I decided to risk my sanity and try, once again, to get some interesting pictures at Tralala’s Diner. I came perilously close to madness during this experiment. This sim would have to take the prize for the most heart-wrendingly appalling lag and attendant technical problems of anywhere I’ve ever been in SL… which is really sad, because it is also one of the most amazing destinations on the grid…
… as I’ve said, before, I suspect that everything interesting ever created in SL, can be found somewhere in Tralala; every ramshackle building, broken bicycle, weird cat, dead vehicle, every single neon sign, burning tyre, animated piece of strangeness. Those last few make for a ridiculous amount of constantly running scripts, which create horrendous reductions in frame rate, causing mind-numbing lag. It took me about eight hours over two days to get these pictures…
… they are the pictures I could take, not the ones I wanted to take. I had to avoid any areas that had neon, and try to avoid areas with lots of animated objects. Sometimes, I would arrive, and stand in the same place for 45 minutes, and half the scene would not have rezzed properly, and I’d just close Firestorm and come back later, hoping for a better result. Other times, after 45 minutes, most things would have rezzed, and I’d go to take a step forward, and suddenly be running on the spot, like a lunatic, unable to stop running, stuck between two buildings…
… I eventually settled on exploring the most empty places, with the least things happening. I wound up seeing parts of the sim I’ve never seen, before…
… which wasn’t really my intention, as these places aren’t as spectacular as the more crowded, neon extravaganza in the centre of the place, but, that way lay madness…
… out here on the fringes there were places that were still not properly constructed, the grass all a meter in the air, random objects seemingly just dumped for future placement… it kind of added to the feel of the place. There is just so much stuff here, it is mind-boggling. It would be wonderful to have the kind of top-end network connection, and super-computer that could make it possible to actually enjoy this sim, rather than it always being a genuine struggle with my sanity trying to even move, here…
… but, out here, on the fringes, it wasn’t too bad, though it was still a near constant struggle…
… I eventually made it to the shore…
… and stood, looking out over the brooding ocean, wondering if this is the last time I will put myself through this amount of effort for a few pictures.
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