IvanBenjammin

Yeah, not sure what's happening with Primbay. I list stuff there, but haven't had any sales through it. I remember getting a notice about it officially launching, and originally all caspervend merchants had it on automatically. I gather there was a bit of backlash to that (it was a bit cheeky, especially given the 5% commission that Casper gets), and it was quickly fixed to be off by default. The fact that it seems only caspervend merchants know it exists says a lot about how successful its been But like Syn said, you might as well - its a couple of clicks.

Wow, this thread got hostile. Reposting from another forum where I asked the reason for the 5 day waiting period: * One of the founders of PayPal (Pierre Omidyar) was an original investor in Second Life. Linden Lab got a very good deal - $1 flat rate to cash out, which is what we residents get charged, but they get a float on the money for 5 days. Not sure if Linden Lab or PayPal gets interest on the float, but someone does. * The delayed cash out is one of the anti-fraud and money laundering methods. Otherwise someone could buy lots of L$ on a stolen card, send it to an accomplice or alt, and cash it out before the card-holder notices. There are other limits on charging, cash outs, and L$ transfers (I know, because I hit them when I was a Lindex trader), the 5 day delay is just one of them. So its not that they can't do it faster, but that they have a deal with paypal. Original Post

You should've definitely been told - I was. They opened up a support ticket on my account and explicitly told me my money was being held. So not sure what went wrong, there, but its definitely not common practice to not tell you about it.

That was pretty much the same thing they said to me, and it went through the next day.

Yeah, the Easter weekend made a mess of my cash flow, too. If you have premium membership, contact live support. If there are any issues they'll be able to tell you.

:shameface:

Oh, I was being slightly tongue-in-cheek, but yes, it does sound like you've been lucky so far. Keep being firm about it. The potential clients you lose because of that policy are probably the clients you don't want, anyway. Now I really have derailed the discussion.

I agree with you, Moose. Except the part about being a freelancer and getting paid on time...

You're correct. I apologize for being pedantic. But its not like I derailed the discussion...

Stoke. You want to 'stoke' the fire, not 'stroke' it. That would be uncomfortable. Aside from the money laundering/fraud reasons, AFAIK the 5 day wait is part of LL's deal with paypal. I don't mind that, but I would like to see processing outside of US banking hours, because that can be a pretty big delay on payouts for those of us outside the U.S. - I have to time my cashouts by paying close attention to U.S. time zones and if I'm out by an hour, it can mean an extra 24-48 hours of wait time.

Its either that, or the teacher is clueless about the concept of copyright as well. If selling the product wasn't the goal, nobody would care - I know I made plenty of infringing stuff in the process of learning 3D (possibly even a TIE fighter...), but I never tried to sell it.

Maybe the objective of the course is to teach that copyright infringment is bad, mmkay? If so, then you get extra credit for picking Disney as the company to infringe upon.

It seems to take a few minutes between the item showing up in your unassociated items and being able to use it in another listing. No idea why, but I've found that 10-15 minutes between uploading and trying to edit listings works. Take a break, smoke 'em if you got 'em

Thanks for putting up the transcript Inara. Two things of most interest to me: "The current terms might indicate that we might somehow have some plan to steal people’s content and somehow profit from it for ourselves, without benefitting the creator, and that’s obviously not our intent at all. It would be very damaging to our business if we started to behave in that way because this whole platform is all about the content you all create." This sums up what I've always felt about the TOS - basically that as badly worded and open for interpretation as it is, you can usually count on a corporation to act in its own best interests, and helping themselves to our stuff would be pretty terrible for their reputation and image. "Weirdly enough , when I got here, there was actually a policy telling employees that they could not be in-world as a Linden; so we reversed that policy a couple of weeks ago." This is...odd. I can't fathom why they'd have a policy like that in the first place, and Ebbe himself seems a little puzzled by it. At least its reversed, now. And on a personal note, its totally cool to see my own work at use in that auditorium. His comments about "we did all this together!" makes me feel all warm and fuzzy

Nice work taking the time to analyze that, Drongle - you have way more patience for the theory than I do.

I think they're going to have to start breaking old content sooner or later... SL desperately needs accounting for textures. I was looking at the display weight value, because reading up on it it suggests it measures texture use. However, normal and spec maps have no effect on it at all, so that's pretty useless.

The concept of "replacing geometry with normal maps" is the 'only in second life' part of my comment When normal mapping came along for video games, it wasn't about replacing geometry because you didn't have the polygons to replace in the first place, it was about giving detail where you previously couldn't. So in a way, SL - as a platform, but also in terms of popular opinion and culture - is approaching it from the wrong side, and there's nothing to be done about that. So if I sound a little ranty and incoherent in what I say on the subject, its because I'm relatively new to SL so coming at it from a different angle. Questions like "should we use high poly geometry or normal maps?" sound kind of rhetorical to me Composition of normal maps from separately baked parts (technical term: floating geometry) gives you a lot more control, and assuming you have the ability to create normal maps from grayscale images (ndo or whatever), then you have the ability to punch out detail and blur/sharpen pixels as much as you like. Yes, it all comes down to pixel interpolation in the viewer, and there's definitely times when it makes more sense to bake in one layer, but those artifacts that you point out in your rivet are just the tip of the iceberg, and can get pretty messy in more extreme situations. And little artifacts in normal maps can look pretty glaring if the light catches them.

Only in Second Life... I don't want to sound disparaging of the many talented and self taught builders out there, so I won't rant like I was planning to. Use less polys, not more. Normal maps make stuff look better, so use them. Treat your triangles and your pixels like non-renewable resources, and really try to understand the mesh uploader and how different LODs contribute to the overall land impact. Regarding Drongle's bakes and renders (not entirely addressed to you, Drongle - please don't think I'm trying to lecture you...): The geometry of the bolts appears more raised than the normal map because normal maps don't bake (and therefore lose data from) angles close to 90 degrees, so its pretty much ignoring the bottom, steepest part of the bolt mesh. This is one of the reasons to use ambient occlusion bakes with your diffuse, because they can help to add much needed depth to a normal map. Even if you intend for your normal map to be 512 or less, work and bake at a much higher res. Photoshop is better at pixel interpolation, and a lot of jagged edges can be mitigated by downscaling your image. Finally, you absolutely can use hard edges in your normal bakes. Soft/bevelled edges will always be better, but sometimes they're not possible to do. In the case of your rivets, I'd keep the hard edges, and bake them separate to the underlying mesh to avoid any baking artifacts, then combine them together. This gives you a mask around your bolts, so you can have the edges as soft or hard as you like by blurring the edge (another thing to do in this case is to give a slight indentation under the bolt to make it look like its deformed the surface underneath it. Something like this can be a pain to do at the baking stage, but is simple as in PS, when you have separate layers).

Has your total prim usage increased at all? Using materials on prim objects forces them to use mesh land-impact calculations, which in cases of complex physics can really inflate the LI. And I guess the other related question is whether your fps drops are constant, or just while things are rezzing.

I don't think premium membership costs are substituting much of anything. Some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations suggests to me that members get around 60% of their membership fee back as L$ in the form of stipends (based on quarterly payments of US$ 22.50, L$300/week stipend, and a rough exchange rate of L$250 per US$1). And as Mr.Moose said, running servers is not cheap. I have no idea what percentage of tier money goes into ongoing costs, but I'd bet its a significant fraction. Also, the cost of land isn't what keeps 'high-end' building talent away IMO - its the fact that SL's tools for creating and importing content are neolithic compared to what most artists are prepared to use. Visual quality and performance is also more important to these people than most, and stumbling through a laggy mess of a sim is enough to put many people off permanently.

I agree they're worth every penny, but it was a significant investment when I was starting out. One other thing I'd like to add is that I wish listing items on the marketplace was as easy and straightforward as it is in caspervend. Another one of those examples of the users of SL doing it better than the creators.

You can't go wrong with CasperVend. The premium version is pricey, but a worthy investment, and they have a vendor system designed for textures which might work well for you.

Suzanne Logan wrote: ...what you build here belongs to LL not you. Nope, what I build here belongs to me. LL grants themselves 'non-exclusive' rights to use it as they see fit, but ultimate ownership and copyright are mine. Unless you refer to things built entirely out of prims and library textures, in which case ownership might well lie with LL.

Yes, the social aspect of SL was clearly a focus from the start. I find it interesting how...idealistic that FAQ reads now. SL is so much larger now that managing the economy the old way would have become a nightmare. The focus seems to have shifted from "hey, lets all get along and share!" to "be an entrepreneur, make stuff and get paid for it!" The entrepreneurial thing was present from the beginning, but it now dominates. Kind of like the shift of the web itself, actually.

I went and had a look at the FAQ on the old economy. Seems like the only hold over from those times is the stipend provided to premium members. I'm glad it doesn't work that way anymore If I'm reading it correctly, there was no exchange (buying or selling) with real dollars back then?