WADE1 Jya

Ralph, I think current tier packages work great for the "hardcore" SL userbase, so why change it? What I like is this new premium private sandbox idea... this partly addresses the casual users need of more room to play. I hope this opens up more, perhaps with a huge non-premium public sandbox continent as well? Casual users -- which is most new people -- need more room to play! Without a place to play... where do they put all the great houses, cars, pets, castles, spaceships, etc merchants provide? It's simple. They have no place here, so they don't purchase anything much. This lack of room to play hurts merchant's potential bottom line, stopping casual users from purchasing SL content. You don't need to abolish or cheapen the tier products, the expected flawless continual permanency (with associated customer service requirements) does carry higher operating costs for the lab. Complimenting existing tier products with some land offerings that appeal directly to the non-committal casual users is probably the way to go.

Why 2D text-based is apparently the focus? That sounds so 80s.... Mobile platforms are perfectly capable of running 3D games & even perfectly capable of running multi-player worlds like Second Life. There is also a big hole in this idea... would not any serious game developer prefer to launch their game directly to App Store? A pro game maker will see no need for this platform, so I can only imagine attracting amateurs. There is kind of an immediate skill drain situation on this. Surely some people will pay to make simple games, so maybe this is a nice secondary revenue flow for the lab. The games (if they are all only 2d text) will not really be very marketable themselves. However, they could possibly build a small community of hardcore amateur game makers who all pay into the lab... a neat idea perhaps. I sure hope Rodvik is still also working to get SL onto mobile devices too & this 2D thing is very much a minor side project.

Oh one last thing Brooke..... any timeline for us to get charting data or infographics? I wanna see a nicely designed page looking something like this (except with the data related to my sales & stuff): Xstreet had one chart, and OnRez had dozens of them. For Marketplace to be counted as a definitive advance over these old systems we should have some number of charts (well, some number larger than zero that is!) :smileyvery-happy:

Thank you again for providing needed info. While the team is in there Brooke, could you ask 'em for me, if is it possible we could get item names listed on our transaction pages on SL site? Seeing only "Order #1281062839" and having to then go cross reference this with info from the marketplace site - it is unnecessary complex dance of many steps... reminds me of government make-work programs -- where more work is created as if just to celebrate inefficiency. The order info needs to be more simply collated. Many thanks, WADE1

so... nice to know.... but will these fixes cause logins troubles and failed transactions all day again today? /me wishes Linden tested fixes in a seperate beta environment privately & didn't "bang on things" in our live commerce environment.

resolved here too hah that was a quick fix! guess i just was trying to do stuff at the wrong moment

Hmm...online profiles are down too, it says: We're sorry, but something went wrong Please try again in a few minutes. If you continue to receive this message please use the options under the viewer's "Help" menu or visit Second Life Support. Go to my.secondlife.com No sign of this trouble on Grid Status Update page.... is it just me having the problem?

Anyone else having trouble with profiles today? I get (after long time in black screen of death): Frame load interrupted by policy change It pops up in big black letters just like that on a pale pink page... never seen a message like this before.... sounds srs, what's gone wrong now? Policy change? :matte-motes-stress: what? :matte-motes-silly: Makes it kinda hard to do stuff inworld when I can't interact easy thru profiles.

Sounds like you're having a lot of fun with flying :smileyvery-happy: Flying was one of the things I really liked when I was starting out in SL too. Perhaps because I can always fly in my dreams, so being able to fly... it made SL feel like dreamland to me. I flew millions of meters to space once (its really not space up there, just endless blue sky) but if you try that, you'll see some weird things happen to your avatar.... if you fly really high! I've heard of skydiving groups in SL, but not of a flyers group or of flying races yet.... If you can't find any flying races (there must be some somewhere I think), you could always start one up yourself. Maybe set up an obstacle course or racetrack & challenge others to race Easy quick way to get racing against others is just "hey you, see that mountain over there? bet i can get over there & back here faster than you!" READY.... SET.... GO!!!

Is he running on "Ultra" graphics settings? Sounds like he just has graphic preferences set too low. If he sets graphics to Ultra he should be okay! If he has a slower machine, he might not want to set all settings so high. Ultra puts every graphic setting to max. I have found the following custom setting works for practically anybody.... if they follow the steps: (Hopefully Lindens will make this setting as the default soon so everyone can see mesh no trouble!) Depending on his graphic settings, yes he may see meshes may appear as blobs, or triangles. To solve this issue, get him to increase his "Draw Distance" and "Object Detail" (under "Preferences" >> "Graphics" settings). You can also get him to adjust the value of renderVolumeLODFactor to 4 (go to "Advanced" >> "Debug Settings" >> type "renderVolumeLODFactor" in the box to change value) to further ensure proper viewing of mesh objects at all distances. Hope that helps :matte-motes-sunglasses-3:

Sorry to hear you're having trouble. I am confident Lindens will patch these bugs soon. Sculpty used to have similar difficulty back in the day. Until Lindens fix this, I would suggest a couple workarounds. I have encountered one complex mesh I made which would cause some avatars to crash upon touching mesh. The bug didn't affect my avatar, so I could not replicate their difficulties. However I discovered workarounds which stop all crashing for everyone. Before touching or editing the mesh link it to a prim, with prim as root. Use edit with area selection so that you never touch the mesh. Then you can select the prim root & scale up the linkset freely. Another option would be upload it, then logout and login under any pre-2.0 viewer. In older viewer, your mesh will appear as a prim. You can edit the prim scale here. You can also encase this prim (your mesh) inside of a bigger alpha prim so it will never be touched. Very kludgy-hacky but will get the job done!

Hey its hard to keep up on all changes.... I'm thinking I missed something perhaps. Did anything change or update with transparency in viewer 3.0? What transparency formats can be accepted now? Targa, etc... Is there an optimal way to make transparent objects, like cutout edge alphas etc? Prefer something new without the alpha sorting issues.... Thanks!

Not to scare you or anything... but that money you have in the bank is also just pixels :matte-motes-sunglasses-3: Most of the global money supply doesn't really exist in any solid form. It is primarily just 0s and 1s whipping round the world every few microseconds as intelligent algorithms inside computers decide for the banks where to trade it next. Occasionally, a portion of this money (your allocation of electron bits) will be represented by paper you can carry with you. The paper itself has no intrinsic value. In the 21st century, pixels (or any raw digital information) can have tremendous worth. & to answer your question..... No, you do not have to pay to get L$. Paying to get L$ might just be the quickest easiest route. You can get L$ in exchange for any goods or service which you might offer to another resident, educational institution, company, or military existing in Second Life

In quick summary, everything you see in SL (or most 3D environments) is mesh -- except particles & text I guess. A mesh in simplest form is a flat plane, think like a sheet of paper. Just like paper, you can fold it and cut it anyway you wish to form shapes. Prims are meshes, they are just superlimited ones. Sculpties are meshes too, they just also have their own severe limitations. "Mesh" coming to SL, it really just means removing the inherent limitations of prim & sculpty.

looks like you're off to a good start amarock! you could always make yourself a little mesh ring (for future use after mesh has seen wide adoption), then it'll be much easier to wrap your textures with pixel-perfect fit everytime & no seams, warping or worry with repeats.

Qwalyphi, if you see the artist's page they are wanting to look into it. They did not reply with oh its open source its okay... I signed on to deviantart just to pass the artist the info they need to take the item down, since it is less than obvious how to do this easily.

It is simple for the creator to take this down. I see on Deviant Art the artist is aware of the rip at least. All the mesh creator has to do is go to the marketplace listing you linked here. Then they click "Flag this item" >> "Infringes My Intellectual Property Rights". As it is specific "MY".... only the creator can take this item down. Wow it sure didn't take long to see some rips appearing. I am worried of this happening next with the likes of Sony, Blizzard, Microsoft, Disney or Nintendo IP. Then Lindens will find themselves under the thumb of some very aggressive litigation. For sake of survival of this platform, I hope Lindens stay proactive, vigilante & aware... really they should probably tighten things up a lot better to ensure this occurance is exteremly rare, not the norm! Since Lindens directly profit from all copyright infringments on marketplace they are in an extremely precarious position.

Well I just want to say a big thank you to Brooke for communicating to us about the issues. It really takes emotions down a notch or two when we are able to have real conversations. The effect for me is very calming anyway. I just wanted to say I'd prefer the whole grid just shut down for a day (as we used to see every Wednesday) then to see these multi-day upheavals & try to work in a beta-grade environment. I am not paying tier to beta test & I expect things to generally be in working order to run a business on the day to day. Every time Lindens mess things up, it costs me real money. Overall I am happy with SL, but I feel like its an ant farm & maybe Lindens are shaking it too much. A great idea (which a non-SL-related business partner I work with uses quite successfully for their commercial websites) would be Lindens have their own private marketplace, seperate from the commercial site we residents use. It could be quite cheap: a micromarketplace with just a few Linden bears for sale or something. To the public such area would be invisible, access limited to Linden employees. This closed Linden-only beta environment could have been used to loop yesterdays tests through. Then we would see zero disturbance! Lindens could peacefully work & take all the time they need to ensure things are perfect. When it was working correctly it could have just been updated live to us with no visible issues. I propose Lindens desperately need to create their own private beta-marketplace environment to rapidly iterate all the good stuff they are working on. Applies to the grid as well, you guys should test all your new stuff privately on seperate Linden-only beta grids (I know these already exist). When core features of Second Life stay in flux, or remain semi-broken for days, you lose people. Might be behind the dropping concurrency of SL we see lately.

Voted! & thanks for the heads up, checking my links now to ensure everything is working.

If anything it looks like they took less off your transaction. 1843 - 1805 = 38 38/1843 * 100 = 2.0618557 That is only 2% commission? Lucky you I think :matte-motes-grin:

I hope you're right Dante & we find in future this is a moot point to consider. Maybe this awkward stage is over surprisingly soon... I'm still of the opinion that it will take a very long time before even 50% of the grid is on enabled viewers, let alone everybody being enabled. Seems a lot of people don't even know what mesh is, don't care to find out about it, and will only update when/if forced to. As a developer it is going to get more & more difficult to cater to this crowd. I do want to make the nicest experiences for all... until everybody is caught up.

For those who can't see mesh.... they just see spheres & donuts rendered in place of the mesh items. Currently it is impossible to make an environment with mesh which visitors with non-compatible viewers can also enjoy. In developing sim spaces, I feel forced to make a seperate mesh area... and parallel to this, a non-mesh area --- and there is still the problem that if non-mesh viewer users go in the mesh area or even have it in their periphery view from a distance -- things looks real ugly! These donuts & spheres get hugely in the way! It would be nice if mesh could just not render at all for the people on old viewers (since this is obviously going to take months or years to get everyone updated on mesh viewers!). In the meantime, why can't the meshes just be invisible for them? If mesh simply did not render for incompatible viewers, then we could easily overlay mesh experiences in our sims without worry of inconveniencing those who can only see prims & sculpties. Isn't simply not rendering mesh for incompatible viewers a much better option?

For those who can't see mesh.... they just see spheres & donuts rendered in place of the mesh items. Currently it is impossible to make an environment with mesh which visitors with non-compatible viewers can also enjoy. In developing sim spaces, I feel forced to make a seperate mesh area... and parallel to this, a non-mesh area --- and there is still the problem that if non-mesh viewer users go in the mesh area or even have it in their periphery view from a distance -- things looks real ugly! These donuts & spheres get hugely in the way! It would be nice if mesh could just not render at all for the people on old viewers (since this is obviously going to take months or years to get everyone updated on mesh viewers!). In the meantime, why can't the meshes just be invisible for them? If mesh simply did not render for incompatible viewers, then we could easily overlay mesh experiences in our sims without worry of inconveniencing those who can only see prims & sculpties. Isn't simply not rendering mesh for incompatible viewers a much better option?

stylish! being transparent is the new black

Check to see if you are applying the textures as "Planar". It looks like that is what is happening... either that or you did something very unusual in building your model's materials. If "Planar" is set on, just switch is back to "Default" and it should fix.