Medhue Simoni

Ok, it has been almost a year now since LL completely destroyed the inworld search. Currently, the inworld search is about the worst it has ever been. It's been a full year too, with absolutely no improvements at all. Again, A WHOLE F-ing year that LL paid people to do absolutely nothing. Seriously, I want a job as an SL search professional, so that I can sit and do nothing for a year. The search hit rock bottom when PICKS were removed. So, why did LL not spend the past year fixing the problems with PICKs? Or, should we go another year with a BROKEN inworld search? Sorry if I just pissed off a bunch of LL devs, but I evaluate things by the results.:smileymad:

I feel a sudden urge to take a shower.:smileysurprised:

It's pure craziness, Darius! On monday, I made it into the results for the word Animation. Yeah, I did, really, for a whole hour. I was like #8 too, on the first page, for 1 whooooooole hour. Did bring back some good memories, lol.

Maybe I missed some1 mentioning this, but you do not have full control over the height of the ground level on Mainland. You get like a 10 meter range or something, that you can change it. For a small plot, this might not be a big deal. For a whole sim, like I have, what a headache. After being there over a year and a half now tho, you can't really even tell that I'm forced to have those inclines, but it still sucks. I really miss my underwater caves. Swimming or diving was something I did all the time in SL. Now, I can't remember the last time I was in SL water.:smileysad: Oh, and this tiering up BS sucks! Not to mention too, that LL could've been making more money off me if I did not have to tier up, and I just paid for what I use.

Madeliefste Oh Yeah, I'm kinda in the same boat. Generally, over the years, my sales have been rock steady. Even all last years chaos did little to set me back much, and I only really saw some larger fluctuations than normal. Last week tho, was probably my worst week in over 2 years. I would not guess that Japan has much to do with this. My guess is that St Patties day had more to do with this. I'm sure that if any1 really want to do a detailed analysis, you will find that St patties day is generally only a good holiday for bars and pubs. Generally too, because every1 celebrates it on different days, and some on multiple days, it usually last about a week long. Sorry, but I don't know too many people that drink while they are in SL, lol, or are on the pc and drunk. Well, this is my little theory. This week tho, kind of a great week so far. It is crazy how much inworld search changes. Monday, for like 1 hour, my store actually showed in a search for Animation, and it was even on the first page. Like I said tho, 1 hour later, it was gone, and has never shown in the results since. It is only because of Darius's search tool that I know this. It is funny too, cause for about 1 hour on monday, my sales were definitely elevated.

Vasquez Rae wrote: /ok i fixed my first issue by using an animation to lift it off the ground, but now when standing, the knees bend awkwardly and the feet actually lift off of the ground, is there any good way to make a large avatar the knees only bend when standing on actual ground, when i stand on a prim its fine. I can only guess that you have left 1 of the settings in the legs at a zero setting, which would allow the default animation to be able to overide the legs. This is the only thing I can think of if you are only seeing it on SL ground. The ground probably is not perfectly level, which is allowing you to see the problem better. Change that zero setting in the legs to 1 or something. But it does not have to be a zero setting that is the problem, the leg setting just needs to match the first frame exactly to have it be an issue.

Here's the thing, I've already discounted my product massively before I even put the products up for sale, originally. How long do you think it takes to make 50-60 motion capture animations? We, as merchants, make money in the long haul. The prices are already adjusted for that. Now, LL is asking me to cut the price for a sale, which is fine, and not unreasonable. The part that becomes unreasonable is LL's 50% take on the sales. 50% for what? Some tweets, and postings on facebook are supposed to be equal to my month of work? Some1 that offers to take 50% of your profits must think that they have something extremely worth wild to offer to the profitability. Sorry, but I don't see that value as anywhere near the value of my time and effort to actually make the product. To me, LL asking to take 50% is a massive insult to the actual creator of the products.

Madeliefste Oh wrote: I think it is reasonable that LL asks a price for the promotion of the item, but 50%? No, that not a fair deal at all! The work you need to do to promote Dash Deals is nothing compared to the time and dedication it takes from a merchant to create an item. I would have been interested to participate when LL had temperated her greed to earn on our backs. But with this percentage, no thanks! Don't forget about all the customer service you will have to do on all those extra sales, some of which will be failed deliveries.:smileyindifferent:

This, as a deal for us, is questionable, at best, Brooke. How do I think it should be different? Well, without knowing the details of the promotion and how exactly it will be marketed. I can only tell you what I would like to see. 1 - Cut LL's take on the deal by 25%. We are already being asked to cut our price in half. LL taking another half of our already cut half is like getting hit twice. 2 - Do a Dash Deal every single day. 3 - Make a video for it and post it on SL's Youtube page. You don't have to get crazy with the video, just 1 intro, 360 view of the product, or quick demo. No more than 30 seconds. Heck, depending on how proficient the Linden is, you could do 2 dash deals a day, for 2 time zones. 1 being more expensive for the merchant, then the earlier 1. Now, it looks like a deal to me. I don't think 1 full time person doing this is too much to ask, and it should easily pay for that person. If it does not, then include a set fee to the merchant to cover the estimated costs, rather than taking a larger cut. Plus, posting regular videos on Youtube will generate a larger, more regular audience. I don't think it is a terrible idea tho, and it does have promise. I would just like to see it be bigger than it is with more focus on it being a great deal for both the merchant and the consumer. Right now, it just looks like a great deal for LL. :smileytongue:

Well, I checked some models yesterday, and all my prim costs are up. This is not good, and I think that the equation needs to be adjusted. The penalty for size is also way off, IMHO. Because of this long wait, I've had to make sculpty representations of the mesh that I've already made. With the current costs, my customers are not going to want the mesh versions. The prim cost is going to be almost twice that of a sculpty prim, despite the mesh version being greatly more efficient than the sculpty version in so many ways. If you ask me, mesh should get an added bonus in prim cost because the textures applied to mesh, are far more efficient and is not taken into account. The current common practices of texturing objects in SL is extremely inefficient compared to texturing a mesh, and we get no added bonus for this in prim cost.

Morgaine Christensen wrote: Medhue, I looked this over a bit at work . Are there any other tutorials or manuals that you know of for SLat? Will this program run on a MAC? I've never seen a tutorial, other than the 1's I made for it, which are not good. I should redo them. I doubt it will run on a mac, but I really have no clue. For me, SLat is all about speed. Speed of doing or changing any aspect of the animation, from softening up some hard edged movement to cutting your fps in half and still retaining the detail, it is all just clicks away. Plus, you get 1 of the easiest to use camera controls that I've ever used, and that is a huge plus when it comes to speed. The Lycan thrashing video was done as an exercise, which I wanted to film myself making the 2 animations. So, I had to move very fast and think of the fastest way to make it, which is why i used alot of pre-existing animation and blended it all together. That whole video took me about a half hour to an hour, to make, and only has 3 added cuts to show the final animations. It is sped up around 3 times normal speed, but that was only to cut the time to the length of the song. This is why i use that video as an example of the program. If you want to see my SLat tutorials, which i only have 2 and they just show the basics, then do a search on youtube for "medhue slat".

I'll check it out. Sounds like a good charity event.:smileyhappy:

Welcome Bagman! I'm excited to see how things will change.:smileywink:

If you ask me, an inventory is crucial to the experience. Change our Objects folders into My Objects and has that be the only folder that shows in basic. You can't get confused with 1 folder, and it gets you ready for the Advanced viewer. Maybe also allow folders that are made by the user too, this way if they get a folder or buy something and get a folder, it will still appear. Again, this gets them used to the Advanced viewer, without having all these folders when you start. Having the option, right away, to engage in commerce is also crucial, IMHO. Even, If nothing more than a visual reference. Plus, a big marketplace banner somewhere. The basic viewer is perfect for some kind of advertising space and is a special market for those that cater to newbs, so allow the residents to market directly on the basic viewer. Too me, the basic viewer is way too basic. Actually, it barely covers the first hours of an average first time experience, when I really think it should have enough there to keep some1 interested for at least the first week. Plus, it is not all that clear that there are other viewer, and I don't really count pop ups or warning messages. It should be a visual thing, right there in your face, especially when you can't even buy stuff. My other dissappointment was that the basic is not really a "light" version, made to run on low end machines, which is why I always pushed for 2 viewers. I was not asking for 2 viewers so that it is less complex, cause I really don't see that as the problem. Too me, my facebook friends buy super cheap laptops and basically can't run SL and have any kind of enjoyment. So, my thoughts on 2 viewers was about accessibility and performance, not complexity.

For me, it was not enough to just clear the cache, I had to delete the whole SL folder. C:\Users\You\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife

Oh, but you guys are talking about a laptop. Sorry, you are probably right then.

Yes, thanks for the number info stuff. That was very interesting. I mean i kinda have some experience with them and I know what are the best cards, but I had no idea what all the numbers meant. A year ago, i got the 210 for a back up pc, and It handled alot better than you are claiming for the 220. I'm sure you are probably guessing tho. I could actually see shadows in SL, but only at around 10 fps. The pc the card was in is a quad core and has 8 gigs of ram tho. I never tried it in the Pheonix viewer. I kinda liked the card tho, and it performed as I needed it, but I have moved on as now I have a 450 in that pc.

I have purchased about 6 different computers for SL over the years, 4 in the last year and a half. They all have different video cards. A couple of them are real beefy, and all of them got them same warning message. Check your Nvidia Control Panel. There are lots of different settings you can play with. Also, the last time I got a new video card, none of the drivers worked until I got the driver directly from Nvidia's website.

OMG! Awesome thread, laughed out of my desk chair, lol. Gonna save this thread to come back later and finish reading. Thanks Keli! Wish we had kudos here.:smileytongue:

Nyx Linden just updated the wiki page with the avatar files. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Clothing_Tutorials

Zhoie Zimermann wrote: On another note, wondering if someone can help me out. In my desperate attempt to raise my sales back up I put in 3 ads in marketplace (1 PG product ad and 2 adult product ads). As many times as I have refreshed and viewed the featured items, I have only come across 1 of my ads 1x (1 of my adult items). No times for the other 2. However, in this time I came across other merchants products numerous times each for the same ad. Can someone that knows tell me how this can be? Is this also affected by the new mirroring of in world searchs? Is just refreshing your page and looking through the new featured items not an accurate account ? Thanks so much! It all depends on the category. For example: Thousands of people are paying for homepage listings, and not even checking or caring if it shows. With so many people buying homepage enhancements, it is virtually impossible for you to actually see your own ad, since the system seems to only show some 20-30 in the window. If you choose a category that only has a few ads, your ad will show every single time. Personally, I wonder why so many people think that some1 is going to look thru the homepage ads, other than merchants looking for their items. Who just sits there on the homepage? A long time ago, on Xstreet, I would just leave the homepage open, because i also saw all my stats, and we had that cool forum ticker to see when hot topics popped up. On our new marketplace, there is no reason at all to have the homepage just sitting there open.

Couldbe Yue wrote: even though this is actually off topic, I think I finally worked out who the missing millions are. If you look at the site stats, you'll see the under 17s are a huge group compared to their actual presence in the teen grid. I think they thought they could tap into that market, rather than realising that the kids are probably hanging out here because they get their titilation from the discussions. I'd like to hope I'm wrong but on LL past performance I'd say I'm probably spot on. After all, it is an amazing amount of disruption just for a couple of hundred teen accounts. The other thing to remember is that LL prefers to only deal with a few creators rather than a sea of them. Each change reduces the number of creators and I'm sure they're more than comfortable with it. Assuming the amount of money being spent on the marketplace hasn't decreased then I would say they're more than fine with what is happening. I think the problem they may find is that most people these days aren't happy to keep paying tier when the income isn't there and they've never quite managed to understand that diversity is the key. Hey ho. Well put. I'm not against the teens, and I saw alot of this coming when they introduced 3 different maturity ratings. I was actually looking for G land when I bought my sim, thinking that some day, it would be the only category that LL would allow every1 to populate. I was convinced by my friends that SL would never go that way, lol. So now I sit with an M sim, and LL won't change my sim to G, even tho I don't sell any adult items. Is it a big deal to change a sim to G? WTF? I guess 200 a month is not enough to make some1 change a setting. Really, LL, I'll pay you a few hundreds more to change it, if that is what it takes. Just tell me what I have to do. No, LL has a mainland where G land is spread out all over the place, and has no designated area. Who planned this crap? I feel bad for the teens, they are getting shafted almost as much as us.

hibit Spad wrote: Medhue, may I respectfully suggest that if you think LL is taking too long to develop mesh, that you can always go over to teh opensim project and volunteer to help them code mesh into their version of SL. I suspect that once you start digging into the code you will quickly change your mind and become much more tolerant of what progress LL is making on mesh. Where did I imply that it was easy? I simply stated that the reason we don't have mesh, right now, is not a technical issue. Half of coding anything is making decisions. These decisions can lead a product to market faster, or they can slow the process of getting the product to market significantly. Projects can go on for years and years, but at any point, if the decision was made to bring it to market, then it would be there. Again, this is about decisions, not technical issues.

Linda Brynner wrote: What i understand is that the movie business these days uses 25 and 30 frames per second. Simply because the human/brain eye doesn't seem to be able to process more. Smooth anims in SL are made like that as well. Users of higher end computers can see the actual smooth anim, while users of lower spec computers will see less fps automatically. While it might be great to upload every animation at 30 fps, as a movie might use, doing this in SL will ensure that your animations will take a long time to load. By a long time, I mean up to 10 seconds. While this might be fine for other things to take 10 seconds to load, with animation, the whole point of using the animation will be lost. Even with an AO, if you made every animation in the ao at 30 fps, then you would walk 10 meters before your walk kicked in. Not to mention how much space that AO would take up in your cache. Deciding what FPS to use on an animation is totally depended on what the animation is. If you are making a stand which has little or no movement, 5 fps is more than good enough. Adding more frames would not make any difference at all to the animation. More frames would just make the animation larger than it needs to be. If you are making a laugh, which has lots of tiny little movements happening very quickly, then you will require more FPS to actually see all the movement. With animation, things happen in fractions of a second and when you have many things moving very quickly, then you will need as many frame as you can get. The same goes for when you are recording motion. If you are recording a motion that moves very fast, you will need to record that motion at a very high rate, something closer to 60 FPS, and then trim it down to 30 fps, or lower, when editing it for SL.

The bottom line is that we could have had mesh a long time ago. These are decisions not technical reasons. Right now, the claim is that LL is working out all the details, which I consider most of those details to be BS. Prim cost has some relevance, but everything else is total BS, and does not change a single thing about whether some1 will use mesh. Again, tho, these are all management decisions. All we needed was a simple uploader to control the objects being brought in, all this extra stuff was a decision, not a technical need. We also did not need avatar meshes before coming to the main grid, again a decision. Even tho I'm almost useless with actual code, I still understand that mesh not being in SL is less a technical issue as it is LL's managerial decisions.