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Silas Merlin

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Everything posted by Silas Merlin

  1. I think it is necessary to find a solution that does more than adhering to the new rule and the existing or future laws that are hypothetically at the root of the decision. That is, design a system that would be acceptable to the most dedicated oponent. To establish stricter rules than necessary to comply. In other words, regulate the new collectibles system. Regulating the new system obviously has a cost in manpower. However, if one of the rules were that a given percentage of all sales through the new system was to be given to a charity, then, maybe... there would be volunteers to undertake the task of moderating/approving new collectible series. Here are examples of What I mean by stricter rules (a list that will probably end up being so long and restrictive, should it come to be, that I will regret having suggested it) : -Regulating the content, so that each item is a unique design, rather than a different colour. -Deciding how many items are to be shown ahead of time (only the current one ? the current one plus the next one ? the current one and the two items coming up ?) -regulating what vendor script can be used (for example a script is being designed that is locked in such a way that the creator has no way to alter the order in which items will be chosen by the script) -Restricting where such machines can be rezzed (to make the role of the volunteers easier) etc... That said, the two aspects that are absolutely necessary to retain in the new system to perpetuate the spirit of the old one are : -The resident's choice is limited to buying or not buying the item that is being offered. -the items have to be transferable. Furthermore, the creators should retain the choice as to which (approved) script they are going to use, as well as the possibility to choose or design their own machine. How (or even whether) to display the charity should also remain their choice so as to be in total control of the look of their vendor. TLDR : What I am proposing is going futher than complying with the rule in the hope that it will not be abused and will not draw new complaints and regulations that would result in the new system being banned as well. EDIT: Removed redundant text.
  2. That is precisely the problem in this thread. the actual gacha players are underrepresented if at all. Maybe some are reading, but I doubt it, because they are being repeatedly stigmatized with numerous pejorative attributes (and creators too for that matter). The voices being heard (hammered would be a better word) are a handful of gacha haters who are delighted to see the gacha gone because they think this means they are finally going to be able to get their hands on the goods easily for the same price (being under the wrong impression that the true price of the item is that of the pull on the machine).
  3. Gachas were perfect in that respect : If it turns out noone wants the items, then no new copy is created, because noone plays the machine. The possibility remains. With a limited release you decide ahead of time how many copies can possibly exist. If noone wants it, all the possible copies will not be created. But, if it turns out to be something people want, all the possible copies do get created, and then that's it, no more ? why do that ?
  4. It is not the events. there is noone to enforce a rule, it is just what a gacha is.
  5. It is not "some of the gacha events", it is the intrinsic characteristic of a gacha item, the understanding that it will never be made available for sale directly by the creator in Second Life. The new policy does not suddenly make it alright to break that rule. It would make the millions(?) of gacha items out there worthless. The only way that I can continue to sell my gacha items after the end of this month is if a new system to make the items difficult to get is approved by Linden Lab. EDIT : added "in Second Life" to the first paragraph.
  6. I have been visited in my dreams by a mystical bird with magnificient plumage of impossible colours. The bird spoke inside my head and said that the name for whatever comes next to replace gachas shall be.... PATCHAS (any resemblance with existing or fictional characters is totally fortuitous).
  7. AFAIK We are not allowed under any circumstances to upload anything bought or downloaded from Turbosquid and the like, unless the items are distributed under CC0 (public domain), because you have to own all the rights to content you upload to Second Life.
  8. Ah, no I don't mean a group, because that is a one time payment, yes ? I mean an actual subscription as in you pay a fee every month to get every single item produced until the end of the month by the brand. (or maybe would work better if you pay one month for the next, so that you can't join in on a month that has already started?) legal question : can the items issued from a subscription be transfer (convertible for copy/mod) ?
  9. To me: -Artificial scarcity = yes -unique item = no the reason is that you can never be sure that there is only one of your items out there : There is what is probably wrongly called copybotting (ripping would be a better, more generic term) : your item could be ripped in SL and reuploaded on some private region you will never know of, or reuploaded on opensim. there are also god powers (a feature, not a hack) that allow such a power user to take a copy of any mesh. (not that they do, but they can). Unique does not make sense to me for virtual goods, and if you are selling your item no-copy, there is always the chance that it vanishes in a rip of virtual space and time. If you sell it with copy permissions, the buyer can rez as many copy as they like, therefore it is not unique. you could of course sell it as an NFT and deliver the inworld copy of the artwork to the owner of the NFT token. but then what happens when that person sells the NFT ? you have to kindly ask the previous owner to please delete your copy ? It does not work.
  10. Another alternative to gachas would be.... subscription. Paying a subscription to a given creator would give you all the items they produce that month, or the next, and there would be no other way to acquire those items at any time in the future. Would that be illegal because you would not know what you will get when you pay the subscription ?
  11. the first step (designing your dress) is something that can be done in Marvelous Designer, which is totally unlike any modeling software out there. It does not feel like working with mesh at all. Look for tutorials on youtube by Daisy Winthrope. Of coure the problem is that this is a very expensive software, but luckily they have a trial period you can make good use of. The second task is optimizing the resulting mesh, which is indeed a daunting task. That said : -having designed the dress of your dreams in the first place will give you incentive to continue on the journey. -as long as you are not selling it (plaguing Second life with yet more unoptimized mesh), you could very well skip that step (for now) the third step is rigging, which can be done relatively easily with acceptable result using Avastar, which is affordable and has a discord were you will find a lot of helpful people to guide you (provided you take the time to watch the tutorials first at least). EDIT : There is a problem though... the dress has to be rigged specifically for the body you use inworld. For that you need the files called "devkit" which creators often make difficult to acquire for some mysterious reasons.
  12. Item #4 is the only one that is being offered for purchase. In my experience, it is mostly resellers that actually played the gacha machines. When they decide to play on a machine they do not even wait to see what they are getting. They simply play the machine a given number of times that they know will statistically give them the whole set. They do not resell the items "at a highly inflated price". They got it wholesale so to speak, and they are reselling it at what they deem is their actual value. It makes more sense for the "end user" to stay away from gacha machines entirely. when you want a specific item only from a series, it is up to you to first look for it on Marketplace, and if that fails, go to yard sales and look for it. I am not interested in selling the item directly to you, thank you. When you do get the item, come to me to trade it in for mod/copy if you want. As stated above, in my view, as the creator, I am not interested in selling the item directly to you : I want to spend my short time on this earth making things. Not in marketing (finding ways to reach out to the general population in numbers, in hope to reach the few people who will want my item). Resellers are willing to do that work (find the buyer who will actually pay a "fair price"). Resellers will buy my items in quantities that will make up for the low cost. This is correct, it makes absolutely no sense for you to buy this item you do not want. The point of this new vendor is to make the items artificially scarce, so that resellers can do their thing, and so that collectors feel (rightly imho) that they own treasures. to recap : -If I sell items mod/copy myself, I have to stop creating to spend energy and time reaching buyers, which in itself requires skills that I do not have in the first place. -If I sell the items mod/trans directly from a vendor, the supply becomes unlimited and resellers will have no interest in them whatsoever, and collectors will have trinkets instead of treasures. The only two viable alternatives I see for myself are : -To sell the items mod/trans in limited quantity with a total value that represents what I want from my work. In this scenario I still have to find the buyers myself, and the resellers vanish along with the yard sales. Yard sales both in SL and in real life are something that make life more interesting, imho. -To use second life only for the pleasure of seeing my creations inworld. That is, to keep them to myself, take pictures, make exhibits where you can't buy, etc... And to sell the mesh on external online stores only, which means that should you buy them there, you would not be allowed to upload them to Second Life, because you didn't make them. Part of the issue here is that we are putting very different things under the same label "gacha". In order to explain, Ihave to make the same mistake, and create categories that are bound to not encompass everything, but I do not see how to say this any other way : -There are series that contain a single item in different colours, one of which has a texture that is actually different from the others and has more work put into it and it is the rare. (many "duds") -series with a myriad items in slightly different variations of colour. Everything might be interesting in itself, but the sheer number of them and the fact that they come in variants make it so that you are bound to end up with very many semi-duplicate, which also effectively makes them "duds". -series with a quantity of absolutely unique items, without variants (or the variants are a single item with a texture changer). This type of series often contains one or more items that are marked "rare" and may or may not be more elaborate than the commons. This last type is what I am personally talking about. Were gachas not going to be banned entirely I would like a label to be created by some authority, and you would have to adhere to certain standards in order to use the label, much lke it is done for things like "organic food" in the real world. "Less content" ? I doubt it, there is already so much content in SL that no single person will ever see it all, I think. "less new content" ? Definitely. For creating content, start with a tool like Sculptris or sculpt GL, it is very much fun, you don't really need to know much at this point. Once hooked, you will gradually learn all you need to know. (Just very basic concept you need to know : mesh is made up of vertices (points in space), edges (that connect the vertices), and faces (when three points are connected by edges you get a triangle). A mesh can be coloured, or it can be textured. in order to be textured, it needs to be "uv-mapped", that is, make each spot on the mesh correspond to coordinates on a flat texture). The problem here in my opinion is that what is being taken away is one of several intangible concepts that makes Second Life so special for all of us, whether we are aware of them or not. They are characteristics that, put together, make the virtual space very real in our mind. Real in the sense that they make for a space that we want to live in. Some of those things we take for granted, yet they are lacking in other virtual worlds, because people tend to just fail to grasp their importance, and simply discard them when designing a new world, albeit for good reasons (performance, feasibility, scalability, whatever..). Some of them that come to mind : The feeling of interconnectedness the world map provides : despite regions and clusters of regions being totally disconnected from each other, the world map gives that wonderful feeling of being part of a larger world. The ability to see accross region borders, and even cross the borders ! "live editing" : the mere ability to rez a cube... The myriad of ways in which you can customize your look (in some worlds you would have to commission an immutable avatar with clothes that will never change, for a fee of 1000 real dollars). ....And gachas, items that are scarce, can't be copied legally, and that can be traded, gifted, and resold, along with the fear of losing them through some mishap. This makes for a wonderful, very real feeling. This goes away ? Opensim ? naaaah, it just doesn't have the numbers that Second Life has, which is also one of those essential intangible treasures that make SL so special. Yes, that, exactly that. If you play a machine put out by the creator, the quantities are unlimited. It is only if a reseller chooses to sell their items in a machine that items will run out.
  13. Romy, I did try all sorts of things. It just doesn't do. I stopped making gachas for a very long time, because of all the whining, hate, insults, begging (generally in that order in a single conversation). It turned out that all those people who said "I would buy your items individually at a fair price" suddenly vanished, poof! gone! when I stopped making gachas. This month I decided to make one and I am glad I did, because it turns out it was my last opportunity to do so, and it confirmed the difference : for me this mechanism is the only one that makes creating these statues even remotely worthwhile.
  14. Retirement is the worst idea mankind ever had. Stay as a consultant ?
  15. Thank you Theresa. Is there already a jira for that ?
  16. Hello is there a bug with eyelashes or what am I doing wrong, if I try to place eyelashes where they are supposed to be at the top right corner of the head texture, they just don't show up with bakes on mesh ? I made sure to create new body parts items, no old or default texture is worn... yet default eyelashes show up instead of the ones on my texture. In the end I gave up and moved the eyelashes to a separate material and set it to aux1 On the head slot I just can't get it to work. Is that expected ? Thanks.
  17. LL owns the textures "as much as" the original creator. What I am suggesting is that the skin object be converted to a universal that serves the same purpose, except only for the left arm and left leg. It is the same intended purpose i.e. use as skin. The problem is that people's favourite skin textures can be 15 years old and the original creator is not around anymore to create the universal.
  18. Since this onion skin layer for left arm and left foot seems to be the only viable solution, I wonder if it would be possible for LL to create a tool allowing people to convert a skin they own to a universal for left arm and left foot ? It would solve this problem.
  19. I can see a way PanGemini. However, it would have to be prepared by the creator of the skin, unless they sell the textures along with the skin. First let's see if I understand the problem correctly. You have the system uv on the mesh at bottom, and on top of that you have an onion skin layer that is set to left arm and left leg. You can use system skin, but if you put a tattoo on your (right) arm, it also appears on the left arm, because they are mirrored overlapping islands. However, you can add a tattoo to left arm only, since that will go on the onion skin layer, and not interfere with the system skin underneath. Now if you want a tattoo on the right arm only, here is the solution I can think of : Make a universal with the skin for the left arm slot. This will go on the onion skin and hide the tattoo that is meant for the right arm only. On top of that universal, you can add other left arm-specific tattoos.
  20. I only set the eyelashes to alpha blending. alpha masking for everything else. No glitching.
  21. Just thinking aloud here : If you make it so that you can hide only your left arm with an alpha on a BOM body, that will mean that you can't use system skin at all, which makes BOM much less attractive. As I stated above, to me it makes sense to use the left arm only as an onion skin that is invisible most of the time, you would use is only to add tattoos. In that scenario, if you want to hide only the left arm you would have to use some other medhod with a BOM body, not an alpha, which can only hide both arms at the same time.
  22. The thing is, with BOM, any programmer could make your alpha HUD that will be compatible with all bodies (except for any extra mesh part that does not correspond to the system uv's) anyway, you can use old system clothing alphas to hide parts of your BOM body.
  23. There is something I don't get, can someone explain ? The left leg and left arm slots are apparently regular auxiliary slots, which means if you use them on your body, then the system skin doesn't come through if you remove your universals. I thought one of the aims of BOM was so that people could use their old skins ? Anyway, I was wondering what was preferable. 1. To have a body that can show the system skin, but then you can't have "tattoos" on your left arm and left foot. 2. To be able to have "tattoos" on your left arm and left foot, but then you can't use your system skin at all because it wouldn't bake to the arm and foot. I believe that none of the two is acceptable. So, the only solution I see is to take option one and add an onion skin layer that uses the left arm and left leg slots...... I think this is very wrong, but it's the only solution I see. And it works.
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