NEW RELEASE @ The Home & Garden Expo For Relay For Life

New Release, Clam Bay Beach House Li = 140

Homes & Garden Expo

Second Life’s popular Relay for Life Homes & Garden Expo opens today. This mega shopping event raises thousands and thousands of dollars for cancer research, so a great cause supported by dozens of builders like myself.

The Expo is HUGE, 10 sims jam packed full of new, fabulous and often exclusive releases all ready for your perusal. I had a quick walk around yesterday after finishing my store and have already found some real cute little goodies but more on that in another post.

NEW Release – Clam Bay Beach House Homes & Garden Exclusive

Clam Bay is, as the name suggests designed as a unique, but warm waterfront home with lots of light and space. It is the sister house to Reef Bay Cottage with the same architectural design, featuring a dramatic wave form roof, pool, with full modifying and decorating options. The main difference is a more sophisticated, grey, cream, black and white colour scheme.

The house is only available at the H&G Expo for now but will be launched at the in-world and marketplace stores once the expo closes.

EXPO GROUP DISCOUNTS

30% off for Clam Bay and Reef Bay Houses

15% off all other houses via the main vendor

Please wear your group tag to activate the vendors

Not a group member? Join via the ‘info’ boards at the store

More Info

LI = 140
100% original mesh
Small accessories pack of plants (this is different to the Reef bay pack)
Satnav link to see Clam Bay at the expo on sims Hope 5 and Hope 6, yep the store is that big!
The Clam Bay operating manual can be found here
And the marketplace store for all of my other cottages and decór

Donation Items

As the event is all about raising funds to go into research each builder supplies a number of ‘donation’ items which means once sold all of the proceeds go to the Relay For Life. One of my donation items is a luscious leather sofa set for L$397 with a wide range of colour options.

The other donation item is a simple desk and bookcase set for L$99.

Shopping & Lag

We’ve all been there, a new event is announced and we excitedly race over to see what goodies are available only to find we can barely move and our mesh hand is where our head should be and we have no face. So shoppers here are my recommendations to reduce lag and shop with greater enjoyment, irrespective of how fast or slow your computer is:

Turn on your lag meter (both the official viewer and Firestorm have one) as this will help you to fine tune the pointers below
Set your preferences to low:
- Set your draw distance to around 100 or if you can stand it 90, it will make a big difference
- Turn down avatar complexity
- Turn off advanced lighting BUT select ambient light first
- Turn down post process quality
- Turn off water refections or minimise
- Turn down sky and terrain quality
- Reduce LOD factor – try 2 to 3
On both the main and Firestorm viewers you can save all of the above as a setting in preferences that you can re-use so there’s no need to keep repeating the adjustments. My saved preference option based on the above is creatively labelled ‘Shopping’
If all this sounds a little bit miserable it honestly won’t look that bad if you fine tune the settings whilst bearing in mind the options that make the biggest differences are; LOD, draw distance, Complexity, water reflections and advanced lighting
Plus clever use of windlight will genuinely help to add to the atmosphere and help with the appearance of light and shade without compromising performance. I like some of the Photocool options such as Photocool Dream Booklight 03
Take off any unnecessary huds or attachments and leave any other scripted items at home
When on the sims and if using Firestorm go to the list of avatars button at the bottom of the screen, select all of those listed, then right click and choose ‘derender’ this will save on graphic processing demand. Regularly refresh as obviously the list will change as people come and go. Be careful not to choose the block or mute options, unless you want to!
Dress to impress ❤ ❤ !

I used all of the above yesterday when the sim was starting to get busy with blogger and media groups and managed a regular 35+ FPS and a nice mooch around the shops.

For more information and a list of all participating builders here is the link to the Homes & Gardens Expo website, happy shopping and see you there!