Flea Yatsenko

I don't have any interest in being a young looking AV. But I do understand why some people in this thread are worried someone is going to report them in the new ToS because they are doing naughty things playing as an adult and someone thinks they are a child. Given there's no solid rules I understand their concern.

No one here in the thread does, but they definitely exist in world. The thread is actually pretty civil and level headed, as evidenced by the fact a controversial thread on a very controversial topic is about to hit 100 pages without being locked. I know, I've met them.

The whole "family nude beach" part of SL has been a looming PR disaster for a long time. If you are aware of the allegations that spawned this move, you'd know it was because of accusations of things like artwork at an adoption sim that magically turned into semi-erotic shota images (young male anime characters) as soon as specific avatars were in range. And some of the allegations had no evidence, some had pictures of stuff in world or on SLMP. And I mean, I highly doubt those types are going to show up in the forum to try and defend themselves, because they're basically admitting to breaking the new ToS. Then you have people who are afraid of being accused of being a child AV when they aren't. Only because there are people in SL who have absurd ideas of what an adult should be (i.e. if you're not over 7 feet covered in hair and Aesthetic style muscles you're a child or if you don't have a massive chest and hourglass shape as a female). These are the most vocal people in the thread and I don't blame them. They are basically caught in something they want nothing to do with and they have a lot to lose by being caught up in it. I don't think these new rules are targeted at this group at all. I think they are just worried in general. Not to mention the current political climate has a lot of people biting their tongues on things they don't really like (i.e. tons of people silently supporting this as others have noticed). LL doesn't want to get dragged into moderating how AVs look. It's a total time and money pit for them to be a type of arbiter of when your height slider and facial structure suddenly made your AV 16 year old and now you are permabanned.

Thanks for reminding me, good riddance to them! I think some people who play AVs who get confused as child AVs by some people are feeling a little threatened by this. I.E. femboys who might be mistaken for a child because lack of hair and a softer face. But people are completely forgetting that there are definitely groups of people who are playing very dangerous games in SL regarding age. With lots of very strong rule bending going on (Everyone is naked because it's a family nude beach, we're not breaking any rules about sex!). Ultimately it really depends if this is going to turn into a witch hunt of reports being filed because residents think someone doesn't look adult vs blatantly disregarding the new ToS. And I think some of that is going to boil down to residents reporting. Smartly enough they put it entirely on the avatar and not on the land owners. Which means we won't be seeing land owners freak out and over -react as much since they're not going to be responsible if they're not there and some ToS violations start happening. Personally the more I think about this more I like it. SL getting a ton of negative press in this political climate right now would be extremely bad for a lot of us, specially if we own SL businesses. As long as the fake accusations of being a child AV don't get out of hand. Not that I care, I gave up trying to look good long ago and now I just maxed out my height sliders so I can walk around my builds and make sure I don't get stuck lol.

Because there's always been places where you're not trying to be anywhere close to a child but someone doesn't like the way you look so they call you a child and make a huge fuss. This is going to probably end up like SLMP items being marked adult. Any merchant knows what I'm talking about.

So uh, what happens if Thunes, as a startup, fails?

Well, there's always a chance something is going to break when you are making a listing. It's kind of like having a wall outlet that only shocks you sometimes you plug or unplug something. It doesn't shock you every single time but it's broken all the time because it can shock you. When making listings I always back up my description in a text editor because I don't know if saving the listing is actually going to work or if it's going to throw an error and delete everything I typed in.

It's not that it doesn't work all the time, it's that it randomly stops working when trying to do something and throws a 5xx or 404 error. Specially if you are making listings.

A LOT of tech companies are downsizing right now. They say it's because of AI but I think it's got a lot to do with the fact that a lot of positions at tech companies weren't really actually very productive jobs. And a lot of jobs were very basic "respond to emails 4 hours a day" types of things. I think they are just consolidating jobs and adding more responsibilities to specific roles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_atlas

Is there any ETA? It's going to be so much easier and quicker to use a texture atlas on a 2k than 4 separate 1k textures.

It still costs money to make an AI model, or you need an expensive AI card. There are AI marketplaces and oddly enough the prices for those assets are pretty in line with SLMP, maybe even more expensive. I don't think it'll crater content creator's income by itself. The real threat isn't just to content creators in SL. It's to SL itself. LL managed to fight off companies like Facebook/Meta in the metaverse craze because SL had content and none of the other platforms did. With AI, a large company can spend millions of dollars on AI generated content for their virtual worlds, far cheaper than paying a human to make stuff, and have just as much (modern) stuff as SL has. Everyone laughed at Meta and Horizon Worlds because the content was terrible. They couldn't find quality artists for their budget. Now imagine if Meta launched a new virtual world and they could throw millions of dollars at AI model generation. A company like FB could make thousands of models with their money and they could make SL's content amount and quality look not very impressive. Payscale as the average salary of a 3d modeller in the USA is a little under $50k. Kaedim is $50 for 10 credits. 1 credit for a "low poly" which doesn't look game ready, 4 credits for a high poly. If a company like FB wanted a virtual world they could probably do it for much cheaper. $5 per asset is very good, a big company like FB/Meta could make a lot of assets for their virtual world with that price. https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=3D_Modeler/Salary

I know it's always not an option, but you could definitely design your scenes around shorter view distances.

Lower draw distance, increase LOD (usually Object in graphics settings). Best way for higher image quality with better performance. And disable MSAA. It kills my performance when there's alpha masked textures, like plants. Draw distance is huge, look at this area of a circle calculator https://www.mathsisfun.com/geometry/circle-area.html Notice how area goes from 804 at 32m view distance to 3216 at 64m view distance. That area is all filled with stuff your computer needs to render, download, etc. The less area your computer has to render stuff, the less it has to render (most of the time, there are exceptions) so the better it's going to run.

Sales correlates with how much maintenance is going on. Even if it doesn't directly affect SLMP, billing maintenance can affect people's ability to buy L$ to spend. General inventory issues and stuff can make people just log and not bother with SL. If you are going to spend thousands of L$ on stuff, you don't want to be fighting SL or thinking something is going to go wrong. I think this is a lot more common than people realize. It seems the last few times I've created new listings, I've had lots of problems with image uploads giving me a 404 error, listing not saving when pressing save, etc. That kind of stuff just makes people log out and do other things. I think it affects people far more than they realize. SL is supposed to be fun. There's nothing fun about rezzing stuff and having it take 10 seconds to rez, so you re-rez and end up with 3 copies. Things not attaching then suddenly attaching 5 minutes later. Making an order on SLMP and not having it be delivered for 5 minutes. This whole week is filled with inventory maintenance and restarts.

Can this happen with changing physics of objects (none/convex hull/prim)?

The last week or so, I've been selling higher end, newer products. Actually a lot of PBR stuff. My old stuff wasn't selling well when it usually was. Considering all the SLMP and billing maintenance my sales have been pretty good. The week before though, they were heavily in world sales. SLMP constantly goes between prioritizing cheaper products then more expensive ones. If you don't have both in your store you are going to see large slumps and big booms. That said if search is promoting older products and that changes and your sales go down, you might need to adjust your strategy. Just my two cents, not trying to be rude.

Imagine if you will a Documents folder filled with hundreds of documents with obscure names only the creator understand and can only be found via searching. They understand files, but they don't organize them into folders. Instead of browsing to /2024/final paper/science they just search "final paper 2024 science" and it's all thrown into a huge folder with zero sub folders. It's not surprising since search has gotten so much faster (don't want to show my age lol) on a computer. But it's a direct lack of any sort of organizational skills. If they need an attachment they either don't even bother downloading it and just view it from the inbox each time, or it gets thrown into a giant unorganized folder called downloads.

LL has the marketplace. They have direct delivery. Surely they could include the primary image in the marketplace listing as an image when the product is delivered in world? Directories aren't going to work with the generation that grew up with iphones and androids and only searching for stuff. Making product images the responsibility of the vendor is never going to work. There are too many vendors who don't update old listings or aren't even in SL anymore. They could easily just include the primary product image in inventory when the product is delivered in world. It's too late for stuff that has already been delivered but this is something new users need, not existing ones.

I hope they are realizing that the biggest issue isn't even search quality being poor, but SLMP failing to work sometimes. Random 404 and 5xx errors all the time is not good for an ecommerce marketplace.

Getting 404 errors when uploading images to new listings and saving a new listing sometimes doesn't actually work. Every time I make new listings I get reminded how borked this thing is and how much lost income it's costing me because it doesn't work properly. Wouldn't be surprised if check outs and other parts of SLMP behaved the same way.

You are comparing year over year, right? Like February 2024 to February 2023, 2022, etc?

In world sales are making up for the poor marketplace sales performance for me. But yeah, my SLMP income is some of the lowest I think I've ever seen for the last month. My sales have been kind of below normal for several months, but when SLMP really dives the in world sales fill in the gap. If you are selling avatar stuff, the sale events are probably the driving factor. I went as far as to make my own search engine website for my store and it's picking up the slack. But I think there is some fatigue with how difficult it is to find stuff to buy in SL and people aren't bother with SLMP like they used to and instead look for alternate search or events/blogs. I think the last update they did to search greatly increased relevancy of returned results at the cost of the quality and age of listings. The end result was a bunch of very relevant stuff that is horribly outdated. One of the keywords I target has only the first 4 results having ratings, and one is 1 star, the other is 1.5 stars. And further down in results are some 4 and 5 star rated products, some not from my store. In fact some of my lower rated stuff appears higher than my higher rated stuff when searching with two very generic keywords that target both. The new algorithm is also extremely easy to game. I think you have serious merchants not diving into manipulating search in hopes that it'll be fixed, and more scam-tier merchants diving right into gaming the system as hard as they can. I honestly think the days of just depending on SLMP for sales is over.

Are they both logging into the same region?

It's all a mess. I stopped selling full perm for the most part. Even if someone violates the ToS you have a really hard time finding out if they are violating it. Let alone enforcing it. I think it's really just trust, merchants trust customers to follow the ToS and customers respect it so full perm doesn't go away. But it always seems like whenever I release a FP version eventually the product just stops selling and most of my products don't. I would be surprised if most people followed user ToS, let alone read them.