Candide LeMay

It's easy to cut back yes, but that's also true for the people who create and sell stuff. Some of your favorite creators might/will decide they are not getting enough butter for their efforts and stop. The total amount of butter in SL is not growing, only LL's share of it.

LL charges fees at every step of the process. Let's use an example with the exchange rate 250L/1USD for both buying and selling so it's easy math: 1) Person A buys 25000L, pays 110USD (buying fee is 10%) 2) Person A spends all those L$ on marketplace buying from Person B's store 3) Person B receives 22500L (marketplace fee is 10%) 4) Person B sells 22500L on lindex, gets 85.5 USD (selling fee is 5%) 5) Person B cashes out 85.5USD to paypal, receives 81.22USD (cashout fee is 5%, there might be additional paypal fees etc) In summary: Person A spends 110USD to buy stuff Person B sells stuff and receives 81.22USD LL pockets 28.78USD, that's around 26%. You can work a bit smarter and buy/sell at different exchange rates but LL still gets a significant slice of the pie and it's totally legitimate to ask what level of service we get for it.

Check if you have "Select only my objects" active in Build/Options menu.

When I joined SL the total population was less than 20 thousands. Most people were exploring SL's possibilities, building things for themselves, being creative and artsy etc, all the idyllic ideas we have about the early days. Yet by 2007 I was pretty much burned out on SL and it took me years to recover. I suspect there's just an initial honeymoon phase - regardless of when you join - and after that you have to either adapt or lose interest and leave.

The domain for sims since the uplift is secondlife.io (so it would be simhost-0a538900f1ede4aee.agni.secondlife.io in your example), not secondlife.com. Secondlife.com is hosted on akamai's content delivery network, just like SL assets, that's why you get such a low latency when you access it.

SL did start that way, back in the day you had to pay ~10USD (one time fee) for a basic account. It was probably seen by the management as growth limiting and basic accounts became no strings attached sometimes in 2006.

We don't pay VAT when buying L$. OP, did you pay with a credit/debit card or with paypal? I also use euros and I have found that when paying with a card it has the worst exchange rates. When paying with paypal you get somewhat better exchange rates. In an ideal situation we should be able to say "charge this payment in USD" and have our local bank do the conversion which gives you the most favorable rate. But obviously every leech in the chain wants to collect some fees so...

The person who uploaded the mesh into SL (and butchered the LODs in the process) is not necessarily the same person who created the model. There's a staggering amount of 3rd party content in SL, in various levels of legality ranging from public domain to assets ripped from PC games.

Right. You don't know what EEP settings people are using so you can't rely on it. You also can't create scenes where you're in a dark place yet can see through a window/door/opening that it's sunny outside etc. I'm guessing it would be computationally expensive to automatically detect surfaces and objects that are occluded from the sun/moon, hence the flag.

I would welcome a flag to indicate if an object should receive EEP lighting or not. It's very hard to make caves and other enclosed dark places unless you make a custom EEP to hide the sun and the moon, which has its own drawbacks.

For such a simple object, why are you even bothering with LODs? Just reuse the highest one for all levels and be done with it. It shouldn't affect the LI that much. Also, you're a beginner, don't fret about LI and rendering cost etc at this stage. Get comfortable with making stuff first.

Another aspect of this change that bothers me is this: How much of the collected revenue from these fees stays in SL and could at least in principle be reinvested and how much goes to Tilia? Tilia is a separate business entity and them making more money does diddly squat for SL/us.

The question was how to increase revenue. As far as I can tell SL has been profitable the whole time. Good ole Ebbe described it as a cash machine few years back.

Attract more cows instead of milking the existing ones more and more. I know they've tried and failed repeatedly, so maybe if they can't figure out how to do that they don't deserve increased revenue?

https://www.blendersecrets.org/book I have not read the book version but I like their videos very much (they are free on youtubes). Short and to the point. I'm not sure if it's suitable for someone who doesn't know blender at all, but once you know some basics it's fun to explore based on what your interests are.

You can max out the GPU once you go to higher resolutions. Firestorm 6.6.3 with everything turned on, 240m draw distance, 2560x1440px, no frame limiter (getting 56fps in this scene):

Has been going on for a long time

Whitelist your cache location in your antivirus/defender if you haven't already.

If we have a resident curated list of interesting places it needs to be kept up to date. That could be an opportunity for new avatars to explore the grid and earn some money (although I would not restrict it to only new avatars) - verify if these 5 places in the list are still current, update the listings with a fresh snapshot and get 10L. Who will finance this? LL certainly won't, but we could crowdfund this ourselves. If there are say 1000 places to check, weekly, that would require only 8000L for the rewards each month. I'd be happy to donate few hundred L into the pot regularly for this to happen. With few dozens donors this could be a viable thing with a positive effect.

In the PBR viewer it's no longer possible to disable ALM - it's always on, so everyone should (finally!) see the same thing.

https://secondlife-status.statuspage.io/incidents/5rjh7k9wlvyj

The did improve avatar rendering performance quite a bit since last summer. I was at a music event with 58 avatars (ALM on, shadows off, no av impostors or av complexity limits) and still got ~25 FPS on my gaming rig. That would have been unheard of just a year ago.

Also check that you don't have "Show property lines" activated inworld. Toggling that setting (ctrl-alt-shift-p) makes my GPU usage go from 10% to 60% without changing anything else.

It's neither a TPV issue nor a privacy breach. I can type your name into the inworld (or web) search and if I get no result back I can assume you have show in search turned off. It's as simple as that.

Set your frame limiter to something reasonable (30-40FPS) in the rendering prefs. Do not use v-sync (this used to be on by default and is now off by default, which might explain your experience). You don't need 200+ FPS to SL.