Toysoldier Thor

Rya Nitely wrote: Ami, I'm sorry to hear you're having difficulties, and I do agree with rebuilding old stock using all the new tools. However, I am finding that there are limits to mesh when it comes to prim count. I hoped they would replace sculpties but they won't. For example, how do I build an offsim mountain using mesh and keep prims low? I also find that sometimes I can't link a mesh item to my sculpted or standard prims as this blows out the prim count. But yes, I am going over all my items and reducing prims using megaprims and sculpted prims, and my partner builds mesh items - and our profits are still very decent. I agree with Rya, Medue is correct that a creator should learn the newer creation / technologies LL puts out but for him to make that the crux of why her business is failing is incorrect. Mesh is still NOT 100% endoresed by the entire SL population - even to this day. Plesase Medue do not point out LL stats that prove me wrong. I see it every day that mesh is still not used by a good portion of the population. UNTIL seeing a mesh is what 95% of the grid will see, mesh has limits in it use at a large scale. Example, I just moved my art gallery to my new sim, it including several of my mesh art statues throughout the floor. In the past 3 weeks since my new landscapes sculpties store and art gallery re opened on the new sim I have had several visitor come look at the place. I toured countless visitors. I would say that abou 1/3 of the visitors do not and continue to refuse to upgrade to a MESH capable viewer. 1/3 Medue! Buiders cant create beautiful landscaped sims an know that 1/3rd of their visitors see deformed blobs all over the sim. Some have older computers and when they tried the new viewers with mesh it crippled they PC so they went back. Some told me that they dont see the big deal with mesh that would force them to upgrade from a viewer that works fine. Then as Rya said, mesh was born with a huge limitation that LL burdoned them with that makes Mesh even harder to bring to market - like large structure like landscapes and even homes. Mesh being penalized with LI when sculpties and prims are not. I have been creating and selling sculpty landscapes for years.... even a year later I cannot justify making a mesh pack because its LI is simply hit too hard with LI as soon as you try to grow it to any significant size. A 1 prim sculpty mountain is far cheaper than a 100 LI Mesh. Then there is the stupid wild flinging calculations when you even try to augment a build with a mesh!! This is the biggest joke. Last week I tried to link one of my 3 LI mesh statues with a flowing prim/sculpty build I had that was 5prim. When I linked the the two together to consider selling it... 3 + 5 = around 8 LI? ROFL NOPE... In LL's calculation... 3 + 5 = 243 LI. You can champion and cheerlead about how MESH is the magic solution every creator with declining sales must adopt to save their business but that is simply not the case. I still ONLY sell sculpty landscapes in my store and other than the big slump that most of us felt in late June and into summer (MANY OF US REPORTED IT HERE - even those that do not sell mesh or sculpty) my sales are generally about where they were when mesh was introduced. So Medue.... why is me not using mesh in my 100% sculpty store not collapsing? You are correct that she should look how Mesh COULD be used to create and make sales. BUT you are off based on saying its the main reason her business is declining.

there is one person from these forums that I know what have a ton of great technical feasibility input and ideas about the VLM-MS and VLMs and yet I have not heard a PEEP from her..... What up Sassy ?!?!?!??! I know you would have great insight on the type of DB and DB Table structure from the new VLM-MS as well as the type of webservice interfact - I suspect HTTP/XLM but.... Where is ya Sassy

Update on VLMs... I went to this Friday's Server Usergroup meeting to make sure the Jira is being looked at and as a couple questions to the Lindens. Here is the dialog on the VLM topic.... [16:42] Toysoldier Thor: Since last Friday there has been an amazing flurry of multiple articles and discussions on VLMs as well as the JIRA for VLMs has jumped from 15 to over 80 in just 1 week. The response on the idea of VLM's has been overwhelming & extremely positive from the SL residents that have heard about VLMs or read one of the many articles written about it. (I can post the 3 main VLM articles if you want to read them Lindens). [16:42] Toysoldier Thor: So my questions to the Lindens are: 1) when might we see a Linden response on the VLM jira (it is still officially untouched)? 2) Bigger question is if there is such a strong nearly unanimous strong support for a VLM service being developed for SL... honeslty... is this a factor for LL to consider it as a development priority or am I am the other SL residents wasting our time trying to see VLMs coming to light? [16:43] Cheesey Linden: Toysoldier we are investigating the idea. When we have a better idea of the technical cost we will update the group/jira. [16:43] Toysoldier Thor: that would be great [16:43] Toysoldier Thor: have a lot of watchers wanting to see LL's response to this [16:45] Toysoldier Thor: So Cheesey - is there anything I can spearhead for the Lindens on this VLM jira? I want to help LL out if they need help.... I dont want to see this jira die as do tons of other residents [16:46] Cheesey Linden: nothing right now. its a good idea, we just have to see if we can fit it into our schedule [16:46] Toysoldier Thor: kk [16:46] Cheesey Linden: which requires some research to see the extent of actual work involved [16:47] Toysoldier Thor: please keep in mind that the VLM concept can be a phased in approach.... it does not have to go in as one whole end-to-end solution... the VLM-Mapping Service is the key

Its actually pretty funny how all those in RL around me : my immediate family, my friends, my co-workers respond about my attempts to describe SL and that I run a couple businesses in SL. My immediate family, in laws and friends just don't understand my overall addiction to SL (ie. that I love singing Karaoke most nights and that I attend 1 or more virtual live concerts pretty much every night, or that I create art from inside SL and have an art gallery and go to art exhibits etc etc etc). In fact, the "boggles the mind and can't grasp the concepts of all these virtual activities" attitude I get from my family initially was even worse regarding what I initially got from my Co-Workers (you know the boys will be boys kind of poking). I repeat... "initially". But my immediate family cannot dismiss the fact that over the past 3 years my SL Sculpty Landscapes business has been generating a pretty consistent $300-$400US per month and they see the results from the business when I buy myself a $2500 Alienware laptop from my profits and a new Nikon DSLR and using the profits to kickstart my move of the art I created in SL to a RL art site selling real Canvas. They don't joke or rib me when they know my paypal account has a lot of RL "hot money" in it 100% because of my small virtual business. My co-workers stopped making fun of me very quickly when I told them how much I make from - as one of my co-workers said - "SELLING VIRTUAL ROCKS". In fact what one of my cocky mouthed co-workers (yeah a friend that loves to rib ppl) keeps saying.... "I can't even make fun of xxxx because as crazy as this whole secondlife is, he is making $100's of real money each month selling virtual rocks to the masses in SL". It bugs him even more when I tell him that I only spend about 2 hours a week actually maintaining my virtual store. So the ribbing at work ended long time ago Ironically, I got into SecondLife in the first place because of my work back in January 2008 when one of IBM's top scientists of structure software, Grady Booch, did a presentation to our local I.T. community. He did it via a huge IMAX SecondLife session while he was sitting comfortably at his home in Colorado. A local IT vendor set up a SL viewer that was then projected on the huge IMAX screen and Grady sat at his IBM island while interacting with a RL theatre of local I.T. professionals - including me and my fellow co-workers. I was so amazed at how this was possible that when I got home I immediately registered an account with SL. My rez day was Jan 23, 2008. The rest is history. I did actually even briefly meet Grady in SL as I got to know the IBM sim's manager who knows him well. So that my take on this topic.

Talia Davidov wrote: That seemed like a pretty postive response to me . . though am I the only one that finds it a bit scary the things Andrew didn't know like do picks still work . .:matte-motes-agape: I think most Lindens do not actually use the SL world and experience the SL life that their develop, operate, support, and make policies for. I was a little surprised a comment from Simon that gave the impression he was not aware that VERY OFTEN at SL events where there is currently only one LM - TP location provided to the event how so many avatars end up landing on each others head. This is frustrating especially when an Avatar arrives and does not move away from this single LM location so other arriving avatars are stuck floating in the air waiting for this person to move to the event. With VLM Round-Robining, the VLM-MS can be configured with 3 LM Coordinates and start dropping arriving guests at different coordinates within the event (even if only by a few meters from each other).

UPDATE from the August 3rd "Server User Group" meeting, I was able to get Andrew Linden to post the August 3rd meeting transcripts that included the disucssion on the new concept of VLMs.... The transcript is for the entire meeting - so to help you all out, the topic of VLMs started at my [16:22] local chat message... AUG 3 Server UG Transcripts Thoughts?

UPDATE from the August 3rd "Server User Group" meeting, I was able to get Andrew Linden to post the August 3rd meeting transcripts that included the disucssion on the new concept of VLMs.... The transcript is for the entire meeting - so to help you all out, the topic of VLMs started at my [16:22] local chat message... AUG 3 Server UG Transcripts Thoughts?

As per yoru great idea Czari's good idea... To help promote the support for VLMs and send a message to LL that not only is a good idea but one that the general community of SL supports and wants LL to make a development priority, I have created a SUPPORT VLM poster notecard, and texture kit that any resident can get a copy of inworld and place on their store, mall, venue, art gallery, HUNT, etc. You can get a free copy of it at my inworld store or just IM me and I will send you a copy of the poster...

To help promote the support for VLMs and send a message to LL that not only is a good idea but one that the general community of SL supports and wants LL to make a development priority, I have created a SUPPORT VLM poster and kit that any resident can get a copy of inworld and place on their store, mall, venue, art gallery, HUNT, etc. You can get a free copy of it at my inworld store or just IM me and I will send you a copy of the poster... Here is the poster I created...

Hi Kwak, Just further question on your suggestion... I sorta know what you are saying but that technique you mentioned... are you suggesting to create an extremely low flat surface LOD model? In Zbrush I think I could just uses a plane "tool" and decimate it to extremely low poly. BUT my quesiton again is, would this not be the same as me changing the value of the LOWER and LOWEST LOD metric proposed by the SL Upload utility to a poly count of 5 and 3?

Made, I understand what you are saying and the post of Kwak's as well but I didnt actually use the auto-generated values of LOD from SL's import. In the last revised upload I did after Dronlge pointed out my brain fart of matching the Medium and Lower LODs, I let the other LOD's be auto-proposed to me by the utility and then I changed the LOWER and LOWEST LODs dramatically - although from what Kwak posted - maybe for this logo I should have been even more aggressive. I set the LOWER to 100 and LOWEST to 25. I guess as long as no avatar will likely view the logo from far enough away to engaged LOWER and LOWEST LOD - I could set these LODs to both 10 and 5. I looked at your logo Made and from the photo it looks like your Logo would be allowed to be nore effecient than the logo was was modeling since it appears you are using sharp corners and flat sides. This would allow for much better decimation than my logo which is made up of all analog curves. The surfaces of my logo has almost no flat runs on the surface. Also, my logo is a bit fatter and taller than your logo at the LI you mentioned. As such, the fact that I am now at about LI=9, I suspect I am getting pretty close to what would be expected to be a good LI for an analog shaped logo of similar size.

Well I tend to be a bit of a GEEK and my explanation of the new feature of Virtual Landmarks was geek talk in the JIRA as I was sorta directing the talk to LL. BUT today Nalates did an awesome no-Tech Human blog posting of the new Virtual LandMarks concept as well as provided a very level fair talk of the possible challenges brought up by LL for consideration. If you thought the JIRA was too GEEK for you ... I would strongly suggest you read her blog - it makes a lot of sense. http://blog.nalates.net/2012/08/04/virtual-landmarks/ Thanks Nalates

Well I tend to be a bit of a GEEK and my explanation of the new feature of Virtual Landmarks was geek talk in the JIRA as I was sorta directing the talk to LL. BUT today Nalates did an awesome no-Tech Human blog posting of the new Virtual LandMarks concept as well as provided a very level fair talk of the possible challenges brought up by LL for consideration. If you thought the JIRA was too GEEK for you ... I would strongly suggest you read her blog - it makes a lot of sense. http://blog.nalates.net/2012/08/04/virtual-landmarks/ Thanks Nalates

Well stupid me.... thanks Drongle for pointing out the major factor... I had a brain fart when I thought that by making the LOWER LOD that of the MEDIUM LOD that it would remove the LOD. In fact it made the LOWER LOD more costly. So... both of you mentiond about this SMOOTH SHADING which I am not sure what that is in Zbrush unless it is the parameter during the Zsculpty export where it asks if you want to enabling SMOOTHING - I said no. So I did an experiment based on what Gaia suggested. I went back to the beta grid and I uploaded this same model with and without "GENERATE NORMALS". All other parameters were set identical for a model that was about 5m long. At this res size, the Normal model was LI=9 and for N-Normal model it was LI=10. Saved one prim. I will say though that the NORMAL model looked much smoother than the NO-Normal. When I increased the Logo model to 15mx4mx1m, the Normal was LI=53 and No-Normal was LI=57. As such the Generate Normals helped a little bit for LI efficiently but Generate Normals made the model look better. For me.... I really dont like the quality of the Logo at such a low poly count (looks meh for me and I wished I could use a higher poly count. But what are others opinions... for a logo like you see in the OP... what kind of LI would you expect for a nice quality mesh if it was done efficiently? Am I in the ballpark of LI=9 for a 5x1x.5

I have been working in Zbrush & Shadowboxes to create 3D logos created in Photoshop. Inside Zbrush I can make these 3D models look amazing, but I want to be able to efficiently bring them into SL. I have tried almost every trick to reduce the polycount and then use normal maps to hide the very low rez model that comes into SL. I have deleted all poly's from the back of the 3D model and the model you see in this post is only 2100 poly. I could possibly even decimate it down to just under 2000 but then thats about as low as I can get. When I upload the DAE into SL, the model uload metrics dont even start at the 2100 poly that I saw in Zbrush. I made teh physics use the LOWEST LOD. But as you can see in the 2nd clip, the best I could get is a LI of 25 for a ~ 5m long mesh. Sooo is this about as good as it can get for a mesh of a logo like this or is there something fundamental that I could get this mesh far smaller?

FURTHER UPDATE: Friday Aug 3rd at 4pm SLT I formally introduced and presented the VLM JIRA and concept to the Lindens that attended and run the SERVER / SIM / SCRIPTING User Group. The following Linden were in attendance to hear and ask questions about the VLM concept: Andrew Linden Simon Linden Cheesey Linden Baker Linden I also want to mention and thank several of my fellow Merchants that attended the meeting to be there to support the concept and participate in the discussion about VLMs and how it impacts them as a Merchant. I want to say that my impression on the discussion and the Linden's responses to the concept was very position. They asked several questions about the details of how it might work and who can create VLMs and a lot of conversation on how the concept of VLM's could be potentially used as a greifing tool. There was good response on these questions but by the end of the conversation Andrew Linden said it was an interesting concept and that both he and Cheesey would take the JIRA back and bounce the idea around with other Lindens. At the time of this posting the local chat log / transcripts had not yet been posted on the UG's webpage, but keep your eyes open on the following page for when the Aug 3 transcripts are posted. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Server/Sim/Scripting_User_Group Thanks again to the Linden team for taking so much time to discuss the topic and ask valuable questions. Thanks to all the other attendees and specifically to the Merchants that showed up to provide support and valuable input to the conversation. Lets cross our fingers that the Lindens like the idea enough that they will consider executing.

Great idea Czari on the Merchant store JIRA promotion. Let me see what I could come up with and maybe I can create a link giving "Get involved to lobby LL to develop VLMs for SL" posters. As for your past post on frustration on inworld local avi's asking for your LM when its in your picks.... happens to me all the time as well. But again - this is why it is so important to address the problem of non-virtualized LMs since you cannot resist the culture in SL that residents very often want an LM - even if they get it from your picks they will end up with an LM of your place in their inventory. I could only completely guess at the millions (if not 10's of millions) of invalid, out-dated, abandoned LMs that are sitting in everyone's inventories and in vendors and packs and anywhere else that something references a LM asset. I have about 700 LMs in my inventory right now... i can tell you that if I deleted 650 of them I would not notice any negative impact to my experience inworld.

Hey Rival, First of all I didnt take your post wrong at all about dissing the value of the JIRA. In fact your posting and that of a couple others enforces the the value and argument about the concept of the VLM JIRA. Let me take your posting and interpret it ... When you started your SL merchant business, you did what I am pretty confident the vast majority of new SL Creator-turned-Merchants did, you saw there was an additional value in your packaging & distribution of your products during sales to include a LM asset in each product you package for sale. I did that and countless others did that. For the same reason as countless Merchants also include informational notecards about the respective product and they might even throw an LM in the notecard. You did this at the time when you werent concerned or maybwere not initial aware of the ramifications related to the the HUGE functional limitation that LL never addressed and has left lingering since inception of the LM design in the early days of SL's evolution. The fact that LL's developed a critical LM solution whereby each created LM (both the master and any copied instances of the original) were 100% designed to stand as point-of-creation stand-alone assets with a hard-coded grid location. This major limitation and its eventual ramifications to a Merchant that widely uses LM's as a marketing tool didnt hit home to you (nor most of us) until the first time that you are forced to change this LM's coordinate. Each Merchant at their own pace and/or when the situation hits them will realize this major weakness in the strategy to distribute as a mass scale a Store, mall, club, venue LM. At the point each Merchant painfully realizes it, the easist new strategy that 99.99% of merchants will execute is one of three approaches: Accept the LM limitation and painfully transition all OLD LM distribution assets to new LM assets and continue using LMs as a marketing tool. Realize how painful the LM limitation is (i.e. not having a Virtual LM function in SL) and take a new approach of abandoning the marketing value of handing out LMs all your products and LM givers etc. because as much as there is value in handing out LMs - its not worth the risk and future pain in having to refresh/update LMs as well as the limit on your business's ability to be flexible on when and where you want to have your store's LM. Realize the LM limitation and come up with work-around solutions, technologies, approaches, way to promote your LM in a way that at a small scale (specific to your business) you address the SL-wide LM limit or avoid the LM limit. Regardless of which ever of the 3 approaches you follow after your first painful realization of the major LM weakness in SL, you fully understand that there is a fundamental flaw in the current LL SL LM solution / technology. There is no dispute about that. But for 99.9% of merchants or club owners or whomever.... the thinking is "I understand that SL's LM solution has this major weakness but there is nothing I can do about the limitation so just make business decisions with this understanding" Well I am the 0.1% of SL Merchants and residents that has decided to take an additional approach. I have decided to create a proposed solution that would effectively address this long standing major LM limitation and try to convince LL that they should have resolved long time ago. Solving the LM limitation is not rocket science. Its actually based on an extremely well known and used technology approach of VIRTUALIZATION. To be fair on LL, when they first developed SL in the pre-beta stages, I believe they didnt even have the concept of LMs and TPing between sims. When they realized that there was a critical need for the concept of LMs and TPing to specifc spots on the grid, they likely at that time did not see just how far the SL' grid and its eco-system would come to rely upon the LM solution. So the idea of virtualizing the hard coded LMs did not dawn on them. BUT, they should have realized this huge limitation way back in 2005-6. Well, its time for someone to seriously ask LL why they havent addressed LM Virtualization and try to convince them that this long standing huge limitation needs to be addressed - to improve the SL Experience for all. So here is a question for you Rival. If we could go back in time when your SL business started and there was a concept of VLMs in place and as you stated already you deployed LMs in all your packaging etc. If you would have deployed VLMs back then and 2 years later you were forced to change the VLM location to another part of your land and it only took 3 minutes to make the change in the VLM-MS interface and POOF all your VLMs across the entire grid was instantly updated..... WOULD YOU HAVE ABANDONED THE STRATEGY OF PLACING VLMS IN ALL YOUR PACKAGING? I would suspect not.

Thanks Poenald, I do know there are many ineffective partial solutions that could be deemed workaround and alternatives to the perfect grid-wide solution that LL should have put in place in the early days of SL.... but many of your suggested ideas do not go near far enough to solve the larger problem that LM's should have been virtualized long time ago. The non-LL server / service solution is not effective since it is not wide scale and universally recoginized by all SL residents. Everything tyou suggested are customized one-of solutions that attempt to reduce or get around the root cause issue - that LM's from SL are not virtualized. We can all keep finding work around solutions or we can get LL to come up with a SL grid wide universal solution. The good news for your solution workarounds are that chances are good LL will handle this JIRA proposed solution like they do most SL resident ideas... the Jira will go into perpetual work backlog or in review and never be serously considered. As such, your work arounds are viable small scale solutions. but again... I was not looking for non-LL alternatives... I knew they existed... I am trying to tackle the root cause problem.

Well No one (not even LL) can say that I didnt do everything possible to explain and promote the new feature. If (and more likely when) this JIRA ends up falling into the abyss as do all JIRI items I create for LL, I can personally feel satisfied that I did everything. I moreso need fellow merchants - whom this would benefit greatly - to help make sure that LL is fully aware of the value of Virtual LMs for oru community as well as so many others to expand / improve the SL experience.

This afternoon I created and posted into the VLM JIRA a couple diagrams that will hopefully make it that much more simple to understand and talk about. You can see the LM vs. new VLM diagrams in the Jira as attachements.

So an update for all my fellow Merchants that I truly believe this proposed VIRTUAL LANDMARKS solution to LL would be a huge benefit if LL decides to take this VLM idea serious and implement it overtop of the existing LMs service.... FIRST: You all know I have created a JIRA for this proposed idea. I have seen some of you vote / watch / and even comment on it. If you miss the JIRA in this thread, here it is... https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-8082 SECOND: The Server forum thread on my topic of VLMs suggested that in order to be noticed by LL, a JIRA is not good enough. It needs to be presented to one of the LL User Groups. After talks with some of you - it was agreed that it should be presented at the next User Group for Servers / Sims / Scripts. I have formally placed my JIRA on the agenda for tomorrow at 16:00 SLT. Here is the agenda details for tomorrow's meeting: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Server/Sim/Scripting_User_Group If you really agree that VLMs would be an invaluable solution for the Merchant community, I would love to have you try to attend the meeting and voice your support. THIRD: In prep for a formal presentation of the idea to LL, I have taken one suggestion to "de-bloggafy" the JIRA description and summarize it more to the details of the proposed idea. I have done that as well as corrected / clarified a few smaller aspects of the solution. I have also decided to whip up a couple BEFORE and AFTER diagrams that show visually how both the current LM model works (and its major weakness) as well as how the proposed VLM model works (and its several benefits). The diagrams are attached to the jira. (I wasnt able to insert the images in this posting - getting an HTTP ERROR when I try - so you will have to go look at them on the actual jira) FINALLY: If you really belive VLMs would be invaluable, please watch / vote on it as well as socialize it and the JIRA within your circle of SL friend. Hope to see you at tomorrow's User Group meeting.

Thanks Indigo - I know no matter how good the idea might be that it will be an uphill battle to get LL to seriously consider the idea as their "job jar" is almost always full with their own marbles that they want to work on. But, the idea of Virtual Landmarks has the most powerful direct benefit with the all the Merchants of SL as they have to deal with invalid dead LMs to a grand scale at least one (if not several times) in their content creation & selling career in SL. I am talking to this community in hopes that several of them will also attend the user group meeting to voice their support for Virtual LandMarkts. As for the "Content Creation / Mesh Import" user group's focus, I understand where you are coming from. That the group's title has "mesh" in it give me the impression (and likely an accurate one) that the group is dedicated to promote and resolves issues around MESH content. And since fashion industry is one of the largest current creator groups of mesh, its natural that the group's focus is about MESH. All other content creation like scripts, sculpty, textures, etc. likely would technically fall into this group but I doubt much is talked about regarding these topics. PS - yesterday - as per a jira comment reques - I overhauled and simplified the JIRA description to remove the BLOG aspects from the JIRA. Anyway... off to a meeting in RL ... thanks for the input.

Indigo Mertel wrote: There is an explanation for that: the first topic discussed by the group (or one of the first topics) was the mesh deformer, as that was a major topic among content creators in the past months. I believe the group discussed the mesh deformer for a number of meetings. Subsequently, they discussed another fashion-reated topic: cloth simulation. With her post Natales meant to catch the attention of fashion creators to encourage them to partecipâte to the meetings. However, if you check the group's wiki page you'll see that the focus is described in more generic terms. That explains why this user group seems to be heavily weighted to being a FASHION / MESH user group. I have also gone to this specific user group and submitted my agenda item on the wiki page (that was no small feat for me as I am no a wiki editor and it took me a while to even figure out how others added agenda items to the agenda ). But to be honest with you, even though that contact you told me about has still not responded to me nor has Nyx or any other Linden yet rejected my agenda item, as I read the objectives for this group, I dont think this is the right user group to present and propose the Virtual Landmarks. I was even told by members of the Merchant Forum that the Virtual Landmarks topic likely will not be a good fit with this user group. They were suggesting it might fit better in the SERVER/SIM/SCRIPTING user groups. This would be great for me as its at an hour I might be able to attend (after work hours). SERVER SIM SCRIPTING UG : The Server User Group exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about server technology, annoying bugs, and feature ideas. It would be nice if any of the user group moderators would provide advice but I think I might move my VIRTUAL LANDMARKS proposal to SERVER/SIM/SCRIPTING today. Only bad thing about that group is that its agenda is very busy. But thanks again for enlightening me on the UGs.

Indigo Mertel wrote: Check this blog post for more details on the Content Creation Improvement User Group. You should be able to find some answers there. You may want to check Natales' blog for more posts, as she posted a few times about this group in the last two months. Wow are we in synch. I JUST sent a PM to GEENZ SPAD as per your suggestion asking how one would get a proposed idea (posted as a JIRA) in front of the eyes of the Lindens via the Content Creators UG. After going to the Blogsite you JUST sent to me in your last post, I now know who GEENZ SPAD is. So thanks for the perfectly timed posting to that blogsite. The way the new usergroup is described, my proposed idea sorta fits this group as it is a new idea for SL technology that LL could consider.... but I am a bit confused why Nalates suggests that this group is a focus of "FASHION" and Content creators. Not sure why fashion creators are specially mentioned over all other content creators since they do fit the group of a Content Creator. So I am wondering if this usergroup's purpose is moreso to promote new ideas that advance "fashion" content? To me a user group that seeks members from any group (creators, merchants, service providers, etc.) whom have ideas that would improve the general experience of the SL grid should be promoted. Generally I would have not seriously considered participating in this user group if I had read that there seems to be a slant toward Fashion content creators. I create sculpty terrain landscape packs and art and mesh sculptures (not mesh terrain packs yet as LI penalties on mesh makes sculpties the more viable option still). Regardless, since all fashion content creators are likely MERCHANTS as well so that they can sell what they create, I would think many of this sub-class of content creators would see just as much value in VIRTUAL LANDMARKS as any other commercial enterprise within SL. I wait to hear a response from Geenz Spad. Thanks!