Myrylyn
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Posts posted by Myrylyn
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A quick follow-up. With the release of the latest "Oculus-ready" beta viewer, you cannot revert back to the one from 2014. Even with "update manually" checked in the settings before you try to log in with the old one, as soon as you try to connect to the main grid you're told "You must update to the latest build."
That's... not good. That wrecks a lot of a the fun projects I've been working on.At least I made one last video before the switch-over. As a major advocate for Second Life, I feel like there is going to be egg on my face after this. I just want to cry.
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Yes, the latest build is very frustrating... given how great Linden Lab's original Oculus-capable viewer was back in 2014. I've been limping along using that one ever since. It produced such great results that I never updated my Oculus drivers beyond .6.01 (to remain compatible with that one-off project.) Now, I'll have to figure out how to revert everything back... and that's not going to be easy.
Anyway, here's something I made with the "old" Oculus-ready Second Life Viewer:
As you can see, there's a huge difference in the quality of the "old" viewer and the "new" one that Nvzn has posted.
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For starters, I'm super excited by all of this! I'm not going to pooh-pooh anything yet until I've really had a chance to play with all this amazing new stuff. Seems to me an upcoming version of SL is going to incorporate hand/finger tracking as well as face-tracking a la FaceShift. I have a ton of experience with both, thankfully!
As for animating such a cool rig, I've been just doing basic stuff in QAvimator up until now, using 3DS Max for my mesh and vertex weighting. Clearly, I'm going to have to graduate to a better animation tool.
Can anyone recommend a good animation tool that'll work well for Second Life?
I'm going to stare at this thread until I hear about where I can download the skeleton file-- though I supposed I could import the angle that someone kindly supplied as a DAE. I've already loaded that onto Aditi and I'm delighted with the flapping wings and wiggly tail animations you can upload as an .anim file.
I am positively giddy with delight! Even if it's not perfect, it's a huge step forward! Wheee!!!!
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Hi, Cecilia!
I'd love to share my story with you. Would you be willing to meet in world? Can I friend you?
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No joy. I filed a ticket on the issue and I'll post whatever they suggest to this thread.
Seems someone sweeping through the Marketplace listings is being a bit of a busy-body today. We merchants love that, don't we?
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Well, I submitted a ticket-- that'll be the first step I expect.
Seems a little tedious that my work was flagged as "Not As Advertised" because the category was "BDSM Costume" as opposed to "BDSM Accessory."
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I recently had some of my newest products flagged for being in the wrong category. The notice I received kindly suggested a new category for the work.
I updated the product to be in the new category (everything looked up-to-snuff before I hit "Update") and hit "Update."
However, when I go to edit the product again, it still shows the old category. Anyone else have this problem?
I'm not sure how to get support with this issue...
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Found an even "better" example:
Someone ordered something on April 8th and it was delivered on May 2nd.
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I am looking closely at the difference between my "Orders" page and my "Transactions" page.
An item just appeared in my "Orders" page on May 2nd. In my "Transactions" page, the order was placed on April 28th.
That's just sort of terrifying.... Maybe I did have a lot of sales and they're only just now being cataloged...
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I think one thing people neglect tracking is how many times your items appear in search results (Reports->Top Searched Items) and, on a more granular level, how many times those items are clicked on and viewed (Reports->Top Selling Items).
Do note that the "Top Selling Items" also lists the number of times that someone has viewed the items, not just the number of times it was purchase. This is hugely importantant, because it indicates that you've made an "impression" on a customer. If your impression-to-purchase conversion ratio is really low, that probably means your item is attractive to them, but perhaps too expensive... or the images or text are misleading or uninformative. Good "copy" and images are critical at this point.
Unfortunately, pulling these figures into a database for analysis is still rather hard-- I don't actually do it yet. But I can imagine writing a web page scrubber that pulls this wonderful information out, tags it all by date, and allows you to do item-by-item analysis. Running the scrubber once a day should be sufficient to get great data.
For those that are not so technically adept, you could always do a screenshot of the first page of your Top Selling screen and compare it to yesterday's snapshot.... and do the comparisons by eye.
I will try to whip a system up that does as I've described above, but it sure would be easier if the Marketplace compiled and displayed that data in a more useful form. After all, it would help their constituency to move more product, thereby increasing Linden Lab's commission.
Stay tuned.
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Regarding the re-listing of items, I think it within reason and within the bounds of "fair play" to re-list and item that has zero sales and/or zero reviews. It's entirely possible that one might list an item only to have it flooded out by a massive listing of similiar items by another store owner.
I can't tell you how many times my items have been flooded out by someone else's "one-in-every-color" batch of new items.
As and aside...
Gosh, it would certainly help customers if each listing we did had the option to have seperate SKUs in it-- you know, a drop down for each color / pattern / flavor. From the client side, wading through a listing of one stores very, very similiar items can be quite tedious.
If the Marketplace had such a feature, you can bet I would use it for my similar items.
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I hasten to add that I try not to use keyword spamming and none of my work falls under the 60's-70's theme of "madstyle." That could account, perhaps, for the week-over-week 50% dropoff in sales I suffered in April.
You can bet that the next time the Marketplace has a promotion, I'm going to do a very nasty Frenemy-Style interpretation on it. Within the TOS, of course.
:matte-motes-big-grin-evil:
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Here are my latest weekly figures, for what it is worth, as well as a graph of my historical records all the way back to selling my first product:
EOW - Earnings
4/8 - $US 208.33
4/15 - $US 162.58
4/22 - $US 91.40
4/29 - $(US 45.26
Make of it what you will. My store number is 95818 and I never suffered any sort of problems with my store. For me the conversion to DD was very smooth and painless. Nonetheless, I cannot explain the areas below that I've highlighted.
Perhaps someone else has some theories.
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And... just like THAT, my sales are booming again.
What a curiousity.
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Wow. Just wow.
I'd love to heap all kinds of ire on Linden Labs but, frankly, when I type in specific terms that would lead customers to my products... um... my products do appear... and they appear within just the first few pages of results.
The only conclusion that I can draw from this is that people have just stopped buying my products for whatever reason-- and they've stopped buying them very suddenly.
This leaves just a few possibilities:
1) Someone is making products that serve my niche better than I am
2) My customer base has been satiated by existing product line
3) My customer base has maxed out
4) People are spending their money elsewhereI guess I'm just going to have to sit tight and hope people start buying again...
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I'm with you, Medhue, I'm halting all production as well. With all the talents I've picked up over the last few months building things for the Marketplace, I should be moving on to developing iOS and Android apps anyway. I mean, blimey, I could even pick up C# and write stuff for the Windows Phone 7 in XNA. I hear it is easy...
... the app marketplaces are actually run by reputable and reliable companies.
I'm rather disappointed.
:matte-motes-crying:
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Madstyle?
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Wouldn't it be just like Christmas if all this seeming sale stoppage was just a delay in reporting? :matte-motes-big-grin:
Sadly, I've already tested this theory. If I buy something for myself, from myself, I get notified almost immediately. :matte-motes-nerdy:
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Well, look out, because Diablo 3 just entered a completely open beta at 12 noon today and it will last through the weekend.
We'll probably lose a lot of a cross-gendered and male avatars this weekend!
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Well, I can safely say that this week has been an absolute disaster. Down from the previous weeks' earnings ($200, $160) to nearly zero.
Something has surely occurred.
Perhaps its that I didn't carpet-bomb my listings with "madstyle."
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I was discussing the impact that paying one's taxes might have on the Second Life economy with some friends over lunch, and I am hoping that you're right, Kampu. However, I wouldn't have expected the belt-tightening to be so dramatic.
Hopefully, when they get their refund checks, their money will go into this economy-- and not the real-world one!
:matte-motes-sarcasm:
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I've only recently started doing in-world sales, as I have not wanted to sign on with any sales vendor services (such as Hippo) because I want to stay as "vertical" a buiness as possible. With my numbers being so small, I want keep costs down.
Therefore, I've built my own kiosk system which holds nearly all of my products. Because getting sales data from the kiosks is almost as important as getting the sales themselves, I had to learn some basic PHP, mySQL, etc. as well as create an entire database system within the kiosk itself. It was quite a learning experience for my wee, young brain!
But, to your point, I see very little sales from my in-world kiosk-- even though it is at a prime location in the South Side Snakepit's foyer. I've often spied on its usage and it appears as though people just use it to view my products and browse the photoshoots... then just hit the "More Info" button to buy from the Marketplace. It's frustrating, but I think people enjoy the security (receipts, records, etc.) that the Marketplace gives them.
It does make it hard for me to pay rent on a Hippo stall that doesn't actually make money directly.
So, yeah, the better the Marketplace becomes, the less sales I expect to see from in-world sales tiles or kiosks. More and more, I'd expect to see these kiosks as more of an advertising vehicle-- which is why I crafted my custom kiosk to work (and appear) the way it does.
It's an experiment-- an innovation-- that I hope will pay off and raise awareness of my shop. I would share a picture of the kiosk, but it is largely obscene.
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This has happened to me twice now, and each time, my normally high sales (150$US/week) numbers drop off to nearly nothing... then take about two weeks to get back to normal. I track my sales data very closely and I definitely see patterns to the behavior. The last time the downturn occured began 2/7 and ran until 3/1. Those were lean times. The earnings data has an almost vertical drop-off and resumption.Again, this week, as compared to the last, the difference in earnings is quite stark. Not the good, Game of Thrones "Stark," either:
My weekly accounting period ends each Sunday-- with last week's take being $162.58.
Typically, over the Monday-Wednesday timeframe, I would have made around $50US. Not counting sales from my brand new chair, "The Frenemaker," I've only made about $6 since 4/16.
It's very disheartening to see such dramatic swings in my earnings; I'd like to be able to count on at least some level of consistency. Are these dramatic swings "normal," yet completely unexplained?
I was under the impression that search results weren't being messed with these last few weeks, except for the ill-conceived "madstyle" promotion. I guess that may be a way for Linden Labs to shift the focus of the content-creation away from adult goods, into more mainstream pursuits.
I can't imagine my store will ever benefit from a "humiliation" keyword promotion! :matte-motes-sour:
Can anyone else corroborate these findings?
Or have you, yourself, experienced anomolies like this?
What do you attribute them to?
What have you learned?I'll show you mine, if you show me yours! :matte-motes-bashful-cute-2:
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This is a great guide! And it mirrors what I had to figure out on my own with my wee little brain! It was painful!
Ultimately, I decided to put a version number on the folder that I drag into the Merchant Outbox. It makes it a lot easier to identify the the latest, unassociated version of a product-- especially when you need to do several updates in a single day.
This has happened to me twice now, and each time, my normally high sales (150$US/week) numbers drop off to nearly nothing... then take about two weeks to get back to normal. I track my sales data very closely and I definitely see patterns to the behavior. The last time the downturn occured began 2/7 and ran until 3/1. Those were lean times. The earnings data has an almost vertical drop-off and resumption.
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Oculus Rift - CV1 support
in Second Life Viewer
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If you're seeing my video in "Red/Blue" anaglyph, try changing the video's settings (click the gear) to 2D and make sure anaglyph is off. Happy viewing!