Premium Plus - What are your 'Must Have' features and what are you willing to pay for it?

[Cali Souther]

11 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

 

Inventory has been a primary focus for us making Catznip the last few years (because we're hopeless shopaholics) but even with everything we've done in that regard, we're still bound by inventory being based on the desktop file explorer model. 

(rambling follows)

I've been religiously using the CTS wardrobe to catalog all my clothing purchases the last few months, it's slow going, complicated (and very particular at times) but it does at least give me something taggable & browsable. We've talked about doing something like that in the viewer, but really we need tagging support from LL (something even some Lindens have openly wished for). Neither of us really like the idea of the viewer maintaining a separate tag database .. which to do right would be best done with a web backend so tagging could be crowd sourced (and follow the user regardless of where they logged in) .. which then brings up privacy concerns. It's one thing for LL to have such a backend for viewers to pull tags from, it's quite another for a third party viewer to do it on their own servers (not to mention concerns about it breaking LL's shared experience rules). A local file/database avoids those problems, but that's a single point of failure with some pretty huge consequences should it get lost or damaged, it also ties the user to that one viewer .. which is pointless when such a feature would likely be picked up by other viewers and people do like to hop about.

Kitty just keeps everything in the auto created folders for purchase date and region name so she can then look things up based on when or what event the thing was purchased from .. typically using regular expressions (because OF COURSE THATS WHAT SHE DOES).

We've explored quite a few games to see how they handle large inventories, and as a rule, they don't. In many cases adding the file and folder model we have would actually be an improvement. Where they do make an effort, you end up with something like IMVU which can't work as the asset system they have is orders of magnitude simpler than ours. It's not possible to auto generate such a display, and then we're back into getting users to invest significant time into adding their stuff to the pictorial system .. and begging LL to add tag field to assets!!

The crazy number of combinations of heads, bodies and avatar types possible in SL means any solution good for everyone is going to come with a fair amount of complexity.

Creating another inventory organization "mini game" that's as time consuming and open to interpretation as the one we have now isn't really better, it's just different.

 

Inventory is a very powerful tool and really underpins a lot of what makes SL unique, it enables an almost unlimited flexibility for creators to ship multiple versions of a thing and bundle extras, dev parts, instruction manuals and so on. If you buy a thing in a game, you get the thing. No more, no less, and it will always work everywhere because everywhere is really a very limited set of options and the thing is hardcoded for each of them in advance.

 

But seriously though, tagging support from LL would be a great addition. Every asset gets a tag field that can be edited by the user regardless of the things permissions, and when you start typing a #tag a database query happens and offers some suggested tags based on what you're typing and what other people added as tags for an identically named asset are offered. 

 

(rambling ends)

I'm not techie enough to understand most of that.  😉    Good luck,  if you figure it out - I'll be sure to try the viewer!!

[Jennifer Boyle]

13 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Inventory has been a primary focus for us making Catznip the last few years (because we're hopeless shopaholics) but even with everything we've done in that regard, we're still bound by inventory being based on the desktop file explorer model.

I have long thought the solution is an app that permits offline management and then connects to apply the changes. See:

 

[LittleMe Jewell]

The biggest problem with any offline inventory management is that there is no way to generate images of what is inside of 'objects'.  It could be multiple pieces that make up an outfit or it could be a single piece of an outfit or it could be a box of boxes or a HUD or ....................

And without an image of what we are trying to work with, most of us are not going to be able to do much with it.  It is the unpacking and then rezzing to view or trying on stuff, that is needed in order to properly file things.  I could possibly do a tad bit of re-organizing / filing without actually seeing things, but that isn't going to help my inventory much in the grand scheme of things.  There are just too many items that need to be seen first.

[Sid Nagy]

On 3/29/2022 at 9:15 PM, So Whimsy said:

I've recently downgraded back to basic. I was premium because of owning my own land however, due to having to pay 19% VAT on tier cost I can rent land just SO much cheaper.

Not sure what LL would have to add to make me want to go back to premium, nothing really interesting in it for me and the one thing I did want was costly.

I just kicked out premium too.
The last new Belli themes are all in all a bit disappointing IMHO.
I don't really enjoy making things for those.
Maybe I return to premium if they come up with a nicer theme in the future.

And since I'm not a fan of the traditional mainland, I can use my money better on the tier of my private land plot for now.

Edited March 30, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[So Whimsy]

21 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

I just kicked out premium too.
The last new Belli themes are all in all a bit disappointing IMHO.
I don't really enjoy making things for those.
Maybe I return to premium if they come up with a nicer theme in the future.

And since I'm not a fan of the traditional mainland, I can use my money better on the tier of my private land plot for now.

I was really disappointed with most of the themes, too, especially the newest. Hoping they'll come up with something nicer in the future. Maybe they could do several little themes that only have 20 regions or so, like tree houses or underwater dwellings. That'd be nice as opposed to all that generic stuff we already have on the MP aplenty.