One of the features I have at Cherry Street Mall are the clothing models. These are female avatars that I dress up in the outfits available through the Nada's vendors there. They are supposed to stand in a clear tube, pose and rotate. They are there to show off some of the latest fashions and to provide eye candy for visitors. I use a text viewer called Radegast to log them on and have them sit on the invisible pose balls Lark and I made. This Radegast runs in minimized mode on my computer all day long. It does not tax the computer like the full 3D graphics viewer does because all that is displayed is text. Radegast will list hundreds of objects in the vicinity of the avatar but does not display them in 3D unless you tell it to.
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| Opal |
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One of the really nice things about this text viewer is the radar. Each of the avatars has a radar built into Radegast that has a region-wide range. So I can see if any of my friends are hanging around at a quick glance. It also shows new visitors which is important when trying to build up the traffic rating for the sim. Building the traffic rating will allow for the sim to be listed higher in search results. This is important because the higher the listing, the more likely the searcher will be to click on your teleport link and visit.
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| Jolene |
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| Jessiewild |
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One funny aspect of having these models stand around all day on an adult rated free sex sim is the number of times they get "hit" on. It's almost always in IM and even though the models are wearing a tag that identifies them as a model, and even though they are set to Busy Mode, they still attract attention from many of the men. I don't see these IMs or "pick-up lines" most of the time. I run the text viewers in the background. But sometimes, just before shutting them down for the night, I'll notice a long public chat or private IM. There are a lot of people out there who have female AVs but are really males. In the case of these models, they are on auto-pilot and unattended, but how do these prospective suitors know that if there is anyone behind the AV, that it's even a female? (Now there's an idea for another post) They must know that I would not be able to hire someone to stand in a glass tube and look pretty for their SL existence, right? How boring of an SL would that be?
In any case, I think the models are here to stay. Unless I decide to do away with the shopping mall - which I may do because there is not much going on there and they take up a lot of room - then I think it's nice for people to be able to look at 3D representations of the products they might be purchasing.
