink Tan-White 78k.

Colors

One of the problems I ran into early on was colors and HUD controlled textures. My shoes, hair, nails, and other items were a problem. In one outfit I could color a hair blond and the Hot CFM Pumps gold. In the next outfit I changed those colors. But, that changed the colors in the first outfit… grrrr.

Inventory: Changeable Items Handled

Inventory: Changeable Items Handled

My solution was to add a WEAR folder in the shoe’s folder. So, my NCore XX shoe has a WEAR folder inside. Within the WEAR folder I have folders named; Gold, Red, Blue, etc.

In the NCore XX folder I have the original scripted copies of the shoes. I build a new outfit using those and set the color and other features. Once I have the shoes the way I want them, I take them off, make a copy, and place the copy in the WEAR->[some color] folder, then put the copy version on. When possible I then remove the scripts from the copy.

If I’ve made a red pair, I can then use shoes from the WEAR->RED folder with any new outfit I build that needs red shoes. If I need a new color I can go back to the originals and repeat the process. This means that I can change colors of the original version of the shoes as often as I want, because those are never used in any of my outfits. Finally stability in my outfits.

This process means I NEVER by No-Copy anything that has options, i.e., color changes etc.

Visual Outfit Browser

This feature is likely only going to create minor change in how I do outfits. The sort order changes. Outfits with images sort ahead of outfits with no image. So, my new outfits will all have images. That means they sort out early.

Updating Outfits

Because I make a copy of things that change, I can change skin or shape and not mess up my existing outfits. I don’t HAVE TO update. But, I do.

I did once mess up a shape used by a number of outfits. What a PITA. I used a changed shape in a bunch of new outfits. Then realized it was used in a bunch of older outfits that needed the old shape. Ugh! I still find an outfit now and then using the wrong shape.

Now I am very careful to make a new shape (copy existing) if I need to make a change for some new outfit.

I have some older outfits I still like. I’ll admit I find fewer and fewer of those. But, there are a few.

Link for more pages below…

2 thoughts on “Second Life: What is the BEST use of Outfits?

  1. “Inventory uses memory but, inventory is basically a text-list of your stuff. I’m not sure how many characters are used for each item. It appears to be 256 or fewer characters but, I have no hard information.”

    Each inventory item is a LLFolderViewItem a collection of around 80 bytes of data (for v1 viewers, around 128 for v2/3/4 viewers), plus a few std::string’s (for the label (i.e. the name of the item), the tool tip, the sort/search strings, etc). But it’s not finished: a LLFolderViewItem is in fact a child class of a LLView, and there, you must add even more bytes (around 100 more bytes of data, plus strings, vectors/maps, etc). All in all (with the strings, 16 bits padding bytes, etc), you can count around 250/400 bytes per inventory item (closer to the maximum for v2+ UI viewer and to the minimum for v1 UI viewers)…

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