SL isn't the same any more

[Pamela Galli]

I read The Tipping Point a few years ago. It turns out that even in this era of immediate mass communication, word of mouth wins the day. Marketing is important, but not as much. And that has been my experience. 

I decided long ago I find marketing beyond tedious, rather like a trip to the dentist.  I don't participate in events or hunts. I do my own mini events regularly, and I pay for a magazine ad every other month. I rarely send anything to bloggers. I ignore my Flicker pages. I do Facebook sporadically. What I do depend on is my clientele -- some of whom have been customers almost ten years -- telling friends. 

[Trinity Yazimoto]

7 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

 

Compare that to somebody who buys a full perm template on MP and spends hours carefully creating their own unique texture for it. Which aproach is the most "original"?

Exactly !

of course, there are the ones doing really original work, not even copying an existing item in rl but just following their inspiration, but they arent the majority, sadly

[ChinRey]

23 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

OK. So other was bad info then. I know that a torus is harder on the server (at least I have been told that repeatedly) than a cube.

The server is a little bit different since it deals with the physics shape, not the visual one. HAVOK and other ODE based engines (such as Bullet and ubODE) have a set of basic shapes they are more happy to deal with than other shapes, including the sphere, the cube and the cylinder. When one of those shapes happens to coincide with the shape of a prim (no prizes for guessing when that happens), the server does it the easy way. In all other cases it has to resort to the much heavier triangle list.

[Phil Deakins]

1 hour ago, Chic Aeon said:

Well as I understand it -- and I am sure others that know more will pipe in. Any prim that is no longer in it "rez" state (that is CUBE that has only been resized and perhaps tapered? don't really know that) isn't loaded into the viewer the same as a regular prim. Regular prims -- again told to me by some techie folks --- have their intrinsic "primness" recognized by the viewer.  

I specifically meant things like prims that turned into "flowers" and such after much manipulation -- hence they weren't even close to the prim they started from.  I suspect (but do not know) that the more you change a prim from its initial state the further away it is from "instant loading" (and we know it isn't that instant  but still).

I thought as much

'Torturing prims' was the phrase used to describe prims that had been manipulated over and above what is possible for them in the Edit box. Not all prims have the same editing options, but there is a way to use options on a prim that are not provided for in the edit box for it. It's different to simply editing a prim.

That's what 'torturing a prim' means, but some people didn't understand that and used it to mean simply editing a prim, or, in your case, editing it miles out of shape but only doing it with the editing options the prim is provided with in the edit box.

[Whirly Fizzle]

All possible with the viewer edit tools...
http://ayumicassini.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/ultimate-guide-to-prim-twisting.html

[Phil Deakins]

Yes, Whirly, all those things are doable with the edit tool, but that's not what I meant. Take the cube as an example of what I meant. With the edit tool, you can twist, taper, top sheer and slice it, but you can't do all the things that you can do with a tube, for instance, by using the edit tool.

Torturing prims is doing those other things with the cube and other prims - things that the edit tool doesn't normally do. That's what torturing prims means - or meant. There is, or was, a way of doing it. I don't know whether or not the method still exists, but I do know that, when I've seen someone say they were torturing prims (a rare thing to see), they don't mean torturing prims because they don't know what it actually meant. They just mean using the edit tool as is, and changing the shapes of prims, but they use the phrase because they've heard it and assumed it means something different to what it actually means.

Incidentally, I never 'tortured' any prims, but I certainly changed many a prim's shape with the edit tool. I even sold a 1-prim sculpture that had been twisted and turned every whichway. And even I have no idea what basic shape it started out as lol. I could look, of course.

Edited May 30, 2017 by Phil Deakins

[Phil Deakins]

I just did a search on Google to see if I could find out how to torture prims, and it looks like mostly the phrase is used to describe the sort of thing you linked to, Whirly. But that's not the origin. That's people thinking they know what the phrase meant and using it that way. I did find this though:-

Prim torture is changing a prim to get it to be a smaller/different shape than what is normally possible. Usually this is done by dimpling a sphere and changing it to another prim type.

That's what torturing a prim meant, and it does ring a bell from way back. There may be other stuff and methods to find on the subject but I'm not going to search through it all. Perhaps as language evolves, torturing a prim has now come to mean something different than what the phrase was originally coined to mean.

 

[ChinRey]

15 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

That's people thinking they know what the phrase meant and using it that way. I did find this though:-

Prim torture is changing a prim to get it to be a smaller/different shape than what is normally possible. Usually this is done by dimpling a sphere and changing it to another prim type.

Yes, there used to be talk about starting with one basics shape, twist it, then change to another shape to achieve some unusual results. I've done it myself but with hindsight it may have been just an akward way to achieve another secret trick with prims.

Take a look at these two pictures:

 

 

 

Edited May 30, 2017 by ChinRey
Changing something

[Chase01]

The bigger creators have multiple people working under them. I am sure some users aren't aware of that but I don't think that really makes much of a difference to anyone including myself. The owner symbolizes the brand and that is what people buy into. If they made it themselves—that's great! They have the talent, experience, and know how to get it done (I can admire that). if they used a template, well I am ok with that too. Not everyone is to the point of being able to make incredible mesh products without assistance. I do question their choice of product though. To @Annika Velde point. I am also tired of those strappy sandals. It is incredibly humorous to run into nearly identical product at the same event no less. That is happening all too often these days.

God bless the bloggers. Cheers to you @Chic Aeon. With all the product out there, they are a great resource to find items. People will follow their favorite blogger much like they do a brand. I don't see anything wrong with that. Its great that there is an outlet for those that don't want to create but can express themselves and add value to the community and to the brands they support. I follow a few bloggers that later got into product creation and that was a great way to showcase their brand. They already had an audience, why not take advantage of it.

 

Edited May 30, 2017 by Chase01

[Trinity Yazimoto]

2 hours ago, Pamela Galli said:

I read The Tipping Point a few years ago. It turns out that even in this era of immediate mass communication, word of mouth wins the day. Marketing is important, but not as much. And that has been my experience. 

I decided long ago I find marketing beyond tedious, rather like a trip to the dentist.  I don't participate in events or hunts. I do my own mini events regularly, and I pay for a magazine ad every other month. I rarely send anything to bloggers. I ignore my Flicker pages. I do Facebook sporadically. What I do depend on is my clientele -- some of whom have been customers almost ten years -- telling friends. 

yes, and you are the perfect exemple that everything is not always working the same and that sometimes, what we think being as a rule is not one.

You are also an example showing that quality can guarantee success sometimes (i said it before, even if i focused more on the bad side of the market). Because, yes, i know your store as a reference, i sent a lot of my friends there who almost all the time came back with a house they are total in love with lol... 

When mesh came out, you silently and bravely dived into 3d software learning and you made the transition really smoothly and perfectly;

Finally, i m realising that yes, there are also the creators like you in SL , who arent maybe the one we see everywhere, but for sure, your items can be seen often bec you are driving your business perfectly (imho). And it's good to remember that !

Im going to bed on a positive note just thanks to you  

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, Chase01 said:

The bigger creators have multiple people working under them. I am sure some users aren't aware of that but I don't think that really makes much of a difference to anyone including myself.

Well, most Stradivarius violins weren't built by Stradivarius himself but by his aprentices. They are still Stradivarius violins though.

There's nothing wrong with that. It's the good old workshop tradition.

The problem is that so many new and relatively new entrepeneurs are completely unaware of this and have completely unrealistic expectations about what a single person can achieve in SL.

Edited May 30, 2017 by ChinRey
x

[Chase01]

3 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Well, most Stradivarius violins weren't built by Stradivarius himself but by his parentices. They are still Stradivarius violins though.

There's nothing wrong with that. It's the good old workshop tradition.

The problem is that so many new and relatively new entrepeneurs are completely unaware of this and have completely unrealistic expectations about what a single person can achieve in SL.

Its too bad we can't have something like a "sticky" for info like this to be posted in the merchants forum. I know in some non official forums, they have user created guides and stickies that can provide some really great info. I know its not a fix all, but it would help.

[Pamela Galli]

2 minutes ago, Trinity Yazimoto said:

When mesh came out, you silently and bravely dived into 3d software learning and you made the transition really smoothly and perfectly;

Thank you for the very kind words Trinity :-) 

I do have to say, tho, that I learned Blender with the same blood and tears as everyone else, probably more so. The mesh forum is proof of how befuddled I was and how much I depended on the help of others. I still do. I find it ironic that so many of us creative arts types wind up having to learn such difficult software in order to make what we do. 

[Prokofy Neva]

12 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

And with regards to being able to edit, you can edit mesh content so long as it's set modifiable. Sure, you can't move every little piece around individually, but you can retexture, apply custom materials, add/remove scripts, again only if it is set modifiable by the creator. There is no reason we shouldn't be able to enjoy the benefits of mesh and the creative freedom we enjoyed before no-mod became so prevalent. 

Speaking of the benefits of mesh, mesh should have made SL run a lot better for most people. There are things LL did and failed to do which made the opposite happen, pushing SL's hardware requirements higher and higher.

 

To be reiterate, I don't think SL should go back to how it was years ago. Change isn't necessarily bad, but LL could have handled certain things a lot better.

Of course I know you can edit mesh because I work with it every day. But there are real limits, the most obvious being that you can't increase the size without adding sometimes huge amounts of land impact.

Seldom do things look good when you recolour them.

Scripts often don't work right in mesh.

It's not as adaptable to editing as prims.

The worse thing about mesh is that you cannot put one mesh on another mesh, and this drives you crazy. Instead of just bouncing, what it does is give a confusing error message, "The owner of this land does not allow..." although that is irrelevant and then the item disappears, not even to lost and found, but into the ether, until you relog. SO ANNOYING.

The workaround is to put down a prim board and rez out all the mesh on to the board, then cam it into place. But this is ridiculous. They should fix this.

[ChinRey]

10 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Of course I know you can edit mesh because I work with it every day. But there are real limits, the most obvious being that you can't increase the size without adding sometimes huge amounts of land impact.

Yes. Unless it's a very simple mesh it has to be optimized for a specific size and there are limits to how much you can resize before you get serious LoD (if you scale it down) or LI (if you scale it up) issues. There's no real solution to that.

 

12 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Seldom do things look good when you recolour them.

That's not really a mesh issue as such. But it's fashionable to use baked textres for everything these days and with those it is limited how much you can modify.

 

13 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Scripts often don't work right in mesh.

Not sure what kind of scripts you are thinking about there. A script is a script and does exactly the same no matter what object it's inside. But of course the geometry of mesh is different than a prim and that may cause issues for scripts that alters the actual item one way or another. A regular door script for eaxmple will only work for a mesh door that was made to work with regular door scripts.

 

17 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

It's not as adaptable to editing as prims.

In my opinion that is the biggest disadvantage of mesh compared to prims. Prims are just so wonderfully adaptable.

 

18 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The worse thing about mesh is that you cannot put one mesh on another mesh, and this drives you crazy. Instead of just bouncing, what it does is give a confusing error message, "The owner of this land does not allow..." although that is irrelevant and then the item disappears, not even to lost and found, but into the ether, until you relog. SO ANNOYING.

You really shouldn't have that problem today. It only applies to meshes with faulty physics. It took us a while to figure it out - it's not as if LL ever published any usable documentation about mesh - but today any half decent mesh maker knows how to make proper physics models you can rez on.

[Chic Aeon]

6 hours ago, Pamela Galli said:

I read The Tipping Point a few years ago. It turns out that even in this era of immediate mass communication, word of mouth wins the day. Marketing is important, but not as much. And that has been my experience. 

I decided long ago I find marketing beyond tedious, rather like a trip to the dentist.  I don't participate in events or hunts. I do my own mini events regularly, and I pay for a magazine ad every other month. I rarely send anything to bloggers. I ignore my Flicker pages. I do Facebook sporadically. What I do depend on is my clientele -- some of whom have been customers almost ten years -- telling friends. 

Taking a break from a really funny movie after a successful and "learning" mesh day.

I am also not a marketer. I also don't network unless you count these forums which I certainly don't . I don't do ANY social media except for one group on Google Plus for Opensim and that is much more about supporting Opensim and making it look as "viable" as possible for those that make it their choice. 

THAT being said, I do fairly well. I won't be moving into a penthouse anytime soon but it is a well paying hobby. I will say, sadly and somewhat embarrassingly that I personally haven't found any increase in sales from blogger posts. Yep, hard for me to say after nine plus years of blogging. And hopefully my posts help the folks that I feature; I know not. Blogging has changed dramatically over the years -- almost a decade and the games people play make me tired. I continue to do my thing, MY way mostly because I love taking pictures and I like to support fellow creators. 

Hunts which used to be helpful are now very marginal and mostly feature items so poorly made only the newest of us would want them. There are of course exceptions, but I rarely even go on hunts in order to blog them these days as one can  visit and hunt at 100 shops and get a handful (literally ONE handful) of bloggable items. It simply isn't worth the effort. 

But I am even worse than Pamela as I don't have a group. OMG! How CAN that be?  I just don't. I like to create and while I have been on the event wagon for a year and a half I have decided of late to build what I want to build and not build "products". That is how I used to work and some of my best long time sellers (LONG time sellers) I made for myself.  So currently I am furnishing my bedroom and those items are going into events -- after I make things for myself . I am also working on another project and again, those items are going into a venue after I make them for that. 

We can get so caught up in building for sales that we lose the whole point (for me anyway) of building which was to create, enjoy and learn. 

I have only been on my reflection of the old road mentality  for a couple of weeks but I am enjoying myself a lot more.

Whatever we creators do, in what ever matter we choose to do it , "I" feel that the most important thing is to love what we are doing. 

 

And a PS here before I hit the publish button. I really enjoy doing events. I like to watch the setup and the venue coming to life. I TP in often to see what is new while the setup is going on. I unofficially blog (with permission) the events I am in.  I have some other thoughts on events and monthly venues but they are way beyond the scope of this discussion so I will calmly close and get back to my movie -

 

 

[Pamela Galli]

33 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

But I am even worse than Pamela as I don't have a group. OMG! How CAN that be?

"Even worse"? 

I don't have a group either, other than Facebook. I do have a mailing list. 

I believe if it ain't broke don't fix it. So far it ain't broke. 

[Chic Aeon]

1 hour ago, Pamela Galli said:

"Even worse"? 

I don't have a group either, other than Facebook. I do have a mailing list. 

I believe if it ain't broke don't fix it. So far it ain't broke. 

Well I don't do Facebook (in any reality) and I don't even have a mailing list LOL. So I win!  

[Trinity Yazimoto]

Well, marketing isnt my thing, either but i do a minimum. I create for my own delight, i always did, and probably will always do. I limit myself to 4 events requiring an exclusive per month, this is the limit i can produce. I work full time RL,(librarian) i love my rl job and my SL hobbie NEVER did enough money for even paying for my parcel (in the past) and my sim nowaday. I pay with my own RL money. I also pay all my shopping bad habits with my rl money. My hobbies pay the event fees as i start now to get my money back for those, but barely more. I dont do this for money, as i money and I have always had a weird relationship anyway lol..

I have my own website, where i post about my items and also its an opportunity for me to create new pics and so use a tiny portion of what i buy (lol).

i have Flickr, google +, Twitter and recently FB. People seing me there would tell you that really my marketing there is not agressive, i prob post twice a week, (the days im not working in rl) and that s all.

I also have a small group, and so i may offer them 1 new groupgift each sunday + 1 monthly. 

I love to create and for me as long it remains fun it will be ok. The day i will not enjoy it anymore, i will do something else. SL is not my job, there is no reason i bound myself to things i do not enjoy. 

I do love working in Photoshop and Blender. And more than that, i think i need it ... The rest is a bonus but not a need

[Prokofy Neva]

4 hours ago, ChinRey said:

You really shouldn't have that problem today. It only applies to meshes with faulty physics. It took us a while to figure it out - it's not as if LL ever published any usable documentation about mesh - but today any half decent mesh maker knows how to make proper physics models you can rez on.

This is simply 100% false. I don't know how people end up saying things like this. I think it comes from theory, without any practice.

I deal with hundreds, thousands of mesh items -- I put furniture in hundreds of rentals, I buy all kinds of gachas, hundreds and hundreds and HUNDREDS of items. They do not rez one atop another. Believe me, hope beats eternal and I try and try with this and just often forget, so hard does the old prim habit die. And baboom, they go disappear, I get error messages it doesn't work -- just had this last night with three different creators' items I was putting out, over and over again. 

Nearly ever single piece of mesh has this problem. Very few don't. When they don't, it's maybe the floor of the house that doesn't have the problem -- but putting things on book cases by the same author will have this problem. I can easily demonstrate to you a hundred different creators with this problem.

It's a theory only, what you're saying. The reality is, it just doesn't work 90% of the time with a huge variety of items.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

8 hours ago, Chase01 said:

The bigger creators have multiple people working under them. I am sure some users aren't aware of that but I don't think that really makes much of a difference to anyone including myself. The owner symbolizes the brand and that is what people buy into. If they made it themselves—that's great!

Some of the most talented and original mesh makers use these templates and prefabs because they are stretched so thin. They could make the same thing themselves but re-texturing is easier. I find this more and more. I don't care, I buy it anyway, but I credit the template maker first in my blog.

[Phil Deakins]

8 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Yes, there used to be talk about starting with one basics shape, twist it, then change to another shape to achieve some unusual results. I've done it myself but with hindsight it may have been just an akward way to achieve another secret trick with prims.

Take a look at these two pictures:

 

 

 

@ChinRey Ok. I see the differences in the prim's shape, and I see that all the edit box data is identical. So what's the other  "secret trick"? To put it another way, how was it done?

Anyway, I was just pointing out that the phrase, 'torturing prims', did not mean simply editing prims, regardless of how convoluted a shape they became, which is how it occasionally gets used. It meant changing prims in ways other than the straight forward adjustments in the edit box.

[Pussycat Catnap]

11 hours ago, ChinRey said:

 

It's mine, I made it myself. It took me a whole minute of hard work!

The reason is we used the same texture creator tools and only made one very minor modification to one of the factory presets.

Ponder what program that is. I've been struggling for a long time to figure out making some textures I've wanted to put on my outfits... and spinning my wheels...

I'd love it if I knew of something that could help me out like this.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

51 minutes ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

Ponder what program that is. I've been struggling for a long time to figure out making some textures I've wanted to put on my outfits... and spinning my wheels...

I'd love it if I knew of something that could help me out like this.

If I had to guess I'd say it was Filter Forge, which has a huge library of user created procedural textures which can be used to generate near-infinite variations (in most cases complete with appropriate normal map, etc).

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

This is simply 100% false. I don't know how people end up saying things like this. I think it comes from theory, without any practice.

Nope. I have lots and lots of practice and I know exactly what I'm talking about.

 

2 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I deal with hundreds, thousands of mesh items

Then you have hundreds, thousands of mesh items made by unskilled mesh makers. Or old mesh items. As I said, LL didn't exactly document mesh so we had to do quite a lot of testing to figure it out and that took a while. Me and Drongle and Aquila and Arton and others have spent endless hours on the beta grid reverse engineering the uploader's handling of physics models. It's all documented in the mesh section of this forum. Browse through all the old posts there and you'll find all the info, both the theory and practical examples.

Or I can tell you here. But you have to say please first because you my friend need a lesson in politeness more than anything else.

Edited May 31, 2017 by ChinRey
Editing