Anything new for you with your business in 2012?

[Chelsea Malibu]

Happy New Year everyone.  As I look at what I want to get done for 2012, I was wondering what others have on their list of goals for 2012 in world and in particular, for their business.

My goals for the year are pretty simple but may take some time.

1. Have everything in my store available in the Marketplace.  I probably have about 10% of my store in MP so far but as we all know, setting up boxes, making the ads, creating descriptions, etc, takes a lot of time.  Was sorta holding off until the Direct Delivery but who knows when we will see that.

2. My Frank Lloyd Wright collection.  He is one of my biggest inspirations and I have already started but I want to create an entire line of FLW inspired home accessories, stained glass, lighting, etc.

3. Make some new friends and get out more.  I spend most of my time secluded in my workshop making more stuff and I almost never go out and explore or make new friends.  2012 I want to change that by making some new friends and to see if I can find that Second Life I used to love so much.  Yes, most of you remember that day before malls and clubs where all there was.  When people actually built cool sims just for sake of building cool sims?  It must be there still but I don't know where to look.

And, on the back burner, I still like the idea of starting a Second Life Better Business Bureau but that is not something I want to take on alone.

[Pamela Galli]

Mesh.

[Princess Verwood]

Great topic Chelsea. My goals for 2012 are things I've been wanting to do but havent found the chance:

1. Either find a new mainstore or build a new interior to the one I have now. It would be nice to have more space to put things as it grows. But I often find that I come to a blank when I try and think about what would be good.

2. I would like (though I have been hesistant) to pick up a sculpty program again to learn more. I would really like to do this in this coming year.

3. Meet more people, network, and find better ways to promote.

 

I hope a wonderful new year and a very sucessful 2012 year to come for everyone!

[Medhue Simoni]

Rigged Mesh Lycan Avatars. Just male and female, and I'm not really sure I'll do anymore, myself. Rigging it was a pain in the butt. I must have uploaded it about 20 times just cause of the rigging. Really tho, I got enough work just in animation to do, so I will be working with some mesh avatar makers for my other AOs. If any mesh avatar designers want to work with me to match up my AOs with your avatars, just contact me inworld. I will require that the avatars be efficiently made and under 40k in display cost. If things work out, I will just display your avatars next to my AOs, and hopefully vice versa. So, basically we are just trading hippo venders.

Plus, more work on my combat system, and some other AOs, like zombie and more monster AOs.

If I can afford it, I do want to buy another full sim. This will be a combat sim, maybe even a Lycan slash Vampire combat sim. This is kind of part of a much larger idea with possibly a video series to promote it. We'll see, it all has to do with how sales go, and how much I can get done.

[Tamara Artis]

hmmmm

1. learn to draw hair

2. practice editing photos so I can do it faster;

3. get some time and finally set up my x-poser stand thats waiting in my inventory for 6 months now lol;

4. find some time so I could finally do some free photos for my sl friends;

5. learn how to make poses!

 

[Porky Gorky]

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Pamela Galli wrote:

Mesh.

 

 

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I''m finding it really hard to commit myself to developing mesh in 2012. So many people I've spoken to are experiencing performance issues with the V3 based viewers and are refusing to use them. With such a small percentage of the userbase actually able to properly view mesh (and I expect a good percentage of those people are creators themselves) it doesn't make good business sense to me to spend my production time producing content for such a small userbase. I've played around with mesh trees and landscaping items, but I am wary of investing hundreds of hours into creating large mesh builds.

So I am completely undecided on how to develop my business in 2012. 6 to 12 months ago I was all ready to embrace mesh, unfortunately I don't believe the average prefab purchaser is ready. So at least for the next few months I guess I will continue to develop builds with standard and sculpted prims, taking advantage of the new scripting and LI features to make my prefabs more  prim efficient and lag friendly.

[Chelsea Malibu]

I would think the new prim scale would help you as well or does it?  I'd be curious to find out.  I do see where Mesh for homes is not where it needs to be yet though the irony of that is hilarious since it does in fact use less processing power.

I'm in the same boat as you on this.  I would love to do direct imports from 3DS which I love using but given the PE restrictions, it's just not prudent at the moment.

Another point on mesh that someone pointed out here recently was that SL was not built for this as it was a hacked in feature.  Most game engines require mesh and when you build for performance, the only way to do this is with mesh. 

I should have added something to my list that I'll add now.  I bought Sculpt Studio over a year ago, it has been rezzed in my workshops since I got it but have yet to put out a single quality sculpt.  It seems like it should be easier than the 3DS import things I have to do but I am not a professional modeler so the studio idea appeals to me a lot.  If anyone has some suggestions on where to learn to use this, I'd love it since the instructions that came with it don't say much.

[Medhue Simoni]

Mesh is just a matter of learning the system. Once you know the system, just about anything is feasable and almost ALWAYS less prims. Sometimes, much less. I'm still a mesh newbie really. Never made a mesh until last year. I made this shack with mesh. It is 29 prims. It is for my combat system. Inside of it is a rerezzing ammo pack and health pack. All the windows are breakable, and you have to break down the doors, which also rerez, to get in. Oh, and there are rerezzing beer bottles on the porch to shoot at. 2 textures cover the shack, doors, and windows. Then, there is 1 texture for each of the rerezzing ammo, health and bottles. That's 5 textures for the whole thing.

 

Not long ago, I sold a rope bridge, which is only 14 prims and 1 texture. The purchaser messaged me and told me he saved over 200 prims on his sim, just by using my rope bridge instead of the prim/sculpty version he had. I even made mesh haybales, to replace my cube prims 1's. These are spread out around my combat area, and by linking the haybales together, I saved another 30. This was only replacing cubes but the linking benefit you get from mesh can save you a ton.

[Medhue Simoni]

To be honest, I think most of every1's lag is in their own avatars. I have yet to see some1 without a mesh avatar that is under 150k for the display cost. My Werewolf mesh avatar, that I'm working on right now, is under 20k in display cost, and that is fully armored, and with weapons. He is only 8k, for just the avatar. Imagine how much smoother things will be when every1 is wearing mesh.

[Charlotte Bartlett]

Ditto here, I have so far got 3 houses ready to go for Mesh but am holding them back until the market feels right.   It's been really inspiring to test them and see what can be done but I think it will be a few months in before I put them out.

My other goal for 2012 is to move into avatars/mesh etc.  I have created my first line but still a LONG way to go - fingers crossed I'll achieve it!

<3 Charlotte

[Harm Xue]

 

1- Get all these new ideas out of my head and into actual items, it's been hard to defeat inertia and get to work.

2- Expand the store sim wide, possibly incorporate with a role play sim.

3- Stop myself from trying to make mesh avatars, there is so much potential there, the SL standard mesh is a pet peeve of mine and how it works (or doesn't work) with animations, but it would be a huge endeavourer. Most...stay...clear of it...stop myself...

 

[Madeliefste Oh]

Nice subject, Chelsea.

1. Improve mesh skills. For sculpts I made all my textures in Photoshop. With mesh I'm now experimenting more with 3d generated textures, and 3d textures combined with Photoshop.  Apart from getting more handy with modeling I will mainly focus on getting more skilled in texturing in 3d.

2. I'm going to expand cYo further. The focus will be more on mesh then on sculpties.

3. New brand. I think I found a hole in the market that is not covered yet. I'm going to make a new brand to cover this hole. It will be a niche shop. All objects will be made out of mesh. I'm not going to do this alone, it will be a cooperative project, where I work with several people who are talented in a field I don't cover myself. We need about half a year for all preparations, so the brand will not see the light before mid 2012.
Since we still cannot have several stores on one merchant, I'm going to work with an alt as seller for this brand. Because it is just necessairy all objects in the brand stay together in one shop, both in world and on the marketplace.

 

 

 

[Toysoldier Thor]

Hmmmm what will I work on doing in 2012?  hhmmm

 

1. Create a new sculpty pack.  All my sales since August of 2010 - which have been relatively solid and stable until August of 2011 when my sales made a significant reduce shift (settling at about 30% less than before August) - have been on products I created prior to August 2010.  I havent made a new Sculpty Pack in about 16 months (I got addicted to the SL Art World).
   
   So I vow to get my butt back to making a couple new landscape Sculpty packs for SL and the other open sim worlds I sell in.  I cant complain though - considering the monthly revenue my sculpty packs make me and that I spend about 5 hours a month on my store - it has been an amazing cash cow for me!  But Time to give my store a boost with some new products!
2. I said in August when Mesh officially enterd the main production grid of SL that Mesh will not be mainstream adopted until about Q2 of 2012.  Well the good news is my predictions are tracking to be pretty accurate.  Although you can buy and use Mesh - the lack of stable viewer support, lack of creators, tons of mesh-related technical problems and limits that havent been figured out, and the technical complexity of the new technology have all proven to be factors that influenced my prediction.
   
   BUT, I still believe that Mesh will continue to mature and grow in adoption.  The goofy current statistic of "18% of all sims that have at least one mesh on it" from LL had little meaning except to prove that mesh's adoption is much slower than LL predicted.  But I still believe that the hurdles of mesh will start clearing up and by Q2 of 2012 it will be a viable technology for MAINSTREAM creators/merchants to start creating mesh products.
   
   So althogh mesh is still not a viable alternative to Sculpties for large sized landscaping and terrains creation (too costly to scale up), in 2012 I will start experimenting with the process of how a MESH is generated and optimized and imported into SL and properly packed and sold.  Maybe I will even create an experimental Mesh Landscape pack to see how it sells compared to my sculpty landscape packs.
3. Try to survive the envitable arrival and deployment of production Direct Delivery into SL MP.  We know LL's hisotry of deploying even maintenance changes and we have all witness the horrid pain of their major transitions of systems.  So we all have to expect the transition to DD will not be fun for most of us Merchants in MP.  Once I survive it, then I need to adapt to it and leverage it if it can be leveraged somehow.
   
   My strategy to transition to DD is to be the latest of adopters to DD.  I will stay on Magicboxes for as long as LL allows us Merchants to use it.  Unlike a lot of complaints I read here about horrid "magicbox" blamed delivery issues, I rarely have delivery problems.  Yes they are slow delivery at night but they get to my customers almost all the time.  DD is not a huge benefit for me.  SO... I will let the merchants (those that are Beta testing it now) that love being early adopters do all the hard work.  Let them find all the glitches in LL's code and system.  I will enter DD when everything seems stable and no more DD complaints show up in the forum.

There - that is my list.

In the meantime I will play with my Art, Art Gallery, Karaoke singing (shameless plug - that tonight is my first ever real SL singing gig at 11pm), and generally enjoying SL's daily life.

[Kayleigh Fadlan]

My plans for 2012 are to improve the school even more.

Our Newbie and Info Path needs to be overworked to inform all residents coming to our school not only about the basics, but also about important things such as lag, rezzing probs, texturing, lod and other things people want to or should know.

There are also plans for more useful things to put in our store for our students, along with our tutorials. We also plan to do video tutorials to make it easier.

And of course, more classes and teachers, especially RL topics.

 

[Sassy Romano]

I'm going to work on making Toy my sleeping partner...

[Toysoldier Thor]

---

Sassy Romano wrote:

I'm going to work on making Toy my sleeping partner...

---

 

HAHA!  

I might be Cheap but Im not Easy....

(hmmm come to think about it... Im easy to - DAMN!)

[VonGklugelstein Alter]

I am going to become fiercly more competitive and will probably launch a few new lines and products.

 

I may start making more light fixtures, some Art Deco and FLW inspired accessories, some Prefab Homes with more than one room per floor, mesh stuff, more suckulpty building products, new door scripts and of course a gazzillion more textures in a buncha fancy colors. 

 

Maybe if I find the time I will even fix the trashed listings on SLM that are still a mess since the merge from SLX..

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Basically following Linden Lab's lead by improving offerings here and branching out as stated in the last blog post by Rod ....

"In addition to delivering new features and increasing our support for Second Life, we will be launching some completely different products next year not related to Second Life."

I think I'll call them Dart Dollars, or just DDs for short!

[Josh Susanto]

First, I need to get a 3-button mouse, which is not as easy here as you might imagine.

That done, I'd like to finally dive into Blender and Sketchup, specifically to produce mesh building components with a minumum amount of data, emphasizing things like the use of tetrahedrons rather than cubes wherever possible. Two mesh tetrahedrons use less data than one mesh cube. So, for example, I should be able to make a tetrahedron with an interior surface and an exterior surface for less data than it would take to make a cube with only an exterior. How to get in and out is still a "problem", but with 1-triangle poseballs and such, this begins to be practical at least as some kind of alien architecture. 

Even as a more terrestrial style, though, I'm hoping to make very heavy use of large intersecting mesh triangles. Making buildings this way produces a colder, more geometric effect, but it also frees up data to be used for things like rocks and plants, which we should probably only want to be less geometric, if anything. The total idea is to allow not just more consumer choices, but also a more stark contrast between "natural" and "artificial" items.

I had thought about making mesh versions of a bunch of my sculpts, to see how much wasted data I can remove. But having looked at the question more carefully, I realize that my sculpts don't really waste much data, because almost every triangle is at a different orientation than those tangent to it. The loading cost for my mushroom template, for example, turned out to be more than 80L. So I'm not going to pursue that angle any time soon, you can imagine. The only reason I can anticipate converting any of my sculpts to mesh would probably be to improve specific points of curvature or something like that. Because most of them are just rocks anyway, I'm probably not going to stay very busy with that.

By the end of the year, though, I hope to be making "efficient" mesh avatars. Probably something like gastropods with one short, fat arm and one long, skinny arm. Maybe they can live in big tetrahedrons or something.

 

[Robert Galland]

It's always hard for me to balance the requirements of real life with that of the business I love operating here in SL and this year will be no different.  I am going to try to find more balance and release more items this year.  I started working with mesh like others here and find I enjoy it.  Just waiting for the right time myself. 

[Porky Gorky]

HI Robert.

I find it a bit disconcerting how many of our fellow prefab creators from "back in the day" have gone now. I bet there are less than a dozen prefab businesses left that started when we did. Some of those that are still here seem totally inactive, they have land and sell stuff but haven't added any new content for years. I stumbled upon one of my old favorites the other day, Modlife owned by Rem Koohaas, he built all those cool white modern builds that seem to spread across the grid  in 2005/6. It was really cool seeing his stuff again, it all seems really retro now and bought back some fond memories.

Anyway, glad to see some other old timers are still around and planning for 2012. Best of luck to you :matte-motes-big-grin:

[Robert Galland]

Happy New Year, Porky.

Yep, still ticking.  Coming up on my 5th anniversary in operation, yet not one of the models I made early and still sell are in the same form they were when they were released.  Adapt or die.  You are not entitled to your place in the market and have to keep at it.  I realized that even before I made it big here and have never forgotten it.  I think that is one of the reasons I am getting ready to head into year six frankly.  Keep at it and I hope it is still fun for you. 

Rob

[Porky Gorky]

So did everyone's plans come to fruition in 2012 or did your business change or develop in a way you had not foreseen?

[Pamela Galli]

Not really. I knew I had to make mesh, and I have made mesh.

[Madeliefste Oh]

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Madeliefste Oh wrote:

 

1. Improve mesh skills. For sculpts I made all my textures in Photoshop. With mesh I'm now experimenting more with 3d generated textures, and 3d textures combined with Photoshop.  Apart from getting more handy with modeling I will mainly focus on getting more skilled in texturing in 3d.

2. I'm going to expand cYo further. The focus will be more on mesh then on sculpties.

3. New brand. I think I found a hole in the market that is not covered yet. I'm going to make a new brand to cover this hole. It will be a niche shop. All objects will be made out of mesh. I'm not going to do this alone, it will be a cooperative project, where I work with several people who are talented in a field I don't cover myself. We need about half a year for all preparations, so the brand will not see the light before mid 2012.

Since we still cannot have several stores on one merchant, I'm going to work with an alt as seller for this brand. Because it is just necessairy all objects in the brand stay together in one shop, both in world and on the marketplace.

 

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Check

1. Done

2. Done

3. Got the people together, a good team. Made the business plan, designed the overall look, started with the first two products, and then RL came between. I had to shunt this project.

When, about two months ago, I wanted to pick the project again two of the four people were not available anymore.

 

At the moment I'm unsure if I still want to invest the time in a new SL brand, or better choose to use this time to develop something for another environment. Might be better to bet on several horses, since SL keeps slowly shrinking.

On the other hand the project is still on my mind, and the people that are still available are people I enjoy to work with. And the hole is still there, no brand jumped into in yet.

 

All with all I did not make up my mind yet, if I'm going to pick up this ambition again in 2013. The project might starve softly, or one day the passion and urge to realise this idea might pop up again, and in the end the brand will still see the light.

I'm curious. 2013: Surprise me!