IvanBenjammin

Sounds legit to me. I can't believe you made me read Fox News, Perrie. Little girl should've just been thankful to Yahweh.

The 5 business day time-frame is fixed - its part of the deal between paypal and LL. Paypal gets to float your money for 5 days, and in return you pay a flat $1 fee per cashout. In my experience it takes 5 full business days. I cash out Monday evening local time, which is Sunday night PST, and receive in paypal on the following weekend. Now that you've reminded me of Thanksgiving, I expect it will be a day late. So, there's nothing you can do about it, and getting angry at support people isn't going to help. Spare a thought for those of us outside the US who have to keep track of american holidays and timezones.

Step 1: Create a cube. Step 2: Sacrifice cube to the polygods. Step 3: Create another cube. Step 4: Profit! Sorry, serious now... Gather reference imagery is my first step. I have folders and folders of reference saved, and I am continuously adding to it. It's part of my system backup, too - that's how valuable it is. I often find the process of gathering imagery to be inspiring in itself. Make notes and sketches, plan out as much as possible. This is tricky sometimes, as when you're learning you don't always know what you need to plan for. If I'm working smart (and I don't always, sometimes I dive right in) I'll plan out my UVs and by extension of that, what shapes I'm going to need to start with. If I'm building a column or pillar, say, I know I can start with a cylinder and unwrap its UVs, then begin adding detail.

You can set up Mailing lists - I use one by Artizan It amounts to a notecard of names that you can send items to.

The SL2 announcement impacted consumer confidence. Just like an RL economy, when consumers lose confidence they stop spending money. Once people realised that SL wasn't going away tomorrow the economy recovered (mostly). There have been suggestions from the Lab that some inventory content will transfer across to the new platform, and it is reasonable to assume that unscripted mesh items (building kits, environment props etc) will be transferrable, while a great deal of fashion and avatar stuff won't be. The MP has always been a snafu. It would be nice if they make it compatible with the new platform, because that would imply that our usernames and L$ accounts will be universal across both platforms. I don't know if more people are going premium or buying land, though I have noticed an increase in small groups establishing their own RP sims, so perhaps people are pooling resources to buy/rent co-op.

I make mesh buildings/construction sets and environment stuff, not fashion - so I'm in a completely different market and my observations may not be relevant. Having said that, my sales have actually increased over the past couple months. I noticed a big dip around the time that the SL 2 announcement 'slipped' and consumer confidence plummeted, but since then my averages are up.

Madelaine McMasters wrote: IvanBenjammin wrote: I don't think anyone really knows how it will pan out, which is why money is being thrown around at all the possibilities. It's going to be interesting, that's for sure. I agree. I find it interesting, but not surprising, that huge money is flowing into start-ups with little history in the field. I expect it'll be like the late 90's 'dotcom' bubble - lots of money will be spent and most startups will fail, but a few will be winners.

I think we'll see both, but they will be targeting different markets. VR in games and social virtual worlds will be niche for a while, until products like the Occulus are a $100 piece of hardware that's completely plug-and-play. But it has uses beyond that, namely streaming panoramic video of things like concerts/sporting events. AR has massive potential for advertisers, but it will be interesting to see how consumers respond to that. I love the idea of virtual tagging and the kind of art installations seen in Gibson's 'Spook Country' novel, but I know that what we'll actually get is virtual billboards and advertising everywhere. Google Glass was supposed to be a big thing, but instead it turns out consumers are pretty hostile to the idea of people walking around with cameras on their faces. I don't think anyone really knows how it will pan out, which is why money is being thrown around at all the possibilities. It's going to be interesting, that's for sure.

The flickering itself is unavoidable, except by structuring your meshes in such a way that there's sufficient gap between overlapping triangles. Its caused by the renderer trying to work out which triangle is in front when the distances are too small to calculate accurately. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-buffering The black marks look like shadows being cast by the top cards, but the renderer is then getting confused as to which triangle is on top.

Charli Infinity wrote: Hmm off topic but that just reminded me of another question... What do content creators in SL that make their living in SL fill up in the "Occupation:_______________" section of any form in real life? Always wondered about that. Make enough in SL to support your family in RL? That's amazing. "Artist" If its actually a person asking a question, it goes something like this: "So what do you do?" "I'm an artist" "Oh, cool! So like, drawing and painting?" "No, 3d modelling." "Oh, cool...." *glazed look to the eyes* On Topic: No, I don't get bored. I spend 95% of my time in my sandbox.

It makes absolutely no business sense for Linden Lab to do what you're suggesting. It would be short-term gain at the expense of ruining themselves and alienating their customers in the long-term. Also, there's very important wording that gets overlooked in the hyperbolic discussions about this issue: "Non-Exclusive." They don't own my stuff, I do. They have incredibly broad rights to use and resell, but they don't own it. Its not a nice TOS, and there has been huge backlash against it. But the Lab is aware of how critical merchants are to its success - hell, they do SL better than LL does. To do what you're suggesting would ruin them utterly. At the end of the day, and regardless of whether they're trustworthy or not, you can count on a company to act in its own best interests.

Hmm, never occurred to me to use multiple linksets. Good call, Kwakkelde

Its definitely a balance. Land Impact is still important because its measuring download weight. It doesn't take into account multiple copies so in that sense its not giving you a true accounting, but its worthwhile having individual meshes as low as possible. For the builder/land holder, LI is important because of prim allowance. For the visitor, modular building is important because its more efficient for their viewer. Low LI modular pieces that can be linked together is the most efficient way to build environments. Linking makes no difference (AFAIK?) to the render load, but it can reduce total LI if you use pieces that are less than 1 LI - 2 pieces that are 0.5 each unlinked will use 2 LI of a parcel's allowance, but only 1 when linked. You can also pack a lot of detail into small to medium sized meshes as long as that detail is reduced in the lower LODs, and still get a low Land Impact.

Basically what Kwakkelde said, AFAIK (I'm no technical expert). The viewer is still rendering each copy of the mesh separately - it has to calculate lighting and shadows correctly. However it only has to load the data once, and crucially this is the bottleneck. The CPU has to tell the GPU what to render (called a drawcall), but even low-end GPUs are very quick - they can spit out triangles faster than the CPU can say "render this please." So with 12 columns, the CPU says "Render this column 12 times at these coordinates." and the GPU crunches the triangles. You can see how this is going to be faster than 12 unique meshes, because then the CPU would have to say "Render this" 12 separate times, making the GPU wait on the data for each. This is all just as I understand the process, which admittedly I've only recently gotten my head around. I could be wrong - I'm more familiar with DirectX rendering than OpenGL and there may be some crucial differences between the two that I'm missing.

No, my LI calculations are pretty consistent, but I make my own LOD meshes. Physics weight used to vary a little, but I've now learnt the trick to sort that (upload from file, don't press 'analyze'). Make sure your object scale is consistent, as the size of an object's bounding box has a big effect on LI.

Ok, so you said 'don't advise me to switch over to Blender', but I'm going to tell you to do exactly that, but only for the export process. Not all dae files are created equal, and its possible that an update to Maya or its fbx convertor has added something to the file that the SL uploader can't read. Blender's dae export has been developed in part BY SL creators, and its proven to work. I can sympathise with you not wanting to model in Blender, because I sure can't. What I do is export obj's from my 3d app (Silo), import those to Blender, then export out daes. Its a bit of a roundabout way of doing things, but it works. Also, sorry.... holy **** that's a high poly count.

I'm addicted to sleeping. If I don't get at least 6 hours out of every 24 I go into withdrawal.

lol

Internet fame, guaranteed to last for at least 15 minutes!

BadEddy's comment about pricing is a good one. It is tempting to set your prices lower than your competitors, especially when starting out. I know I did it. But there's a lot of psychology around pricing and perceived quality - too low a price tag and you will give the impression of being low quality (or worse - ripped/stolen).

Aspire Rang wrote: Welcome to modern capitalism, where it's not a bribe as long as you use another word for it. Can I use that line? Brilliant.

Mailing lists are good for people who want to follow your store, but don't have a spare group slot. No one understands how 'relevance' works, but its known that number of sales (or possibly total revenue) is a factor. Quality is better than quantity, but a certain amount of quantity is important for making you look established.

There's no magic bullet, really. The problem all starting merchants face is getting noticed consistently amidst the thousands of other creators and merchants with the same idea. Word of mouth is by far the best advertizing, so engage with your customers and listen to their feedback. You want someone to buy your product, tell others about it, and then remember you as a creator they like so they'll return. If you're making clothes, definitely have demos. You might find a lot of people grabbing demos and nothing else, but at least that's exposure. If you're making larger things like houses, then being able to visit them inworld is sufficient. Do you have a group and/or mailing list? I would recommend both. Do not spam your customers, but you definitely want to be able to let them know about new releases. Finally, you require tenacity. It will be slow going in the beginning, but once you start getting noticed and have a large enough body of products it will improve. Part of that is just winning the marketplace ranking game and the arcane mysteries of 'relevance' - Once a product gets popular enough to move up into the first few pages of search results, your sales will snowball.

I meant to throw in my 2 cents when this thread was first posted, but I got distracted. On the subject of maturity ratings: I agree its very important, especially if you're selling G rated stuff. Personally when I'm shopping I filter out adult rated items, especially in categories like 'home & garden' (it doesn't mean the same thing in SL as it does in your local home depot type store...). The last couple of times LL borked the marketplace maturity filters I was able to correct it, but having a bunch of items flagged as adult did have an impact on my sales. Regarding malls and satellite stores: In my experience satellite stores don't help much with sales, but they do help with brand exposure. Don't expect to make a lot of sales from a small store (especially somewhere with only enough prims to have some vendors and posters), but if you have a landmark giver and info about your main store, it will encourage people to visit there. Different niches might have different experiences - I sell building components so I don't get a lot of impulse buying (except from the wealthy landed gentry). Product listings: Absolutely agreed with what's been said already. Clean, professional looking design, plenty of info about your products. My inworld vendors give out notecards which have similar amounts of info to a marketplace listing, and I try to have other posters around the vendors. I find it good practice to have one 'scenic' looking image to grab attention, but also have other posters which detail components and/or options included. Posters should be bright and clean, preferably with text that's readable on a 512x512 poster - 1024k posters are (IMO) utterly wasted texture memory. Don't make anything excessively dark, even if you're selling 'dark' things, as people use a wide range of display brightness settings and what's visible to you may cause me to squint. Finally: Be nice to your customers, even the angry/irate/difficult ones. Be easy to contact via IM or notecard and try to respond promptly. Due to my timezone I'm usually asleep when SL is at its busiest, but I have a note in my profile explaining this and that I will respond asap. If you can remain calm and polite in response to an angry/disappointed customer then chances are you'll be able to diffuse the situation and maybe even win them over.

SL will shut down, one day - when its no longer profitable. The release of the next iteration is a while off, and we know very little about it at this stage. Regardless, it serves no one to panic about it. If you want SL to continue but engage in behavior that damages the SL economy (ie, not spending money, and advising others not to as well), you engineer a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you like SL and want it to continue, keep spending L$