So you want to join our SyncShell?
To ensure stability of our SyncShell, we have decided to first ensure your IVCS is set up correctly.
Check out the links to the the side for more information.
Shellgate on hold for Dawntrail
2024-08-08 I'm waiting for all the body mods and IVCS to be considered stable.This means all the ivcs bones will, euhh, wiggle appropriately when used in certain... animations.Until then:
Do not use multiple body mods in the same collection applied to the same character. Only have one active body mod maximum.
Do not use multiple skeletons at once unless it is explicitly stated by the author of them that they can be used this way.
Ensure your load is definitely below 800MB. The graphics update apparently causes issues due to upscaling. Still looking to confirm this.
IMPORTANT NOTICE March 2024
(2024-05-10: sorry had to push it to May, got super busy)I'm receiving boatloads of complaints from people who tell me the ShellGuards at some venues don't know what they're doing.Nobody will give me the names of those venues or who the guards are. You REALLY need to give me the names.Also, currently, the only venues with officially ShellGate-trained ShellGuards are MogHeart and VIBE. Other venues will be added in the future.I have nothing to do with any other venues. These are not officially ShellGated venues. The last report I got through the contact form on the bottom mentioned some venue on Twintania. I have no knowledge of any ShellGated venues on Twintania.I currently don't have time to do any ShellGate work. This will change in April, when the ShellGuard training guides and the other guides will go live.How to tell when a venue probably has no direct connection to the ShellGate site and system:
They force you to lower your load in smaller events: ShellGated venues will suggest you lower first, if you don't, they may remove you. Officially trained ShellGuards don't antagonize people. Officially ShellGated venues will generally start checking loads around the 20 mares mark. If you got load-checked with only a handful of people in the venue, then I had no connection there.
They ask more than 2-3 questions: This means they don't use the indicator system. ShellGate generally starts with 2 questions, then may ask more. This is to keep the process clean and simple and not too much of a hassle. Exceptions exist for TBSE characters. If a venue asks a whole slew of questions then they're making the process annoying to the patron. ShellGate avoids this.
They ban Nofflebones or tell you xyz mod is "bad": ShellGate doesn't cover Nofflebones yet as generally very few people use it and those who do almost always have a correct setup.
They use the wrong priority stacks: All official ShellGuards or ShellGate-trained ShellGuard share the same list of priority stacks which are all pulled directly from the readme's or from the devs themselves. I'm getting reports of seriously bad priority stacks being requested.
Like I mentioned above, I'll be back in business starting April. Because of all these reports and because of a lot of requests, specifically from supra-management types, ie., people who manage communities that affect multiple venues, I'll be launching a Discord for ShellGate. I really didn't want to do this because I don't like gating information behind a login.What's to come starting April:
ShellGate Discord Server: Due to requests by many people and to centralise all the research channels that exist on various Discords right now.
Megaguide: Best practices Penumbra and Glamourer setup for crash-free living. This guide will have you make a whole slew of collections, streamline your setups, allow safe gender and race swapping, offer F to F+ quickswitch options, and much more. This will also probably fix the TBSE-X crash issue on the viewer's side as having bad default collections seems to interact with other people's TBSE setup. But more on that in April or May.
Guide: ShellGate for venue owners: A guide specific for venue owners. Why, what, how, who, etc., of using ShellGate in your venue.
Guide: ShellGuard training manual: A guide specific for ShellGuards. Venue owners and ShellGuards have entirely different priorities. That's why these guides will be split. DJ's have different priorities as well.
Guide: ShellGuard for DJ's: Yes, DJ's. A Twitch DJ should keep their mods turned off at all times but ShellGate may result in a few things that DJ's may find a bit annoying. It'll be explained here.
Full rundown of currently known issues with TBSE delayed crash issues.
Proper listing of "Official" ShellGated venues and sign-up process for any venues that want to join. The immense popularity of ShellGate resulted in many venues adopting it or a similar system. I never intended for there to be a sign-up. It is supposed to be free and open for any venue to use but it seems more guidance is needed.
Start here
Click the link below to open the document that has the information you need if you need to still install IVCS or don't have your priorities set correctly.
Do you use animation mods? Or special gear mods?
If you use custom animations such as dances or animations for lewd activities, you MUST install IVCS CORRECTLY.
If you use gear mods that require IVCS, you MUST install IVCS CORRECTLY.If you do not use these, you probably* won't need IVCS. Inform the SyncShell Guard who sent you to this page that you do not use anything that requires IVCS and have a nice day :D
(*) It is still better to have it than not as some animations have been reported to look for other people's IVCS bones and then cause crashes. These are used very rarely and usually in private.If you DO use these, read on.
Do you have IVCS installed?
If not, get it from the link in the document linked above.
Then follow the steps in this document to set it up.
Do you use a custom body?
In that case, you need the IVCS version of that body. This information is included in the document linked above.
Do you use multiple bodies on the same character or change races and gender without fanta sometimes?
If you do, let the ShellGuard know. Besides priorities you need to change an extra setting or two depending on your setup.
Have you set your priorities correctly?
After setting your priorities for the different mods, go back in and check if they have "stuck". Sometimes they reset back to zero if you didn't press enter after setting them.Setting them up can be confusing. The best practices for this are as follows:Go to the document linked above.
Scroll down to the examples and pick the one that fits your situation the best.Create a folder in penumbra and name it "-Body mods" or something like that. Drag all the body mods and IVCS mods into this folder. We do this to keep everything neatly together so we don't have to search around so much.Set the priorities of the different mods as they are shown in the example in the doc. Don't forget to also ENABLE the mods.Go to an empty area such as the inn, your apartment, or a random house and try a few IVCS-enabled dances or animations. Strip naked and see if everything is in order.If something is wrong, scroll down to the Troubleshooting section.
Troubleshooting
General Issues
My piercings are gone!
You probably use Freya with the piercing pack. Sadly the piercing pack is not IVCS-compatible. You will have to find alternatives.(March 2024) Piercings appear to be a common issue for many people. If the mod you use requires you to turn off vital parts of your IVCS mods, it probably isn't compatible. Ensure you have IVCS-compatible piercings.Some piercings have extreme graphical quality and are meant to be used for GPosing only. If you use these in a venue, you will quickly grab the attention of management, ShellGuards and other patrons.
My breasts and/or genitals are see-through!
Your priorities are likely set wrong. Go through them all and set them again, pressing enter after putting in the number.(March 2024) You may be mixing multiple body mods together, especially male and female body mods. Don't do this! We've found issues with this that cause lag and crashes. Make new collections instead!
Everything below my head is see-through!
(March 2024) You likely have a corrupted bodymod. Download it again.This issue appears more often with TBSE-X and has led to some players turning off the TBSE-X IVCS mod. This causes major issues on its own.A good rule to live by here is that if your results don't align with the readme that comes with the mod, something might have been corrupted and you should redownload.
My breasts point upwards! This is weird!
You've probably not enabled an option that should be enabled regarding smallclothes or emperor's new… Go back and try different settings.
I'm a Femroe and my boobs are pointing down!
Check Unique Racial Bodies base and turn on everything that isn't tagged as NPC. May depend on your Bibo+ variant.
My fingers go through the floor when I dance or do a lewd move!
Your IVCS is set up completely wrong, Check the doc carefully and start over. Ask if the venue has a mod doctor of some kind who can help you troubleshoot. Not every venue has this. Look for a big froge behind a bar counter somewhere. They usually know.(March 2024) If other players or ShellGuards mention to you that you have floor-fingers, then you may be mixing multiple body mods in the same collection. Do not do this! Another cause may be customs kill effects for combat skills. You should never have these enabled when you're in a venue. Make sure they are fully turned off (gray and not red in Penumbra).
Yo half the venue just crashed, your stuff ain't working very well.
Pause ALL shells you're in, including the ones with the shellgate. Then turn ON the shell of the venue you're in. If you still experience IVCS crashes, contact venue management and help them find the culprit.So far when we've told people to do this, -their- crashes stopped. We cannot fix other people's syncshells. We can only do what we have the tools for.If non-ShellGate venues want to add people to their shell freely, then they can and that is their issue to deal with. Generally they'll turn off sounds, animations, and VFX and they'll be fine as then it becomes the user's responsibility to accept the suggestion to turn those off.
Male Roegadyn and Hrothgar
Other people are getting "crunchy" lag when I do some dances!
Your Unique Racial Bodies Base is set to priority 0. If you play a Rhothgar or Roegadyn with HR3 body, you should be using the IVCS version of it. Check the google doc linked above to check the examples for the right Priority Stack.If IVCS Base is 0, URB should be at priority +1 and the IVCS version of HR3 should be at +2 but refer to the google document for the most up to date information on this.This issue is NOT HR3-exclusive but it seems to happen more often with HR3. I chalk it up to Roe's being rare and having fewer resources to get info from as a result.
| Mod | Priority |
|---|---|
| IVCS Skeleton Base | 0 |
| Unique Racial Bodies Base | +1 |
| IVCS version of HR3 Body | +2 |
The table above shows the priority stack but you should double-check the google doc for the latest information.
TBSE-X with other body active
Quick link to this section for ShellGuards:https://shellgate.carrd.co/#tbse-xmultibody
This section was updated 2024-01-27 at 5AM.I've found the issue that caused floorfingers for several players who used TBSE-X.If the mani pedi pack is active in any ACTIVE COLLECTION, then female bibo hands and feet will be applied to a male TBSE-X body, causing an URB-like issue.In other words: if you have this pack affecting your male TBSE-X character, you'll bug out and about 1 in 20 people who see you will crash.What is meant with an "ACTIVE COLLECTION"? If your vanilla character is male, then we're talking about your Default, interface, player character and male player character collections.
One player had multiple bodies active on the same character and would swap between male and female with glamourer. While it can work, I advise against it. It allows for a variety of issues to crop up and requires that you turn off all your female mods when you swap to male and vice versa.The player created a new collection for their character, following my advice to use different collections for their different gender glamours. This didn't fix the issue for them because they also had the bibo mani-pedi pack active in their default collection. They might have assumed that the default collection would be overwritten by their character collection but apparently, that is not what it does.The default collection appears to have some form of inheritance relationship with every other collection. This means that for this player, the mani-pedi pack for Bibo+ was being applied to their male TBSE-X character. So whenever they did a dance that affected their fingers and toes, or when we used "cycle pause state" on them, they'd bug out and make some people crash.Removing the mani-pedi pack from being applied to their male non-bibo+ character solved the issue for them.
Load sizes
Quick link to this section for ShellGuards:https://shellgate.carrd.co/#loadsizes
Big loads eat up RAM
You may crash because your memory is used up. Solutions to this are getting more RAM, getting more Virtual RAM, or PAUSING people who have oversized loads.Getting more RAM costs money and requires you open your PC and change things.You can get more Virtual RAM by increasing the size of your pagefile. The ShellGate site is not a technical website designed for helping with this so I suggest you google "How to get more virtual RAM" or "pagefile" or "paging file". What it does is shift some of the load from your physical RAM to your harddrive. If your page file is on a HDD, you could consider moving it to an SSD.Some players have "big loads" and with that I mean they have very complex characters that take up a lot of memory space. You can see how much a player uses by looking at the green eye icon in Mare. Hover over this with your mouse and it will show how much they use.
So what's big?
The majority of mare users appear to sit between 50MiB to 400MiB, This is considered small to low medium. This doesn't mean that their characters look basic.You can have a 2GB character and a 200MiB character look almost identical. The only difference is that the 2GB character is unoptimized.Problematic big loads are above 800-1000MiB. Avoid getting this big. These are only good for GPoses.
Below 300MiB is considered a light load. Usually a custom body with vanilla-like or optimised outfits.
300-600MiB is a medium load. Less optimized clothes or more complex clothes, lighter tattoos.
600-800MiB is considered a heavier load but not problematic. Detailed tattoos, complex clothes, custom tails with light fluff.
800MiB-1GB is a gray zone. See below.
Over 1GB is where issues will crop up. HIGHLY detailed tattoos, very fluffy tails, particle effects, SFX on skills, Hi-Res textures. Unoptimized mods in general.
2024-05-10: What about these triangles?
Late winter of 2024, Mare added triangles to the hover pop-up of the green eye icon. This shows the amount of triangles in a model.Modern hardware is built to render triangles. In other words, if your outfit has one single triangle, your video card needs to work one amount of work. An outfit will have way more triangles than that. According to the mare dev, vanilla characters tend to have between 5000 to 20 000 triangles. So for the most complex vanilla characters, your video card needs to work 20 000 amounts of work.In the past, we only checked for the size of your load in memory. That was because we couldn't easily see the triangle count of a character. Keen-eyed ShellGuards and venue managers would spot when there was a download of 100MiB or more, and would then check and see the uncompressed file load being almost a GB. We couldn't spot triangles.Triangles do NOT take up file size the way textures do. The model file simply lists them and their location and this doesn't take up much space. A small file can list a thousand triangles or it can list a million. A small file can therefore still lead to a massive slowdown. We can thankfully see the amount of triangles now.
So how many triangles is too many triangles?
This is a bit harder to tell at this point. We've had a lot of experience that led us to call 800MiB the cut-off point for trouble-free mare loads but for triangles we're not too sure yet.So far we can conclude the following:500k or more triangles is an instant pause. Turn these players off. They will lag you, HARD. Consider this the old 1.2GB equivalent of "Hello sir or madam, please lower your load." It's an instant whisper by a ShellGuard. Do NOT let these players roam free in a full venue, your patrons will just pause the whole shell. 500k is just badly optimised.400k Is the upper limit for some of the most elaborate fashion glams. Use these for GPoses, not for venues.The majority of complex outfits will hover around the 300k mark. Below 200k is good, lower is better.75k and below is highly optimised and suggested for all venue staff to strive for.Special thanks go out to the anonymous commenter for reminding me to add the triangle update! Their comment:
Some additional tips, MB load is only part of the equation. You also should pay attention to the Triangle count as well. Most character models in modern video games are around 75k-200k poly. For reference, VRChat will mark your model as "low performance" if you're over 35k. The memory load (MB) impacts you based on how much VIDEO MEMORY your graphics card has, whereas the total TRIANGLE COUNT impacts you based on how FAST your graphics card is.For user models in Mare, I'd suggest below 75k as optimized, sub 200k as medium, and anything above 500k being excessively high and unoptimized.
I have a ton of triangles, how do I lower them?
Don't use the gear mods that have so many triangles.Yep... that's it, not much you can do other than contact the mod creator and ask them to optimise their mod.
So what happens when someone has a big load?
If a person is below the Gray Zone of 800MiB to 1GB, then not much happens. It is best for everyone to optimize their outfits using BC7 compression (explained below). ShellGuards and venue management generally don't act when a person is below the Gray Zone.Above the Gray Zone however, ShellGuards and Venue management will ask you to lower your load. This is true even in venues that are NOT ShellGated.The gray zone is an area where a player's load will start causing issues that cause frame lag, out-of-memory issues, etc. Everyone should try to stay below this zone but some outfits just sit there no matter what you try to do.From what we've seen, 800-1000MiB is where most venues draw the line. This doesn't mean that 799MiB is the max size you should get, smaller is always better.Venues, now even those without ShellGate, will almost always act when a player is at 1GB. Once all the 1GB players are dealt with, they'll move on to the 800MiB ones. Below 800MiB players will rarely or even never be asked to look into their load.
Let's say you see a person with a huge load, now what?
It now is up to you to decide whether to pause this player or leave them visible. Players, especially the staff members, at an event with many (50+) mares visible may decide to pause everyone who goes over 1GB or even over 800MB. Doing so generally brings back a lot of frames per second as it clears up a lot of memory.On the flip side of this, it means that if you have a highly detailed character, it becomes more likely that others may pause you or even have ShellGuards point out to you that you have a very large load and should look into adjusting this.
Quick link to this section for ShellGuards:https://shellgate.carrd.co/#myloadsize
How can I check my own load?
You can check your load by clicking the icon on the far right (1) and then clicking Chara Data Analysis (2)In the next window, you see your uncompressed size which is the total space you take up (1) and the size of what others download when they first see you (2)
The Uncompressed part is the important value here. It is what is loaded into memory. When we brought an entire venue down to below 800MiB per player, with the majority of players around 200-400MiB, I received comments about how smooth the gameplay is. After 2 players with loads of 1.3 and 1.8GB entered the building, panning the camera became laggy. Once we brought them down to 400Mib and 600MiB respectively, the lag went away.
Only look at the Uncompressed value
I have to put extra emphasis on this part because a lot of patrons at ShellGated venues keep confusing the two.We don't care that much about Compressed value. We care about Uncompressed because that is what is loaded into our RAM memory and causes lag if it is too high.
Compressing Load
There are ways to minimize your load, compress the data, and thus be a more pleasant mare user. I don't want to put this information here as it would just be a simple copy-paste and I'm not an expert in this. I refer you to the mare discord for this. Look around there and you'll find what you seek. They know better than I do.Update 2024-01-14: Alright here is the info but check those discords please...There are a few guides out there about compressing "stuff", but this mostly covers the filesize on your harddrive. To be less of a burden to other players, your textures should be compressed instead. On the Mare discord the common suggestion given is to compress them to bc7.To do this yourself, please check the Mare discord or this google document:
This can drastically lower your load.
Examples so far have been a player with a nearly 2GB load going down to 660MB. Another from 500MB down to 300MB, essentially making them jump down an entire category.Some venues may set a limit. This is generally high. If the limit is for example 1.2GB, they may contact you and send you this information.
GPOSE clothing is not venue clothing
There are outfits out there that are highly detailed or big or special that are meant to be used with gpose to make cool screenshots. They were never meant to be used in a venue or public setting.An example of this is an outfit that has a lot of reflections and detailed textures. It is great for poses, but not great for wearing out in public or even Limsa.
Custom battle effects
(March 2024) Confirmed by Mare Dev and our testingIf you have any custom skill effects, such as, your white mage skills are now blood mage skills or you have cool warrior attacks, remember that these are loaded as well.It's best to have these in a separate collection that you can unlink from your character collection. You never use these in a venue anyway, causing unnecessary data to be sent to everyone in the venue. These files can be big.
Watch out with fancy paid mods! You'll be banned from ShellGated Shells!
Paid mods are getting bigger but not venue-safe
(March 2024) In the past few months we've rarely had any issues with players with big loads. We simply informed them about the issue and they usually responded positively, lowering their load and taking some time to optimize their outfits.Lately, however, things appear to have changed.Several paid mod creators have been putting out unoptimized mods that cost a lot of money while also drastically increasing memory load.I've personally run into several players who refused to lower their load even though they were at 2GB themselves. None of them wanted to admit that the reason for it was that they had just paid a lot of money for a mod that had just come out.Obviously, they want to show off their shiny new outfit that barely anyone has yet but they're also causing crashes and lag for many patrons.
Some mod creators are to blame
They make highly detailed mods that look exceptionally well but they don't tell their patrons that they'll be blocked from SyncShells for wearing these outfits.Mod creators should mention that whoever buys it will most likely be banned and paused by many people. They don't do this, either through accidental ignorance or on purpose. They would get fewer sales if they mention this.
Mod buyers are getting scammed - ShellGuards beware!
ShellGated venues have ShellGuards that are connected to this site and our community of, well, ... ShellGuards.Some venues have been doing a sort of "ShellGate lite" where they only focus on load sizes. This is a bad approach as priority issues can cause lag as well.ShellGate and ShellGuards should -never- antagonize patrons unless those patrons are intentionally causing damage. With this I mean direct trolling.The players who bought these mods likely did not know that they're GPOSE mods and not venue-safe mods. Don't blame them for not knowing this. Don't blame them for wanting to show off their cool outfit. At no point did they decide to lag and crash everyone else.You can kick them from the shell and advise them to do personal syncs with those who wish to see. Do not leave them in the shell as they'll crash and lag everyone else. They can rejoin later when the new outfit smell has faded.
This is policy guidance...
I don't want to tell venues how to run their venue or shell. ShellGate has always been about giving information, not telling what to do. In this case I need to intervene as the big paid mod issue is causing tension between people who just want to have fun.As I've said before. The mod makers who sell fancy highly detailed outfits are to blame for this. Not the patrons, not the venue management. With that said...
Inform your mod creators about what they're doing.
I am not going to try and find every single one of the hundreds/thousands of mod creators and wag my finger at them. MOST are doing a good job and optimize their mods.Some are not. If you buy from them, talk to them. Message them and tell them they should at the very least release a venue-safe or mare-safe version of their outfit.
How do I get the SyncShell Key?
The person who sent you here is probably a staff member of a venue. They will ask you a specific question about the priorities you've set in Penumbra. Answer this question and they'll give you the key.
Help! It doesn't work?
Common issues with joining a shell include:
You copied a space at the end of the password.
You're already in the shell.
You're at max shells. You can't be in more than 20 shells. Venues that have multiple shells need to rethink their strategy because that shit is NOT cool.
The shell is full. You can't see that but they can. Ask if the shell has room. The maximum capacity is 300 users. It sometimes caps out at 299 or 298. Anything above 290 users can be considered "full".
The shell was locked or the password changed. ShellGuards and Shell owners will do this sometimes to do maintenance. For example if someone hands out the password to people who haven't been checked, the Shell will be locked immediately and the password changed while the ShellGuards sort through whoever shouldn't be in the shell.
They gave you the wrong info. Shit happens. Some ShellGated venues have switched to single-use passwords and sometimes they send one to multiple patrons accidentally.
Mare etiquette
Using mods with friends is fun and all, but when you go to a venue, there are some things you should consider.Quick link you can give to out: https://shellgate.carrd.co/#etiquette
Don't use flashbangs, explosions, or earthquakes.
Flashbangs are big animations that cause a big flash or visual effect that either covers a whole screen or blinds people. Similarly, explosions and earthquakes are very annoying.This doesn't include dotes that have a neat explosion animation. They're generally small and benign enough to not be an annoyance. What we're talking about here are big, room-wide, or even venue-wide explosions that literally blind people or make people's camera shake heavily.
Don't use permanent torches.
Some mods exist that allow you to leave torches behind, similar to how in Minecraft you would drop torches as you explore a cave. Other mods allow you to throw flares or other objects.Do not use these in a venue. They're cool, but they use up a lot of precious memory and some bug out and just stay there.
Do not try out new mods and animations inside a crowded venue. Do not frequently switch your gear around.
If you install and try out a bunch of mods while inside a crowded venue, you're making everyone inside the venue download your mods. The same goes for swapping out your gear and designs. Set up your outfits beforehand. Try out new mods in the safety of the inn or your own home.If the venue has few people (less than let's say 10), then it doesn't matter as much. It's still better to do this somewhere else.
Do not use big mods.
Some mods have very detailed and big textures or highly detailed models. It's a common practice of veteran mare users to simply pause or block people who have massive mods. It all uses up memory and with up to 200 people in a venue, it can get cramped very quickly. What is big? Veterans frequently block anyone who starts a download over 200MB. Some even complain at 100MB.When Mare downloads something, that is the COMPRESSED file. This means that a 200MB download will result in a much, much larger actual file size.See the troubleshooting section for info on how to lower the load that people are sending you... by pausing them.
Do not use unoptimized mods that use a lot of particles.
Some players report serious lag from these types of visual effects. We're talking mods that add visual sparkles that fly around. Some are really heavy. Check with venue staff if they notice a slowdown on your particle mod.
Turn off the music on your dances.
Pretty much all dances come with music and pretty much all of those dance mods allow you to turn the music off. If a mod doesn't have a toggle for this, you can easily add it or go into advanced editing in the mod and just delete the link to the sound file, then save the changes.The music that comes with the dances will clash with other people's dances, the background music and the Twitch DJ music.
Don't use mods that have sounds that travel venue-wide.
An example of this is a slapping mod that makes the slaps be heard on the other side of the map. Contact the mod-author to change the mod so there is a distance fall-off to the sound.The slapping mod itself isn't that annoying but other examples include some dances with music, various flashbang mods, etc.
Do not use naked Lala mods.
You'll get banned from whatever SyncShell you joined, no questions asked. Lala's are considered too close to children and we don't run with that. There is little to no leeway here. If you want to make a naked gremlin that is 300 years old, green, hairy with big ears that looks nothing like a Lala, then use a different race as a base, like cat or lizard.Venue security staffers are getting really tired of all the people trying to find where the limit is. It has gotten to the point where the limit is infinite and anything that even remotely looks like a naked Lala will get instabanned and possibly reported to Mare devs who will do a permaban.
Do not teleport or log out from the dancefloor.
In general RP, it is bad form, rude, to teleport from the dancefloor. In ShellGated venues, it will leave the management wondering if you crashed or teleported out.Instead: RP-walk (this means slowly) to the exit and leave the house. Then teleport wherever you want. You will pass by the greeters who can see that you've left the "normal" way.
Don't run through the venue, especially with a big load.
Some venue owners have established a new rule regarding running and RP-walking (walking slow). This is unconfirmed: If you run through a venue, you'll get loaded and unloaded quickly, if your load is too big this can cause surges in people's systems. Some say these are power surges for which a sort of protection is then triggered that simply crashes you out of the game.Again, this is unconfirmed but some tests have shown that it is plausible. Now that you know, you don't have to be surprised when you're told not to run inside the venue.
Why?
Recently, Nightlife2 was released and shared in back alleys and seedy nightclubs. This modpack is generally shared without further explanation yet requires a very important mod in order to function correctly: IVCS aka, Ilusio Vitae Custom Skeleton.The animations in this modpack control bones that the skeleton in the vanilla game does not have. As soon as an animation tries to change the position of one of these missing "bones", the game will crash. It's like dividing by zero in a way. It errors out.We aim to put a stop this. So instead of just handing patrons a SyncShell invite, patrons are now required to check their IVCS installation and then tell the Shell Guard which priorities they have set. Shell Guards are the people in a venue who hold the key to the SyncShell. These are usually the bartenders.The issue existed before but was made more prevalent by Nightlife2. Even if you don't use nightlife2, you should still check your IVCS.
The ShellGate Alliance
The idea behind the Alliance is this: If one venue knows that another venue uses the Shellgate, it makes it easier for them to implement the ShellGate themselves because if they know that person has already been checked by the other venue, they don't have to do as much work to add them themselves.In other words, if you join one ShellGate venue, it becomes easier to join other ShellGate venues.Current venues in the ShellGate Alliance by order of joining:
MogHeart on Sagittarius
Vibe on Raiden
Venue name to be announced: A
Venue name to be announced: H
Venue name to be announced: K
Your venue here?
So far 5 venues have started with or are preparing to use ShellGate.
Changelog
2024-05-10 Added triangle section. The megaguide is coming!
2024-03-12 Overhauled the layout and updated parts of the text to fit with new developments and issues various venues have come across.
2024-03-06 Confirmed the skilleffect issue with mare dev and many others. I'm doing a major overhaul of the ShellGate site with a massive best practices guide and several other guides. I've been very busy. Don't expect it anytime soon though.
2024-01-27 Solved the floorfinger issue for TBSE-X multibody setups.
2024-01-26 Added clarification that uncompressed size is what is important for memory issues for others in mare. This was not clear enough and I received questions about this in the field.
2024-01-26 Added new major issues with TBSE-X installs that have other bodies active in the same active collection. See button below for quick jump.
2024-01-14 Changed light load to max 300 after making a basic character with a custom body, skin, outfit, and hair as a baseline example. Added a section for compressing load. See button below for quick link.
2024-01-05 Added another reason as to why a Shell might not work: The Shell being locked by management. Also added the 3 venues that are working on implementing ShellGate. (Minor: Christmas background swapped with stars background.)
2024-01-04 Added info on crashing regardless of the ShellGate under Troubleshooting. Also added information under Mare Etiquette on load sizes. Added a troubleshooting section purely for the Load issue.
2024-01-03 Added femroe boobs pointing down to troubleshooting
2024-01-01 Added information on H3body crunchy lag when racial bodies isn't prioritized correctly.
2024-01-01 Added information about the max capacity of shells sometimes being 298 or similar.
Contact?
Please don't contact the site owner. I make no money here and only made this for the greater good or something. In fact I'm losing money because I paid for Carrd premium plus.I'm not an expert at any of this. All I know is things are much more stable and I can sit in a venue with 60 mares active and not crash.If you really must find me, ask a ShellGuard.