Ceera Murakami

By the way, something to bear in mind for those of you who leap to be on the bleeding edge of this new technology. This came up in one of the other mesh threads. Until viewers that have backported this Mesh capability are widely in use, only those few people using the LL 2.x Mesh Viewer will even be able to see your pretty new Mesh creations, let alone benefit from them. Anyone using a 1.2x Viewer, or a TPV that hasn't yet backported the 2.x code for mesh, will see you and your incredible mesh Furry avatar like you're wearing the Emperor's new clothes. They won't see the mesh components at all, except as little tetrahedrons that don't ever rez into anything. They will just see your prim and sculpty bits, and maybe a naked and badly deformed avatar that should have been hidden from sight. Your lovely 40-prim dream castle with soaring spires and flying buttresses? They will only see the prim windows and doors, and the prim and sculpty flags, and not the mesh parts. But they will bump into the collision mesh of the castle that they can not see. Yes, the attractive possibilities of mesh will probably make a lot of people switch to LL's 2.x mesh Viewer, just to be able to benefit from Mesh, even if they utterly despise the 2.0 UI. Unlike tattoo layers and avatar alpha layers, this tech will be a game-changer that will be almost impossible to ignore. And no doubt a lot of the 2.x-based TPV's will rush to offer this capability, as soon as they can. I certainly hope that at least some of the TPV developers were in the mesh closed beta. Were there any? Or did LL shut them out, in hopes that the introduction of Mesh would force more people to adopt their unpopular 2.x LL Viewer? But until the Residents do widely adopt the new Viewers as their standard, it's going to be like selling movies only on DVD, when everyone has video tape players, and only a small percentage of the consumers have DVD players. Few at first will be able to benefit from it. But what will be worst about the situation is that unlike DVD's, if you're not ready to get that new Viewer yet, for any reason, your experience will still rapidly become worse, as new mesh buildings and your friend's new mesh avatars become increasingly impossible for you to interact with.

New proposal in JIRA: Second Life Viewer - VWR VWR-23039 Display Names: Retain a queue of previously used Display Names that the resident can switch between, and which remain visible in their Profile

Thinking about this, I would like to propose one idea that would be of benefit to several factions here. Allow, no, force, the resident's Profile to show an "AKA list", showing the last 10 Display Names that the Resident has used. Those ten names could be switched between at will by the resident, with no fee, but new names could only be added to the list once per week (with or without a fee, or a requirement to be Premium, or other restrictions). That list would be searchable data, so even if the resident wasn't displaying "Trevor Bloodmoon the Werewolf" as their current display name, you could still find them in Search. In use, the most recently used display name pops to the top of that list, and you always have the option of using none of the Display names, and showing your User Name instead. If you fill the list with ten choices, and add a new display name, the least-used name drops off the bottom and is gone. This would make going from one roleplaying venue to another and changing your name to match as simple and painless as changing your clothes from an Edo period Japanese Kimono to Gorean slave silks. It would make it usable by roleplayers who RP in more than one venue in a given week, or who do not live 24 x 7 in only one role. It will make it much easier for foreign-language residents, who could display their Japanese name in Katakna, Hirigana, and Romanji characters, as well as an English language nickname, and switch between them as the current group that they are interacting with requires. (Proper Japanese when in a Japanese-speaking sim, Romanji or an English nickname when at a general club venue.) It would allow someone who was Partnered to use their Partner's surname socially, while still using their original or professional name for business. For example, I could have "Ceera Saito" as a Display name while socializing with my Partner, and readily switch back to "Ceera Murakami" when I am working as a Builder and Sim Architect, and both would be searchable names that would find me. It would make it much easier to identify friends who changed their name, especially if they change them frequently. It would make it much harder for a griefer to assume a name, create problems, and then leave without a trace, without abandoning the account (assuming you could only add new names and flush the old ones out by adding new names once a week). Noob griefers who try to impersonate several people would show a history of their past assumed names, making it easier to spot repeat offenders. (Of course, a serious Griefer would use a disposable free alt once, and then delete the account, discarding it like a thrown-away Saturday Night Special handgun used in one crime and thrown into the river.) This doesn't solve all the problems, but at least it would make the names more usable.

I hope you are right, Dante. I'm certain that future generations of furry avatars and all sorts of other products will benefit from this. How will a physically large mesh get textured, and what limits will there be on the textures for them? Will it be possible to assign multiple textures to subdivisions of the mesh's UV map, and to assign a multiplicity of tiled textures with repeats to individual subdivided areas? What physical size limits will an individual mesh object have? I am familiar with DAZ|Studio, and I know the mesh figures there usually had far more pixels in their surface texturing maps than can fit on a 1024 x 1024 texture. If we are stuck with no larger than a 1024 a 1024 texture, the maximum practical size for a mesh will be severely limited by its texturing limitations. Who wants to look at a mesh skyscraper with pixels half a meter wide on its surface? Take a look at a 1024 x 10254 texture applied to one face of a 50M x 50M megaprim. The pixels are ungodly huge.

@Lightscribe Your example, however, also shows just how easily a proven and popular product could be rendered instantly obsolete by the introduction of Mesh. Would you be so happy if your 243 prim gun was already perfected, fully functional and on the market? If it was one of your best selling items, and the introduction of mesh slaughtered your sales because someone else beat you to the market with a better-looking, two-prim version of your primmy gun? Would you like to compete against imported copies of the many exquisitely-detailed guns and other weapons already for sale for use with Poser and DAZ|Studio? I make custom buildings for my clients, in huge, multi-sim builds. Just recently I completed one building that was well over 3,000 prims. It was an eight story dorm building, with every window and door detailed, down to the unequal, 'artistic' divisions of the panes of glass in hundreds of windows, exactly the way the architect had detailed them in their Autocad blueprints. I can see where a talented expert with 3D mesh generation, like "Stonemason" on the DAZ products website, could probably make that same dorm building with less than 30 to 100 mesh and prim parts, including all the doors that need to be able to open and close. Just how much prim reduction is possible will depend a lot on how big an imported Mesh object can be, and how badly LOD screws up mesh at a distance. But if we were talking about a generic downtown city block structure, which product do you think would sell, and which would end up in the trash and deleted? Stonemason's imported 30-prim Mesh build, ported over from DAZ? Or my 3000-prim version? Take a look at how much the use of sculpted prims in furnishings has already slaughtered prim counts in furniture, and what sells well now. Fortunately for me, the effort necessary to make a one-off custom mesh build, precisely to client specifications, is probably not worth it for the mesh pros. They will build their generic homes and urban scenes, and sci-fi set designs, and won't want to make a specific University campus, detailed exquisitely. Why would they, when they can expend the same effort and make a generic product and sell thousands of copies, instead of a one-off sale? Can I learn to use Blender and other free tools to eventually make detailed Mesh parts for my custom buildings, and reduce my prim counts drastically? Quite probably. I've slowly learned how to make my own sculpties with Blender, but I'm light years behind the capabilities of the high-end sculpty makers that have programs like Maya at their disposal. It will take me years to catch up. And meanwhile, the mesh pros will become all the big name brands in the market. The ones I really feel for will be the furniture makers. They are already starting to feel the pinch, as a 40-prim bed gets replaced by one made of one to six sculpted prims. With an almost unlimited source of pre-existing, high-quality mesh furniture out there, that has been created for DAZ and Poser modelers, the prim content makers will be swept aside, both by the actual legitimate creators of those models, and by the rip-off artists who grab stuff from Renderosity and import it, claiming it as their own. It's going to be a very rocky road, for existing content creators. I believe a lot of them will not survive.

Well, it certainly looks promising, I'll say that. I look forward to the day when a TPV that doesn't rely on the crippled 2.x UI backports the Mesh Import capabliities into a usable Viewer. Will mesh be visible to the users of non 2.x Viewers?

Ralph, That is actually one fear that is not an issue with Display Names, as proposed. When looking at prims owned or created by someone, you will see both names - the Display Name, followed by their actual User Name. If the creator later changes their Display Name, their creations do eventually reflect that change, but at all times their real User Name remains attached to the prims (and presumably other assets, like textures) that they created.

Another question, Jack: As I understand it, the new registration process would, as proposed now, require a new account to create a one-word username, without unicode characters, and would disallow an exact match to existing user names, with or without the dot between them. So, for example: "CeeraMurakami" and "Ceera.Murakami" could not be registered for a new account, since "Ceera Murakami" ("username ceera.murakami") is already registered as my unique name. Correct? But what characters will be allowed in the unique user name field for a new account? Just the letters A-Z, a-z, and the numbers 0-9? What about periods? Hyphens? Spaces? Apostrophies? Diacritical marks? Can someone register "Ceera Mura Kami", and have that show as "ceera.mura.kami" for their username? ("ceera.mura.kami Resident" in legacy scripts and on non 2.x viewers, but not displayed that way in 2.x for the most part.) Will someone be able to register "ceera.murakami______________________" (my exact unique name string, followed by a bunch of underscores, or periods, or some other easily ignored character, to the length limit allowed), to push the word "resident" out of display range? And if we catch someone who is clearly making a *** deliberate *** impersonation attempt, copying not only our name but also our appearance and profile information, will that be an AR-able offense, as a violation of the TOS regarding deceptive or misleading representation? I think that should be a bannable offense.

A couple more things: I'll agree with several others in this thread that a land owner should be able to turn OFF display names on their property, just as we can turn off Voice Chat. If I want to be 100% certain that no one can stand in my "Fox and Ground Construction Company" offices wearing a misleading display name and passing themselves off as me, or as one of my employees, and harming my business, or ripping off my customers, I should have the right to turn that feature off on my parcel of land. And can you please explain why the new registration process has to ignore the last name field? Why force them to cram everything into a single name field? If I want to register my account as "Fred Murray", and that is unique, why should I have to register as "FredMurray", and be known in-world as fredmurray.resident? Why not have "fred.murray" as my unique user name on the things I create? Yes, with the display name they can force it to display as they want. but it would be SO much simpler, and much more compatable with existing scripted content, if the majority of people continued to use the "first name, last name" convention that all current scripts are based on. Allow them to enter data into both fields, and concatenate it with a dot for the user name, as long as that is unique. So new user Fred Murray shows up in legacy scripts as "Fred Murray", and not as "FredMurray Resident". For example, if I wanted to make a fresh account as "Ceera Saito", which is a unique name, and which would allow my unique name as that account to match the surname of my SL Partner, why shouldn't that be allowed? Why should I have to be "ceerasaito Resident"? And I agree with Qie. First setting of the Display Name should be free, but after that there should be a small fee to change it.

Well, Jack, I must say that I am pleased to see at least some offers of compromise here. But we're still at about the point of 95% what the lab designed, and only 5% addresiing what your paying customers are concerned about. Please, we really do need both a color and text style differentiation between Display Names and unique names. It should be possible to tell them apart at a glance. Consider some option that is friendly to color-blind Residents, like displaying the changable name in parenthesis. *** The official Linden Lab 1.2x viewer needs to support seeing display names, the same way that it supports seeing avatar alpha layers and tattoo layers. *** (I'd emphazize that more, but your borked Blog software won't let me do it.) You need to offer a patch to the 1.23.5 official LL viewer that will enable seeing display names. Many, many Residents still find the 2.x Viewer unusable. It is going to cause incredible confusion once this goes into effect, when maybe 30% of the user base is using Display names, and well over 50% can't even see the name in use. If one user is going by "Fred" as his Display name, and I'm in chat with him on the 1.2x Viewer and all I see is "asdfghjk123", how can I even talk to him? How will I know that the "Fred" that someone else is saying is trying to get my attention is the person I see as "asdfghjk123"? Yes, the TPV's will eventually backport this function to their viewers, but many of us, after the Emerald incident, are gun-shy about using TPV's. Both official LL viewers need to support seeing the display names. *** We need a way for individuals who are concerned about impersonation to be able to protect their unique names. *** My SL Name, "Ceera Murakami", is a legally registered business name, or DBA, that I own in the real world. I have a bank account in that name, and can cash checks written to that name, just like any Hollywood actor or actress can do for their assumed stage name. I should have the same right to protect my legally registered business name that any celeberty or corporation has today. The common names like "John Brown", that might be people's real-life names, won't be likely to apply for that protection. But those of us who have invested time and money establishing our very unique names as a brand and identity for our products and services will want to protect our unique names. Let us do that, PLEASE. Please allow any existing Resident to add their unique username to an "exclude list", by paying a reasonable one-time fee, or even as a perk of being a Premium member. If a name is on this list, and someone else tries to use it as a display name, that name choice should be denied, with a response that the name is protected and already in use. Or at the very least, the person trying to change their name to that should get a warning, and a notification should be sent as an IM to the owner of that protected name that "asdfghjk123.resident" has set their display name to the original user's unique name. Approaching this as a role-player, people who role-play should be able to flip between several Display names at will. Most roleplayers that I know in SL do not live 24x7 in their roleplay sim, and never leave it to roleplay in any other venue. Most of them enjoy several different venues. In the morning they may be a steampunk avaitor in Caledon, at lunch time they may be a castle guard in an Edo Period Japanese sim, and that evening they may be an officer in a Star Trek sim. Changing their name only once a week is useless for that. As a compromise, I would suggest that perhaps you can only accumulate new names once per week, and perhaps there is a fee for changing names, as there is for Partnering, but the last 10 display names that you have selected remain visible as a list in your profile, and can be switched between at will, or turned off, in favor of displaying your real unique name. That would allow a roleplayer to use one account in several different venues, switch between them at will, and would still make it possible for those worried about impersonation, or confused when a Friend vanishes and a stranger appears on their Friends list, to check the profile and see that the stranger who just IM'ed them as "Trixie Trollop <sally123.resident>" is the same girl that they met last week and hired as a dancer in their club, when she was calling herself "Kathy Cameron". Being able to flip between a list of names that is visible in your profile would also allow a resident to display their name in Japanese when they are interacting primarily with Japanese speaking residents, but to change to a name that is readable and pronounceable by English speakers when they are not in exclusively Japanese areas. I really dread visiting some venue and having to say "Hey, you! You, with the Chinese name. What the heck do I call you?", when I can see that they are conversing fluently in English with others. If I could look at their profile and see that the girl wityh the unpronouncable Chinese symbols over her head and an equally unpronouncable random character string as her user name also goes by "Sally Wong", it would enable me to politely address her and interact with her. Again, thank you for at least trying to listen to our concerns. It is very refreshing to see that change in behavior from the Lab employees and management.

Pamela Galli wrote: There is a warning when you return something that says no-transfer deeded objects will be lost. Tell, me, how do you deed a no-transfer object, when deeding it to a group is a transfer of ownership? That can't be done. No-copy deeded objects might have issues that way, though. In general, the "Return all items on parcel" button is incredibly hazardous, and should never be used.You are almost certain to trash something that way. The most common problem is the house, pool and a couple of trees all get lumped together in a single coalesced object, or in objects that bear no relation to what was part of your house or part of the pool. If you have even one Linden Plant in that mess, you can't rez the coalesced object except on land that allows you to create plants and trees. If you have one no-copy item in that lump, and it fails to rez for any reason, it vanishes forever.

Stand on the parcel, and select "About Land", and go to the Objects tab. It will tell you how many prims are on the parcel, and how many prims the parcel supports, as well as the combined total allowed to all the parcels in that sim owned by that owner. That information is available to any parcel owner, and is even visible to visitors. In the 1.2x viewers, About Land is a choice on the World menu. Not sure where they hid it in 2.x.

Just sub-dividing won't make things get returned, but changing what group or individual owns the parcel will. First, turn auto-return off. Then subdivide the parcel. While both parcels have the same owner, or are owned by the same group, they continue to share prim count. At this point, check the allowed prims, and adjust as needed so each parcel either is large enough to support what it has on it, or has only as many prims as its size allows. Once you are within the prim limits per-parcel, if you change the residential one to a different group, or to being personally owned while the club parcel is group owned, they each will observe their own prim limits. Now, make sure that the prims on each parcel are set appropriately for the ownership of the parcel, or the group the parcel is set to, so auto-return won't start returning things if you turn it on. For example, if all the prims in the residential part are still set to 'Mike's Club', but the parcel is now set to the group 'our love nest', you need to change what group those prims are set to on the residential parcel. Once you're sure the group settings are OK, you can turn auto-return back on.

Yes, the stipend for Premium accounts accululates each week, no matter how often you log in, and does not 'expire'. The old "paid Basic" accounts from prior to 6/6/2006, which get a L$50 weekly stipend, must log in each week to collect that. If they mis a week, they miss the stipend.

Hello Kim, and welcome to Second Life. It would certainly be refreshing for Linden Lab to have a Marketing Manager that actually "gets it", and understands what the product is that they are promoting, and how the customers who use that product actually use it. The marketing people that they have had in the past have been too willing to focus on some single, internally-generated 'magic bullet', like "If only we could get all those FaceBook users to join SL...", or "Lets really support a select group of clothing creators", or "Let's pitch SL as a great tool for Business communications!", while utterly ignoring the realities of the environment as it stands today, or the impact on your current customers. In all honesty, this was not likely to have been their fault, so much as the fault of the clueless management they worked for, who do not really understand their own product, or how it is used by their customers. Your predecessors merely did what they were told to do. Will you have the courage of your own convictions, and the high personal ethical standards, to at least occasionally tell the boss "Sir? That is a bad idea, and this is why..."? I hope that you will. I've been an active participant in SL for more than 5 years now. I spend an average of 20+ hours a week in-world, logged in and doing things in Second Life. Some of my time is spent socializing, but much of it is spent creating the in-world content that others purchase and enjoy, and that makes this virtual world unique. Within 4 months of joining SL, I was a content creator, making and selling clothes, and earning sufficient income in-world to completely cover all my in-world expenses, and also cash out real money every month, to spend on niceties for my family in real life. Within six months of joining SL, I was doing multi-sim content creation projects, making entire sims for my clients, from scratch. I currently design and create whole-sim and multi-sim projects for major clients like Rutgers University, and even in the current depressed economy, on average I cash out at least some small profit every single month. Less than 1% of the millions of customers that are registered for Second Life manage to cash out anything at all, let alone doing so every month, so I think I can say that I "get it" for how this virtual world works, and what the customers here want. I'm not one of the "big merchants" who cash out enough to live on as a full time job. But I think I am pretty representative of a typical 'successful' content creator and Resident in Second Life. In the real world, I have a full-time job as a systems administrator for a worldwide Corporation, with responsibilities for projects that have multi-million dollar profits, and in many cases, have multi-million dollar penalties for failing to meet customer requirements. No project I have ever worked on has ever had to pay those penalty fees for failing to meet customer expectations. So I think I can safely say that I know a bit about providing customer satisfaction, in a software services and solutions business where lots of real money is on the line. To me, the "x-factor" of Second Life is that it is a virtual world that allows individuals to create (or to purchase and assemble) their own content and virtual experience, and not merely be limited to what the service provider makes for them. And most importantly, it is a world that has an actual micro-currency economy, where what you sell in-world can be cashed out for real money. Very few virtual worlds offer that at all. The original slogan "Your World - Your imagination" was most appropriate. What you can do here is limited only to your imagination. Think of the song that Gene Wilder sings in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", titled "Pure Imagination", and apply that to Second Life. Come with me And you'll be In a world of Pure imagination Take a look And you'll see Into your imagination We'll begin With a spin Traveling in The world of my creation What we'll see Will defy Explanation If you want to view paradise Simply look around and view it Anything you want to, do it Wanta change the world? There's nothing To it There is no Life I know To compare with Pure imagination Living there You'll be free If you truly wish to be I can think of few things that sum up the Second Life experience better than that. You have quite a task ahead of you First and foremost, please, do not think of Second Life as "Just a game". It is a virtual world, with all the possibilities that a real world has, and more. Thinking that Second Life is no different than "World or Warcraft" or "Ultima Online" is as limited and incomplete a view as thinking that the city of Monte Carlo, in France, is only a Grand Prix racing venue, while ignoring the casinos, the resorts, the social life, and most particularly the local population and business economy that thrives there, even and especially when the big race is not in session. Learn how your current customers use the product. Experience it yourself, deeply. Then you will know how to market the many aspects of the product to new customers, without killing the experience for your current customers. Understand there is no "one true way" that your customers use this product. Trying to focus on any one aspect is like herding cats. We are a diverse and contrary group of individuals, each with our own goals and aspirations. Focus too much on any one cat, and the rest scatter in a thousand different directions, and you lose many of them. We are a very difficult audience to please, and no one decision you make will ever please all of us. But if you keep the diverse needs and uses of this virtual world in mind, and don't focus on any one faction, either among your current customers, or among hoped for "millions who have not yet tried Second Life", you will stand a better chance of long-term success. Unfortunately, your fellow employees, especially the upper managers that make the big decisions, seem intent on throwing rabid dogs into the herd of cats that you're trying to manage. Watching the policy decisions of the Lab for the last several years has been like watching Mel Brooks' movie "The Producers". They seem intent on making the worst possible business decisions. Why, I cannot begin to guess. The recent misguided decision to admit 16 and 17 year old children into a virtual world that contains large amounts of XXX content, with woefully inadequate access controls, is only one of many bad policy decisions that are going to make your job much harder. Unless they ban all XXX content from Mature sims, (and in the process infuriate and drive off a large percentage of their current paying customers who own Mature land in SL and have XXX content on their land), those children will be exposed to XXX content, and both LL and the land owners will face severe legal liabilities for providing XXX content to minors.

Personally, I don't care if there's ten thousand checkboxes in Preferences, as long as the UI allows me to do what I need to do, and do it efficently. Viewer 2.0 was a classic example of how NOT to design a User Interface. The UI design team made invalid assumptions about how Residents used SL, that simply did not fit a majority of your customers. Common tasks took more mouseclicks, or became flat out impossible. Multitasking is almost completely impossible in 2.0, for example. And throwing even more things into that modal sidebar makes no more sense than a Swiss Army Knife with 5,000 blades that is three feet wide, welded to a post. It becomes unusable. Second Life's Residents, your customers, have an incredibly varried set of needs. Some people never do more than one simple task at a time, while others multitask daily. Some people use Voice and never type, while others can't stand Voice, and exclusively communicate by typing. Some people build, and need good building tools, while others barely know what a prim is. Some people want all the real-world info on everyone that they can get, at their fingertips. Others don't want to EVER see real life info on anyone else unless they explicitly hunt for it. Some people want to use SL for gaming, while others use it for text-heavy roleplaying. Choice... It's incredibly important to user satisfaction. We have diverse needs. Many of those needs are opposites, depending on who you ask. We need the ability to choose what is important to us. Vtewer 2 took away a lot of choices. It took away a lot of existing functionality. We need options to restore what was lost in that UI change. Give is that chat focus fix. And while you're at it, give us back a text entry field that moves with the text chat floater. It is impossible to participate in a busy text conversation when the text entry field is welded to the bottom edge of the screen, if you try to place the text chat floater anywhere other than right on top of the lower edge. Try moving your eyes back and forth between what you're typing at the bottom edge, and the 15 posts that came up in the text chat floater at the top edge of the screen, while you were typing. It's a lost cause. Now try that in the 1.2x floater, where the new text chat posts appear right above the floater's text entry field. So much easier, no matter where you want to position that floater! Definitely, give us the ability to tear off every one of the sidebar's 'tabs' into floaters, with multiple instances allowed for each tab, so we can see multiple people's profiles again. And give us an option to NOT have the sidebar try to grab every function first! A single UI, with no options, is called "one size fits no one", and is very bad UI design.

Not completely, no. You can only transfer items that are "Transferable", and there is no way to do it all at once. The Lindens won't facilitate inventory transfers. You just have to give things from one account to the other until you've passed them everything that you can. A "no transfer" item is just what it says - you can not transfer it to anyone else.

I'll grant that they fixed some things. Allowing the option to have the sidebar slide over the world view, instead of body-slamming it to one side, is a major improvement. That one aspect was one of the things that most nauseated me, physically, in attempting to use 2.0 at all. Allowing the text chat entry to be streached wider helps a bit, and removing the earlier arbitrary 512 character limit on posts, and restoring that to the 1.x version's 1024 character limit helped a lot. Being able to add and remove some buttons on the lower bar, and being able to hide the favorites bar and nav bar in favor of the mini-location bar is a big step forward. They even put the camera controls back together. Kudos to them for these changes, and well deserved. Unfortunately, they also broke new things with this version. They crammed the Appearance Editor into the already over-used sidebar, and it now, as with almost every 2.x change, takes several more mouse clicks per activity than the 1.x or even 2.0 version did. Two small steps forward, one giant step back. There's progress over 2.0, but very slow progress. They need to stop breaking functionality and making things take more mouse clicks to do.

If you can see it, you can select and edit it. I've edited things as far as 512 Meters away, in the next sim over. There's two options in the Advanced menu that affect the distance limit. Uncheck "Limit select distance", or else the distance you can select at is constrained by your draw distance. Check "Disable camera constraints", and you can pan through hills and can send your camera further away.

Well, a lot of this has been covered in other replies, but here's an answer from someone who has been a merchant in SL for 4+ years, doing everything from clothes to furniture to homes to full-sim building projects. 1: When I started in SL, it was not possible to get a transaction record at all for zero L$ transactions. They were not recorded in the transaction record from LL at all. It was also not possible to set an item as "for sale" with a price of zero L$ - you had to set the box as "free to copy" instead, which again left no transaction record. So any merchant that wanted to provide demo items had to set the item to L$1 for the price, or they would be unable to obtain a record of how popular the demo was, and could not tell which items people had "looked at, but maybe not bought". That sort of information is invaluable in making your product line better. If you can tell from a disparity between demo sales and sales of the actual item that customers like a skin or a dress at first glance, enough to try on the demo, but then don't buy it, you should ask "Why?", and look for ways to fix flaws that may be in that item. Maybe the side seams were bad? Maybe the color of the prim skirt only matched the top at 3 in the afternoon? Info on what demos in particular get taken by customers can tell you a lot. So just dumping all your demos in a single box is no answer, either. 2: Most vending systems, as they were developed, took the above limitations into account. If you know a sell price of zero L$ is impossible, you don't write code for it. The early work-around was to sell for L$1, and have your scripted vendor refund the L$1 after the transaction. This had a risk, however, as occasionally lag or glitches in LL's handling of sales transactions would make a condition where a person could repeatedly make a demo purchase, NOT have to pay anything, and still get the L$1 refund each time, thus draining funds from the merchant's account. So many merchants are leery of settings in a scripted vendor that can pay funds back to a customer without merchant intervention. 3: Demos do cost something to make. Especially with skins or non-prim clothes, the only way to make a demo version is to upload additional textures with "demo" stamped on it somehow. That can double your texture upload costs for texture creation, and in a large line of clothing or skins, that is not a trivial cost. On things like the prim hair with a "Demo version" box floating over your head, you still need to do extra work to make each of those demos, even if you use the same demo box texture for all of them. Time spent making demos needs to be paid for somehow, as it is time you can't be spending making new products. L$1 per demo helps defray those small but swiftly accumulating expenses. L$10 per demo texture adds up for the merchant faster than L$1 per demo item does for the customer. 4: When it was standard practice for ALL demos to be L$1, it was also LL policy that all accounts, even the free first account, got at least L$50 a week in stipend. Everybody had at least that small income, and could use it to buy the demos, even if they never bought L$. Everyone could save up their weekly stipend to buy that dress that they wanted. So an L$1 charge was no big deal. Eventually, LL changed their system so L$0 purchases could be made, and so L$0 transactions appeared in the transaction record. That happened because the MERCHANTS asked for that feature. But most of the existing "Big box o' freebies for L$1" items didn't get changed over to L$0 items - too much effort, for no return, to track them all down. And it took a while for the vending systems to catch up to the changes, and allow zero L$ transactions in scripted vendors. Today, new merchants see both L$0 and L$1 demos and freebies, and it's unclear to them which is "best practice". Leaving demos at L$1 does make it much easier to track them. A busy content creator has a lot of L$0 transactions, every day. Yes, it can be filtered out by various manipulations of the CSV files from LL. But it still takes more effort to do that than to simply eliminate all L$0 transactions from the record. About "Send as gift" for L$0 items: One thing no one mentioned here. What about sending demo items to your alts? My main does most of my shopping. If I see a skin or some other demo item that might be perfect for one of my alts, but I need to see it on them to be sure, it's much easier for me to simply send that to them "as a gift", than to log off, log on as the alt, get the demo for the alt, log off, log back on as my main, and keep shopping. And a lot of demos are no-transfer or no-copy, so I can't just collect the demos as myself and send them to my alt in-world from my own inventory. What is best practice today? In my opinion, using zero L$ demos, somehow linked to the original item, as proposed in the new XStreet Marketplace is one very good option. So is doing zero L$ sales of demos form scripted vendors, with a tracking system that can flag the item as a demo, and link it to the associated item. Neither of those options is readily available yet to most merchants, but I see it coming, as SL evolves. The system also needs to be able to provide metrics on zero L$ items that have no associated "for sale" item. For example, I give away free sets of megaprims. I sell no associated product. But I would like to know how often people obtain that free item. If people eventually stopped wanting a free item, I would know I could stop offering it. If people get it a lot, I know the interest is high for that sort of item.

Yes. You can "Abandon" it (the choice is in the About Land dialogs), and can then go back to where you signed up for a home in the first place, and they will randomly assign you a new one of the general type you request. You can do this up to five times in a 24-hour period. In each home style there's about 4 or so variations, and some are slightly better done than others. But honestly, most of the free Linden Homes are not very fancy at all. They are built with very limited prim resources, and the texture work on them is only average, at best. If you want a higher quality home, you'll probably have to give up on the freebies, and buy or lease normal land elsewhere, and buy a better home made by a pro builder. Or learn to make one yourself, which really isn't all that hard. The Linden Homes are just intended as an entry experience into the concept of having your own home - like a low-rent Studio apartment. If you want better, you'll need to pay for that, or make it yourself on a normal parcel of Mainland, or on a private island sim parcel.

There is a bug that was introduced in version 1.23. and which also exists in 2.0, that causes one or more of the head, upper body or lower body sections of the avatar to become invisible. There have been JIRA bug reports about this ever since 1.23 came out, and LL still hasn't fixed it properly. What is happening is that the code that is supposed to allow you to see the new avatar alpha masks that they released in 2.0 is buggy, and sometimes thinks you have a masking layer attached even though you don't, and never have. There are some work-arounds in the JIRA entries. From http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-12906 Temporary solution: Bring up the Advanced menu (CTRL-ALT-D) From the Advanced menu, go to Advanced>Character>Rebake Textures or CTRL-ALT-R Body textures should load and appear as originally expected Additional findings: Per Nyx Linden: The issue is that textures you baked using the 1.22 client aren't valid on the 1.23 client (the alpha channel is wrong). We cache these baked textures on our servers, so when you log in for the first time with a 1.23 client you might see this bug. As I'm going to different regions I've not visited in some time, then donning avatars I've not worn in some time, I'm seeing this invisi bug. Rebaking the textures seems to be working thus far, and I'm not having the same issue with the same AV I've recently worn before in the 1.23 viewer. What this amounts to is that for EVERY clothing/skin combination that you have worn in 1.22 and earlier in a given sim, there could be a cached copy on that sim's server of that baked skin, and 1.23 and later see that baked skin as "corrupted". So to fix it, you have to do the character rebake dance each time it happens, with each skin/clothing combination, in each sim that you have visited before, until you flush the old data out of the sim servers. Ugh!

Keavy.Federal wrote: This raises some questions for me now as I have only recently come back... Group lands get 10% bonus?? How does that work exactly? If I am say at like the 32000 tier, and I group everything, does that mean I can own 35200 in my tier? (I'm rounding of course) I do have an alt, so would I just make a group and invite? My alt is a "registered" alt where I paid like $10 for it a long time ago. Do they still have that program? I forgot what the benifits of that were. Sorry for all the questions... on more: Are you having a good day? Yes, that is how it works. If the land is deeded to a group, even if only one member in the group is a Premium member who actually provides that tier, than you get an extra 10% allowed, without exceeding that one member's tier threshold. You could make a brand new alt, give only the minimum info, then create a group and you and the alt both join it, then you, as land owner, ded the land to the group. Then check your stats for "your land", and you'll see you can now get an additional 10%.

I haven't seen anything yet on the new fees being implemented. Possibly, like many, many Linden Lab policies and plans, the people in charge if implementing it got distracted by some new "shiny", like the new TPV Policy and TOS, or Viewer 2.0, and dropped the ball. In this case, it would, in my opinion, be a good idea if they never found that ball again. The proposed new fees already hopelessly damaged their credibility with a lot of content creators, and caused a lot of people to cease using XStreet-SL either as merchants or as consumers. It may be that they are waiting for that firestorm of hostile Resident opinions to die down a bit, for us to be distracted by the new TOS and TPV policy, or some other issue, before proceeding with what was pretty obviously a poorly-received policy change. Sadly, I wouldn't count on it being any more than a temporary reprieve. Linden Lab virtually never reverses course on any ploicy decision, no matter how much their paying customers oppose the idea. And especially not when they believe it can make more money for the Lab if they proceed.

Is it sufficent in itself to be certain you should be banned? No. No more so than a dentist whose surname is Pain or Fear should automatically be avoided. But the name would certainly detract from his business popularity. Would you ban someone who chose the name HaHaImAGriefer ? Or HereToCauseTrouble? Or SimCrasher? Many people in SL would, in a heartbeat. And in most cases, might well be right to do so. CopyBot has very negative connotations in SL. I can't see why anyone would choose that as a name, except to try to get people to arttack, ban or antagonize them. If you want to be accepted in SL and not get treated like a pariah, I would advise dumping that account and starting a new one with a less antagonistic name.