Toysoldier Thor

Baloo Uriza wrote: Perrie Juran wrote: Can you imagine what would have happened if there were not alternative TPV's available when LL introduced Viewer 2? How many people would have left the grid as being now unusable? Just the whiners. It's not like the code tree went away, the resident devs could still check out code and resubmit patches. Strangely, the Phoenix crew doesn't seem to give back to the code tree ever by submitting patches and improvements. Soooo what Baloo is trying to tell all of us is .... The Phoenix team is selfish and evil and a plight on the goodness of the SL grid and Baloo would be more than happy to see the Phoenix TPV be removed from the SL grid. Correct me if you are not saying this. I guess your feelings from Imprudence and many of the other TPV's is the same? What is your thoughts on TPV's? Are you happy that LL is starting the process to get rid of them? IF so, why?

Baloo Uriza wrote: You make it sound like a good thing that the Phoenix Developers care about anybody but themselves, and enjoy pissing on the user experience for those who don't want to play ball with them. This selfish attitude is what got them banned once before when they were known as Emerald. Anybody who expected any better from them really had misplaced hopes. LOL... wow now that is such a compelling argument to the discussion thread. Coming up with interpretations from my statements on Phoenix and conclusions on how a defunct TPV "Emerald" and that related generation of develoers has any relation to the Phoenix team. First of all, the selfish attitude you seem to be seeing in this thread from me is not coming from a Phoenix Staffer - Im a user of Phoenix. So the Phoenix team has displayed NO attitude in this thread since they have not even commented in this thread. Secondly, please take a moment and try to explain how my comments in this thread brought you to a conclusion of "SELFISH ATTITUDE"? You completely lost me and likely several others on your logic. Now... brushing off your mis-aligned posting, why dont you try to provide some value to the discussion that is ON TOPIC. I am guessing from your off-topic "attacking the TPVer" posting that you are a LL Viewer fan or one of the LL Fanboy that defends LL when ever they need protecting from the community. If your topic had some relevance to the topic like trying to explain why LL's Policies made complete sense and even why TPV's should be wiped off the SL grid I would have given your posting some respect. But it was clearly an off-topic bashing. I will give you another chance.... please explain to all of us how what LL did made a lot of sense and how it was 100% justifiable that Oz would announce a policy that cripples a largely used inworld functionality and then gives whopping 5 days for the entire community to prepare for its removal ! I would love to hear your side of this.

So you think by LL removing True Online status, this will protect your privacy? ROFL OK... so tonight someone will IM ping you and wait to see if your client responds back with a "the person is currently not online" or if it gets no response. this technique is used by countless SL residents now in case SL's online status is borked or if the user had placed themselves in LL's lame "invisible" status (unlike Yahoo's invisible status where when its set - there is no way for someone to know if you are online as the client truly acts like you are not online). You clearly have no level of usderstanding just how many products and services use true online status to run store, clubs, staffing, support, distribution of products and updates,etc. etc. And then for Oz to announce it on Friday and tell the TPV's that they will break it 5 days later when Oz and LL had clearly no clue of the impacts to their decision. That is clearly irresponsible and a typical move by LL. Sadly we see it happen all the time with the LL Commerce Team. We can banter back and forth about just how little or big these first rounds of TPV restrictions will be to the TPV makers and the residents.... but sadly the truth will be known after the damage is done. I could tell very clearly at the Oz audio conference that the TPV representatives were furious. I give them credit for not jumping through the internet and taking Oz's head off. I might have if I was in the direct cross hairs of this policy that the TPV makers were. this is not business as usual for the TPV nor will it be for all those SL residents that use Phoenix and other viewers as opposed to LL Viewers. The only ones that will not be impacted directly by this is LL and the LL Viewer users. But they will be impacted when their inworld products that rely upon True Online stop woking this week. And as one SL Merchant asked angrily.... will LL be stepping up to refund all his 100's of customers that will be demanding refunds for a product that no longer works because LL removed the function its based on?

Clint Snowfall wrote: While I totally agree with what has been said here..I question if you have spent any time in the newb rezz areas in the last two years. Veteran residents do indeed harass newb residents into using a TPV. They make up any number of creative descriptions of the LL viewer to get the new people to drop v2/v3 within mintues of joining SL. Now, not all new residents fall for it and not all newb rez areas have this problem 24/7, but it occurs enough that you can find the problem. I personally started on v2 and I loved it, I will still use v2 over any of the v1 style TPVs. BUT as soon as Firestorm came out for download in any form, I got it and I will swear by it. It is hands down better than v2. But I enjoyed the fact that I had the decision to choose whichever viewer I wanted to use, a freedom I still enoy at this moment. If in fact LL decides to push out the TPVs, they will lose me and my SL businesses. No I do not hang around the SL welcome / help sites, but I have on countless occasion had Noobs come to the Karaoke club I hang out at (which gets a lot of boobs because its SL's most popular karaoke place and on the destination guide). Often they have the Viewer 2 / 3 and as part of the the advice we all give them on helping them with how to sing in SL and clothing etc. we suggest with reasons why they should try replacing their viewer from LL to Phoenix. If they say they dont want to - thats fine. If they ask why - we tell them that most SL residents have the phoenix viewers and if they need help or support from us on how to change their setting to sing at the club, we cant help them since most of us dont use LL viewer. Another related reason is that if over the first few weeks they have problems or questions or need help with their viewer, there is a better chance to get help from a fellow resident if they have phoenix. Having the viewer tag over your head even helps Noobs that decide to stay with LL Viewer 2 / 3 because at least then they can ask a resident that has a similar viewer. This will no longer be the case now that LL is forcing the viewer tag to be hidden. Now the Noob will have to be forced to locally shout out "can someone that know the LL viewer please help me" of which they might get some biased chat back. The removal of the viewer was based on some lame justifications and it was only to give the LL Viewer a better chance to start gaining inworld marketshare. This is the one removed feature that doesnt personally bother me but the principle behind the reason is annoying. The loss of True Online is going to be far far greater damage and impact to the main grid - too bad most of the TPV attendees at the meeting didnt have enough arguments. If there were Merchants and club owners at this meeting.... Oz would have got an earful and had a new hole ripped into him.... but sadly none of these communities were there to express their concerns.

Uhmmmmmm We all need to remember WHY LL gave us this 3 day 0% commissions break. This was not a promotional offer from LL. This was a token of LL's apologies for the Valentines Day Masacre where many of us lost a ton of sales / revenue that for the critical hours of the busiest shopping day in MP (not me as I dont get sales spikes on Vday but those that make and sell Vday stuff), For some of us that dont normally make sales on V-Day (like me), this commission free day was a nice little bonus. But for those of you that worked hard to prepare for that huge single day of sales on V-day, the little commissions that you received from LL these past 3 days will not make up for the 12+ hours of sales that most were not deferred but lost. So depending on what Vday means to you as a Merchant - this was a small bonus or it was a drop in the bucket to what sales LL lost for you on the V-Day Masacre. I still appreciate the token offer but I am also still waiting for LL Commerce Team to provide details of exactly what they did to ensure that another V-Day Masacre will not happen again. THAT would be a much higher sense of appreciation from me.

Perrie Juran wrote: Can you imagine what would have happened if there were not alternative TPV's available when LL introduced Viewer 2? How many people would have left the grid as being now unusable? /me shudders at the thought. Yes you are completely right. As much as I see that a proprietary LL viewer would have helped LL now in keeping control of the SecondLife Service and how much it would have reduced / almost eliminated one of SL's biggest problems (Copy-Botting on the grid), I think we all know what happens where there is no competition within a product or service. If LL forced SL and its viewer to be locked and internally developed only, we would now be stuck / forced to use a horrendous LL Viewer. We would not have a lot of the innovative functions, features, solutions that TPV like Emerald and Phoenix brought to the SL Residents (even against LL's wishes for them to do so). It was the presence of the TPVs and their quick moving, customer driven, innovative teams that introduced the competitive atmosphere that forced LL's undesirable LL Viewer to even introduce changes they surely would never have done if the TPVs were not in the market. But sadly these surprising out-of-the-blue and extremely fast to execute LL policies will surely have a huge impact on the incentive of these TPV's to continue to innovate. I am sure a lot of wind left their sails on Friday. You could clearly hear it in their voices on the audio - a sense of "the end is near" and "LL is starting to shut us down" attitude. Oz only provided lame arguments on the reasons for this new policy and everyone listening to him could easly tell was nothing more than excuses from LL for a policy that has alterior motives. The one that made me laugh was when Oz said the reason that LL wants Viewer Tagging to be removed from avatars is because SL Noobs were being harrased! ROFL laughing. What grid did he hear that from? The unspoken truth was that LL did not like that highly visible message over all SL resident's heads that most residents dont use the LL Viewer. Everyone on the audio sesssion knew that. So for those of you that truly believe that LL's recent TPV crushing policies will have no impact on the future of TPV's developing for the SL Grid..... ask yourself this... If you were on one of these teams and you are getting no revenue / profits from all your efforts create and support these TPVs and what drives you and your team is just the internal satisfaction of being innovative and developing viewers for SL that provides a clear value add to the overall experience of SL for residents. Then LL shocks you one day by telling you in one meeting that : 1) many of the functions in your TPV that many of your customers love will be removed for "privacy" reasons, 2) LL will "break" these functions in the next 5 days with no ability to properly warn and socialize these removed functions and knowing that all the SL residents will attack your team (not LL) with support calls and anger on why these functions all of a sudden were removed. 3) LL add another policy that limits many of the innovations to improve the experience on the grid unless LL first blesses it AND THEN LL develops it themselves for you to use later ! 4) And you know that regarding point #3, many of these innovative ideas have often been rejected by LL and even if they werent rejected, LL simply does not have the resources to take on this development of your ideas. 5) Finally you are not a stupid person as a TPV developer and you can see that LL's long term objective is to choke you out of the market and so you are now waiting for the next call from Oz Linden to tell you that "here are the next rounds of TPV restrictions that we left as exceptions last time". So.... if you are in the TPV's shoes.. tell me how inspired you are to keep developing TPVs for LL and SL ?

Dart I do agree with you and always have had a belief that LL founders should not have come to market with an OPENSOURCE model.... not for the grid and not for the viewers. Yes I understand some of the benefits of opensource to quicken and leverage innovation via collaboration, but if LL would started out 9 years ago with a proprietary architecture then many of the problems that are fundamental risks to SecondLife now would likely not have appeared. - There would not have been a major bleed of their customers to countless opensource grids based on the SL grid when LL's poor customer service encouraged many SL residents to leave SL to other grids like Inworldz. LL can brag (like they did in the Oz Audio) that Inworlz has no content and Phoenix team is free to move development to thes grids but they cant deny that LL has lost a lot of monthly revenue from customer that have moved their communities to Inworldz and other competing grids. - They would never have lost control of the critical viewer that is the window into the SL Grid. Way back in 2009 when I was at a Linden session that Blue Linden was hosting on dealing with a lot of problems about copybotting ... I told Blue then that LL should never have opensourced the viewer and that they should start the process of shutting down opensource viewers to regain control of access to the grid. We all see now the price LL has paid for opensourcing the viewer. Sadly most of us will now pay in the future as LL starts weening us off TPVs and pushing the TPVs out of the SL grid. It will take about a year but if I were Phoenix and especially the smaller viewer makers, there would be little reason to be developing a viewer that pretty much will have little difference to the LL viewer. Remember that most of these TPV teams get little if any REAL rewards for creating these TPV.... only LL benefits from it. So Dart, you and I agree on LL's wrong strategy way back when on using OpenSource. The problem is that OpenSource is entrenched into the entire SL archtiecture and countless non-LL entities have extremely strong hooks into this model. So for LL to begin the process of shutting down OpenSource and getting TPVs out of their product will be a very slow and painful process and hurt a lot of people in many stages as the hooks are ripped off. Sadly LL is taking a cowardly approach. Rodvik should just stand up and make a clear direction / roadmap statement on their new direction and set a deadline of when he wants TPV's off the SL grid. He should have the ethics and customer service mindset to give everyone a long period of time to adjust to this new model. i.e. No TPV's on the grid as of Jan 1 2013. Most importantly Rodvik should come out of denial and realize his LL Development is not innovative on viewer development nor do they have the cycles to provide effective resourcing to develop and maintain the best viewers for the SL grid. As such, LL should develop a strategic partnership with a new SL Viewer Development Team that is OUTSOURCED to a company like Pheonix. i.e. LL should be PAYING the Pheonix Team for being their Viewer Development Branch. Also, LL should give this team a high level of development freedom whereby their ideas would get a priority in the LL development roadmap. But we know this is not how LL thinks. PS... for anyone to think that Oz's friday announcement not being a big deal.... that is naive thinking. It would typically be coming from someone from LL or someone that is a loyal LL Viewer users (a rare one:). The writing is on the wall and dont be surprised in the next 6 months when LL announces further TPV restrictions that deals with exceptions like the RLV viewers and other restrictions. Thinking this is no big deal is short-sighted thinking. This is part of a bigger plan that Rodvik has.

Koltari wrote: Yes I do think this is a willed change. It is hard to beleive a company could be so out of touch not to see how this (and other prior decisions) will effect the current use of SL. Or could they? Any company of this size must have a long term plan regarding all their products right? If they don't something is very wong. SL as it is atm might not be part of their over-all plan. Which I would find sad but I might not be within their precieved target marked...Somehow I almost hope they're just a badly run company and they'll see the errors of their ways. But I can't beleive they don't have a goal to which all this are means to get there. I totally agree with you Koltari, I dont think Rodvik is a stupid man. He may have as little maturity and experience in understanding and running a customer driven company, but he is not stupid. This new set of TPV Clarification rules is clearly set out to influence the TPV makers to showdown and get out of the SL Viewer Business. Rodvik does not believe in opensource and these policies prove it. Rodvik believes that LL needs control of the critical factors to LL's major sources of revenue - SL. They have known for a long time that their inability to create a viewer that best meets the needs of the customers (the disaster called Viewer V2) and with the viewer code being opensource, it allowed a better viewer to be created that met LL's customer needs. Because of this LL lost control of the majority marketshare of the Viewers. since the version and functionality of the Viewers are critical for many new / changing features in SL, the fact that LL lost control of the viewer market was and continues to be a big risk to their business. As Sassy said, the extent to how badly LL lost control was when LL deployed MESH in August. As I stated in the forums when mesh was released, I predicted that Mesh adoption would not reach critical mass for a main reason that LL did not own the main viewer marketshare and so mesh would not start to be adopted until Phoenix released mesh in their viewers. This must have royally frustrated Rodvik and the Sr. LL team. This new set of policies is LL's cowardly approach to deal with TPV's once and for all. Why do I say cowardly? Because instead of taking the mature up-front approach of just making a corporate statement that "by October 1 2012 LL will no longer allow any TPVs to be used to log into SL", they decided to simply take the cowardly approach of putting policies in place that will remove almost all incentive for any TPV makers to keep developing. No need to develop when LL literally wipes out any chance for them to innovate without handing the good ideas to LL for their permission and then general release. They might as well become LL Viewer development staff. What is even more sad in Oz Linden's announced policies and strategy is how little he either knows about or cares about LL's customer base. To make an announcement on Fri Feb 24th that a major function will be shut down for privacy reasons and then LESS THAN A WEEK LATER EXECUTE ON THE STRATEGY.... WOW.... that is just poster child example of how immature LL's management is. Oz stated in his audio presentation that this is a new LL Management and they should not be judged on past bad LL management practices and decisions. Well he is right... with how LL Commerce Team has handled DD deployment, and their recent handling of the ALL RECEIVED fiolder we all hate but LL will still deploy and now how Oz is executing the new TPV polcies.... The new management has changed.... its even worse.

As a few of us already predicted in this thread, we all know LL all to well. Nothing has changed with the way LL deals with their customers. We knew that with LL Commerce Team following a strict rule on keeping everything secret until they absolutely have to expose information, that if LL Commerce Team actually makes a rare appearance on the forum to announce a new feature - even if they make it sound like its just to get our opinions - it very likely means they are fully commited to what they are announcing and are just spinning the forum posting to make it sound like they are asking for our opinion. Since LL rarely asks their customers for opinions on their internal half-baked ideas and just goes ahead and develops, the LCT just hoped that maybe the Merchants and customers would like the new feature they planned to deploy anyway. Soooooo to anwser my own question on which option LCT would following in this thread knowing how much we all hate their ides.... They decided to take the road of lying to us and just moving on with the idea regardless of our "CRITICAL FEEDBACK". If there is any bright side on how the LCT treats us, we can all take heart that Oz Linden has proven that this mistreating the SL customer and not listening to its customers is not just an immature habit practiced by the LCT.... Oz Linden's Friday bombshell to destory the future of all TPVs and actually execute on the policy less than a week after he announces his ill thought out policies, proves the problem with LL's poor handling of their customer base is company wide. What is scary is how little all LL Staff know of their SL customers when they come up with these disasterous ideas, policies, and deployment plans. <sighssssss>

I can see that Rodvik came in here and thought... "why the heck does LL allow competing viewers? This loses our control and strategy of the SL grid". I have said this during the emerald days that its only a matter of time before LL will force the wipeout of the TPVs. I guess Rodvik is making this happen. The spokesperson from Phoenix said it right.... if LL is going to restict our innovation to improve SL then we might as well go to other grids like Inworlds. Oz can spin this BS any way he wants but this is LL's full press attempt to wipe out TPVs... we know it , the TPVs know it , and even secretly LL knows it. what is sad is that LL doesnt have the capability and often not the foresight to run with innovative ideas that have come from Phoenix and other TPVs. They are stopping TPVs from innovative and they do not have the ability to enable the TPV's features. DARK DAYS get darker.

So I listened to OZ's audio announcement of LL's new restrictions on TPVs... Sky not falling??? lol I would strongly suggest ppl listen to OZ's audio... you will hear how in LL's ideas this is no big deal and it is ! Just a few things I picked up in the first 15 minutes and no wonder Phoenix staff and a growing # of residents that mostly use Phoenix viewers are getting upset as this news from LL is getting out. You will love hearing it Sassy - no more "true online" status checking - will break distribution vendors that rely upon it... but LL's response... "they will just have to update their vendors" no big deal according to LL. OZ doesnt even know the possible use cases that LL's rules will impact. Again, another typical LL response... downplays any pain and effort that LL places on merchants, creators, residents. - Oz hopes that DD will fix other related delivery bugs that online status check uses to fix delivery - Oz's response to what TVP's should do about older viewer.... "Im not gonna worry about it". He doesnt give a hoot that all older viewer's functionality will break in unknown ways.... typical LL response... dont care about backward compatibility. His attitude is that all residents should keep up to date and doesnt care about residents that dont. - When asked when LL will break things.... He didnt know or have a date. So TPV makers dont even know exactly when things will break. - Some in the audio already suggested "why dont you just kill the TPVs?" they see exactly what most others are seeing this goofy new set of rules. And Oz is saying... "we are not saying that" ... but meanwhile they are putting down rules that say .... dont put out any function outside what we are doing in out Viewer. Kill innovation - kill competition. - LL doesnt want ppl to see what viewer ppl r using... their lame excuse is that noobs are being harassed because of the viewer they are use. WHAT UTTER BS! They just dont want residents to know that most ppl dont use the LL Viewer. - Color tagging residents will be broken this week and this will cause another huge uproar for tons of phoenix users that love this feature. But no biggy for LL since they dont have it in their viewer. - But the biggest BS.... is that LL wants all TPVs to gut innovative functions that LL doesnt have. That is the biggest embarassment joke of them all. Talk about lame! LL cant compete. Their Viewer 2 and 3 could never out innovate the TPVs ... they created a viewer that most to this day hate... so the best solution to the problem..... just kill the the innovation that LL doesnt have.... and force them out of the market. I fully encourage all to listen to Oz and see just how lame LL has become.

Listening to Oz's "the world really isnt falling" posts is like listening to the LL Commerce Team's posts that everything will be OK.... ohh hold on.... LL Commerce Team rarely posts anything accept to apologize for mistakes they made or to intro a new half-baked idea that most ppl hate..... but thats not the sky falling either i guess.

and a link to the Pheonix site that will be impacted by LL's new policies... http://www.phoenixviewer.com/ to get a view from the team that will feel the impact not those that are causing the impact I know a few features I use that will be removed soon. Ticks me off royally!!

So I just read the announcements from the Pheonix team..... Aparently LL has given up trying to out innovate with features in their viewer compared to the TPVs..... So LL's motto is "If we cant compete with the TPV on innovative and more usable viewers, lets just force the TPVs to remove any feature we dont have"... How lame is that folks! Here it is right from the horses mouth... 2.k : You must not provide any feature that alters the shared experience of the virtual world in any way not provided by or accessible to users of the latest released Linden Lab viewer. Interpretation from the Pheonix Team: "This means that third party viewers will no longer be allowed to innovate features which relate to the shared experience unless LL has the features in their viewers first. However LL has indicated an interest and preference in working with third party viewers to develop such features together." And LL slide continues... There was also a lot of other new rules that will further gut pheonix features from the viewer - some this week - because of LL's privacy policies. Features the leverage your ability to see if someone is online. So I guess the days of the TPV will be ending soon since anything innovative from TPVs cant be put in until LL puts it in first even if they steal great ideas from the TPVs.

Couldbe Yue wrote: ... as for you Toy.. what ever happened to your "over my dead body!" attitude to mesh?? have a change of heart did we? Before I respond to answer your question.... go back into any of my threads where I ever said MESH was a huge mistake or the death of SL or that I would never learn Mesh over my dead body. Just one post from me where I suggested it. Now to remind you what my position was right from the start and what I still believe and has actually come true... I said to all the Mesh Fanboys back in August that Mesh will not reach a critical mass until about Q2 of 2012.... and guess what??? who was right. Mesh has slowly gained notice in the main grid but it is still far from widely accepted in SL and still a large % of residents do not use a mesh enabled viewer. As such, my prediction is looking like it will be dead on... about Q2 of 2012 might be when Mesh finally reaches a critical mass. I said that because of LL policy to only penalize Mesh with Land Impact prim costs for every factor - including if it holds a script, Mesh is still and will likely be for a long time an inffective competitor to Sculpties for large scale landscape / terrain shapes (which most of my revenue stream comes from). My experimentation on mesh has proven that to be true - and not just for mesh over 65m... even mesh far less in size. Related to point 2, I said that I would not be making Mesh terrains because I do not feel there is a viable market for high prim count mesh landscape terrains like waterfalls and mountains. That point still holds true as all my Mesh experiments have been on making art statues .... not terrains. Finally the last thing I siad back in august was I would start trying to learn how to create mesh models until 2012 and or when I felt that the initial bugs on mesh have been worked out. Well guess what... I started learning advanced mesh development as my new years resolution. And I have already entered 1 3D art challenge from the University of Western Australia and I am working on a submission for their March submission. So exactly where has anything I told many of you in August been wrong or different?

Sorry I am not familiar with all the details of how Aditi works since I have only logged into the SL Beta grid (I assume is Aditi) to go experiment with MESH. I am assuming (likely wrongly so) that this half-baked feature only works on a specific sim within the beta grid or should it be visible on ALL sims that I stand on in the Beta Grid? Secondly and of bigger concern is that this new RECEIVE ALL folder that likely LL will be forcing upon us regardless of our 100% rejection of the idea will only be visible to any SL Resident that has a new (yet unreleased) version of an LL or TPV viewer???? Please tell me LL is not serious about this? If this is true, then here are a few major concens: Mesh has been out since August. I can tell you with 100% assurance that to this day a very larger portion of SL Residents STILL dont have the upgraded viewers to see mesh! In the pas 1.5 months I have been creating and placing Mesh Art Statues at my expanded Gallery and I have invited several of my friends to come visit and the % that still cannot see my MESH statues is about 40% of all those I invite. They either cant be bother to upgrade, are scared the new viewers will be unstable and are happy with the stability they have, or they dont think Mesh is a big deal to them and do see the need to waste even 10 minutes to upgrade. So.... if this new feature will be rolled out to the main grid (as I suspect LL will ram this stupid idea in regardless), what is the transition plan? What will happen to in-coming inventory for the vast majority of SL Residents that do not upgrade to yet another new version of all these viewers to allow the function to work? Where will my inventory go if I am using Phoenix 1.6? This is a concern if LL rams this ALL-IN-ONE feature or even if LL needs to deploy the DD MP-SHOPPING-BAG folder into production. If its based on the same underlying structure and requires ALL residents to upgrade in order to receive goods they bought from MP.... how will LL deal with this? If this feature is part of the DD service.... are you telling me that LL is only NOW starting to work on the DD Shopping Bag folder for all resident viewers??? If this is the case, then either DD will not be going live on the main grid for another 6+ months until ALL viewers have the upgraded code to support DD, or LL will ram it in and we will all see a reduce MP sales traffic and a nightmare of customer complaints when they shop on MP and their purchased goods go into neverland because they dont have the required viewer.

So I got a bit lost from a onslaught of feedback and comments on this thread. This new proposed ALL-IN-ONE Reveive folder is only available to LL Viewer V3? Again, as I said in my last posting, I have been on Aditi this weekend a few times to work on Mesh experiments and when I looked at my folder structure, I did not see this Reveive Folder. I suspect this feature is only for LL V3 viewers? Regardless if LL ignores us and continues to release this All-in-one or the MP Shopping Bag folder for DD, shouldnt this folder be visible for ALL VIEWERS regardless of the version or if its LL or TPV?

Darrius, you are 100% correct in the observation.... the LL Commerce Team has completely painted themselves in a corner regarding the future of this hairbrained feature after their only response in this thread to all our clear distain and clear rejection of their proposed "great new idea". This is exactly what they posted to remind everyone.... CommerceTeam Linden wrote: Hello everyone, We really appreciate the feedback you are sending in, and are reviewing this thread closely. We understand that the feedback you provide to us during this Beta phase is critical in the decisions we make moving forward with this product. It will take us some time to review all the feedback, however we will address these concerns. Keep an eye out for that coming next week. Please keep the constructive feedback coming! The Commerce Team So LL clearly stated that OUR FEEDBACK is "Critical" in their decisions with this product. And there is no way even LL could spin the opinions coming from the pages and pages of posting resposes on their product.... ITS WRONG AND NOT WANTED IN THE FUNCTIONS IT PROVIDES. The only positive that came from this thread on the function was generally..... "if the new feature was what LL promised us during their rare DD details release - a special folder like Made mentioned a "MP Shopping Bag" folder that would ONLY receive items from MP - then this would have been good and acceptable" This is what LL should clearly have got from us regarding "Critical" feedback we provided them. There is nothing from all this feedback that should be telling LL Commerce Team that their "all in one" Receive folder is wanted at all. So LL Commerce Team has painted themselves into a very clear fork in the road for the decisions they have in front of them: They could true to their statement and actually listen to our clear feedback and SHELVE this feature completely. They could go back to development and come back with the MP-ONLY SHOPPING BAG folder that was promised to us as a feature of the up-coming DD and that we all would fully accept since we expected this to be part of DD. They could completely lie to us and somehow spin all this rejection of their half-baked proposed feature to only be a request to improve some of the minor features and make the thing actually work (I have been on Aditi a few times this weekend for Mesh testing and I do not see this folder in my Pheonix 1.6 viewer). So LL Commerce has a decision to make on if they truly were "listening" to our critical feedback or just posting some non-commital lip service to us Merchants / Customers.

Since the new year I have made a personal commitment to dive into expanding base knowledge of 3D modeling for sculpty making to creating amazing new 2D and 3D SL art creations using MESH. I have just completed the expansion of my SecondLife MIRAGES OF ART - Toy's Art Gallery from its 5 floors to now 7 floors (added 2 new large floors). My 5 floor gallery was already bursting at the seams with over 50 of my artworks. The two new floors will be used to show my 2d and 3D SL Mesh model art for visitors to explore. You are all invited to come see how SL Mesh can be used to bring 3D modeled & Textured art into SecondLife. Click on the top "Mirages of Art" image to get a link to the SLURL to my art Gallery. Over the coming weeks I will be filling these two floors with many new MESH Statues and Art Models. Please remember that you must have an SL viewer that is capable of seeing mesh. This would include: LL's Viewer V3Pheonix FirestormPhoenix 1.6On a related note, my entire Art Portfolio - including my recent 3D MESH creations to 2D art were recently indepth reviewed by the popular italian Virtual Art, Fashion, and Technology website MONDI Virtuali. I am truly humbled at the surprising and highly complimenting critique of my full art portfolio - all of which you can explore and experience yourself at my SecondLife Art Gallery. Following is the review of my Art Portfolio: http://www.mondivirtuali.it/portal/en/content/toysoldiers-landscape

OK so a major update and improvement on the instructions I provided in the OP posting on how to get ZBRUSH to create multiple textured surfaces on an SL Mesh object.... ITS MUCH MORE SIMPLE AND EASY.... ALMOST ZBRUSH BRAINLESS - now that I understand zbrush more. I am going to edit my OP posting so that no one uses those initial instructions. High Level logic to the workflow.... The way Zbrush defines SL Texture Sufaces for SL is by defining PolyGroups on your Zbrush model then telling the UVMaster to create a UV Map & creating a separate UV Island on the map for each polygroup it sees on the model. Here are the detailed basic step-by-step instructions on how to apply multiple texture faces on a single object Zbrush "Tool" (i.e. Zbrush's terminology for a model) that can be collada exported to SL to allow independent editing of these surfaces. Steps preceeded with the word "Normal:" means that the step is part of the normal workflow of creating a zbrush model for export to SL: Normal: Create a new model (i.e. "Tool" in zbrush) and go into Edit mode and "make polymesh3D" Normal: Do all the basic shaping of the model you want at the lowest polycount (best you get your model to the lowest polygon count at this time before going to further steps) Normal: If you want to fine-tune your model shape now and/or you want to start the PolyPaint process of your model now, you can with no penalties to the workflow. - Increase model's polycount to very high res (over 1 million polys for a 1024x1024 SL texture resolution) - This is done in the TOOL->Geometry-Divide (press it 5 times for 5 divisions of the model's poly count) Normal: You can continue with both high-res shaping and/or polypainting the entire model - Remeber that real subtle shaping changes at this res will barely if at all detected at the lowest LOD destined for collada export to SL. ** Ready to identify the individual texture surfaces for manipulation in SL ** ** This is done by setting PolyGroups on the model for each of the max of 8 texture surfaces ** Reduce your model back down to the lowest Geometry (ie. lowest LOD) - done in TOOL->Geometry-SDiv1 Enable your PolyF ("Draw Ployframe" grid) button so that you can select each of your polygroups that will match each of your Texture Zones / Faces you want available in SL. - A poly mesh grid will appear on your model and the color of the model will change to a single color weird color. - As you create new polygroups, these new polygroups will be represented as a new color on this grid Draw "select" the polygons that are included in one of these polygroups (i.e. using the Crtl-Shift keys and drawing a lasso around all the polygons). - All the polys you green lasso'ed will remain visible on the screen and all the other will hide from the screen. Press the TOOLS->PolyGroups->"Group Visible" button. This will set all the visible polys as a new defined polygroup (and it will be assigned a new color on the polygroup grid) - To see the hidden polys, just CRTL-Shift and Click the hidden part of the model. This should hide the polygroup you just created and make the hidden part of the model visible. To see all the entire model press the Ctrl-Shift and click anywhere off the model Repeat Steps 7 & 8 until you have defined all the polygroups you need that will = all the texture surfaces you want to be texture surface editable on the mesh in SL ** You have now defined all the SL texture surfaces on the model as POLYGROUPS ** ** Now you can either continue PolyPainting each polygroup or the entire model until you are happy ** ** When you are completely happy and want to take the completed model to SL... ** Goto ZPlugin->UVMaster Menu and click the "WORK ON CLONE" button - This creates a lowest polycount copy of your entire model where UVs will be applied to it and later on transferred back to your main model - protects your main model from mistakes and gets around UVMaster limits on working with models with multiple LODs and/or subtools In UVMaster menu, click the "PolyGroups" button - this tells UVMaster to make a UV set where each polygroup must be an island on the UV set - each UV island when exported to SL will become your independent SL Texture surface In UVMaster menu, click the "UNWRAP All" button - this unwraps your model for each polygroup and creates the new UV set for the model - you can see the actual UV set with all its islands if you click on the "Flatten" button. Click "Unflatten" to return - you can see the seams of all the islands on the model if you press the "CheckSeams" button ** Now to place the UV set back onto your main model from the clone ** In the UVMaster menu. click the "Copy UV's" button In the main TOOL menu, select your main model again to make it the active model on the Zbrush screen - does not matter if your main model is in high or low polycount LOD In the UVMaster menu, click the "Paste UVs" button - this applies the UVs from the clone to your main model *** You have now create a Zbrush model with multiple surface zone that SL will recognize *** ** Now to get your model ready for exporting to SL ** Normal: Make sure all your PolyGroups are visible (Shift-Crtl and click somewhere off your model) Normal: Make sure your TOOL->PolyPaint Colorize is enabled so you can see your painted model Normal: Make sure your model is at the highest resolution so your painted model is at the highest resolution Normal: Goto the TOOL->UV MAP submenu and click the 1024 buttom - you are doing this to tell the texture mapping to create a map of 1024x1024 resolution that matchs SL's max resolution during mesh import or to create your own independent texture map for SL import after some photoshopping of the texture map Normal: Goto the TOOL->TextureMap submenu and click "New Form PolyPaint" - this transfers the polypainted data on the model onto an industry standard Texture Map that conforms to the UV Map of the model at the 1024x1024 resolution Normal: Optionally if you want a workable external copy of the texture map the click the "Clone Txtr" button, then under Texture menu, you can export this cloned texture to a file on your hard drive. ** You are now ready to export your model to SL ** Reduce your model to the lowest geometry / LOD from the TOOL->Geometry-> SDiv1 - you need to do this so that the Collada export tool will export the lowest LOD to SL In the Zplugin->Zsculpty utility, click the "Export to SL MESH" button and follow the simple instructions Save your Zbrush Tool (if you have already a few times during this process Exit Zbrush Enter SL Mesh Import your new Mesh and if you want you can include the texture as part of the import Res your new SL mesh YOU ARE DONE!!!! You can Select Texture any of the polygroups from the model and change the imported texture for that surface, or change any texture dynamics that SL Edit allows. (I still want to thank iridescence for the initial instructions - even it they were overly complicated - because it triggered me to experiment in the critical processes and tools suggested. But as I was trying to write up detailed step-by-step instructions for this thread I realized major portions of the initial instructions were redundant and not even needed. I now learned more about 2 new features of Zbrush and the inter-play between functions / tools)

LOL Marcus.... LL Commerce Team wanted our feedback and thoughts.... but now that they saw the overwhelming response that their grand idea is a concrete balloon..... they really dont know how to reapond. They know full well that any response from them to defend the new feature that they likely will be deploying (regardless of our hatred for the idea) will just get us more angry. They know that they painted themselves in a corner and moved this idea too far down the road to implementation (i.e. the posting from SLUniverse from a TPV developer makes it clear that they have already instructed TPV companies to incorporate this new feature) and cant back out now even if they wanted to. This is typical LL Commerce Style. As such, they cannot post a response to tell us what they know we want to hear from them..... "Thanks for the feedback and its clear that this feature is not wanted in the state we have it so we are shelving the idea". So really..... if you were Brooke or anyone that drives the "LL Commerce Team" forum postings.... what would you say if you were them? Not what would be the right thing LL should do.... how would you wiggle out of this next big mistake of theirs?

Thanks to some input from a helpful member on the Zbrush community forums that has used Zbrush for Mesh creations in SL, I was given some really basic seed workflow information on how Zbrush can build a model and define texture surfaces on the model that can be successfully exported out (via Zsculpty tool) to SL. I will say that I have only had some REALLY UGLY initial successful results last night in trying to follow the instructions that was given to me. So this post is just to provide initial basic workflow. I will post again when I nail the exact steps. The reason my first attempts was so ugly and incomplete is because of my limited understanding of some of the critical features of Zbrush needed to follow this member's instructions. I need to learn more about them. So this was the actual quote from "Iridescence" on that forum... I create each polygroup/texture zone as it's own subtool, create the UV, create the textures for it etc all in it's own personal subtool with a single polygroup. Then before I export it, I use the subtool master plugin to merge the subtools, preserving the tools as separate polygroups within the one model for final export. Then you can merge up to 8 subtools for a final mesh that exports with 8 texture faces. Alternatively, do your UV unwrap and material assignment in another program like Blender. EDITED THIS OP POSTING .... I have removed the instructions I initially provide in this OP posting as there is a much more simple approach. You can see these new high detailed instructions in the thread posting from me. These steps are far from step-by-step since I have not perfected this by far (dont understand some parts). Also, what came into SL was only 2 of the 6 sides because I did a few things wrong on how i set up the polygroups and/or used SubTool Master, BUT..... IT WORKED!!! I will report more details later but if there are any other Zbrush smart ppl in the forum that could provide more details and insight on these steps.... please feel free. The good news is - contrary to an assuption that since no one in this forum had any answers to how to do this then it can be assumed Zbrush could not do this - Zbrush can do this.

Marcus Hancroft wrote: Sassy Romano wrote: MartinRJ Fayray wrote: (apart from that: I really like the idea, it gives us more easier options to organize our inventory!!!!) MartinRJ Fayray Martin, how did you CLOSE my JIRA reporting this new, unwanted, unrequested behaviour as a bug? I don't wish to get into debate about whether the JIRA or forum process is most appropriate, i'm just interested in how a resident can close another residents JIRA. I can't close JIRA's. MY guess, Miss Sassy... MartinRJ Fayray = Linden Alt That was my first and strongest assumption..... MartinRJ FayRay has to be a Linden Alt as I am not aware of anyone other than a Linden that has rights to change status of a LL JIRA or to be able to close a JIRA they did not create. I think MartinRJ slipped up and didnt realize he/she was taking action as his Linden Alt.

Dart.... The ONLY reason that an email INBOX has the ability to work effectively vs the disaster that this LL Received folder doesnt have a hint of: Advanced tagging, filtering, sorting, item categorizations that can be applied to the inbox in order to keep it somewhat structured: An outlook Inbox (and others as well) has: Multiple Columns that categorize each item in the mailbox (to, from, size, attachments, urgency, confidential, date received, etc.) Because of point #1, the inbox can be sorted by any of these fields which helps maintenance and allows me to grab a batch of common emails and drag them to another folder Filtering based on point #1 I can also apply inbound rules on items coming into the inbox (i.e. if email is from Dart then send to my "critical must read" emails folder) And despite ALL these advanced filters which the LL folder has NONE OF.... you all can likely provide countless examples of ppl that inboxes with 1000's of emails. So... if LL were to have released a NEW RECEIVED FOLDER with all the capabilities of what most email clients have, I might have been more excited. They Didnt. I suspect that the LL DD Developers has no way of creating a MP RECEIVED folder that could only receive purchased items from the MP site... so they turned a limitation into a proposed cool feature. Lets hope that is the reason because the alternative is that LL came up with this stupid idea all on their own or with help from secret whispers from their trusted merchants they listen to on the side.

Kylie Jaxxon wrote: I think it says, "misfiled" Some non-Linden took it upon himself to change the status of the Jira. Thhat doesnt stop Merchants from voting, watching, and commenting.