Medhue Simoni

Phil Deakins wrote: Perrie Juran wrote: It is also one of the reasons why, and I know Merchants and others may not like my saying this, there shouldn't be Instant cash outs. No creator needs instant cash-outs. They (we) only need to plan a few days in advance if having the cash either in the account or in the bank is going to be necessary. Well, it's not really about need, and instant cashout doesn't have much to do with this. Instant cashouts doesn't imply there are no restrictions. They would only be done for established merchants that have a long record of completely legit transactions and little to no complaints. LL would be idiots to just allows some newbie to cashout instantly. So, my point is that instant cashouts would not help a scammer. To be clear on my opinion tho, I can accept a 2 day wait for cashouts, but going beyond that is not a good thing for the economy. Any kind of bottle neck effects the economy in negative ways.

Perrie Juran wrote: Of course not everyone in SL wants to build or learn how to build. I was teaching a two year old account how to store back ups in a box to reduce inventory clutter and had to first teach them how to create a prim! But still it goes against the general flow of "Your World, Your Imagination." I beg to differ. If you own a house in RL, is it yours? What about your car? How about your TV, or computer? Did you make any of those things? Did you put the painting on the wall or the couch where it is? Did you make the paintings? Is the room any less yours? "Your" doesn't imply that you created it. It implies ownership. Some of us like to make animations. Some of us like to make textures. Some of use love gardens. Some of us build castles. When we all come together and voluntarily trade goods in a free and open market, every1 benefits. We acquire the things we need or want by voluntary exchange. No person in SL could even think of doing it all. I know how to make most things in SL, but why would I when I can buy it for 50 lindens, and some1 that loves making that put more detail than I would have. I'd love to see more professional creators in SL. There really is room for every1, and it encourages novices to learn and promotes competition. Again, every1 wins. Some may lose businesses, but that is not a loss, it's a learning experience. It's the market saying they should move in a different direction. This is why the market works and is the most moral way to run a world. It's all voluntary. To dictate or use protectionism within a market, is to use force. What benefits every1 is SL being as beautiful as possible. I have faith that the really passionate people that create in SL will learn the things they need to learn to compete directly with any1. Today, most of the best tools are free.

"I actually regard the Second Life community as far more polite and less vitriolic then many video game communities I’ve managed, maybe it’s just my experience but for me it’s a step up." - Rodvik Humble Did you hear that? We are slacking BIGTIME!!! Great interview! I really miss the speeches, the Lindens would give every year. This felt like 1 of those. For the most part, I agree with most of what Rod said. What always worries me is just how tight lipped LL always is. It sounds like Rod understands how different SL is than other other game platform, but I don't think he or maybe the board doesn't understand that the communities and creators need openness so that we can plan ahead, and maybe even help out. It's not just our game tokens on the line or some nik naks. For many of us, it's our livelyhoods, and more.

There are always going to be exceptions. There just is not much to a computer tho. You need a case, a motherboard, a processor, some ram, a hard drive, an operating system, a graphics card, and a power supply. They are now selling PCs with no dvd drives. People can argue about all the parts and what is better or worse, but in the end, there just isn't much to it all. I prefer to let the name brands deal with matching up parts, as I have better things to do. What I do is look at those parts, that they put together, and ask, can I use this, and is this a deal? What do I need? What can I easily change? Is the case standard, and how easy is it to work with? If we are talking a normal SL user, or creator, that just wants to be able to see all the beauties of SL, than the person needs a mid level cpu, alot of ram, and a mid to high graphics card. Most of today's cpus can easily handle SL. With brand names, the bottle neck is usually in the graphics cards. So, the easiest thing to do is to find a name brand with a decent cpu, and as much ram as possible. Bam! 500 bucks and I have a brand new PC that is twice as fast as something I got 5 years ago. Get a $100-$200 graphics card that meets whatever level you want to be at, and BAM you have a decent gaming machine. No fuss! Plus, time is money. If it takes me days and weeks to find or get parts, and more to deal with making sure they all match up, I'd hardly say that is efficient use of my time, besides breaking something and being screwed. When I goto a store, I know it all works, and it takes less than an hour to pick 1 out. When I get home, I drop in a new graphics card and plug it in. If you are an SL merchant, you are already creating on new faster machine and selling items before the custom PC guy even picks out his case. If you want to know about parts, I watch this awesome Youtube channel.

Well, I think it really does depend on what you make, and what that market is like. Also, it depends on what your goals are. Some marketing is almost always needed. When I say I don't do any, I don't really mean that. I put out a kind of press release the day I release a product, or update a product. I hit all the social networks, and some SL related sights. Beyond that, and some enhancements, I don't really market things. What I try to do, is involve my business in self perpetuating things. For example, vending machines for my affiliates. Once the vendors are set up, it all just runs on it's own. I have hundreds of affiliates, and it grows daily. Word of mouth would be another self perpetuating type of marketing. The real question, around any kind of marketing, is whether a certain type of marketing is worth the time or expense. Here is where the problem lies in SL. We have yet to figure out an affective marketing system, at least for most of us. For me, I'm not too sure that spending even 5 hours to make an extra $200 is totally worth it. If you strictly look at it from the point of view of an hourly wage, that's not bad. Here's the thing tho, if you work fulltime on the net selling digital goods, your time is not based on hourly rates. For example, I'll spend a good couple of weeks, or 80+ hours making an AO, and over time, I'll make up the cost of producing it. Eventually, I make a profit and much more. Another example would be making Youtube videos. It might take a couple of days to make a video, but I know that if it gets marginally popular, I'll make $20+ a month off that 1 video for years. Who knows how much if it goes viral. I'm just saying that looking at things from an hourly rate doesn't really show the true cost. The last point I want to make about marketing is that it all can amount to a big bubble. We all have to get our products seen, but there can be many dangers in marketing so much that your view of the products real worth gets distorted. This happens all the time in the real world, and we can see this when the stock of a company falls rapidly. When the profit margin on a product starts to shrink, so will the budget to advertising the product. When half of all your sales are based solely on that advertising, every less dollar you spend, or time, will result in fewer and fewer sales. Imagine all of a sudden, you don't have 10 hours a week to spend on marketing, or even 5 hours a month. Or, let's imagine that you spend so much time on marketing that you don't spend enough time updating, or improving. This is all part of the distortion. Maybe you are making too much because of all the marketing that you react too late to a major change in the market. I don't mean to poo poo marketing, I'm just saying that there is a correct level for every industry and probably every business. Spending any more time than is needed, will hurt you in other areas.

Well, I think the OP's first example is not a bad set up, other than the video card. Throw a Nvidia Geforce 650 in it and you will probably be able to run SL on high, with shadows. Unless you want to be **bleep**, I wouldn't be building my own PC. It's just not worth the time or energy. You might save $50 bucks, if you are lucky. Plus, many people go cheap in all the wrong places, causing bottle necks in their system. I recently got a similar set up as the OP's latest, except with 16 gigs of ram and a larger power supply. I don't even run SL on it, cause it's kind of overboard for SL. I got it for 3D video rendering. I still run SL on my old PC. My old Gateway PC has an AMD Pheonom 11 X4 810 quad core with a new Nvidia Geforce 650 TI Boost and 8 gigs of ram. It runs SL at high with shadows, at around 39 fps. I originally paid about $550 for it with cheap Radeon integrated graphics. So, I'm just saying, you don't need to pay alot to get something decent for SL.

With the Lindex being the only place to sell, of course there are more lindens being sold on the lindex. The days waiting for a 247 sales is completely and totally dependent on how many people are selling at or above 247. Considering there are more sellers now, you would expect that many want their cash as soon as possible. Every time some1 wants it asap, they are going to put a bid of 248 or higher. Everytime this happens, the 248 sells need to be filled, instead of the 247 sells. This is what is extending the time. Imagine a merchant trying to sell lindens and seeing that there are 210 million lindens that need to sell before theirs' sells. They are simply choosing to sell at 248 instead.

WhiteRabbit, why did you put this in the Mesh forum? It's all developers here, which is why there is more argument than what you were seeking. You should have created this in the General forum. I agree completely with you. LL clearly doesn't understand the importance of clothing just fitting you, and not making the customer pissed off. The last part is obvious. SL is difficult enough to understand and figure out, the last thing you want is for them to be frustrated all along the way. Buying a dress and putting it on should be a 2 step process, not a 50 step process trying to find which fits, and then remembering which that is, and it is still not perfect. Guess what, she just threw in the towel. I'm a guy, and I won't deal with mesh clothing anymore until this is implemented. Almost all the arguments against implementing the deformer are from people that aren't that experienced with anything like this. I have every bit of confidense that all the clothing creators will love the deformer and so will their customers. Will they need to rethink some items, or make some items not used by the deformer, well of course, those decisions are part of the creative process. Any mesh clothing creator that doesn't use the deformer, I guarantee will lose all their customers. That's how confident I am about the importance of it. What I don't quite understand is why it isn't in Firestorm right now. Yeah, ok, LL implements some ridiculous shared experience rule. So what! It's obviously a dumb move, and the deformer project proves that. If not for that rule, it would already be in Firestorm, and every1 would be using it. LL would get a good look at how it performs, without doing any work at all, and not affecting their viewer at all. Personally, I don't even understand how LL even has the power to enforce the rule. Firestorm has more users. Battle over! Firestorm can do whatever it wants! Time and time again, a 3rd party viewer shows LL the way. They obviously shouldn't be the 1 dictating things. It should be the customers, which Firestorm has it's eye on, which is why they have more users. I'm not a LL basher or a Firestorm basher, or an any1 else basher. I just try to see things without rose colored glasses. Many of the changes LL had to make to the viewer after V2 was not Firestorm's or Pheonix's ideas, they came from LL in the original viewer. LL just tends to lose their focus. Heck, LL still hasn't put the pie menu back into their viewer. This should show how clueless they are sometimes. It only makes sense too, as Lindens come and go, but we, the creators and users in SL stick around.

Pamela Galli wrote: I have never spent much time at all promoting, other than notifying my customer list of gifts or promo items each week. I used to have Xstreet ads, and then "enhancements" but those got so screwed up I will not touch them. I have one classified which I am pretty sure is worthless. So I am thinking about doing home show things and taking out magazine ads, in place of the no longer viable marketplace advertising. The thing is, it's pretty hard to tell if any kind of promotion has any effect. To me, the problem is that LL never created any kind of mass media for SL. In RL, when TV was at it's peak, it was said in the marketing industry, that all you had to do was get your product on TV and you'd clear the shelves. Hence why we started seeing infomercial after infomercial, and shopping channels. LL could have done something very similar, but the results would have been major advertising for SL too. We had/have Treet TV, or whatever it is/was called, but few people knew about it. We also have Metanomics, which was a great show. LL has it's own Youtube channel, and they could have used it as the central place to show SL related videos. LL has never done anything serious on Youtube. I'm totally a free market person, and I'd not want LL interfering in the economy or just promoting certain businesses, but there are some situations where the benefit help every1 and the negatives are tiny. Simply showing other people's videos on their own channel, would have gotten them many more views and subscribers, as well as being the centerplace for SL videos. Youtube is huge. I'm already making money on it and I'm not even doing much. LL could easily get a million views a month. 95% of all my website traffic comes directly from Youtube. To me, video is so important to marketing, that if I were CEO, I'd of created a timeline like animation window in SL where you could drop character animation into the timeline and control multiple avatars like this. That would have given the machinima people a nice system to more easily create their machinima with, and had more people advertising SL with their videos. Just a thought.

Madeliefste Oh wrote: Rya Nitely wrote: Even with MP listing enhancements, items like clothing and skins have the best advantage as these are often impulse buys. I think clothing and avatar accessoiries are often impuls buys, but not skins. Skin is considered as a part of the personality, most people tend to choose their skin with care. I have often heard things like: I have been looking for a skin for days now, I tried like hunderd demos, I have three left now and don't know which one to choose. What do you think, that is the best skin of these three? Yeah, I think AOs would probably be the same way, as I hear the same thing from customers, "I've been searching for days(or weeks)". Plus, both skins and AOs get worn pretty much all the time, so they are being essentially advertised to every1 the person knows or sees them. Where as clothing is changed more regularly. Every1 does things different tho, and it's easy to find people that change their skin daily, or AO, but it's not as common. AOs might sell more tho, as there are lots of different things that can be made. Oh, and of course, men and women shop totally differently, for the most part. I have as many clothing items in SL as I have in RL, and that's not many. In 6-7 years, I've only gotten maybe 4 skins.

How old is your graphics card? Can you give us your spec on your machine? Does it meet the minimum requirements?

Madeliefste Oh wrote: My most important tip is controversial. Don't invest much time in marketing. Every hour spend on marketing is one hour less for creating and improving your skills. I have made my marketing hours in the past, but after a few years I came to the conclusion that it is more profitable to spend my time on creating then on marketing. I stopped 95% of my promotional activities. It made me a happier creator and my business did not suffer from it at all. I pretty much agree with this! Of course, every business is different, but for the most part, if you make items to use in SL, marketing is like trying to get somewhere on a stationary bike. I decided long ago, that engaging in any kind of marketing that consumed my time on a regular basis and took me away from creating products, was not worth the time invested. Actually creating products does much more to advance the business, IMHO. Currently, the extent of my marketing are some enhancements for more popular AOs, and a 1000 linden classified ad. I guess you can call my affiliate system as marketing too. I used to spend 10s of thousands more on classifieds, but LL ruined the system and make it less valuable. I can't end this reply without talking about how things used to be. Back in the day, meaning before 2010, the inworld search worked in a way that it actually ranked merchants for any keyword. It was all because of the ranking in the search engine that I got 70% of all my traffic to my inworld store. There was absolutely no need to do any marketing at all. All a creator had to do was focus on creating and making their customers happy. If you did this, you got regular customers from search, and you would climb up the search ranking if got enough profits to keep expanding your business. It was win win for every1. LL sold more land, as the size of your store meant alot to your search ranking. Today, I don't think any1 has any clue how anything is ranked in the inworld search. I won't even use it cause all I ever get is a mish mash of random results.

I'll add my 2 lindens, Porky! Let's see, I think SL will be around for many years. At least until 2015. It will continue to decline at it's current rate, unless many of the top merchants close up. If that happens, than the decline with quicken. Personally, because of the lack of fixes in my field, I'm not enthusiastic about SL anymore. These things have not been fixed in my 6 years here, and I have no hope at all that they ever will be addressed. I've spent the past year mostly working on other platforms, and building a business outside of SL. LL lack of interest, direction, and communication forces me to seek other more stable sources of income. Now, there are areas that are growing in SL, or that have more things to be excited about, like mesh and Gaia's Avastar in Blender, but I'm not sure how much any of this will help. If other merchants start seeking other sources, as I have, than SL will not last long. MY BIG IDEA FOR LL IMHO, I think LL has to take the bull by the horns and do somelthing somewhat drastic. I know I'm going to piss some people off, but I think LL should begin releasing complex scripts for public use. I mean, they are mostly coders, so let them code our world. I love independent coders but good 1's are hard to find and harder to stick with. Plus, with every1 writing their own code for things, we get a fragmented independently minded cluster fluck. Imagine if LL wrote the main code for all the combat systems in SL, and then the merchants in SL do whatever they want with it. We'd have more people actually creating instead of banging their heads about code. Maybe LL also controls the servers to keep track or stats in this combat game. Or maybe they write code for a full on RPG. We'd also eliminate alot of really bad code out there. There are lots of complex systems code that LL could write for the community. I only got this idea from looking at the code that LL wrote for a complex navigation system for pathfinding animals. Of course, not being a coder and the code not well commented, I had no clue how to implement it. So, yeah, LL could write some nice code but they would also need to explain it and comment in the code better.

So many want to make this about whether virtual money is real money or not. That is a non issue and should not even be discuss by any1 with half a brain. Money is determined by governments to enslave their subjects. It's just a word game. The only real money in the world is gold and silver. This has been determined by the market. Everything else is fiat money, which governments use to print as much as they want. Fiat money allows governments to tax the public without the public seeing the affect right away. Money printing is a hidden tax, which expresses itself in inflation(rising prices). The reality is, your virtual assets are real property. They are something you acquire thru your labor. Again labor versus play, is just another word game. These assets take up real space on a server. Essentially, all virtual worlds have property rights. This is easily assumed because no 2 character can have or use the exact same assets. Yes, they might be able to use an exact copy, but not the same asset. Owning that asset means you have the exclusive right to use it. Passing your assets onto some1 else, without your expressed permission is actually theft. Do not confuse this with some1 illegally copying an item. This is not theft, as the original party still has the object. Now we are getting into a whole other argument, so let's not go there.

Besides trying other viewers, I have something you could try. Delete your C:\Users\Medhue\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife\medhue_simoni and your C:\Users\Medhue\AppData\Local\SecondLife folders. These will be different on a mac, and of course the user will be you not me. You will have to redo all your settings, but I've been forced to delete these before, as it was the only way I could get back inworld.

I'll chime in, as I've seen some wackiness lately. I think it was Sunday that I had the worst day of the past year. Down about 75% from my norm. It was bad, really bad. Monday was about 20% of my average. Tuesday was somewhat back to normal. The thing is, the week before was quite a good week, and then Sunday came. Now, I have no clue what happened on Sunday, as I'm just not doing a whole lot in SL lately. You can bet tho, that LL did something. My sales just don't fluctuate that irratically.

Oh, and 1 last note about tools. Recently, I was contracted for a big job. They didn't contract me because I knew 3ds Max, which I do, but because I knew DazStudio. Outside of the mega gaming corporations, not many have the capital to deal with licenses and everything else. Many smaller game companies are taking advantage of all the different tools out there. Not dealing with licenses can be a HUGE plus. I see this happening more and more. By all means, if you can learn Maya or Max, than go for it. If you can't afford them, than start out in Blender. The experience alone will be worth it.

Yep, this is the place to discuss merchant concerns or possibly get some advice. I must say tho, that it is quite challenging, as every merchant has a different view of what is being successful in SL. This is great that we have such a mixed field. It can be problematic as myself answering a question is much different that some1 that just wants a few extra bucks every week. I'll throw some points about being profitable out there. *Be prolific! A handful of products aren't going to make any1 very much money. Yes, there are 1 hit wonders, but that is about as common as in RL. Release, at least, 25-50 products before you start thinking you should be profitable. *Start an affiliate vender system for other to sell your products and earn a commission. You can't know every inch of SL, so let others that have some expertise in other areas sell your products. *Get a thick skin and talk to your customers. Find out what they really want or need. Expect to be insulted on the rare occassion and don't let it get to you. *If you want to earn real livable wages, then create options for products to make them higher end. 10L products might get you sales, but you would need to sell a crapload everyday for them to make you anything significant. Look at other high end products in your field, to get a feel of what people are willing to pay within a given market. *Customer Service is probably the biggest factor that will keep your customers coming back. Yeah, not every1 can be available 24 hours a day, but make customer service a big priority and make it as good as you can. Last note about tools. Yeah, If you want to work on a specific game or for a specific company, than you might need to learn 3ds Max or Maya. These programs are ridiculously overpriced tho. Blender can do almost everything that Max or Maya can do, if not more and more compatible with somethings. Technically, they all can use the same file formats, so it really shouldn't matter which you use, depending on what you are making. Personally, I'll prob be hiring model creators in the next year or so for some video and movie projects, and I really don't care at all which program they use. In my book, quality far outranks which tool you use. My last point is that if any1 is actually wanting to get into the game industry, then you better learn to make meshes ultra efficiently. 1 million polygons and 20 UV maps for 1 character is not exceptable, and few games will use more than 1 texture. Just my thoughts.

Ok, basically you don't use the Compatible with Secondlife feature. This feature adds your T frame, or first frame. As long as you are using the SL Avatar in Daz, it will export the right bvh file, so you don't have to check the Compatibility checkbox.

Oh, I understand the need for protection, but 5 day turnarounds is hardly a way for an efficient economy to run. Heck, I'd accept 2 days if that was the rule and didn't go past 3. When you throw in weekends, when the rest of the net runs 7 days, it gets to be rediculous. Rod just talked about lessening the bottleneck on improvements in the viewer. Now, how about addressing the delays in cashouts? Really, if it was 2 days and reliable, who would complain about it? When someone like me reaches 7 actual days, I'll have 3 or more cashouts in process by then. I can't imagine how many times a larger merchant would cash out. For the smaller merchants, it doesn't promote the instant need to create right away, as you won't see the money for a week, at best. As merchants, our biggest obstacle is the competition in the market. When you pile on other things that slows the whole process down, you create more volitility in the markets. With so many people on the edge of folding or just hanging on, it creates a situation where they are more likely to hold their money, as they don't know when the next payment will come. It destroys many impulse buys, or investments to expand. Do I seriously expect cashouts to be instant? NOT Really! A few hours does makes sense tho! It takes a few minutes to look up an account and comb over transactions, or scan an account with a program to flag transactions. Plus, any substantial merchant has a long track record of transactions that can put them in a fast track category. A few hours to a days is plenty of time for security to do it's job. Any more than that is a bottle neck, which is usually a simple fix of adding more personal. Of course, these are my opinions.

This is a response to LL changing the Terms of Service. You can find it here. The ONLY reason anyone uses any other exchange to convert their lindens into dollars, is because LL takes a WEEK to exchange the money. This is not exceptable in any logical person's book. It takes more than a WEEK if LL is backed up. If LL wants everyone to use the Lindex, than all LL has to do is implement instant cashouts. No person would need to use another service if LL would actually do what is needed. You, LL, created the problem which you are now rewriting the TOS to try to correct. Just implement instant cash outs and PUFF, the problem is solved. If every person used the Lindex, that would mean more payouts for LL to process, it would result in cashouts taking even longer. How the heck does LL think it can even deal with all the transactions if they get backed up with processing cashouts now? The only real solution is to implement instant cashouts for all those that cashout regularly. If LL can't do instant cashouts, than please explain to us why, in detail.

Pamela Galli wrote: YOu might want to know, Medhue -- that last animation bug I had, that you so generously fixed for me, and saved by Whirly, who twice confirmed that there is a bug and documented it. It was about to be closed by Lindens who at first they could not reproduce it. Now its status has been changed to minor and that it has something to do with triage. I still have another bug from months ago, confirmed, then ignored. Yeah, I'm not surprised. Same stuff I've been dealing with for over half a decade now. I'm extremely willing to help LL in any way that I can to fix the bugs. I'll give them, or make them any animation they need to test any of the bugs, as long as it seems like a serious effort to fix the problems. If a Linden wants to contact me directly, I'm more than willing to do whatever I can, but I will not ever be creating another jira. Creating jiras is not the job of the customers. We don't get paid for our time wasted trying to help LL, which would really not be an issue if LL actually fixed the problem we report. Unlike LL employees, I don't get a paycheck just for coming into work.

I hear ya Jonas! It's really sad how LL has neglected the animation system. If all the problems were fixed, SL's animation system would truely be a joy to play with and far surpasses any other ever made. That said, I'd be willing to bet every linden I've ever made that LL will never fix any of the major animation issues, or at the very least, the looping bug.

We can only assume that LL doesn't care enough to do anything about it. I totally hear what you are saying about not being motivated to create for SL anymore. From the messed up listings, messed up enhancements, various 6 year old animation bugs, ridiculous Land Impact system, to no movement on the Mesh deformer in a whole year, what exactly is there to be excited about. For me, the only thing that even draws me in is what Gaia Clary is doing with their Avastar plugin for Blender. Again tho, what's the point when LL can't or won't fix anything. @Pam - Yeah, I know you mentioned that they are working on some animation stuff, but I heard it only has to do with an internal AO, which is simply a matter of merging Firestorm's code. Plus, it doesn't help me at all. I already made my own AO system that easily kicks their internal AOs butt. They won't fix any of the bugs. I've been trying for 6 years and I don't think they have any1 on staff that could even remotely understand how to fix the issues. Heck, even a simple priority problem on turning animations is beyond their scope of interest. Even the spread hand morph bug jira was abandoned. You'd think that would be an extremely simple fix.

Actually, it's not content theft at all. The person bought the game. There are 2 types of licenses that most people allow for. The first 1 is a license to use the content. The 2nd is a license to sell the content. I would think that uploading a Sims mesh into SL is still just using it. Now, if the person was to sell the items, than that would obviously be wrong. Of course, these are just my opinions.