Porky Gorky

I definitely don;t think SL is perceived as being a vacation place. It's general perceived by the masses as being **bleep**. The reason LL only manage to retain such a tiny fraction of their total signups is because their new user orientation is atrocious. SL is a complex world and the new user orientation needs to be intelligent and supportive, hand holding new users for as long as possible until they are confident enough to break out on their own and more importantly, get out their credit card and sign up.

I am so completely out of touch with what SL is like nowadays. 2005 to 2010 I had my finger on the pulse so to speak, but after I stopped working full time here in 2010 and got a proper job I just could never find the time to go out and explore and to get involved in SL. 3 years later and I have barely left my lands in that time other than quick visits to customers. Despite this out of touchness, I still keep plodding along selling content so my lack of SL knowledge has not affected business it would seem and I keep up to date on technical developments on the forums. I still spend about 30 to 40 hrs a week working on SL content but most of the time my avatars are sat idle as 95% of my design process is done outside of SL. That's not to say I don't allow myself recreation time, however because SL is work...when I finished work it never occurs to me to do something recreational in SL, I just shut my viewers and spend my play time somewhere else. So to summarise that rather long winded answer to your simple question....Nope, Porky don't party much :smileyhappy:

hehe i have not changed Porky's clothes since about 2008. I put a bag on his head in 2010...that was a big day :matte-motes-big-grin:

Good post Pam and it is something that I have been considering recently after seeing a discussion about it somewhere else on the forums. I am not prepared to build only to RL scale unless there was a clear indication that the majority of users are using a more realistic camera angle. However I am about to release a new mesh build that is quite big and shrinking the overall build by 25% significantly reduces the LI. So I am considering putting 2 versions of the build in the box along with details on adjusting the camera angle. Something else I am considering is placing 2 versions of the build in the demo area, one with standard SL proportions and the other RL proportions. I would also place a large poster with instruction on how to change the camera angle and the difference in LI between the 2 versions. I figured if customers could actually see the 2 versions of the build stood next to each other, play about with their cameras and explore both builds and appreciate the LI saving then it may convert more people to the cause.

Perrie Juran wrote: Now they are combining everything into one HUGE cookie jar. mmmm...I want cookies now.

All looks normal to me. Have a look at the MP listings attached to this Porky account to test, all listings should have an SLURL at the bottom.

Czari Zenovka wrote: In many cases merchants who are copybotted have no idea they have been, especially those who sell hundreds-thousands of items. The only way such a merchant even knows one or more of their items has been copybotted is 1) if another SL resident tells them 2) if they are out and about in SL and just happen to come across the copybotted item or 3) if they see it on the MP. In my opinion a lot of copybotters choose large merchants, perhaps because they are known designers and it is believed that a copybotted item from them would sell better than one from an obscure, relatively unknown merchant. Perhaps it is exactly because merchants who sell a LOT of items are so busy creating and doing the myriad things necessary to get the items in their store & MP plus any marketing they might do that these larger merchants are targeted; the rationale being they are too busy to notice. Many merchants I know, especially those for whom their SL earnings are either their entire RL income or a great portion of it, rarely leave their sims due to being extremely busy. It is not easy to earn that kind of money in SL. Even if they did...the probability of just "happening" to run into one of their items that was copybotted is slim given how large SL is. Trying to keep track of one's items that another has copied & has for sale on the MP is also extremely time-consuming. Every merchant that I know who finds out their item/s are being copybotted immediately file DMCAs. It is easier than ever to find copybotted versions of your work. With so much of SL's commerce being driven through the MP, that is where thieves predominantly sell, especially compared to a few years ago. All a merchant has to do is run a MP search for keywords relevant to their business then sort the results by Age: Newest First. Do that every day and it only takes a few minutes to skim through items added in the last 24 hrs that match your keyword searches. The added bonus to this is it also allows you to keep fully up to date on what products your competitors are releasing on the MP.

That's what I said, but it was cooler when I did it cos I sounded like Spock :smileytongue:

You are trying to find logic where there is no logic to be found.

Bots?

Perrie Juran wrote: LL knows that people build things composed of prims, textures, scripts, etc, created by others. This is a fairly common practice so I would not worry about getting in trouble with LL over this. The alien is right. In the past thieves have often set the root prims to creators other than themselves, in fact it is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Allot of content that I had taken down showed some of the more popular megaprim creators such as Research Project and Winter Vetura as the creators. Megaprims could not be copybotted themselves but the prims were freely available to anyone to use full perm. I think this is a non issue.

When flagging was first introduced I had some bars and pubs that were taken down because they were listed under General instead of moderate, so I think this rule has been around for a long time. Chances are this rule has allways been in place, it just that LL don't fully moderate the MP listings themselves, they rely on their users to. So chances are someone, maybe a competitor, or just some nob head came along and flagged your listings because they are sad little people with nothing better to do with their lives :matte-motes-big-grin:

Medhue Simoni wrote: How can a company sell the same dang thing and throw a different number on it? I could pay a coder to make those changes. It's change for the sake of change driven by the need for employees to constantly "improve" their products in order to justify their ongoing employment. As the rate of technological development and product development increases across the board we are coerced motivated into keeping pace with these sometimes unnecessary "improvements" in order to stay up to date and current. It seems to becoming ever more prevalent in my life it's really getting on my nerves now! mini rant over

Lucretia Brandenburg wrote: There are content thieves who take great pride in what they do and don't hide it; they speak about it openly (albeit through an alt). They're very arrogant about it and contemptous enough of others that they have no problem with coming forward and saying what they do. You are referring to a very small minority....and they are idiots. Certain well known content thieves have been baited and retaliated against quite effectively by a group of SL users in the past. Using alts and masking their IP's did nothing to protect them. I spent over a year sat in a closed channel on IRC frequented by some of SL's most notorious copybotters, and believe me, they don't publicly boast about their exploits any more. In closed circles they spend the majority of their time discussing ways of staying hidden and anonymous.

Lucretia Brandenburg wrote: From copybotters I've known, there are different reasons they do it. Some to rip off items and resell them as their own, some to use the items for themselves, others because they think it gives them power and boosts their egoes, some do it to "prove" they're smarter than others to get round safe guards against it, others because they think everything in SL be free and they will go on about the virtual economy and how offensive it is to pay for pixels. I don't think this question is stupid. Finding out the core reasons why thieves choose to steal content is not a stupid question, and it was not the reason for my comment. Inviting copybotters to incriminate themselves in the public domain and possibly expose themselves to a trap was the reason for my comment.

Sita Writer wrote: If you are a copybotter -- would just love to know why you do it I think this question is worthy of a Darwin Award.

I've used a program called The Logo Creator which is pretty cool, although there is nothing I can do in there that I can't do in Photoshop so I don't really bother with it any more. http://www.thelogocreator.com/

ImaTest wrote: I visited a friend's store earlier today that was absolutely stunning. It was made entirely of mesh. I mean it was really breathtaking. But the land impact of it was massive. Not only does all that rendering have a cost for customers visiting, but also the landowner/renter in "land impact". The store has been around since at least 2005, that i know of. It was once a store built from prims. I know the owner well. The prim count of the original build was something along the lines of 35-ish. When she moved to sculpts it jumped down to about 25. Now, as mesh, it's 360 something land impact. That's absolutely nuts, considering it's just a basic building and uses no more than 20 prims! Beautiful or not, that building is NOT effective. It's gorgeous and people are of course free to use however many prims they want to for their builds. But store owners, and sim owners need to, or should, take into account their customers as well. That store takes ages to load now, because of the high rendering cost. She's getting ready to strip it down to a sculpt store again, because she's received many complaints about the lag and slow rez times. There are things that can be done to reduce the LI of larger mesh buildings such as not including lower LOD's and using separate small interior spaces with limited camera view distances to reduce the need for lower LOD's, but this is not practical when building large and open plan as most stores tend to be. From personal experience of building large mesh structures, I am really not satisfied with the LI's I am getting. I am now moving away from 100% mesh and trying to find a balance between using prims/sculpts for large structural sections and relying on mesh for the finer details that will set the build apart from regular prim and sculpt builds. I think there is a more ideal balance to be found between prims, mesh, render times and LI for larger structures. Mesh is awesome in the creative freedom it offers, but that comes at a price for some types of content, big open builds being top of that list unfortunately.

Medhue Simoni wrote: Making a mesh in 3ds Max, or any other mesh creation program, is almost exactly the same as making an item in SL. There is little to no difference, essentially. The same way that you would make a bicycle in SL, is how you would make a bicycle in 3ds Max, even down to holding shift and moving the item to create a copy of it. Creating a UV map for the mesh, that is different, and LL's convoluted Land Impact system makes mesh different in reguards to creation. It's not that complicated. It's actually pretty basic. It all just looks intimidating. Like I said earlier in this thread, making a mesh in 3ds Max is 1 small step up from making a prim object in SL. So many focus on mesh not being created in SL, which to me is kind of goofy to focus on, as everything, besides prims, is created outside of SL and brought in. I don't see the difference. I agree with this. I found the transition from building with prims in SL to 3D modeling in 3DS Max almost seamless. Within a few days I could create anything in Max that I could with standard prims in SL. This gave me a great foundation to build upon as I learned the numerous more advanced creation tools. I think there is a double learning curve to mesh which allot of wannabe and current mesh creators tend to ignore. Learning 3D modeling is only half the battle, learning how to optimize your mesh for best performance in SL is a whole other ball game and it is an area in which a lot of current mesh creators are failing badly. So even though 3D modeling is essentially easy to learn, especially if you have experience of the toolset in SL, creating a fully optimized mesh end product in SL is not so easy.

I purchased 3DS max in 2010. Cost me £2300. Not sure what that is in Mickey Mouse money. It has already paid for itself through SL sales, but more importantly it has given me the opportunity to learn industry standard 3D modeling software which in turn has allowed me to facilitate a permanent career change in real life from a pen pushing desk monkey to a full time designer. So although I initially purchased Max to create content in SL, I also saw it as a long term investment in my future and my ongoing quest to become a better and more relevant designer in RL.

Landowners pay through the nose for land in SL, they have purchased the right to do whatever they want within the bounds of the TOS and that includes banning whoever they want. Don't like it then just get your own land and never leave. This thread is a non issue.

Glad to see you are finally upgrading your computer Czari! I have been reading about your hardware inadequacies for far too many years now :matte-motes-big-grin: What are planning on buying? Regarding buying online, my advice is to find as much customer feedback online as you can relating to the company's repair process and turn around times etc. If a company performes poorly in this area you can guarantee people will be complaining about it on the interwebs. These forums being a perfect example of that.

ChicByTrinity wrote: I noticed that I'm losing 20-30 L$ in a few hours or so, and it happened at least 3 times now. I noticed a loss of a few hundred L$. What could be causing this? :matte-motes-agape: Log in to your account on secondlife.com, there you can view your transaction history, that will tell you where the L$ went. I think the most common cause for this sort of issue is group liability. Someone joins a group without realising there are associated charges.

Dillon Levenque wrote: To the best of my knowledge the i7 isn't all that important; the people whose opinions I respect consider the i5 to be completely adequate for SL. Tho OP indicated a desire to use the box for advanced things other than SL; given that an i7 would seem to be a good choice. edited for spelling I agree with that. I went from using a i5 3570K to a i7 3770K recently and only saw a minor improvement in performance for SL and gaming in general. Certainly not an improvement that warranted the price difference. However I really started to see the benefits of hyper-threading when rendering in 3DS Max and I am happy with the change I made to i7 now. So if the op is rendering 3D, or encoding/decoding video then they should consider an i7. If not then go with the i5 or AMD equivalent.

Mikki Miles wrote: Rya Nitely wrote: My main tip to anyone starting out would be to try and steer clear of over-saturated markets, like clothing. THIS! But i think even in clothing market there are still some niches, like ethnic clothing. I am still looking for some nice mesh bavarian Lederhosen ;-) I think a couple of years ago there was a big problem with market over-saturation. But since mesh rolled out that is not the case at all. In some regards the markets have been leveled and we have entered a new phase where every market has the potential to be exploited again through the sale of mesh products. Take prefab buildings for example, there were/are many thousands of awesome buildings out there before mesh went mainstream. Competition was extremely tight. Nowadays if you are building in mesh then that is not the case at all, there are less than a hundred "top quality" mesh prefab buildings out there right now and the whole market is very much there for the taking. This is true for nearly all mesh markets in SL right now apart from maybe clothing which is and always has been the most actively developed market. When I started selling content in 2005 it was easy due to the lack of competition. It feels like we have gone full circle and reached that situation again with mesh to some extent.