Day 73: Miss Second Life Formal Wear Pageant Round 5 and Lag

Live from the Miss Second Life Formal Wear Pageant Round 5 event!

OK, no more suspense...I won First Place in this round!!!! Thank you for all your help in support! Thank you! Thank you! THANK YOU!!!!

And believe it or not, it turned out to be *VERY* close in scores! You made ALL the difference! This is from the Miss SL Website:

     The Judges Chose Natalia 1st Cindel 2nd and Terry 3rd.
     The Live audience chose Cindel 1st Natalia 2nd and Camryn 3rd
     The Web voters chose Natalia 1st Cindel 2nd and Regina 3rd

     Natalia 3+1+1=5
     Cindel 2+1.5+1=4.5
     Terry 1+.0+0=1
     Regina 0+0+.5=.5
     Camryn 0+.5+0=.5

So I won by 1/2 point, from your votes! So again, THANK YOU! :) For all of you who voted, made suggestions, or kept me in your thoughts, I really appreciate it!

So what does a beauty pageant look like in Second Life? Your insider action on-the-spot reporter has the story! :P (Sorry for the quality of these pix...I was playing model, IMing people, and shooting at the same time.)



This is the event area at the Costa del Sol Resorts where the show took place. This was taken before the show started. The panel of pictures at the back is the live audience voting board. I am standing on stage on the right side.



The event host takes the stage and makes his annoucements, along with some commercials for the event sponsors :)



Then the event host says, "Next we have Natalia Zelmanov. she was born on 9/24/2006, her favorite color is sky blue and she comes to us from Rieul." Hey, thats me! So off I go to strike my 2 poses and walk down the runway. This is a little backwards, because of the stage layout. The poses occur at the head of the runway first, then you walk down and back.

One by one, all 5 contestants walked down the runway. Several contestants had dropped out because of the time, making this a smaller group. The audience cheered, waved, and clapped for their favorite contestants. There were comments in English, Spanish, and Portuguese!

Finally, the event host said, "Aren't they all fantastic? Lets hear it for all the ladies tonight! While you are making your choices and the judges are finalizing their decisions, lets please take a moment to again thank all of our wonderfuls sponsors, Especially Costa del Sol for providing us with tonights location."



Now comes the nerve wrecking part...waiting for the votes!

Then, from the voting board: "Voting Board: Voting has been closed, calculating results..." The event host said, "ok people please be patient while calculate the winners and lets hear it for all the ladies once again! arent they great!" *Yikes* thats even worse than before! If I had an anim for it, I would have been chewing my nails! :P

At 18:43, the event host said, "And Now the moments youve all been waiting for....The third place winner for todays event is:" At 18:44, he said, "Terry..." (I am omitting full names)

At 18:46, the event host said, "And now the Second place winner in tongihts event is ...... ..........." At 18:47, he said, "...... ..... . . . . .. . . ." (Really, thats what he said!) Then, "Cindel..."

*Yikes*, this could be a really good thing or a really bad thing! I dont have any virtual fingernails left!!! I remembering almost jumping out of my skin!

At 18:49, the event host said, "And now we introduce to you the first place winner of event one for group5" "and let me tell you the choices are very hard" At 18:50, he said, "how can you pick just one of all these fine examples?" "they all deserve to win!" "but the judges and you all must make a choice and the choice is"

You know...a girl really could only take so much! :P

Then he said my name: "Natalia Zelmanov !!!!!!!!" "Natalia come on down!"

All I could say was, "OMG!!" And I walked down the runway like I was supposed to. The RL me was shaking at this point. I had a hard time walking straight :)

The event host said, "Natalia do you have anything to say to all your admirers?"

So here is my thank you, for the live audience, and to all of you who read this blog: "Wow! Wow! Thank you so much judges, friends, and audience. Thank you so very much for your support!" "You have really motivated me to make even better outfits for the future events!" "Thank you so much again, and please have a safe and happy holiday season! :)"



So here are the 3 winners this evening: Terry is in the beautiful red gown in the middle, and Cindel in the gorgeous semi-transparent gold gown on the left. Im the midget on the right. :)

So what does this mean?

We get 1 point for coming to the event. We get 3 points for first place, 2 for second, and 1 for third. That means I have 4 points at this time. There will be a casual and a swimwear event. We will earn similar points at these 2 events.

Then I assume that the top 8-10 girls will go to the final round. Thats my goal: to make it to the final round.

Prior to the event, I knew that lag would be an issue. And I have to work out ways to deal with lag. Hope these tips will help you if you ever need to do things under heavy lag.

Lag is caused by a number of things: There is lag on an overloaded sim (lots of people and/or objects). There is network lag, where your data is not making it to Linden. Then there is client lag on your computer.

The best thing to do is to test in a laggy environment. I spent the day practicing my walking and posing. I tried out a number of things at the Ahern Welcome Area (a high lag location). The newbies mustve thought I was crazy, being all dressed up to walk back and forth! :P

There are 2 main problems with lag and runway-type modeling in SL (oh, just listen to me...what am I saying...the blonde hair is really getting to me :P)

First, when lag suddenly gets bad, it feels like you cannot move, or move very slowly. So, we tend to pound on the "W" key to move forward. Then suddenly, lag clears, and we go shooting off the stage. Im sure thats happened to you in high lag areas. But its not funny when a model does it! :P Its not easy to get back on stage under heavy lag. Thats why modeling stages have invisible guardwalls to prevent the models from falling off the stage. If you are ever in an event at a modeling agency in SL, click on the View/Highlight Transparent option and you will see the guardwalls.

Also, putting Sexy Walk directly into your shoe (instead of using an Animation Override/AO device) makes the Sexy Walk far more reliable. This worked out VERY WELL for me tonight at the show, because it was one less thing I had to worry about.

Second, on the runway, you need to strike poses reliably. I normally use a HUDDLES Quick Pose HUD to do my poses for the photos in this blog. It is simple to use and inexpensive ($149L). But under heavy lag, the HUDDLES Quick Pose doesnt work reliably. I press the button for the pose and nothing happens. :( So I ended up creating a new folder, putting the 2 poses I want to use in the folder, right clicking on the poses, and selecting "Play in World". Not fancy, but works *REALLY* well under high lag!

You wont believe this, but I really went to extremes to reduce lag. I lowered the Draw Distance to 64, the minimum (click on Edit/Preferences.../Graphics tab/Draw Distance). This limits how far I can see (64M), but not a problem in a small area like a stage. If you get local lag, where your screen freezes and you hard drive goes crazy, try this. It may help.

I also Cleared Cache to get rid of excess textures in my cache buffer (click on Edit/Preferences.../Network tab/Clear Cache button). You need to relog to Clear Cache. After I relogged, I TP'ed directly to the show site to limit the amount of unneeded texture in my cache.

I thought about reducing the Graphics Detail, but didnt think I needed it. I also thought about turning off Particle and Tree rendering (Client/Rendering/Types/Particles and Tree). Fortunately, I didnt need to do either. But these are also valid techniques for reducing the effects of lag.



Ah...finally, I can go for a swim! I hope my formal gown is waterproof :P