Ciaran Laval

Medhue Simoni wrote: Here is what I don't get. Why is this not immediately part of SL, if nothing else more than a testing ground for it? It looks simple enough to implement easily, and it could be used in Role Play sim that kind of do a similar thing. I would think this could be a brilliant way for people to get interested in virtual, or imaginary worlds. I agree, although to be fair to Linden Lab they have been talking about additional projects for a while, the actual concept sounds like it could add value to Second Life itself.

Dartagan Shepherd wrote: These days it's less costly for a company to go with real-world micropayments, which would also help clear up the confusion and create more trust. Barclays in the UK are unveiling a system whereby you can text payments to people, which is another boost for the mobile market, I'm sure other banks are doing this the world over.

Lucinda Bulloch wrote: Seems they are aiming for the mobile market, I think the human race is heading towards people having terminals instead of PC's, all tech is heading towards a centralized data base and only terminal access, that's the only way they can control the internet, they will say its a good thing because it cripple's most hackers and code writers, I think these terminals will lack the ability to program, only run apps created by approved people, big brother is coming if you like it or not, so I would just enjoy the internet while it last, in a few years it will be gone and the new system will be very one way, it to you and you will have little choice but watch, lol, think about it, what are these none playing people, see they are creating the role play for you, they will limit then what can be said and done, one day you will wake up and realize that all along you were farmed. Over thirty years or so of companies trying to do this and it failing, the mobile market has moved it along somewhat but it always comes back to power and control by the user. I've been installing dumb terminal solutions for decades, then the seesaw shifts again.

Money sitting in your Linden dollar balance is wasted money, so there's no harm whatsoever in putting it for sale on the Lindex as a limit sale, look at the figures, how many Linden dollars are for sale at price x, go one level below the big bulk and let it sit there for a few days, you can cancel a limit sale with no penalty, if you want just let it sit there with the big bulk money, it will sell eventually, even if you want your money in a few minutes, limit sell can work in your favour.

Qie Niangao wrote: More importantly, however, it's crazy to keep maintaining two completely separate search systems for in-world and Marketplace items. In-world items set to show in search should automatically populate Marketplace and deliver on sale without any additional fuss and bother for the merchant. The current separation is just silly, especially now that both use the same search engine. Good point, I have read about a vendor api somewhere but have never seen any details.

Tier prices are too high, but LL can't cut tier as they have no other strong income streams. LL's model of having their own servers which means always on demand is also restrictive. On demand hosting would be useful for some ventures, entertainment ventures spring to mind, if a club or music venue is only really used Friday, Saturday, Sunday, then only charging the owner for tier when the venue is in use, would make it more appealing for people to try and run entertainment ventures, but with the model LL have, that's not feasible.

Dartagan Shepherd wrote: Marketplace commission, like other sinks can be equated to real money, they’re just not thought of as revenue because they’re not a direct income. However, ask an accountant how this works and they’ll tell you that it is income and on what side of the balance sheet it falls in real world accounting. Money comes in from whatever source (tier, buying $L, premium accounts, etc.). LL puts some of this money into a global pool of L$ we call the economy. The more they take out of that global pool (which was purchased originally with real money), that’s the ammount they get to keep in real dollars. Take the last published quarterly report, where gross Marketplace sales were published. Quarterly gross Marketplace sales: L$1,183,000,000 5% quarterly commission in L$: L$59,150,000 Converted to real dollars at a rate of 260 (just because, even though there's no real correlation between what the exchange says a linden dollar is worth and what it's worth on LL books as real cash), it’s roughly $227,500 USD for the quarter. Roughly $76,000/month USD gross earnings from the Marketplace commission. This isn’t complete because it doesn’t include advertising sales or purchases in real dollars (PayPal purchases on thr marketplace, which are inflated substantially from items purchased with L$).. If we were dealing with a fixed sized economy then we could do something with these figures, because sinks take money out of other users hands and therefore it leaves a big gaping hole for Supply Linden to put his selling hat on and sell Linden dollars directly, which brings to Linden Lab, real, bankable income. However it's not a fixed sized exconomy, so sinks are not so straight forward to evaluate. The other shoe of people buying Linden dollars has to drop for sinks to work, they aren't just about selling Linden dollars, they are aimed at balancing the economy so we don't get steep changes in the exchange rate, they are there to ensure the economy isn't awash with money, too much money in the economy would be bad. They definitely servee a purpose but it's not one that's easy to quantify.

Irene Muni wrote: I do not understand why some argue that Marketplace and Buy InWorld are a trade in which you have to choose one or the other party . As a consumer I see the Marketplace as "Google". It's easy to find, compare, and make a list of possible similar products. It's eause buy many demos in a short time. And i t is easy to see the store of a merchant so I get an idea of his style. After that, do I buy in MP or inworld ? It depends. There are items that I would never buy without seeing them in Madrid: houses and furniture and similar, animations, plants and landscaping, many scripted objects, and many other ( and here comes the problem of how badly many merchants raised their shops inworld, others have commentd already). But just an example, why buy clothes inworld? The photo of the clothes is the same in MP and the shop inworld (btw, how few merchants offer demos of his clothes). Why buy an skin inworld if I've tried the demo I bought in MP? .Why buy inworld an item of a creator that I have already bought other items and whose quality he has shown me? I think that for a resident living in SL for some time the dilemma is not Marketplace or InWorld. The choice is quality (in MP or IW) or junk (in MP or IW). Marketplace and inworld shps do not fight, are complementary. There's a wider picture than this though, inworld shopping helps to subsidise other ventures, clubs, roleplaying, art galleries, people rented out spaces which goes towards social spaces. The more people slide to the marketplace, the more those social spaces struggle, it's too late now to do anything about it but some joined up thinking earlier in the process could have been helpful.

Dilbert Dilweg wrote: I feel ya there. I just sold Sweethearts jazz yesterday foR the same reasons and other reasons compounded my decission to move on, Good Luck to everyone. Sorry to hear that, I didn't agree with all of your decisions but that's a very popular place and I know it will have taken a lot of effort to keep it going. best of luck to you.

You can't really send yourself email via llemail as avatars have temporary email addresses, have you tried using llInstantMessage instead? http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlInstantMessage

Photoshop has far more features, it's the better package by a mile but it may be that you don't need to use those extra features.

Syle Devin wrote: So I am trying to find out if it is worth it to make a whole building is mesh or just use the textures on prims. to give the look of a mesh. I really want to make the whole building in blender and then upload it but do enough people see meshes, and are meshses stable enough to make it worth it? It is also a lot less prims which I love but if people won't see it then it's pointless. Any advice? Edit: I am no where near new to the 3d world so I know what I am doing but I am newer to second life mesh. I have no real idea if meshes work well enough in world for buildings and such. I know they work well with clothing but not sure about naything else. Go for it, just don't try and upload a whole building as one mesh as you'll run itno issues with textures, they're limited on how many faces you can have per mesh upload.

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: You're very welcome, the "number of textures side by side" part can be replaced with "2" in your case, so then it's exactly what you did. It however also works for any other amount. You asked for a formula afterall, not just the right digits for your specific case:) ah penny drops, because I wanted the full texture to repeat twice across the full width. I was doubling it at the end of my formula. I was getting confused because I thought number of textures meant how many faces I was texturing but now I understand what you mean. Yes I wanted the formula, otherwise I'd have been here again with another question with different sizes, long term the formula is very useful, so again, thank you very much for your help

Thinkerer Melville wrote: As to deeded objects, I hope you kept copies for youself. I have not found any way to recover deeded object and render them as usable as they were before the transfers. Set them for sale, or sort the group perms to allow manipulation of deeded objects but as Qie points out, when you deed, you hit next owner perms.

The idea has some merit, there are some showstoppers for some folk, the exclusivity clause and the loss of editorial control being two, although the latter is part and parcel of collaboration it would be better if the edited version was approved by the blogger before going to press, LL are bound to want some editorial control for posting something in their backyard. There's a value tradeoff here, which includes extended reach, although people are bound to want to be self promotional, that's part of the value tradeoff. If it kicks some lif back into LL's ailing blog it will be a good thing..

There are performance issues to take into consideration with this approach, you'll have sensors constantly running.

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: Eh yes that's exactly what I put in my post.... Haha! I think the number of textures part threw me, it all works anyway thank you very much

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: pfff, that was for some reason more confusing than I suspected...anyway... I went with 3 prims side by side and made a formula for the left prim. The result is this: Repeat = [number of textures side by side] * [width of left prim] / [width of all three prims combined] Offset = 0.5 * [number of textures side by side] * [width of the left prim] / [width of all three prims combined] - 0.5 or Offset = 0,5 * Repeat - 0.5 The result can be less than -1.000 or more than 1.000. In that case keep adding or subtracting 1.000 until you have a number that fits the offset range. If the prim on the right is the same size as the one on the left, you can multiply by -1 for the correct offset. Note..there can be some rounding off. In that case this might work slightly better: Calculate the repeat for the center prim: Repeat(center) = [number of textures side by side] * [width of center prim] / [width of all prims combined] round off the result to an even number and use this for the center prim. Repeat(left) = [number of textures side by side] - Repeat(center) / 2 the result will be 100% seamless, there might be some very very minor texture stretch, absolutely not noticable. Ah that starts to make sense! Thank you. The offsets you suggested in your later post do indeed work perfectly The only thing I'd add here is that I find the repeats by: repeats = size of prim / total width of side So in my case for my edges it's: repeats = .210/14 Which comes out at .015, which I then doubled as I wanted the texture to repeat twice.

namssab1nad Piers wrote: Your math would simply immensley if your prims were not such odd sizes. Always try to keep your prim sizes as close to round numbers as possible. If that is not possible, since we are dealing with metrics,is to keep your prims last digit ending in an even number. This will make virtually all of your calculations end within the number of decimal digits supported by SL. It also means a simple calculator will give you exact results. Try it, you will be suprised at how starting out with that small change will help. The number crunching worked well for those prim sizes, it meant I could get my repeats to be no more than three decimal places, that won't work if for example I had my starting edge walls at .200 instead of ,210.

Thanks a lot I'll try again tomorrow as it's getting late for me too.

I've been trying to calculate the formula for calculating offsets, and can't grasp it. The situation is I have three prims, the two edges are 0.210 and the main centre piece is 13.580, so overall it's 14M wide. I have my horizontal texture repeats set to 0.030 for the two edges and 1.940 for the centre piece, so the texture repeats twice. I currently have my offsets set (from left to right) at -0.500, -0.508 and 0.492. This comes out very very close to being ideal, well it's close enough to get away with it. The same settings pretty much work for a 12.8 prim set of 0.192 for the edges and 12.416 for the centre piece. However I can't work this backwards to give me a formula for working it out, it doesn't help that I can't remember how I ended up with the offsets I currently have, this whole thing got delayed, I think it may have been simply trial and error. Anyone got any clues?

Steps are quite straight forward to make in Blender, there are a couple of techniques that can be used but making stairs isn't too tricky. Texturing on the other hand is a pain, I suppose you could in theory just texture the first step in Blender , that shouldn't be too bad and then use the array modifier. I like Blender a lot, and it's fun to make things with but what gives me the heebie geebies is thinking about how others are going to want to texture the item.

Toysoldier Thor wrote: Thanks Ciaran.... I wanted to test this theory on just one simple model. and you are right. But for my model even the 1st script did not change the LI. You mentioned that the 1st script changed the LI but I think you were talking about the convex hulls. So I am not sure what these are impacted by the 1st script but my mesh model was not. Ah yes it will depend upon the physics shape too and the calculations for that, good point you raise though that adding a script doesn't automatically raise the LI.

Porky Gorky wrote: Why should merchants be allowed to remain anonymous when they are taking real money from people? This isn't a game, this is business and LL continuing to allow Merchants to operate and take money from people with zero accountability is wrong. If you don't want to register at least PIOF with the company that hosts the platform you make your money from then don't sell content. Go and be a normal resident and remain anonymous. There is room anonymity in SL but not when it comes to selling content for real money. You're getting very close to be careful what you wish for territory here, the next logical question being if only piof people can sell, why shouldn't the same apply to those who buy, as where else are they getting their Linden dollars from to buy the goods?

Toysoldier Thor wrote: I took my mesh "kneeling woman" sculpture that rezzes at a LI=2 and kept adding script after script until I had 9 scripts in the mesh sculpture. The LI satayed at 2. One of the scripts is large - over 500 lines of code. So the complexity of the script didnt change it nor did adding up to 9 scripts. That was my point Toy, it's having one script that makes a difference, it doesn't then matter if you have more or how complex the scripts are, the presence of one script and it doesn't matter how big or small it is, is what makes the difference.