leliel Mirihi

Porky Gorky wrote: Based on the amount of sims that went offline during Q4, I speculate that there will not be any more public economic reports. A minor dip compared to the number of sims that were lost in 4Q08 and 1Q09. LL is always late releasing the reports and each time people come up with some wild speculation as to why. I think it's just because LL is slow.

geekress wrote: ppl keep telling me the same things. i have done a clean install my comp. is just over a year old and has a lot of room on it. its not hte computer. i have tried a lot of 3rd party viewers they do the same thing. by great i mean it didn't lag much and it worked great. If everything used to work great but now no viewer runs on it then something changed on your computer. What did you do just before and after this started?

Nalates Urriah wrote: The Phoenix theam has a work around until the Lab gets it fixed. You mean there is a work around that will work on any viewer and the Phoenix team did not discover it first.

Good catch. I wonder what the point of it is, tho.

Photoshop 4 doesn't support 3d painting, you have to upgrade to Photoshop CS4. :matte-motes-big-grin: Anyway the answer is File->Open and select the .obj file.

Liz Venenbaum wrote: Problem is, it requires a very tight integration between the game engine and video hardware, It also requires an entire building full of environment modelers and level designers to make it. The kind of quality you see in modern games takes several years and hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, it's a bit much to expect hobbyists working in their spare time to be able to duplicate it. Imprudence once offered an option to have animate standard trees, I don't know why no current viewer seems to implement it anymore That was a standard feature that dates back to 2004 I believe. But in their never ending quest to cater to people with the lowest of lowend hardware LL disabled it in 2009 and removed the code a few months ago.

Chosen Few wrote: If its present at all, it requires an extra render pass to calculate. A special render pass that does some extra things is a better way of putting it. Extra pass implies that the viewer would only need one pass otherwise which is a few orders of magnitude off. The viewer has to do thousands of passes (draw calls) each frame to draw everything. You can see the exact number needed by turning on Develop->Show Info->Show Render Info, it will add an overlay in the bottom right that tells you all kinds of details, "Render Calls" is the one we're looking for in this case.

The GPU renders what you tell it to, it doesn't care if it's fully transparent. It's not a waste of time tho because the next viewer update won't render fully transparent faces. ^.^

Rene Erlanger wrote: Again you answered you own statement....Traffic Bots! How many Bots?...10k, 20k or more.? That's why i take the concurrency before the Traffic Bots ban with a pinch of salt. In reality 2008 concurrency might have only been slightly higher than Jan 2010. Um no, I didn't answer my own statement and neither did you. We don't know how many were bots and how many were people no matter how eager you are to jump to conclusions. We're never going to be able to answer that question definitively one way or the other. I doubt the answer will be as simple and one sided as you seem to make it out to be tho.

Rene Erlanger wrote: You''ve answered your own question (bolded text) ...spread out across more Merchants. MP is great of lazy Merchants or ones not knowing how to market their own products in-world......MP does it for them more or less. Of course I answered my own question, I listed the only three possible answers so one of them had to be right. You could also say that the MP is great for merchants just starting out since they can't afford to spend the same amount of money on marketing as the well established merchants. Anyway I think I'll drop this tangent since it's drifting away from my original point. I was never denying that the MP had an effect, I just don't think it's the main reason for SL's decline. Its about 16% drop. 58k Jan 2010, about 48/ 49k nowadays (drop of 9-10k)....but that graph is over 2 years, so about 8% drop per annum. It's an almost 50% drop if you go back to the historical high of 89k in the fall of 2008. Yes I know a lot of that was bots. But it's also the same time LL suddenly announced the 66% increase on homestead prices as well as many other very unpopular moves. Those were some dark times in SL, many people were very pissed off, and concurrency was dropping fast.

Rene Erlanger wrote: Well at least you're the only one here along with Dartagan...that can see the danger signals if SL continues to lose Estate Sims at the rate of knots....in that it will wipe away their remaining profits and eventually reach their break-even point. Um...There's a lot more than just two people that can see the warning signs, we just disagree on what the cause is. The concurrency hasn't dropped off that much in the last 2 years....look at the 3rd graph. The average daily concurrency is a slow gradual decline.....it is no way proportionate to the drop-off in In-world shopping traffic and In-world sales. I have been recording in-world data for over 4 years...like unique visitor accounts or Classified advert click-throughs......these are not pie-in-the-sky theories!! There's a good reason for recording such data.....i.e existing and future trends! That just reinforces my first question. If the people are still here but they aren't buying inworld and they aren't buying on the market place then where are they? Either they're not buying, their purchasing is spread out more evenly among merchants due the the market place, or they're not here.

I understand where people are coming from with mesh clothes not fully conforming to the avatar but I think there's a little too much focus on clothes. This whole avatar shape issue doesn't affect mesh buildings, mesh vehicles, mesh objects, mesh terrain, or non rigged mesh attachments what so ever. There's a lot more you can make with mesh than just mini skirts. I think it's a bit silly for people to say they don't care for mesh and won't use it just because of problems with one of the many types of things you can make with it.

Rene Erlanger wrote: Nope, not only Marketplace...just the general climate of the economy...including copybotting too.(LL not effectivel dealing with it) But the other grids have significantly smaller markets. Are these people making the same amount of money in the other grids as they were in SL prior to the introduction of the MP? That's the part that sounds fishy to me and why I think they left for a lot more than just the MP. You don't get it ....and i explained it, in another post, the difference in the potential sizes of regular income to be made from a well marketed In-World store compared to Marketplace with it's very limited Marketing options But all else being equal there should still be the same number of people wanting to buy things, so where are they? I think the decline in the user base and concurrency is what's really causing the reduction in sales and these people are leaving due to LL's bad track record over the last few years. Also the new, and worse, inworld search was introduced at the same time as the MP. Really you could explain this trend as a series of unrelated coincidences that interacted together.

Rene Erlanger wrote: Nope,...a lot of Merchants have given up their Sims. Owning a couple of Malls, i've gotten to know a lot of Designers over the years.. I can tell you from just that sample....many many have given up their Sims or downsize their lands......in the last year. Some have closed up shop completely...and ventured over to InWorldz or Avination Grids. You're telling me these people quit sl and went to other grids just because of the market place? That sounds a little fishy to me. Marketplace has had a huge impact on In-world traffic....most Merchants will tell you that! (and therefore sales). I have unique visitor counters in all of my Stores (26) around the Grid....and have records on Excel Spreadsheets going back more than 4 years! I never doubted that the MP had an effect on inworld traffic and has thus caused some places to close down. But does it really matter that much to a merchant if the sale is inworld or on the MP? A sale is a sale after all. My point is I don't think the MP is the main reason SL is in a decline. I think people are leaving more so for other reasons. Bugs and bad customer service has always existed. Customer service wasn't nearly as bad 5+ years ago. There's a limit to how much people can take and for how long. Tier prices have not changed for Full sims since 2007, Mainland has never changed....only Homestead sims changed from their initial offering of $75 to $125 p/mth in 2009 I know, I was here. Doesn't mean the prices aren't too high now.

I'm shure some of those sims were closed due to the market place. But I have a feeling the majority of them left because of LL dragging there feet and ignoring bugs for years, support denying there's ever a problem, sudden and erratic policy changes, ridiculously high prices, etc. That is to say I don't think now is the best time to draw conclusions on what the market place is doing to inworld locations. There are way too many other reason people are leaving.

As a temporary work around set the debug setting RenderMaxTextureIndex to 0. SH-2908

Qie Niangao wrote: Sure, we could still go on group shopping sprees. But we don't need to. We don't need to buildin-world anymore either, and for Mesh, it's impossible to do it in-world. The majority of building was already done out of world tho, that is if you consider textures, sculpties, animations and sounds building. Building inworld may be a draw for some, but personally I don't care where you build something, just as long as it's in sl so I can see it. For me sl is about sharing what you've created, not creating it. If the reasons to go in-world diminish enough, eventually there won't be anybody with whom to socialize, and no reason to buy anything at all. I agree with your logic but I don't think shopping and building are the only, or even biggest, things to do in sl. I see an order of magnitude more people socializing and role playing than I do building and shopping. People use the market place because they can get what they want faster so they have more time to do what they really want. That right there tells me that shopping isn't the big draw you make it out to be.

Deltango Vale wrote: Good points. And why did inworld search go to hell? Because of that damn 'adult' policy with its stupid V2 viewer. The adult policy pre dates v2 by a year. It was actually introduced with the much beloved 1.23, which was hated at the time. Perhaps you were thinking of the new new search v2 introduced?

You didn't say you were using a vm and wiping after every use so I don't see how I could have known about it. ^.^

Yes there are several ways to track you even with all that. If you really want to drop off the radar you're going to have to get much more restrictive, to the point where many websites break. For starters I'd suggest looking into the FireFox addons NoScript and RequestPolicy. Search the web if you want to get hard core about it.

Charolotte Caxton wrote: Mesh should not be seen I think as the end of sculpts, no more so than sculpts were not the end of flexi prim skirts or texture clothes, although all that was before my time. Prior to sculpties there was very little prim clothes aside from shoes and flexi skirts. Sculpties didn't kill the old methods so much as create new markets. The same can be said of mesh, the biggest types of mesh items we see are form fitting skirts, jackets and shirts that follow the body, and hair that drapes over the shoulders, the three things that sculpties just can not do.

The Lindens are just a little slow, gotta give them time to sip their lattes and take long walks in the park.

People said the same things about sculpties 4 years ago but look at the market place now, it's full of sculpty building packs.

My post wasn't just satire, there's a serious argument in it. LL could have added support for procedurally generated textures or even painting directly on objects. Many people have been asking for such features for years. Yet instead LL told us to buy Photoshop and upload images. The situation with creating textures for SL is directly comparable to creating meshes. Photoshop is just as hard to use as a 3d modeling program. Yet nobody seems to have a problem with it.

Maelstrom Janus wrote: I have no argument with anyone who thinks building outside sl using a mass of complex software and then paying to import the stuff they made is a way of being 'drawn into' SL ...my problem with mesh has always been - and its quite obvious - that while Lindens have promoted mesh it took away the onus on them to provide building software - even the lindens 'tutorial' on mesh was nothing more than a warning about copyright breaches - no advice on the software to use or how to go about making mesh based items ! It also caused a total stasis in inworld building with nothing new ( bar the introduction of 64 m prims as standard - still not big enough !) when we could be getting new methods of shaping and cutting prims, newly shaped prims etc. Lindens should be providing the tools to build with in view of the fees they charge and they should be adding new features to those building systems to keep the art of inworld building alive and vibrant. The introduction of mesh basically stopped any development with the inworld building system at all. And as a result in world building is becoming dull and repetitive..... Mesh takes away the pleasure of inworld building and turns building into labouring over complex software only to then pay to import something you dont even know is going to look good once it arrives in world. I have no argument with anyone who thinks building outside sl using a mass of complex software and then paying to import the stuff they made is a way of being 'drawn into' SL ...my problem with textures has always been - and its quite obvious - that while Lindens have promoted textures it took away the onus on them to provide building software - even the lindens 'tutorial' on texturing was nothing more than a warning about copyright breaches - no advice on the software to use or how to go about making textures! It also caused a total stasis in inworld building with nothing new ( bar the introduction of 64 m prims as standard - still not big enough !) when we could be getting new methods of creating textures inworld. Lindens should be providing the tools to build with in view of the fees they charge and they should be adding new features to those building systems to keep the art of inworld building alive and vibrant. The introduction of texture uploads basically stopped any development with the inworld building system at all. And as a result in world building is becoming dull and repetitive..... Textures takes away the pleasure of inworld building and turns building into labouring over complex software only to then pay to import something you dont even know is going to look good once it arrives in world.