Here's a fun SL tutorial from Alicia Chenaux, explaining what "jelly dolls" are, why they're useful, and how to use them to decrease avatar rendering lag. The funny thing is, Linden Lab

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, but because most SLers don't use the company's official SL viewer,

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 like Firestorm, most users aren't even aware this feature exists:

In the newest default Viewer release, each time you change the appearance of your avatar, a small notice with your new complexity value will appear in the upper right of your display for a few seconds... There is also a new graphics preference you can use to limit the impact of high complexity avatars around you; it lets you set a maximum complexity for avatar rendering. Anyone you see that's over that limit is simplified to a "JellyDoll" - a solid color silhouette without attachments shown - saving you most of the cost that you would otherwise have had to draw that avatar and so increasing the performance of your viewer.

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, and in

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. It's a nifty and valuable feature, but once again points to the massive fail of encouraging the growth of third party Second Life viewers before the world had really gained a mass market. Now we're stuck with a world where about a third of the user base sees a community largely made of jelly, with the rest wondering WTF they're talking about -- all together, but still not seeing each other for who they want to be.

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