#virtualclothing — Public Fediverse posts

I've updated the guide for mesh clothes for Ruth2 in my Ruth2 and Roth2 wiki.

Some changes:

• Kaydi Rose Designs is a new entry.
  
• I've also added the fashion store I run at Nautilus Anchorage Landing in OSgrid; it currently mostly serves as another Deva Moda backup store plus some hard-to-acquire additional Taarna Welles footwear. I've still got two floors to fill, though.
  
• The Great Canadian Grid is gone again, so the two shops there were removed.
  
• Astralia ShoppingCity lost the retextured Clutterfly and Damien Fate content, so the shops there were removed, too.
  
• Birch Grove is now Birch Grove Winter and currently inaccessible. I've changed one shop that's at all four Birch Groves to Birch Grove Spring and suspended the other two. That said, Jamie Wright/Anna Cooper has a new sim in the making which will permanently offer stuff from at least one of these shops.
  
• Shopaholic was torn down and completely rebuilt quite a while ago. Sabi no longer offers her textured Damien Fate clothes. Thus, Shopaholic was removed.
  
• The Public World went offline by the turn of the year with no announcement. I'll keep Loru Destiny's shop at the TPW-Mall suspended until things clear up.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #RuthAndRoth #Ruth2 #VirtualClothing #VirtualFashion

I've noticed a trend in avatar clothing.

Single pieces of clothing and fatpacks with the same piece of clothing in many colours/variants have been superseded by outfit boxes with tops and bottoms over the years, almost always including footwear and often offering everything in only one colour. We've reached a point at which the former two are basically dead, as seems to be mixing and matching your own outfits. Granted, it doesn't help that clothes-makers often try to make their own mesh clothes incompatible with those by their competitors to keep you from combining tops by maker A with bottoms by maker B.

But outfit boxes themselves are increasingly superseded by complete avatars which add a mesh body plus a mesh head plus necessary HUDs, one shape, one skin, one eye texture and one hairstyle which often doesn't come with a colour HUD. As if you didn't have these already. Yes, you'll look like on the box art, but you won't look any different without out-of-the-box stuff or editing the shape.

These have been around since long before mesh and mostly targeted at newbies who wanted or had to change their look away from default Ruth and didn't know how. But nowadays, complete avatars are increasingly replacing outfit boxes.

Admittedly, that's even more convenient because you don't have to make the outfit work with your avatar if you replace your whole avatar. And right-clicking a folder with a complete avatar in it and then clicking "Replace" is less work than taking your previous clothes off, putting new clothes on, adjusting alphas if necessary and then saving the result as an outfit, not to mention learning what "outfits" in the viewer are in the first place.

Also admittedly, this means that your whole avatar looks different whenever you put on something new if you only ever wear complete avatars as they come out of the box. But over the last years, fewer and fewer users have actually put work into customising their looks anyway because they can't make the shapes that come with mesh heads, starter avatars and complete avatars any sexier.

There used to be a time when most users put work into their avatars by selecting or even modifying a skin, eyes and a hairstyle and editing the shape. But then they had a unique, individual look. You could recognise your acquaintances or well-known avatars by looking at them without paying the name tags above their heads any attention. A killer feature that's pretty unique to Second Life and OpenSim.

This is increasingly sacrificed to convenience and maxed-out sexiness.

I hope that the arrival of Maxine and Maxwell will not only kick-start the increased creation of native OpenSim clothes for these bodies, but since they start out with no clothes at all, cover the basics first with fatpacks.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #Avatars #VirtualWorlds #VirtualClothing #OldAndBusted #NewHotness