[Fixed Landing Points ☠ ☠ ☠]

To me it depends on what the land is. For central hubs and small stores it's fine. For large stores with poorly placed teleporters or no teleporters it's aggravating. If I'm a returning customer then I know roughly what I want to buy and want to go straight to that section, without walking across half the sim and getting lost in a layout maze.

[Shopping Strategies]

I like getting the item I came in for and that's it, but I also like looking around to see if that creator has something that would be even better, or other items on my shopping list. On the MP I check the creator's store, and in-world I'll go to the location and check it out.

I only rarely save landmarks. When there are expensive items in-world I'm considering and wanting to check out my other choices first, or they have a lot of things I'll want in the near future. Before I drop $1499L on a building or furniture set I want to be sure I can't easily find something cheaper for the same quality first. Sometimes that one is the best and it's worth it - but you never know if you don't look.

[Marketplace: search without demos]

I've seen some demos that the creator charges for, but it's usually just one or two creators in the category. When one person is filling up the page with paid demos then adding "NOT [least common word in the store or creator name]" filters that out too.

That's one of my peeves on the markeplace - demos that aren't free. I can't think of any good reasons to do it except the demo being an actual usable product with reduced permissions or some other major simplification. For something like clothes, someone would have to sell a lot of $1L demos to make up for even one would-be buyer turned off by paying to look at the item.

[The 40+ crowd! Do you exist in SL?]

I was 35 when I joined, but that was five years ago.

[Keywords for your products]

Doesn't a search turn up items with your store name even if it's not in keywords? I've seen a lot of searches that pull up all of a creator's items when their store name had the search term in it.

[Snow land in Moderate region]

A bit of an unusual request here: I'm looking for landlocked snow land in a Moderate region. 3072m-5120m. Flat to hilly, as long as the hills aren't too steep to build a house on the side.

[► Adult furniture in a skybox?]

I've had some adult items on Moderate land, in skyboxes and on the ground, and it's never been a problem because they were inside a home and not visible from the outside. The only way to see them would be if someone came inside uninvited or cammed in. Nobody does that just to hunt for naughty things to report on Moderate land. Even on General land it's uncommon, but Moderate land is safer.

As long as you make an effort to keep that stuff private you should be fine in M-rated regions.

[What do you all get on SL for?]

To play around with building things, slowly increase my skills at it, and to sort-of make a virtual life for role-play that's almost perfect. Almost, because I don't want it to be too saccharine; it needs a little sour for balance and realism, just a tiny bit.

[Which mesh bodies have a lot of clothes available for them AND a good maternity form?]

Thanks for the advice! I'll check out the Maitreya again and the ones from Belleza, hopefully one of those will work with shape adjustments.

[Which mesh bodies have a lot of clothes available for them AND a good maternity form?]

I'm considering getting a mesh body for everyday use. I've resisted that until now - I LIKE the classic avatar and it's simpler to work with - but more and more of the best clothes are made for mesh now, so I might switch. What I'm looking for is one that has a very good maternity shape even at full term available, and a large selection of clothes (both maternity and regular) made for that body without the painted-on look of appliers.

I'm not fussy about compatibility with other mesh body parts, since I don't have any and probably won't get any unless they're included with the body package.

Which ones would you recommend trying out? I couldn't get Maitreya Lara to look right past five months or so, otherwise it would have worked well (maybe I'm missing how to change the shapes correctly? up until now my avatar customization has mostly been "swap out the hair and move the shape sliders"). The SelinA bodies look great but it's hard to find clothes made specifically to fit them.

[How much of a shopaholic are you?]

I have a hard time shopping inworld because my computer is slow and I haven't finished saving up for an upgrade yet. Lately I've been looking around on the MP a lot because I'm furnishing an entire house and am only doing a little of it myself. It would take too long otherwise and I want to get it all up and running for role-playing.

As for clothes, I shop as I need them. A base set of good old classic clothes that look nice for everyday, and add on to that as situations come up.

 

[So You Make "100% Original Mesh", Do You?]

I interpret it as the creator making the mesh model themself in their 3D program of choice, without parts purchased on 3D model sites or full perm kits on SL.

40 minutes ago, entity0x said:

The awesome thing about SL, and the VALUE one offers to users of it will be, will be in your creativity  in presenting an object.

That's part of it, not all of it. Quality matters too.

There's a lot more to a mesh than what it looks like at high LOD: two of the same type of item, with similar or even identical appearance with identical textures, might behave differently. Badly done mesh takes longer to download and render, because your CPU and graphics card still have to deal with the extra 500 vertices you can't see. Often the pair won't have the same LI. Different lower LOD models make them look different when you step back, and the quality of physics varies. Bottom line is there's more work involved than making a table look like a particular kind of table.

Original doesn't necessarily mean it's better, but it does mean it's unique "under the hood," since nobody is going to create a vertex-by-vertex identical item by chance on anything much more complex than a mesh version of a prim.

[Second Life should have a way to return unwanted items]

Ability to return items would cause big problems. How would it work on items that were on the marketplace before the new returns policy? Creators might want to offer different permissions, to cut down on return abuse; some have thousands of items for sale already.

I don't have very many, but I do have a few full-perm items for sale. With automatic returns, someone could buy items, transfer copies to their alt or someone else, and then get their money back - anything full perm becomes a freebie with a couple of extra steps. Even nuking all the inventory copies of a copyable item won't fix that because it's already been copied to another avatar's inventory. Returns would quickly kill the full-perm market. It would kill the mod/copy item market too if not very carefully implemented to eliminate modified copies. Right now someone could pass full-perm items around to other people's avatars and often get away with it, but thieves do that kind of thing much less when they have to pay once than never.

You're better off using demos, reading descriptions carefully, and contacting the seller if there's a problem. If there's no demo, sample, or in-world display, be cautious. You can leave a bad review if the seller won't try to fix an item issue, and then avoid that seller. You could also try contacting them before the sale with questions. I would definitely want to help an honest customer who had a problem with something they bought or questions before purchase. Do not want to make it easier for dishonest people to steal.

[Multiple Marketplace Stores per Avatar]

I was confused about the flagging categories too. I didn't realize that there was an option given to flag for incorrect category, thinking there had to be some special complex procedure for it, until I went hunting through several different menu items looking for it and found it. And I only did that when there was an egregious problem making my item search difficult instead of only being an irritation. There was a subcategory for something completely unrelated to avatar accessories flooded with a particular type of avatar accessory, with the titles not consistent enough to filter out with a NOT search. I didn't bother trying to flag lesser problems when I couldn't find the right category quickly.

It's not intuitive and seems like an easy fix, just add more text to one menu label on the flag page.

[Which is less laggy - linking smaller meshes or making one big piece?]

Thanks! These are for me, but I'll definitely take customization into account because I might decide to improve textures and details and sell it later.

About the LOD thing - I've seen a few things that were almost heartbreaking because the high LOD was gorgeous, then the medium one half disappears or breaks apart into a mess. Even though the triangle count is high enough that ought to look like, well, a simplified version of the high one, lacking some details and the stuff that really makes it pop but still a decent model. I know better than to do awful or very cheaty LODs and unnecessary 1024x1024s all over the place. It's texture baking I'm having trouble with tbh.

[What's a Good, Functional Height for a Female Avatar?]

My main avatar shape is 1.72m, and the others are very close to that. A little above average height but not unusual. It's been a decent balance of big enough that I don't feel tiny going around in most buildings, and small enough that I can reduce the size of some copy/mod stuff for modest LI reductions and space conservation.

[Which is less laggy - linking smaller meshes or making one big piece?]

I'm making some furniture for my own use, and I'm not sure which way to do it would be better. I'm starting with a kitchen set - counter pieces, cabinets, and so on. I could make each one individually (smaller for LOD switches), or all together (fewer triangles, same number of textures with fewer repeated cache hits for the same one). Which contributes less to lag, especially client-side?

[Mesh Buildings w/Physics Determining LI?]

Depending on the physics behavior you want, you can sometimes dramatically reduce the physics-based LI result even in prim mode by simplifying the physics. For example, for the walls that have windows, set the physics on that wall as if the window wasn't there. This will drop the physics rendering cost in prim mode because the computer's view of the wall physics shape is simpler. An avatar won't be able to climb through the window, but you probably don't need that anyway. If an interior wall has 2 texturable faces but no windows or doorways, and it's just a texture difference, pretend it's only a single wall with a single face in the physics file. This won't change the physics behavior for avatars, it merely makes the prim shape calculation a little simpler and therefore slightly lower-LI.

You can also ignore some small details, ex: if there's a very thin texturable rail at the top of the wall for decorative purposes, pretend it's not there when making your physics file, since the shape of a rail 0.05m thick (for instance) four meters up isn't going to make a difference during normal building use. Unless you want people to be able to bank thrown objects against it and take the rail position into account, the physics shape of the rail is unnecessary. At some point, there's a trade-off between more realistic physics and the complexity and LI cost of the physics file; before that, there are almost always some simplifications you can make beyond "what won't be seen" and after that point, it's a judgment call, considering what your typical use will be and, if you mean to sell the item, what market segment you're aiming for.

The calculated physics LI when uploading is still going to be inaccurately low, and it'll go up when you switch to prim physics. With a little luck and a lot of keeping your physics and mesh files as simple as possible while retaining all the features and faces/verts you need, you can still keep it low and possibly even prevent the prim physics from exceeding the download cost.

You can also set the window physics to "None" after linking them to the mesh walls, especially if the wall physics don't have a hole where the window is. Openable doors do need their own physics and can be set to either convex hull or prim; their shape is typically simple.

On the texturing issue: it can be a bit of a pain in the butt, but review the "sync selection" feature in the UV mapper of Blender: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/27298/where-is-the-sync-selection-option This will allow you to check the alignment of UV texture maps, and then you can go back to regular mode and rotate the UVs as needed. I'm not sure if there's an easier way to do that or not; hopefully yes, but if not, that does work.

[Kids' clothes need two Marketplace categories]

The typed-in searches on the marketplace can be used to filter most of the toddler clothes out if you add "NOT (thing)" to the search. Some will slip through if the maker didn't spell the toddler brand correctly or abbreviated it, and you have to do individual searches, so it's not going to be perfect and is a bit cumbersome. But if you know you want, like, jeans, you could go to apparel, type "jeans NOT toddleedoo" and then click on the children's subcategory under apparel after the search results come up. You'll end up with things in that subcategory that match the jeans keyword and not the toddleedoo keyword.