Toysoldier Thor

@drongle You are correct. Unfortunately I notice that after I merged it and after I painted it. To fix it would require me going back to merging the base unmerged model (i.e. adjusting the wing subtools into the body subtool) which means re-painting everything. I did a work-around to this flaw by making that portion of the base of the wings black - which is naturally what dragonfly wing bases have anyway - to hide the flaw. This flaw actually taught me another lesson.... to polypaint the subtools BEFORE I merge them to a single model. That way i can make these corrections and adjustments. I will be forced to execute this new process on the dragonfly anyway since I want to create many painted designs AND also change the wing positions and leg positions. I just need time to veg before tackling the re-painting process

@Drongle, I am pretty confident it has nothing to do with physics since I wasn't unable to re-create the anomaly. If it had something to do with physics, then I should have been able to reverse the linkset to the original configuration and the problem should have re-appeared. I am not 100% though since I didnt spend another 15 minutes trying each reverse combination. I have a feeling that the problem is rooted closer to your theory. This linkset has been rezzed at my art gallery since mid-July (prior to pathfinder upgrades). As soon as the other mesh experts saw what I was linking together with mesh they right away pointed at "wow its the 3 tortured torus's that you are using". BUT, maybe by unlinking the entire set and re-linking the set set, the new formula with the capping engaged. This does make sense. If so, taking the legacy linkset into inventory and re-rezzing it would have also worked.

@Theresa myself and 3 other mesh experts tried a few things including setting the prims to none. But it seemed the only way to fix it was to unlink the old Legacy linkset and relink it all. A theory I have is that the old linkset way back when had texture animation scripts in each of the animated prim of the set. I removed the scripts from the linkset as they had no value (once a texture is animated - the script is no longer needed). But I am wondering of the linkset held some parameter telling the new LI calculation algorithm that there are scripts in this linkset. When I unlinked everything and relinked it together - this parameter was reset? I dont know but I could not recreate the problem at all. It seems something to do with the linkset holding some legacy parameter. @Innula... your welcome. I thought it was pretty freaky so I thought I would point it out here.

As promised, the attached image is my dragonfly model with its merged sub-tools and polyframe enabled so you can see the frame of the model. Each color in Zbrush is showing a different polygroup in the model. When I UV map it and export to SL, these polygroups end up being texture zones. I might be wrong in what you meant by loops... but as you can see, there is really *NO strongly defined loops on the wings anymore since the Zbrush DECIMATION process comes up with its own automated calculation on how to remove and position the polygons on the surface. I am sure if I wanted to I could decimate the model even lower with very little impact to the geometry of the dragonfly but my LI for a 3m long dragonfly is already at only 2 and I didnt want to over rationalize the model since Zbrush uses a nice distribution of polygons on the model for its polypainting process. Your thoughts?

Just wanted to throw you all a weird story of what I encountered last week regarding linking one of my MESH models with an already liked group of prims and a sculpty (an animated texture art statue). Thankfully I had 3 expert mesh builders come to my gallery to witness what I did as they didnt believe it either but they all saw what I saw. Background: I have a 5 prim art statue on the top floor of my art gallery. It is made up of 1 hollowed cylinder prim, 1 sculpty with an animated water texture (script removed that made the texture move), and 3 "tortured" torus prims about 10m tall that also have animated textures on them (script removed as well). So, this 5 prim art statue has a prim count of 5 and stands about 10-12meters tall. I also have a single mesh woman model about 6m tall that has an LI of 3. What I wanted to do was link the mesh woman into the middle of this "animated lights pillar" statue. It looked cool that they were together. No biggy.... I simply linked the already linked-set of prims and added the mesh to the linkset. When I did this my LI count went to.... drumroll please .......... 237 !!! Yup - yo uread that correctly - 237 !! I tried unlinking the mesh from the initial linkset (which brought the counts back to 5 & 3) and then linking the linkset to the mesh instead. NOPE... 237. Three other mesh experts on chat didnt believe me and TPed in to see. They suggested I make it convex hull - but already was. Turning off convex hull moved the count from 237 to 238. They all blamed the 3 tortured TORUS prims for the weird linked anomaly and figured there wasnt much I could do about it. But as a last thought I decided to unlink the previous linkset and simply link all of them back up together with he mesh. Magically the new resulting linkset was only 8. We tried to reverse what I did to see if we could recreate the anomally but relinking the old linkset back to what it was.... but nothing I could do would recreate the problem. No one had an answer and the problem is permanently gone.

Thanks Dilbert, As for why Zbrush for me... I started cutting my teeth learning 3D in 2008 using the free Blender tool. Sadly that is like learning to drive on a community built supersports car that was purely designed for performance and not on creature comforts and use of use. Even after 1.5 years of using Blender and having newer versions and changes of my PC OS screw up my exporter to SL and having to know the tricks / inner workings of how to install Python... I got so frustrated with Blender that when a top SL sculpty maker from IBM introduced me to Zbrush - I switched. Zbrush is no cakewalk either - let me tell you - but its model designing is much closer fit to how I think - ANALOG / FREEFORM. Blender is on the other spectrum of being highly mechanical and mathimatical. It was a HUGE coincidental later event that made me much more happy that I made a commitment to Zbrush.... Pixologic bought and later smoothly integrated SCULPTRIS into Zbrush using their GoZ interface. I love Sculptris but it needed a program like Zbrush to be useful for SL mesh creations. As for your advise on the wings.... LOL its funny you mentioned retopo tool / function. Although I have struggled through it in the past with another model to reduce the poly count surgically, I found it extremely painful and frustrating for me So when it comes to the dragonflies.... there are no edge cuts / loops used or moreso remaining (as far as I know). The wings were initially loaded with loops since the initial 3D model used was a cylinder but after I deformed the wing into an extremely flat wing-shaped cylinder, I used ZBrush's "Decimation" plugin. It uses smart algothyms using input parameters to create the target objective reduction. Almost ALWAYS the result is a face-by-face placement on the surface. When I get back on my Zbrush I will take a screen shot to show you how the wing looks like with the polyframes visible. Actually, a trick I learned on decimation in Zbrush is that initial Sub-Tool (fyi : in Zbrush a "tool" is a single model and a "sub-tool" is a single model that is part of an agregate model) decimation and then subsequent merging of the subtools into a new single tool, the polygons are often NOT distributed very evenly. A relatively even distribution of polygons is quite important for Zbrush when you get to POLYPAINTING the model - since you are actually applying color information on each polygon's surface. So if a part of you rmodel has an extremely low poly count (like a large flat surface), there wont be as high a painted resolution there when you scale the polycount to 2 million. As such, to solve this problem, what I use now when the model is done at low res and is ready to be painted, I use a cool and obscure function of the TOOLS->GEOMETRY palette called "equalize surface area". For the Dragonfly clicking this button doubled my initial polycount from 2200 to over 5000. BUT, the polygons were now evenly distributed across the merged model. THEN I decimated the model again to 30% of its 5000+ count. This brought my model back down to under 2000 polycount without changing the model much at all. So basiclly, I didnt spend ANY time at all manually retopologizing my model - I just used the Zbrush automated tools. And I do agree with you that although the wings up close look a bit sharp edged - the lower LI count is what future customers will like more. When dragonflies can be 7M long and only be 6 or 7 LI... they will forgive the sharp edged wings.

This this weekend I thought I would tackle a more complex Mesh project. I decided to build a dragonfly so that I could sell it in SL as either an artwork or a prop at homes, clubs, sim themes, etc. For me, building a dragonfly was gonna be a challenge since a dragonfly was going to require the heavy use of Zbrush Sub-Tools, and intense polypaint Texturing, and the use of Zspheres for the legs. I also wanted step up and try to get the polycount (and as such the LI to as low a number as possible without the dragonfly being too choppy and ugly. Well It took me two full days to sculpt the main body/tail/eyes/mouth (one mesh shape) and create the wings to be an ultra thin mesh. Took another day to paint the dragonfly parts. But I finished. Aand although the wings look a big jagged, it was worth it as I got the complete dragonfly and its full texture into SL at 2LI for a shape of 3m x 1m x 1.5m. In order to enhance the colors, I baked one of the first of many materials onto the resulting base texture (using Zbrush's direct interplay with Photoshop that allows normal maps to be baked in and modified and then automatically sendback to Zbrush). I plan to make a few different colors of dragonflies and change the wing position too. I think I could improve on the texture sharpness by using the texture zones for the polygroups i created (each of the 4 wings, the body, the eyes, and teh legs). At 1024x1024, there just isnt enough texture for the dragonfly to look as sharp as it does in zbrush. Love to hear any other thoughts from the mesh experts.

Darrius Gothly wrote: And this is exactly why I absolutely refuse to purchase any enhancements whatsoever. In the past, while refreshing endlessly, and scrolling through the 40 ads included in each page's scroller, I never once saw my ad. However I did see several other Merchant's ads .. almost always in every single page refresh. It's VERY disheartening to see another Merchant receiving a "view" on every refresh, and after over 200 refreshes never once seeing my ad. That was the point where I realized any money spent on enhancements was wasted. Now if I could afford to purchase the large number of enhancements that the merchants I saw with an ad on every page are purchasing then yes, it would be worthwhile. But I can't and so I wont. And just to be clear, the "view" I saw was the EXACT SAME ad repeated on nearly every page refresh. Many times I would see that same Merchant's various ads placed 2-4 times in the scroller. So it's not that they placed so many ads that at least one was bound to show up. It was specifically that each of their ads received a "view" on nearly every single refresh. I 1000% agree Darrius. Way back when, I tried listing enhancements - 3 times. First of all, it did ZERO to the related listing's sales volume. I noticed no improvement in sales at all between the listing's sales before/after the enhancement period vs. during. And just like you Darrius - I was skiptical if my listing was even being shown or if LL's listing display algorithm was flawed or even bogus or skewed for some reason - so during one of my enhancement periods I went to the MP site and I clicked the website refresh 600 times. NOT ONCE DID I SEE MY LISTING SHOWN. ZERO! But during that 600 tries I frequently saw several other listing show up over and over. Ironically, LL's stats showed how many time my enhancement was actually displayed on a visitor's page but I completely do not believe they are accurate stats. So I dont know how LL has designed the listing enhancement feature, but its well known by several merchants that the listing enhancements are utter useless for most. I would love to know why or how a few Merchants and their listings seem you get their enhancements to show up over and over and others / most rarely or never show up. As such, long time ago I gave up on LL's listing enhancements. Far better ways to spend my $L than the grossly over priced and utterly flawed LL MP listing enhancements features.

I feel your pain as for the past 2 days I have not made 1 sales on MP and just a couple sales inworld. Gotta love the SL economy and its extreme volatility. I suspect or hope it will pick up again soon.

Innula Zenovka wrote: @thread: I'm not at all sure people divide up neatly into gamers, on the one hand, and people who use SL, on the other. While I'm not interested in gaming particularly, my impression from when I look at (for example) the Gaming subforum on SLU is that there's plenty of people -- incudling some noted SL content creators -- who enjoy both gaming and the very different attractions SL has to offer. Probably at times they feel like doing neither, and read a book or watch a movie or go to gym. Based on what I've read here so far, it seems to me that a lot of people from Steam may well look at SL and decide it's not for them because they want an action game with high fps, and they won't come back. Some people, though, may well find they enjoy SL as well as gaming, for different reasons, and some may even find they prefer SL to gaming, and members of these last two groups will probably stick around. What's wrong with that? I agree with you that when SL is exposed to the Steam population... many will not even look at SL... some will be gamers and try it and quickly walk away... and maybe some of this large population will stick around and increase the SL community and grasp onto what is unique about SL vs. the normal GAMER world. Within the scope of this context of this OP question and specifically "Will Steam Help Us?"... there is nothing wrong with that. If Rovik could wave a magic wand and his new strategy magic engages in 1 day with no effort from LL, there would be nothing wrong with this. BUT (always a but)... I guess I am looking at the bigger picture and Rodvik's strategy to go after the Steam community and I am asking myself the question that I would hope Rodvik and his sr. staff at LL asked themselves when developing this strategy.... "Is this the best and most effective strategy to stop LL's flagship SL product from continuing to slide in popularity and revenue?" If the OP is asking the question "WILL STEAM HELP US?" then I am assuming the OP is referring to "us" as the SL residents that love SL and do not want to see it die the slow death we are all witnessing. I am also assuming the OP means that HELPING US refers to LL regaining control of the SL service and righting it and making it popular once more so that SL will somehow return to the glory days when SL was at its peak. Based on my assumptions of the OP's topic, we all need to look at this from the perspective of LL as a business and SL as currently they #1 cash cow. A cash cow that has been slowing dying of starvation since 2008 due to several generations of poor LL management, hairbrained failed strategies, failed progress on corporate culture and development practices maturation, and an utter lack of understanding and respecting their current customer base. We need to look at it from the perspective that when ANY company develops and begins to execute on a new and fundamentally shifting enterprise-wide strategy, it involves significant consumption of a company's resources. IF a company is flushed with cash and staff reserves then pursuing a new strategy has a couple major risk factors removed from the impact of a failed strategy. BUT.... we all know that LL is not one of these companies. Their staff was cut by 1/3 a couple years ago and many of the existing staff now are also relatively new to LL. As little as the vet LL staff understand SL and its residents - these new staff know even less - look at the LL Commerce Team we have now as a perfect example. The reason I bring all this up is that as much as its a risk for a large well established resources rich company to take on a fundamental shifting strategy, its a potentially business life threatening level of risk for a company like LL. So..... back to your questions of "WHATS WRONG WITH THAT?" LOTS! If Rodvik gets this wrong and his strategy fails, he has put a ton of his highly rationed development resources into this strategy. These resources are only further abandoning the current customer base and taken all focus off them so they can go after Rodvik's BRASS RING... the GAMER ! If the Gamers fail to come... LL and SL loses the new infusion of customers that he thought would save SL and he loses the current customers to competing opensim grids that his technology and plans have ostrasized (i.e. a viewer that must do mesh and still no customer service and countless bugs and existing feature fixes ignored). Thats my thoughts.

Medhue Simoni wrote: Personally, I think it is kind of funny that the people saying SL is somehow slow or has bad graphics are sculpty makers. Let's get some stuff straight here. SL can run at 60 fps, just like any game. With the new materials project, SL is about as graphically intense as any game. Our polygon totals can't match some games, but can be much higher than others and still be very fast and smooth. Depending on what you are comparing SL to, the total number of avatars in a region is somewhat comparable to many games of similar graphics. The only reason any1 sees any lag, is totally because of poorly created content, usually worn content, which ruins every1's experience. The social experience in SL far surpasses any other game ever made. With the ability to import your own items, SL far surpasses any game ever made, as far as customization. SL's animation system is also far superior to any game ever made, if you disreguard the bugs, but we could have a better way to interact with each other with animations. When you are talking about gamers, 1 thing they all have in common is a good gaming PC. That being the case, they will have much fewer issues than the average SL user. The only real things that will turn away the gamers, is lag created from poorly made objects, and the lack of complicated gaming experiences. Oh, and making something low prim, doesn't mean it is made well, or graphically efficient. OK so to get a few more points straight.... I - "a sculpty creator / mesh creator" - was not dissing the SL platform / technology itself for its lag. It sure would be nice if LL didnt rationalize the number of sim's executing on a single platform (last I remember LL places 8 sims onto 1 physical server - many its improved since but I doubt that as it would increase costs) so that a sim could take on more load. BUT... what I was trying to say was that as much as current SL customers do not like the lag that exists most days - some worse than others - the unique nature of what SL is - a VIRTUAL WORLD EXPERIECE - and the incredible flexibility that the SL platform provides to all its residents (i.e. to be instant creators) makes it a platform that lag is an accepted part of participating on something so flexible. And for the most part the residents can deal with the 20, 10, 5 FPS lag that we all encounter when we land at a live concert (like last night) with 60 other avatars and we can barely move. A true Gamer would not find this acceptable. Medhue, you clearly are a Gamer and/or know much more about the gaming technology than I, but the reason the other true GAMING environments can provide a consistent solid predictable 30 or 60 fps is because their enviornment (i.e. the entire scenes they are participating in and even all the content their avatar is and uses and has available to them) is 100% predictable. In those worlds the Gamer can and has to download all the scene into their hard drive prior to participating. This means all the content is local to them. The only interaction over the network and to the servers is positioning and reference pointers to the client. As Darrius said.... HIGH PERFORMANCE / LOW FLEXIBILITY. In SL, this major performance trick is not feasible since content is created, owned. and placed on the grid by anyone and can change or move at any time. The SL technology has to deal with this extremely scene and content flexibility that almost no GAMING environment does. It actually still fascinates me that we dont have far more lag considering what the SL grid has to deal with. BUT for SL to maintain the unique value-add it does on LL's customer base, SL must sacrifice performance for flexibility. So its not that SL is inferior to the other gaming platforms... it services a completely different targt market - one that does NOT include the GAMER's need to get a lagless experience. Again, I will point out, Blue Mars thought they could use this critical GAMER SYSTEM technique to create a SecondLife environment using full sim PRE-LOADING to address performance lag that SL deals with all the time. So far, BM was a major flop because using this pre-loading trick meant that jumping to a new sim (especially ones you have never visited) involves me waiting for a minute or more for the BM server to send me 200-300meg of sim data. Also, because of this technique it all but wiped out a huge critical success of what SL has... the ability for any resident to be an instant builder / creator. As for your last point about SL residents with big new fast PC not experiencing the same lag as the average... although I agree that if you have the more powerful PC that lag is less an issue, I can tell you and you know yourself that even the most powerful PCs still encounter major lag often. I have a top end PC with a powerful CPU, RAM, Graphics, and a 50mbps internet link. I often experience the same lag at live concerts and other inworld events that the slow PCs feel. SL actually does not even let me take advantage of my PC's horsepower. I think its so funny that all the SL viewers have a network bandwidth setting that can go up to unlimited yet LL and the TPVs warn everyone "DO NOT SET YOUR BANDWIDTH HIGHER THAN 1.5mbps - doing so might make your experience even worse". Why do they even have the parameter in the viewer then !?!? Just take it away and set the bandwidth to what SL can tolerate. Anyway... I stick to my position that GAMERS will not like SL because SL is not a GAMING FRIENDLY platform. It was designed for flexibility - not to attain top fps performance.

Iwas reading a couple blogs / articles about SL's move to integrate with Steam. Seem to confirm what many of us were sayin in this thread that the Steam move is a strong indication of LL leaving the current customers behind and change focus to the GAMER market. That shoul not be surprising the day Rodvik was announced as CEO. Rodvik knows "GAMING" and so when all you know is how to use a screwdriver then everything around you looks like screw. As many of us have said in this thread and the other thread "forced to close".... LL has no clue what made LL so addictively popular to their customer's and why LL's customers started leaving SL. With Rodvik going after the "Gamer" market that constantly needs speeds & feeds, adreoline pumping excitment and very low patience..... he is attracting a high-maintenance population to a LL operation has has no customer service maturity and is notoriously known for its "shoot from the hip" product/service development and zero quality assurance testing. SL Residents might **bleep** and complain a lot about the large laundry list of LL faux pas's but we are still loyal to the SL grid. Rodvik is abandoning the current market and now attracting a new market that will not be 1/100th as tolerant of LL's immature business practices. As such, Rodvik's strategy will force a lot of the current SL population to migrate to the competing grids (I am sure the owners of SL's biggest competitor are drooling and excited about Rodvik's plan) and then have a new population that will very quickly abandon SL when they all realize very quickly that the SL grid has none of the speeds that they are used to and absolutely no customer service. I think Rodvik is making a big mistake on this strategy. He should have spent his first 3 months TRULY studying what makes his current customers tick and what he could do to make them happy. THEN .... once he restored improved SL services and customer service, he could have considered expanding on a solide SL foundation. Rodvik is simply coming to the conclusion that there is nothing he can do to improve the current population so lets just focus on a new customer base. If the old population hangs around - great.

VonGklugelstein Alter wrote: Amiryu Hosoi wrote: Well, I am strolling the web today because today is the second time LL decided to charge my paypal account to pay for tier. If my sales doesn’t recover I will need to close down my sims and SL will loose again 4 wonderful free landmarks. So that leaves me with one option only. Praying sales will recover after the summer so my friends, residents and visitors can keep enjoying our little corner in SL. ..and a bunch of other stuff Ayhaymee, Correct me if I am wrong but did not YOU create these 4 sims to PROMOTE your PRODUCT? I doubt that LL will agree to forgive you payment for these because besides acting as your showroom they provide a valuable service to SL. LL will take tier because you comitted to paying for the use of these. If your sales model cannot float the 1200 a month then just shut them down and make way for someone to fill the hole you have made in your market... Godspeed!! That is why my recommendation was to sell / abandon the sims that her SL business revenue cannot afford. If she doesnt want to us RL $ to pay for these public use sims then her options are limited and clear. SL economy is sinking - not growing. LL has proven that they do not negotiate prices on teirs. So.... reduce costs - abandon the sims. Actually if she really does want to offer a public sims space to create her japanese themed environments to be used for RP and she wants these sims to cost less than she earns in SL.... if she hasnt already - she should go to SL's competing grids (we all know which one - the one that many others have gone where per/sim teirs are far cheaper) and set up her sims there. The good thing about this idea is that since her builds DO NOT use mesh... she has 100% complete freedom to transfer her builds there and not only offer the public space she wants to offer the public but she can also start selling her builds there. She could even inform visitors to her main commerce store sim that there are huge multi-sim public spaces on the competing grid for them to visit. But regardless ... the solution is pretty clear. Reduce costs - abandon the sim. PS VonG... if she really does abandon the sim... there sure is no waiting list for sims considering LL last year saw 1800 abandoned sims. If someone actually wants a sim.... LOL... they have tons for the pickings at a good price.

You are 100% completely correct. Its so ironic how little the entire LL staff, developers, strategists, etc. really know about their #1 target market. They really do not understand what makes up the their current customer base. They dont know why their customers stick around despite the countless negative impacts that LL befalls on their customers, despite the utter lack of any form of quality customer service, despite LL paying no attention to improving existing functions as opposed to their addiction to keep throwing new wizz-bang technologies on already over-burdened and weak SL infrastructure. Rodvik himself in the eary days was amazed at the completely unique and highly loyal SL resident population and strong commitment to SL that many SL residents have. But Rodvik - being a Gamer from EA - clearly has failed to make a commitment to really understand this same customer base he is in charge of. Watching the activities happening since Rodvik's takeover, its clear he did not come here to improve the SL that attracted so many to SL. He clearly came to LL from day one to transform it into what he knows best.... yet another Gamer's environment. Mesh, Pathfinder, Steam, new Materials sytem - they are all really cool graphic and gaming components that if you could wave a magic wand and transparently / instantly make it part of the SL grid - residents sure wouldnt mind. BUT if Rodvik and even all the vet employess of LL would have actually spent time to understand what is it that attract what target market to SL - then I am sure they would be utterly shocked that the #1 priority would NOT be to make a more technically cool SL. They would notice that their customers want improved existing services.... they want a safer protected enviornment to socially engage in (no stalker and griefers)... they would want better customer service.... they would want to reduce crashes and near zero FPS... they want more affordable sim teir pricing so they can afford to build and expand. IF Rodvik succeeds in attracting the true gamers to SL from all the other environments like WOW, these gamers would do exactly what Darrius posted... they would come in and quickly realize that SL is not about amazing frame rates and goal oriented objectives. They woudl be as quickly gone as they arrived. But in the process, Rodvik would also have succeeded in pushing the SL loyal target market from SL and to the other grids where there has been a true focus on meeting the SL resident's target needs. A good example now of why Rodvik is off base with his plans is Blue Mars. I was very excited about it when it went live and registered and went over there to try it out. The graphics were real cool and more Gamer focused on improving FPS but as Darrius said, BM sacrificed environment flexibility for ultimate performance. By requiring pre-loading of sims prior to a TP and making the barriers to building & creating out of reach for any average resident that in SL can simply create a cube from day 1 - BM was an utter flop for me as an advanced alternative to SL's world. I hve never gone back to BM even though it was Gamer focus developed. So.... sadly Rodvik is following in the footsteps of his predecessors - not understanding what is unique about his customer base - and blinding taking SL to a place that his current customers didnt really want and that his new customers will not be attracted to, I do know that Rodvik's failures will be one competing grid's major success - because this competing grid does know what SL residents want and what SL residents hate and what is encouragng them to leave.

PS Gadget, your response didnt answer my questions.... Do you reallllyyy reallly think its wise for LL to force 30% of SL residents to leave the grid? This is what you suggested to Czari... so please explain how your belifs are wise for LL, SL, SL residents, and even you?

LL is losing SL customer - NOT because they were missing Mesh or PathFidner. They are losing users for many reasons and most of the reasons are related to LL not focusing on maintaining and improving current features and functions. Instead of putting all their development on mesh, pathfinder and countless other NEW SHINY cool things that only add to sim load, LL for a long time should have focused on: reducing lag (improving hw platform horsepower and lower sims / physical server and many other boring but important improvements) dealing with static landmarks that needed to become dynamic long time ago tackling the countless customer Jiras of current functional limitations and bugs that LL completely ignores providing FAR better and more responsive and more friendly customer service dealing with and taking very serious the countless AR's filed against stalkers and sick members that harass innocent fellow members in SL (to the point that either federal authorities need to get involved and SL residents need to leave) reducing costs of operations of SL and passing on these saving to customers in the form of reduced sim Teirs stop making dumb moves like merging the Teen grid to the adult grid and then forcing LL to deploy several restrictions and filters that caused a lot of troubles for merchants, club, owners, and even residents. etc. etc.etc. Did you notice that in many cases LL's efforts require little "COOL NEW HEAVY TECH" effort. If you really think that LL MUST DEPLOY new technologies like mesh, materials systems, pathfinding in order to stop the hemorrhaging SL has been noticing over the past few years.... then explain why so many of the departures of SL residents are to competing grids with far less mature features than SL?? Hmmm - maybe because SL residents are NOT gamers - they are virtual world community participants that want a quality of service and value from SL moreso than they want new cool geek toys.

Gadget Portal wrote: Czari Zenovka wrote: You know, Gadget, comments like yours when you have NO IDEA of what someone may be dealing with in RL is less than helpful to say the least. When you come down with a debilitating illness some day and have to make an extremely limited income cover the necessities of life, then get back to me on how I'm sticking my fingers in my ears. Like it or not, 3D gaming is like any other hobby, it has equipment costs. In this case, it's computer hardware. If you can't afford it, this may not be the hobby for you. That statement comes across as really mean, but I can't think of a polite way to put it. Rock climbers have to buy rope and other equipment regularly. Even stamp collectors need to invest in storage for their stamps. Those of us into online gaming need to invest in keeping our computer hardware up to date. Sounds like you were doing that for a while, why'd you stop? As long as you keep up with it, you should never have to buy an entire computer. Granted, a mobo purchase can add up, but if you do it right and in a timely fashion, even the cost of that can be reasonable. If the day ever comes where I get a debilitating illness and can't afford to fund my gaming, I'll have to find a hobby I can afford. If there is just a little bit of common sense within the strategy makers at LL - it is that they dont ALWAYS listen to the propeller-head geeks who have more time and free money on their hands and that have ZERO clue how to run a large business. If LL would take the advice of Medhue and Gadget.... the already declining SL business and service run by LL would collapse even faster. Why? So let me tell you why not only is Medhue and Gadget's "force everyone on SL to MESH-Only viewers and screw any of the SL resdient community that is too cheap or too poor to afford upgraded computers to participate" beliefs rude and callous, its downright 100% STUPID ! So regardless of whatever BS stats LL might try to fling around, I am going to make a rough guess is that about 1/3 (~ 30%) of LL real human accounts / users (not the alt count - the humans that run all the avatars) have not switched to a viewer that is Mesh capable. Czari gave a couple reasons but I have heard many other reason and my small scale stats from all those that visit my gallery tell me its about 30% that refuse or cannot upgrade to mesh capable viewers. I dont know the total poplation of real human active SL residents but lets say its about 1 million (the number is not too important but anyone chime in if they know a more accurate estimate). SO...... What Gadget and Medhue are suggesting is that screw the 30% of the SL population that for one reason or another cannot use mesh viewers. In this duo's understanding, SL is a gaming environment (where they are completely wrong again) and since its a gaming environment, members need to Pay to Play. As such, even though for all these years prior to mesh, the entire population of SL was able to participate.... what this wise business-savvy <cough> duo thinks is the right thing to do is for LL to force all residents to use mesh-only viewers! Now I am sure most other Merchants reading this posting aready know what that means if LL was stupid enough to listen to this duo... but since Gadget and Medhue clearly do not understand business strategy and only care that they have the coolest propeller-head spinning new gaming environment to play in... I will spell it out for these two. What Gadget and Medhue are saying is that LL should force 30% of LL's customers or about ~300,000 participants to leave "THEIR GAME". Hmmm... considering that LL's SL usage has been declining for the past years.... considering that last year LL watch 1800 sims abandoned.... considering that with all the other open sims competition as well as new cooler competition just now showing up - SL's new signups are sinking fast... Gadget & Medhue, do your really think its a wise idea to force 1/3 of SL's population to LL's competitiors where the current viewers will happily work there? And I wonder what both your SL merchant sales will be like when a 1/3 of SL's population does a mass migration to the other grids? Like I said, LL is often not the smartest business planner and are normally lead-by-the-nose by both their own internal "I wanna develop cool stuff" and SL tech geeks like these two that show up at all the tech user group meetings LL hosts and whispers in LL's ear that "we need more tech cool stuff"... but at least when it comes to this decision - even LL undertands how stupid an idea this would be. PS Gadget - let me help you out a bit.... SecondLife IS NOT A GAMING ENVIRONMENT! Its a virtual world.... it has countless communties that dont give a S**T about mesh nor pathfinder nor material systems nor all the other amazing new things that Rodvik and the tech geeks want to add to SL. They want to simply interact and socialize and do community things. I dont need mesh or pathfinder or countless other things to: sing at a karaoke club to go to the countless clubs and dance places to go listen to live concerts to go the countless art galleries in sl to hang with my SL friends to participate in several of the RPs that have happily existed in SL for a long time before this tech showed up etc etc etc Notice something in this list Gadget? NONE OF IT IS GAMING! If you want to game... go to WOW or Half Life or to the countless other propeller-head infested, HW Ego concentrated, goal driven environments. SecondLife is not this environment... so maybe instead to telling Czari to leave SL if she can afford it... maybe you and Medhue should leave to a true GAMING world where you both can get your Geek on. Nuff Said !

Ami, That is exactly what I read from your OP - that you were trying to point out how the economy and what ever other factors have directly started to impact your SECONDLIFE related revenue and profits to the point that your generated profits no longer can self-sustain your cost of sims that you offer up free for use to the SL community. To the point that you NOW are being forced to dip into RL $ to pay for these sims. I also remember from past discussions (which you have again pointed out in the above posting) that you have a RL income designing and even staff that assists with your SL creating and operations. As such, it was common sense to me that you would not asking or looking for advice on how to change your SL creation method to look on how to make better money outside SL. This was all about you point out that SL's economy combined with LL's unwillingness to re-think nor even negotiate sim teir pricing is going to force you to shut down these public use sims becaue you are only willing to support them if SL's revenue can pay for them. Your OP was very clear from what I read. That is why myself and other thought Medhue's "mesh is the answer to your problem" was: a) not even a valid solution since Mesh is NOT a new magic money generator for most, b) it was not even in line with your OP. You are correct - Mesh or No Mesh - is not the solution. The solution to keep the free sims alive only by the profits generated by you in SL is mostly out of your control. Sadly, you cannot control the RL economy nor the slow demise of the SL economy. LL has some of this control but "THEY DONT GET IT". So shutting down your free non-revenue generating sims to me is the most logical option. Best you get out before it eats too much of your RL $.

And this is where I will disagree with Darrius and Dart full support of Madhue's posted arguments and initial recommendations to the OP on the root cause to her current problems as well as general recommendations to the masses. First of all I will give Medhue credit for a great debator's spin out of his first posting where he quickly realized what he recommended to the OP was way off base. But to remind Dart and Darrius - Medhue direct and single minded recommendation to the OP's posted inworld problems was because she had not fully endorsed nor started producing MESH. Medhue was stating that if the OP would start creating mesh content that this will fix her inworld problems and she will once again be able to regain her SL sales to pay for her free sims. If Dart and Darrius 100% agree with Medhue on this... then you three and I and totally are not seeing eye-to-eye. The OP creating mesh content and dropping development of sculpties and prims will NOT restore her inworld revenue and as such will NOT allow her to have her SL profits pay for these sims. This was her stated opbjective. Medhue realized very quickly that he was way off base on his quick Mesh-biased championing recommendations to the OP when myself and others challenged him. So what did Medhue do on his next posting as a good debator does.... he spun his statement to be something completely different about "the big picture" and mesh is not about SL yada yada yada. Well many of us caught Medhue's spinning and called him on this as well. So if we want to talk about Medhue's latest stand and forget about the OP's topic and what Medhue recommended to her... Medhue, Dart, Darrius..... For the less than 1% of SL creators that are RL 3D creators and make a RL full income creating content - like 3D content - I dont think anyone would argue with Medhue's point. If you are creating 3D models and content... WTF are you creating content in SL for? In fact Medhue.... since you are in this very small portion of the creators / merchants population - WHY ARE YOU EVEN IN SL??? As Dart rightly pointed out and you would completely agree.... If you can make $10s or $100's of dollars selling a model outside SL, why are you wasting even an hour inside SL getting your beautiful SL models into SL and all the hassle to import them and package them and sell them for a whopping $1 or $2 a sale? Take your own advice and the 100% agreed support of Dart and Darrius and GET OUT OF SL and use your talents on more effective money generating opportunties. NOW..... for the other 99% of the SL Creators / Merchants that create content primarily for SL, we are not in your league and as such your recommendations are completely ill advice to us 99% that produce content for SL and other competing open sims. Your advice has already been proven completely wrong when you have told me and several other last fall and even now that unless we start creating Mesh content in SL - mesh creators like you and others will eat our breakfast and take our business away. Well Medhue, 12 months later.... I have only 100% sculptie landscape products for sale. I still make pretty much the same nice revenue / profits each wekk I did when you first warned me last fall. Why has my sculpty business not collapsed Medhue? Just answer that one question for me? Next, for Medhue, Dart, Darrius.... since 99% of us content creators create content pretty much exclusively to work with and target the SL community as well as other similar competing grids, Why are all three of you in 100% agreement that it is wise for me to stop creating and selling Sculpties that I can sell to 100% of the SL community and 100% of other competing grids and start creating and selling MESH content that is only good for a portion of the SL community and ZERO % of any other grid? I would like to know why two business savvy content creator / merchant in this forum believe this is wise advice to offer the SL content creator community. No one is saying that Medhue's advice is not wise .... just not wise nor applicable to this OP's situation nor to the vast majority of the SL creator community.

Actually Deja... To expand on your argument back to Medhue on his thoughts of leveraging technology that can be used outside SL (like 3D modeling).... using MESH as opposed to Sculpties is actually a huge hinderance to that strategy. Unlike Mesh... all my Sculpty packs were available to be transferred to other competing open sim grids (you all know which ones are SL's competitors). With sculpties I have been making a PROFIT on these grids outside SL. Exactly why would I create Mesh landscape packs that are currently not popular even in SL and 100% not possible to be exported into any other competing grid??? So contrary to Medhue's argument about mesh opens my world to bigger markets.... it is actually the other way around. SCULPTIES have and continue to be the only technology for me to take my creations I built for SL and sell them elsewhere - other open sim. Mesh would completely lock me into SL only. If the OP would take Medhue's advice, she would be limiting her ability to sell her creation in any of these other grids.

Darrius and I are on the same wavelength with his posting. As much as we have had our disagreements, you have proven to be a very successful SL creator and merchant and no one wants to see that shrink. Sadly as I said and as Darrius is suggesting - like in RL economic crunches, if revenue begins to shrink then you need to focus on reducing costs. LL simply does not understand that their old monopolistic hold on this market has gone away a few years ago but LL has never been the smartest Business Strategists. They are run from the CEO dows with a very strong TECH/GEEK culture and they do not grasp business factors. They do not see that the critical creators that have made SL the success it once was can very easily transfer their creations to other open sims.... an ability that LL founders ironically created because of their strong GEEK "Open Source rules" beliefs. So as a creator in SL - I have leveraged this ability by using the common technologies that SL and all its competing grid can use equally. So as LL refuses to pull their heads out of the sand and realize that they need to address their teir fees and how to create more compeitive pricing to encourage Land Owner to keep and grow sims instead of abandoning them (which equal $0 revenue for LL).... sim owners need to take more drastic steps. Closing down a sim to reduce costs is a sad but logical option. You wont get any sympathy from LL as they have watch and refused to stop many very high profile sims shut down in the past couple years which were used by LL themselves to promote why SL is so great. They wont negotite with you either. I hope things turn around for your SL operations but make plans that they wont.

Medhue Simoni wrote: Well, I'd only point out that SL's problem has little to do with getting new people to sign up. I like that SL will be on Steam, and I do feel it is a good thing. I just don't think it will make a significant difference. I agree with Medhue on this point. Its neat that SL may be on Steam at some point but the environment of SL is still not a pure GAMING play like almost all other steam offerings. So I think unless Rodvik has other plans not well known for the future of SL (like converting SL into a pure gaming environment), Steam wont be a big impact. I am much more excited that LL officially announced their development of Material System for the grid! This was the critical missing half to mesh on SL. When that comes out - it will greatly improve the experience on the grid and this might attract new communities into SL or make existing communities grow instead of shutting down sims or moving to other open sims where land prices are cheaper - all things being equal.

Medhue Simoni wrote: What some people fail to realize, is that 3d is not all SL. The importance of learning mesh goes way beyond Secondlife. See, myself, as a creator doesn't feel that making items for ONLY 1 platform is a very intelligent way to work, or spend my time. Everything that I make today, can be used anywhere I choose to bring it. In my personal opinion, you'll be writing your own 3d death note by continuing to create only for SL. If people want to occupy their time arguing the mesh or no mesh idiocy, please do it without referencing me. This thread is about Ami and her problems. I seriously doubt that advising her to continuously create items that can only work in SL, is good advice at all. Unlike some people, I looked at Ami's whole collection and I see many items that would be half the prim cost in mesh, not to mention all the other bonuses of mesh. No one "fails" to realize this Medhue. But not everyone has been put on this earth to create 3D models and make money on them. Nor was the OP's topic talking about how her business outside SL is failing. Her topic was about what is happening INSIDE SL. As such, what a creator does outside SL is not up for discussion on this thread. Your response also failed to bring up the new argument you are bringing up now about "the bigger picture of knowing mesh and 3D modeling". Your response was very direct and in my opinion quite myopic in that you clearly were recommending strongly to the OP that the root cause to all her woes is that she is not adopting Mesh. I know you are a HUGE fan of all things mesh but do you honestly believe that her non-adoption of mesh is the root to her problem with lagging sales in SL? Do you really think that the slumping sales in the SL economy does not have many factors and most of those factors have nothing to do with mesh? Mesh is cool and 3D modeling to create a mesh export to SL is really cool - AS A TECHNOLOGY. But the most amazing technology cannot stand by itself to make it successful. There are many other NON-TECHNICAL factors that determine how fast and when Mesh or any other new technology LL introduces on the grid will become critical mass successful. At this time MESH still has not reached critical mass. It has major hurdles to jump before it can. LL - in its proven "geek view" deploying a new technology onto their money making grid did not help matters by releasing Mesh with the huge mesh-only LI penalties when all older legacy prims and sculpties have no penaltioes. This was a big strategic failing on mesh go-live. In fact it is the LI penalties of Mesh that is the #1 reason I will not release a mesh pack for SL right now. I am glad you love 3D modeling and SL Mesh so much, but you really need to put your comments in perspective when providing advice as to reasons why a fellow merchant sees slumping sales in SL. There is much more to the SL grid economy than Mesh.... trust me.

Rose Mackie wrote: I see a lot of the merchants saying "go mesh or die." I don't have mesh and my sales are about the same. I'm always suprised these days to see how well I am doing with my plain ole builds. I thought for sure I'd be passed over by "flashy" products. I think that people will buy your products if they fill a need, catch the eye, and are quality, low-prim, competitively priced items. Totally agree with you Rose. All my selling landscape packs are 100% sculpty only. I still generate about the same sales as I did when Mesh was introduced a year ago. Medhue is well known for being one of LL's biggest champions of Mesh - even his pom poms are mesh He has been promoting that mesh is the savoir of the grid and that all non-mesh conformants will surely die a quick death since LL made mesh production last summer. A year later - I am still here and still making great money on my SCULPTIES. The Mesh lovers keep wanting to overlook the major LI impact limit that LL placed on its ability to grow faster and they want to ignore the current technical limits that LL has still not addressed (like deformers for clothing). These are just small inconveniences to a mesh lover and the attitude is "too bad for those that refuse to see mesh - their loss". Well it might be their loss not seeing mesh but its also a major factor why many buiders of places and landscapes will not use mesh to replace sculpties and prims - if a large number of their visitors still cannot see mesh. Mesh is real cool. I love mesh as a technology. I am even way more excited to hear now that LL is working on a Materials system. But logic for me as a creator that SELLS to my marketplace - mesh still has hurdles to jump before it reaches the "SCULPTY" usage comfort for builders. As such.... I take the "MESH OR DIE AS A BUSINESS" post with a bit of a chuckle as they have been proven wrong so far.

Sasly Ami you are experiencing something regarding the sales drop in June that a large number of merchants reported as well. Something happened in June - who knows what - that caused a noticeable slump in sales and it went into summer. I noticed it too but over the past few weeks it "SEEMS" to be recovering for now. Maybe with summer things will get better for all. But I am like you in that I think the general SL economy is slowly grinding down both to RL economic pressures and because of too much competition pulling interests away from SL. Growing lag problem on the grid (because LL keeps adding new functions and has yet to put a big dent in focusing on lag reducing - i.e. PathFinder now added to all the sims by default which most dont need nor asked for but now have it running on their sims) makes it frustrating to enjoy being on the sim especially when participating in large events like concerts where30 - 50 - 90 guests show up. LL's lack of customer service and dealing with serious AR's makes it scary for many grid residents (mostly women) to engage when wacked out Stalkers are allowed to harass and terrorize victims with ZERO support from LL to shut them down. Competing open sims that are much lower cost to participat - especially when owning sims that cost a fraction the price of LL. The mood of gloom around the grid about the future of SL.... "how long will SL be around" when everyone sees amazing beautiful sims shutting down almost every month because of the cost to operate and when you hear last year LL had 1800 abandoned sims. Being surrounded by bad news stories makes you believe it and you start looking for other options. Also, since not many new users are entering SL - its critical that those that are long time vets of SL are kept happy and stay. But many of them are getting bored or have other priorities now or are dying off. Like a busines - this is a USER BASE NEGATIVE CASHFLOW. LL cant sustain a dropping userbase forever. So there are countless factors that you declining business is likely a victim of. Not using MESH is just one small factor in this but since you are just a boat on the LL's / SL Sea... you go down when the seas drop. I think you are doing the right thing.... Look at cutting your own costs. If that means dropping a non-revenue producing sim - then that is what you must do. You certainly would not be the first. Countless SL residents are closing sims and reducing their land usage. LL does not or cannt change its pricing model so dont look for any help from LL to make their sim teirs more competitive. As such, drop a sim. Wish you luck !