Flea Yatsenko

People who make a lot of L$ generally don't want to mix up their business avatar and their personal ones. PBR is a lot easier than baked lighting, it requires significantly less hardware to be bought. I bought a $750 Ryzen 3950x specifically just to do baked lighting. PBR is easier than BP since the PBR material is a single "object" that contains all the maps, instead of having to manually apply each map as an individual texture like with BP. I don't need a better graphics card or anything to make PBR. The majority of creators at best use SL as extra income. I have seasonal work doing manual labor IRL. The vast majority of them at the very least have a part time job. Some creators only make enough to pay for extra fun in SL instead of having to buy L$. These people are being hurt by inflation the most, which is why some of them are raising their prices. The entire concept of Second Life is to leave a life behind and live a fantasy one. If you had a super successful business, why would you want to bring along all that baggage to every part of your second life when you can just make another one?

Im saying you can get away with things like just creating/editing a base color map in photoshop, gimp, etc and using already generated materials and replacing your own base color map you made in photoshop, gimp, etc and end up with an actual material that looks better than just a regular old texture. Trying to do that in something like a baked build would be impossible because you could never get the baked lighting right in your modified texture. Same thing with a BP material build with baked lighting. I can't promise what the SL market will do but if it's done properly there should be options to let people modify and create better looking stuff easier. Keep in mind any sort of baked lighting, whether just diffuse diffuse with BP materials, can require a ridiculous computer to bake lighting properly for a somewhat complex scene. Some of my larger caves, I would leave my expensive Ryzen 3905x baking for 12+ hours to generate textures. That's a way bigger hurdle to creating things in SL than even paying for Substance Painter. An example from something I made, a flag, I generated the other maps in Substance Painter, then give out a copy/mod material. Now anyone can create their own flag texture base color map in whatever they want and apply it to the material. Now instead of some basic texture they now have a material with their own custom base color.

PBR uses more of your graphics card/GPU. Your desktop was not using all of your graphics card, PBR uses it better so you'll see better performance but probably higher temps and stuff on your desktop. Your laptop was probably already maxed out on your GPU, PBR added more demand to your GPU, so it'll run slower. PBR is shifting the bottleneck from CPU to GPU and some systems are going to benefit (specially with a good GPU/graphics card) and some are going to suffer (like laptops with decent CPUs and weak GPUs)

It's kinda like materials are replacing textures, which is really nice because if you are building in world you no longer have to manage the material yourself with three different maps (Diffuse, Spec, and Norm) and instead the material works like one basic texture. The only thing that's really changing is instead of using Photoshop, GIMP, etc to make your textures, you're using Substance Painter, ArmorPaint, etc. instead. It's easier to use PBR materials than it is to use BP materials in world. And to be honest a lot of stuff you can get away with, like just making the base color map in photoshop then using the other maps to make it into a material (like a fabric). For an example, I made a bunch of stained glass windows for a product I made. I designed all the other maps except for the base color in Substance Painter, then I just created base colors from stained glass texture layouts by using a bucket tool for each pane. The end result was I just used bucked fill in GIMP for a little bit and ended up with pretty stained glass with reflections and some bump and some nice looking stuff. I think PBR seems like it's going to take things away at the moment because people aren't building for PBR yet and people are still learning. But the base color map is way, way easier to create than a solid diffuse map (like @Salt Peppermint said, base color is just colors and diffuse is a bunch of lighting and all sorts of stuff added).

This could become a very big issue if people who are selling these prefab services leave SL. People could end up buying things, getting a notecard, then waiting forever for the IM to set it up. I don't even see the point, LL is pretty good at protecting your stuff. The only thing that could happen is copy bot and it doesn't matter who owns it then. Why are they even doing this? Selling L$700 is less than $3USD, what's the point? Am I missing something as to why this would even happen?

I like the way Kronos is richer in color. It looks a lot less washed out. That said I don't understand the obsession with making sure everything looks absolutely identical on everyone's screens. People will always over ride region EEP settings and change everything anyways. The most important thing is getting everyone on the same graphical level so builders don't have to target multiple technologies, i.e. baked light builds for people not even using ALM, etc.

I always group relevant products together. You want to organize it so customers can find multiple products they're looking for easily. It also has a benefit of encouraging customers to buy multiple products at once because they are easy to find. Basically, just ask yourself "If I was a customer, what would I be looking for? What would go with what other products?" You want to make it as convenient as possible to shop, as soon as someone gets frustrated they'll either leave your store at worse or at best become a lot less eager to spend L$. Best advice I can give you is to go try in world shopping at similar store to yours and see how easy it is to find things or if they've done something clever or bad and take inspiration from there. As a merchant I actually barely shop in world, but going out and doing it will really make you realize what works and what doesn't. It matters a lot more for a bigger store than a smaller one though. It might also help you to look at some marketing articles and stuff out there too. Basically, you want to make it as easy as possible for customers to find what they're looking for, and to find extra things related to what they're looking for. It should be win win, easier for a customer to find what they want and to find cool stuff they didn't know they want, while increasing sales. The most important thing is to be as helpful as possible trying to get customers to find what they are looking for, as well as helping them find stuff they would like but didn't come looking for. The best way to do it is to be honest and helpful, once you try and get spammy, scammy, etc you lose trust quickly.

Personally, I have sales data that says in world sales can make up between a quarter to over a half of monthly revenue. It seems like if marketplace is having issues or LL is having problems with web stuff, people shop in world more. My slower SLMP months have been generally picked up by higher in world sales to more or less average out to normal. My in world store is very, very vertical. People can cam and fly in SL, unlike RL. It doesn't matter if something is 20m in the sky, they can cam to it. In fact I think it's easier to cam to something than it is to move your AV to through a labyrinth mall. I keep the newer, better products down low and the older ones up top. You can cam in SL and you can fly, I don't understand the obsession with having to make 4m tall floors and having 3 floors to have an in world store.

You know how search results are just SEO blogspam of fluff articles that almost never say anything important. Surely you've seen them when trying to solve a problem, and the whole page is a huge wall of text with headlines for all sorts of related questions. AI is going to do the same, but to everything else on the internet. Social media is going to be flooded with low effort content as people try and harvest likes and hearts and upvotes or whatever else. Imagine marketplace filled with shirts with broken graphics and messed up text with people just thinking they'll just spam AI shirts because they can make 20 a day and hope one or two becomes popular. AI isn't going to fix anything. The internet, and even real life, has turned into a contest to get as many views, upvotes, likes, etc as possible with as little work as possible. AI is just going to enable people to dump AI generated stuff on their quest to get internet famous. That and people becoming so radicalized on both sides of the isle and not wanting anything to do with the either side in situations where politics don't even matter. It makes people completely on edge and scared to interact with people. Both people not wanting to mix with the other side, and people who are worried about saying or thinking the wrong things and being accused of being something they aren't. SO they just stay to themselves and don't want to be social. I could go on and on and on honestly. The internet is basically ruined at this point. The days of searching for problems and finding cool forums owned by hobbyists is already over. At best you have Reddit which is owned by Conde Nast anyways which is far from some hobbyist. SL is probably one of the best old internet places around, it revolves around creating content, even if you're not making stuff to sell, you're making an avatar, a place to hang out, artwork, etc. With the rest of the internet turning into pathetic things like making obviously fake videos with their young children (like under 5) to try and go viral it's honestly a miracle SL has held on so long, and I hope it can somehow continue to manage to hang on.

This is the best answer, starting out you want to make as many products as possible and see what is going to earn the most L$ so you can focus on those areas. Don't waste time setting up vendor scripts and stuff until you get your store running well.

LL perfected free to play Game as as Service long before GaaS was a thing. LL doesn't need to keep attracting new users who are going to spend $60 on a game once to keep seeing revenue. They just have to keep people coming back and spending money either on marketplace or for sims. Most online games, you pay a flat fee then you don't pay anything else. That's nice from a player perspective but it means if you want a game to keep making revenue you have to keep selling more copies. SL can keep the same userbase and they will still keep putting money into SL. Most games could only dream of someone spending $200/mo. And LL has thousands of them. Maybe tens of thousands. There's always an incentive to keep creating content for SL, because you can earn real life money. It's not like a mod for a traditional game where you aren't really getting anything for it other than begging on Patreon for a little money as thousands of people download your mod for free. LL has already been through a lot of controversy. SL "banks", pedophilia accusations on multiple occasions, FBI investigations leading to gambling disappearing from the grid, laying off a third of all Lindens because they weren't profitable, Emerald Viewer, etc. And they survived. The hardest part of SL is already done, getting an active userbase who will spend money and create content. It is basically LL's to screw up at this point.

You missed out on simboarding in SL, I looked around, I guess it's totally dead. There were competitions for L$, all sorts of park features (half pipes, etc). They even had rails you could ride. The whole thing is dead, I can't find one anywhere to buy in SL except for skins. All the old sims for it are gone, the groups don't look active either. I still have mine, it works just as well as the There.com one looking at the video. I think it's one of the better "vehicles" I've driven in SL too. It was pretty big around 2012. EDIT:

Yeah, I know. But there's a lot less motivation. That was the best way to get good looking stuff in SL. It no longer is, minus some EEP problems with lighting being like the sun is a big blue glow ball in the sky. Legacy textures are also going to be completely obsolete at some point. I'm also not the only merchant that has seen better sales with PBR products. I don't want to brag but year over year, this month beat last year in a single week and it's all because of PBR. People clearly like PBR and they want more. The entire PBR argument is basically people who have slower computers that are struggling with PBR saying everyone is going to leave because it looks bad and PBR is a huge mistake, vs merchants who are saying they can make more products and earn more with less work and get better results, with people who kinda like PBR defending them. The most valid criticism I've seen of PBR is that SL's implementation isn't the best, which is why the viewer ran so much worse than non-PBR viewers, the blue glow, hybrid color space, etc.

Eventually you are going to reach a point where the graphics card is waiting on the CPU and the graphics card isn't being used all the way. I only use about 50% of my 7800XT with a 3905X liquid cooled with the stuff enabled to make it boost more, except in some demanding situations. If you have a slower CPU you'll see less gains from adding a new graphics card. If you just want a card for SL you are fine with a mid range card from Nvidia, preferably, and I say this as someone who generally leans towards AMD, since Nvidia does have better OpenGL support.

You have to do it for every material in the build, which can add up quickly if you have a complex build. You also have to apply both in world instead of one. If you have multiple color versions you have to do it for each one. It is not under 2 minutes to get a complete non-PBR diffuse version. If you are not premium+, you also have to pay to upload another texture. It does add up, maybe it's not so much for a lamp or something but for a complete house, it would be a nightmare. Not to mention if you are working in Substance Painter or something you won't even have those maps in Blender, so to use that method you'd have to import everything to blender, bake every material, then export every image from Blender. And as @Salt Peppermint said, that method is more or less only for getting the colors, any sort of additional detail or anything else is going to be missing. And at that point why even bother doing any of that and instead just use the base color map from the PBR material. In fact that video isn't even for converting PBR materials to a texture, it's for taking procedural generated images created with Blender nodes and getting an image from it. I think there's a bit of confusion going on about all of this. That is honestly one of the most tedious ways I can think of to make a non-PBR fallback texture for SL.