Eowyn Southmoor

Glad you got it resolved. I've been lucky in that I don't recall having ever had a really bad shopping experience. The last, moderately annoying one was earlier this year when I purchased an item at a sale event. The ad stated the item mod, and that was important to me because I planned on linking that item to something else. Unpacked it and turned out it wasn't mod at all. Had to send a notecard to the creator and wait a few days for a reply, where I was informed "it has a resize script in it". Cue me sending another notecard explaining that a resize script is not the same as having modify perms. After another few back and forth notecards, I was thankfully, finally refunded. Regarding the whole Discord customer service issue - any creator who expects me to join / log-in to use some outside-of-SL software just to get an issue resolved wont be getting any business form me, ever.

You can change the image that's used for banlines, including using a 100% transparent texture if that's what you want.

Hope the new theme doesn't end up the same way the R101 did

I think I must be doing something wrong when it comes to in-world stores 84% of my sales come from my MP store. Now admittedly, i'm very much in a tiny niche field, but I do often wonder why my in-world sales are relatively low. My in-world store has a demo rezzer, which I personally believe to be very important for the products I sell. I think it's important for a potential customer to see an item under their own viewers setting and environment. In terms of customer support, my in-world store also has a re-delivery kiosk, as well as an on-line paging board so customers can contact me. In terms of location, my store is strategically placed to be as close as possible to an area populated by my intended customer base. On occasion, I have asked customers if they looked at one of my demos prior to purchase, and usually the answer is "oh i know your stuff, i dont need to demo it". That's great in one way, but I am not sure it's applicable to new customers. Ironically, I have a couple of affiliate in-world vendors set up in various places - and I sell more items there than I do at my own store. Good thing I am not in sales or marketing in RL

My take on this: Depending on what you are texturing, baking in shadows in certain areas on the occlusion map is still going to be required for best effect. An example of this might be on the texture of a car shell where there might be some very deep creases on the body around the headlights or grilles, vents etc: with these small areas likely always being in shadow. Because PBR in SL actually doesn't work quite the same way as it does in other games, partially at least due to SL's environment/windlight system, it can still be quite difficult to get it to render shadows intense enough in certain areas on an object. In these cases, adding a little shadows in the right area on the occlusion map can help to make it look ever better. Only last week I saw an example of this inworld. An experienced texture artist familiar with PBR and using all the right tools, ended up producing a worse result than a rank amateur trying their hand at PBR for the first time. This happened because the experienced person made both the base layer and the occlusion map with no shadows - effectively relying on the viewer to cast all the shadows correctly. The amateur however, simply used their existing BP diffuse layer as the base, which had shadows baked in in some areas. The end result was that, on "correctly done" version, the viewer couldn't render the shadows in a few spots with sufficient intensity, where as the baked in shadows on the "amateur" version, combined with the viewer rendering the shadows, ended up producing a better, more realistic result, even if technically they made it the wrong way.

You've pretty much covered the real issue why its hard to get new people in SL to stick around. It's not the kinky stuff, its not how the place looks, its not the difficulty in finding things to do - it's the massive complexity in making our avatars look good. New people start off with whatever starter avatar, and it isn't long before they see some really nice avatars, and the first thing they think/ask is "how do I make myself look like that?" - and that's where the trouble starts Anyway, to answer the thread question... it takes me ages to find just the right combination of skin / shape / head, but once i do, i tend to keep it for some time. Each of the last two looks i've created have both lasted me 3 years at least. I still tend to get skin demo's when I see what appears to be a nice one, but 99% of the time I try it and it isn't an improvement over what I have. I really wish creators would stop adding those over-exposed highlights to skins, I find it annoying when i find a skin I like but half the face looks like someone is shining a spotlight on it haha

You clearly understand how to use pbr textures properly, because as you say, pbr doesn't have to mean shiny. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case for the majority of the quick-to-jump-on-the-pbr-bandwagon mob at the moment. I can only hope that after the novelty of "make everything shiny" has worn off, creators and residents alike start to use pbr textures in a more realistic way (when it's warranted of course).

Frankly, I find any political advertising in SL to be both pointless and extremely tacky, but as far as I know, I think it's allowed on mainland. Thankfully in Bellisseria at least it definitely isn't allowed.

Not sure about anyone else, but in the last week the wold map has been much slower in rezzing the map tiles for me - its almost to the point where it's unusable now. Just another "fix" from LL that seems to help some whilst making it worse for others I guess

I'm sorry, but if you think this is the case then I feel you've been living in your own little bubble within SL and really aren't in touch with the majority of residents. I'm sure some people do have child alts, but even without any statistics to back me up, I'm confident that wouldn't account for more than 10-15% of all users, certainly not even close to "just about everybody". Zali might be blunt and tactless, but she has rather succinctly summarized the new changes to the ToS and explained why they were made. LL aren't going to budge over this (nor should they), so at this point you're just wasting your own time in continuing to discuss it.

Ok since it is my turn I managed to take a pic whilst out driving today. Your clue: "Whilst the weather here at this waterfall is nice and sunny, over to the southwest I see some nasty storms out at sea"

It's here: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Fairstone Quarry/123/108/503 I knew where it was from the first post but was waiting for others to figure it out cause I am too busy at the moment for it to be my turn

If the creator can remotely disable a product so that it can't be used by the customer, then the creator should have no issue in refunding the customer. That way no-one loses out. Seems the fairest option to me.

I'll give it a shot: OP has some unbearable issue in SL that requires urgent attention OP thankfully has simple, perfect fix for aforementioned problem which couldn't possible have any drawbacks Others manage to find drawbacks with aforementioned fix Contrary opinions to OP are dismissed, whilst opinions in agreement with OP are used as proof of original point Zalificent calls OP a t-w-a-t (paraphrased) Congrats, you are now caught up Note: this tl;dr summary can be used on 80% of all forum topics

Your screenshot just highlights my aforementioned post about using the mini-map with parcel lines showing. If you had that showing, you would have easily seen the protected channel and would've avoided the banline. I understand how problematic mainland travel can be for some people, but if you aren't going to do the bare minimum of preparation beforehand, then this is the likely result 🤔