It’s that time of year again: Hair Fair! Ah yes, that two-week (approximately) period when most of the grid’s females converge on one multi-sim spot and battle crippling lag in order to stuff their inventories with more hairstyles. Hey, I’m not complaining, I’m including myself in that number! (Plus, the event always benefits a worthy charity, so you can’t go wrong there.)
So, this year the Hair Fair sims are built to look like a sort of campsite; dozens of identical square white tents with sculpted flaps, surrounded by wide walkways and lots of trees. There are even electric fans inside the tents.
Now, all this looks amazing, but all the textures and sculpties and whatnot take forever to rez. When you add in all the wandering avatars, the resulting lag is beyond belief. I was wearing minimal prims and teleporting as close as possible to the booths I wanted to see, and I still could barely, barely move.
(I always wonder why the builders don’t keep the Hair Fair sims almost totally blank; maybe just a plain white wall with partitions and very simple vendors and signs hanging up, nothing else. It’d rez a lot faster!)
One thing that helped me immensely this year was joining the Hair Fair Demos group; Participating designers started sending group members demos of their included styles ahead of time. I went through the demos, made a folder of the ones I wanted and deleted the rest; this saved me a ton of time pushing through four sims worth of molasses.
I’ve already bought several new styles, which I’ll show off in an upcoming post. I’ll probably make at least one more trip, because there are a few designers whose Hair Fair styles I haven’t seen yet. (Some of them didn’t send out demos, or perhaps I missed them; that’s very possible.) This time though, I’m going to copy their booth locations from the official Hair Fair blog so that I can teleport right there.
Coming up: what I’ve bought so far!
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