Ciaran Laval

Tyche mentions the advent of Linden Homes in her regular SLU update, around here you can see them coming online: http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/virtual-business/8523-new-sl-sims-past-week-24.html

Drake1 Nightfire wrote: It doesnt really matter what was said 5 years ago, or even a month ago. The fact is, they own the copyrights and they can clamp down as hard as they want. And there isn't a damn thing anyone can do about it, nor should there be. We all complain about copybotters but it seems there is a lot of whining when SLers want to be "copybotters" and use copyright protected items in SL. Well it should matter what was said five years ago, if people are encouraged to create content then it shouldn't be the case that overnight a company changes their mind and files DMCA's, there should be an official notification. In the case of Star Trek, the project never went ahead, so it appears that there was nothing officially in place, in the case of Coca Cola, there was an official statement that Second Life users could use their trademark for inworld creations. With Battlestar Galactica, a compromise was reached. Maybe it would be useful if there were a page of officially sanctioned trademark usage within the Second Life website.

There are use cases for this, as Qie points out. One example would be a split commission script whereby money goes to one avatar and then a percentage goes to another avatar, this won't work if the first avatar goes into negative balance, so the script may want to check the balance before the transaction completes. However we don't really want scripts around that can check anyone's balance on whim.

Going Postal was a two parter, part 1 and 2 are on Virgin. Thief of time is superb.

Companies need to protect their intellectual property rights but really, if it's non commercial roleplaying they should encourage it, as Porky Gorky states above, this is brand promotion for them, for free. However if people are profiting from selling Star Trek merchandise then I'm afraid that's a no no, the items should not be set for sale. There have been similar issues in the past, Battlestar Galactica and Dune roleplaying have experienced similar issues, in the case of Battlestar Galactica it was agreed that items should not be created and sold, I don't know how well that worked out but the involved parties did come to an agreement.

I was at the Rod Roddenberry event. Surely the issue is commercial usage of Star Trek materials.

Kim Stanley Robinson had an accout in Second Life, he was a guest speaker at an evet but he already had an account. I don't know if he's still around inworld.

Nyll Bergbahn wrote: Anyone got recommendations for any other recently published sci-fi novels as I just love them? I've just started another read of Philip K Dick's Do androids dream of electric sheep? This is not a new sci fi novel but Philip K Dick tells some bloody good stories, although the timelines are far fetched these days as some of the dates that were the future when he wrote the stories, have passed and we haven't colonised Mars yet!

Phil Deakins wrote: I like sci-fi but I've never read a sci-fi book. The best I can offer is are Terry Pratchett's 'Discworld' books. There are dozens of them. They are not sci-fi but films of them would be shown on sci-fi channels. They are amusing phantasy about witches, wizards, Foul Ol' Ron, Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibler, werewolves, trolls, zombies, dwarfs, the Tooth Fairy, Death, and many many more - and humans. Sky 1 have done The Color Of Magic, The Hogfather and Going Postal, they're currently on Virgin Media on demand too. They are nowhere near as good as the books mind you.

Did you teleport to one of the locations Oskar has listed in his post? This fix is only live on areas running the snack RC channel. To check which channel is running on the sim you're in, in the Second Life viewer go to help and about and it will say something like: Second Life RC BlueSteel means you're on the BlueSteel channel, the new fix isn't running on sims on the BlueSteel channel, so you wouldn't notice the changes if testing it on that sim.

Is the land group owned or owned by you? When it comes to media, it often only works for the parcel owner and you sometimes need to deed objects to the group for them to work.

Darrius Gothly wrote: I also 100% agree that they need "Modifiers" in search strings. Things like "AND", "OR", "NOT" and the ability to search on a phrase by enclosing it in quotes would REALLY help a lot.. Absolutely, those features, which were in the client and the marketplace before, had uses for exactly some of the reasons highlighted in this thread. I know people generally search without modifiers, but they will soon get into using them when they realise it helps them find the products they want.

Tyche might have some good analysis of what happened but don't forget other events such as the advent of Linden Homes and merging the teen grid with the main grid, these events would have increased the number of Linden owned regions. GSA was a nightmare and did hurt a lot of merchants, there's no disputing that, there were many threads about that.

Medhue Simoni wrote: It is also worth noting that LL bought Xstreet at the beginning of 2009 and you do not see any significant change in any charts. This would imply to me that the Marketplace is not a significant factor in the loss of sales. Even the Inworld Sales chart shows no significant downward trend and actual goes up right after. March 2010 was when they were completing work on merging XStreet and inworld balances, this significantly increased the power and appeal of the marketplace, so I disagree that the marketplace is not a significant factor here and it has had a knock on effect with inworld sims not attracting commercial rentals. The Marketplace has certainly played its part.

Sassy Romano wrote: I'm going to get on my grumpy step now and ask if anyone that asks for notecards also asks RL phone callers or email senders to send a postcard in the mail instead? *hops off the grumpy step* I don't generally answer the phone due to the absurd amount of sales calls I get these days, I'll wait for someone to leave a message, unless it's at a time I don't expect the sales pests to be phoning me.

Honza Noyes wrote: This would be very useful. Since the JIRA changes, is there any way to file a feature request there? Give it a whirl, new bugs aren't visible to anyone but the person who submits them and authorised people, I don't know how it works with feature requests. Edited to add that I've just commented on a new feature request on the Jira, so it looks like they can be openly visible. The feature request wasn't for this issue though.

Yes it does sound like you have a Linden plant, there's a special group permission required for setting out those trees, unfortunately I don't know the name of a sanbox that allows it off the top of my head, but they are around.

Darrius Gothly wrote: Using the Mesh or Partial Mesh selectors says "I'm an honest Mesh Seller, I'm not selling stolen creations downloaded from some other site, and Linden Lab has my personal info on file." It's just one way of helping folks determine that you are legitimate, honest and selling your own creations. Fair point on the payment info on file point but it doesn't guarantee the seller is selling their own creations.

The notification gets capped, the delivery of the notecard itself doesn't appear to be, as Darrius points out, they do seem to still get delivered.

Tari Landar wrote: Ok, so I know that the whole "send IMs to email" doesn't always send them all, everything has it's faults and it's not 100% guaranteed to always work, though I think the fail rate is significantly low. But I have to say, what kind of creator, that wants to be taken seriously, lets their IMs cap and does NOT select this option? That's actually an honest question, I would really love to know why some people don't choose to let things go to email. . How do you know they don't receive offline IM's? I'm assuming some creators state this, if they then state how you can contact them, as long as that's reasonable, I don't see the problem.

Lasher Oh wrote: I agree. Notecards are the single most troublesome inefficient method of communication. I go out of my way to advise customer NOT to send me notecards but for some ingrained reason they mostly think that they are the guaranteed way to grab attention. Notecards can work well, they help people make their point in one message and get to the point, I'm yet to receive a notecard that merely said "Hello", as opposed to offline IM's where people will often send a hello message and then give no more information. The bigger issue with notecards is that you don't know the contents of a notecard until you get inworld.

Rolig Loon wrote: Second, many (most?) of the people who sell mesh items are people who create mesh themselves, not people who get a kit and add a texture. Those creators have to have payment information on file because there's no way to upload their mesh items from Blender, or Maya, or whatever without it. It's a system requirement. I see no reason why you can't list items on Marketplace that contain mesh, whether you made the mesh or not. There's no rule to say you can't list them, but you won't be able to use the mesh checkboxes when you list the item. There are full perm mesh kits out there, so I'd imagine people would be miffed if others weren't allowed to buy them, utilise them and then sell them on.

Gromlok Landar wrote: Selected Prim and it actually does make it walkthrough, so it seems that the binding box needs to be shaped to fit the design, so if im making a wall with 6 windows, I need to shape the binding box the same as the wall and windows am I correct ? Grom This depends upon the model, you may not need that level of complexity. Will avatars need to go inside the windows? If you have ledges then it may be a yes, if the windows are pretty flush with the walls, you probably don't need to worry about the windows when it comes to collisions.

Inworld shopping isn't what it once was, the rise of the marketplace has something to do with that but is far from being the only reason. Sales to support a roleplaying sim are certainly much more difficult to come by than they once were, the dynamics there are rapidly changing and it;s not always going to be a positive change.

If you have more than eight materials you can either upload it as its own object or make it a separate object in Blender in that scene, then it will upload happily.