Flea Yatsenko
-
Posts
528 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Forums
Blogs
Knowledge Base
Posts posted by Flea Yatsenko
-
-
I have seen quite a few people who render their objects in Blender or Mental Ray and then post those images as the product images. I recall looking at prefab buildings and being pretty impressed with them, only to find that in world they were flat.
You can tell if something was rendered in Blender or Mental Ray by telling if there's reflectivity on it.I'm talking about the kind of shine you would see on something wet or something that has some shine to it. Think of something like a hardwood floor or vinyl flooring in real life. It has shine on it. When you render it in Blender or Mental Ray, it will have shine. When you bake the textures, it won't. That shine makes things look fantastic, but the SL graphics engine isn't capable of doing it very well yet.
That's just one example, but there's a lot of things Blender and Mental Ray will do to make renders look way, way better than something will in second life.
The only way to not get burned is to view the object in world. If it's not available in world, you should move on to someone who does have it in world. It might be more expensive, but renting land cost L$ and if someone is proud and confident enough in their products, they'll have them rezed out and they will pay to give people the luxury of being able to view it in world before purchasing.
I realize that this is really hard to do with clothing and other types of goods, but you should still be careful. That white dress posted before looks like someone bumped up the contrast to make it look better. I am guessing they couldn't get a white color in world so they hoped in a photo editor and cranked up the contrast.
-
-
My store listings seem to be fine, but please let me know if a listing for one of my products appears in your store. Please also point customers who wanted to purchase my items and accidentally bought yours to me so we can all fix this issue together. Thanks.
-
Log back in and out of the marketplace store.
-
I've experienced a lot of what people have been talking about long before DD.
I had people messaging me telling me that a delivery failed back in the fall before DD, except for the fact that it wasn't my product. I'm assuming this has to do with the current listings mix up. I didn't get anyone's money and from the people I've talked to it seems like they did get charged. This is probably why I've noticed items stop selling well until you would resend them to the marketplace with magic boxes. It seems like databases get corrupted and all hell breaks loose. I tracked down the guy who was having a mix up and he just shrugged me off.
I've had a hard time getting all of my items to sell properly. I've had loads of satisfied customers, but it always seems like things die out and eventually only a handful of things sell. I'm starting to think that maybe the database is starting to get corrupted with older entries, the transaction gets borked, and the owner of the product has no idea because the database could be borked and it won't send them any information about a failed transaction.
Deleting all the magic boxes and resending everything to marketplace used to fix it (to the point where sales would increase by 10 times normal), but now with direct delivery it seems to be doing it to me again. I always thought it was the magic boxes, but it seems like it's the website. If anyone wants to test it, I think that if you were to resend an item to the marketplace and reassociate it, it would sell better. I'm going to try on a few items that I know sell well when the system is working, if anyone else wants to try please report back with findings. LL probably knows a lot more of what's going on than us, but if we can at least find a workaround to get things selling again, we'd all be in good shape.
EDIT: Looks like I was at least kind of right.http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/Marketplace-and-Direct-Delivery-Update/td-p/1462915
Something is defintely wrong, but at least they're telling us they've found the issue.
-
I had something interesting happen today.
Someone bought something, I got paid, they got the item, and it shows up in my order history and non-market place transaction history, but it's missing from my marketplace transaction history.
And I've had no sales since then. Fantastic.
-
Josh, I think you need to face reality that just because Magic Boxes worked well for you, that they didn't work well for everyone. I've had the same problems that Nymph has had since September, and now that I've switched to DD I'm selling a lot more every day.
The best way to fix this that I've found is to delete all your magic boxes in world, delete them from the website, get a new one on SLMP, and then put about 10 things in each box and start all over. However, for me, that only let them work for about a week before I got the reset message. My sales would take a day to get good, have one or two really good days, and then they would die out. It wouldn't matter about the day of the week, only when I reset my box. Sometimes I would have no sales on the weekend and a ton on a Wednesday, and others I would have a ton of sales on the weekend and hardly any during the week.
And I'm not talking a difference of 2 or 3 times in sales, I'm talking a difference of 10 times or greater. I've never tried the rez on the avatar and reset thing, but it's possible that'd fix it too.
-
I've noticed a lot of these issues happening before the switch to DD. I kept getting people requesting help with products I didn't even make.
Looks like DD exposed a lot of issues that were hard to find. I've been dealing with a lot of what everyone is talking about since September! I thought I was kind of crazy or maybe I was getting scammed when people were saying they paid for things, I had no transaction history, and didn't get it, but they did (they sent pieces of kits back at a later date to prove it).A lot of the issues I was experiencing had to do with massive wait times. I would start to see sales and deliveries lag by a few hours, then the magic box would send me an email saying it had to reset itself, and then the messages would come.
Considering that the number of people who are vocal about things is realistically around 1-10% of the users, who knows how long this has been going on. A lot of people probably purchased things and never got them (and I never got my L$) and never said anything about it.
I never knew how to approach the subject. Everyone I talked to said sales were just fluctuating and me messing with my boxes and having it positively affect sales was just luck (I doubt a 10x increas in sales after repeatedly doing the same thing is luck, but whatever). I am glad to see these issues being brought to light (though I'm sorry everyone has to go through it).
I agree, the best thing to do right now is to delist things if your store is broken. You might end up with a lot of angry customers who paid for things and never got them, and you might have no idea that they paid for them because they won't show up in transaction history.
What's really worrying is the amount of people who have tried to open stores (or shut down stores) because they thought sales were tanking. Only it isn't their problem, it's the software delivering products.
-
I've been leaving stuff packaged just how they were in the Magic Box, and then updating new stuff to use folders. The more you change things, the more opportunity there is for something to break.
People don't mind unboxing things. I'd much rather have customers unbox things instead of having to run into all sorts of problems. If it isn't broken, don't fix it. There's a really, really good reason why enterprise software still runs on ancient software, and it's because it works.
I jumped on DD as fast as I could, because I've been having problems with Magic Boxes since September. I had an issue and DD seems to be helping me so far, at least when it's working. If magic boxes are working, there's no need to rush into DD, you still have some time to transfer over.
I hope LL gets their stuff together. This new release has left my sales hurting too. If your sales have tanked these last few days, you're not alone.
A lot of people depend on marketplace sales to pay for land. If LL doesn't fix things, they should at least give people a grace period after the first of the month considering what's happened here.
It'd be nice if LL would consider doing things for premium members who experience problems like this. It would be fantastic if LL gave us marketplace enhancement credits or something for the inconvenience.
-
I'm not saying DD is better, I'm trying to help Super (and whoever else reads this thread) fix the problem. I haven't really had a single issue with DD other than a few times I've had outbox failures, but I resent them and it worked.
The point I'm trying to make is that there's something wrong with SLMP that has nothing to do with DD or magic boxes.
-
I understand your frustration. The first time this happened to me it slashed my monthly sales by half, and it was with magic boxes.
From my experience, if you can find a way to reupload your items to second life market place you should be ok. When my magic boxes were failing, I would have about a 80-90% failure rate.
I don't know of a way to fix it. I would try renaming your objects, uploading them again through the outbox, and then reassociating them and seeing if they work. That's stupidly time consuming though. If you can go back to boxes you should for now, LL hasn't given us a good way to reset things with DD if they go bad.
-
I absolutely agree with CTL. I have had problems with Magic Boxes forever.
I would get messages that communications timed out, and my sales would tank. I would resetup all the boxes (limiting each box to about 5-10 items) and my sales would be 10x higher than after I got the message that my magic boxes have timed out. Not only that, but only a few items would sell well at a time, and the successful items would always change after resetting my boxes. I've been playing with it since the beginning of September, and I am fairly confident that there are major issues.
Oddly enough, DD has been working much better for me, but the fact that the website isn't working right is really showing and sales still aren't the greatest I've had, but I'm doing far better with DD than I was with Magic Boxes.
There is something very, very broken in SLMP that transcends DD or Magic Box. When I had my magic boxes, I kept having people message me about a product I didn't sell and them not getting it after they paid for it.
Whatever the cause, it's not just DD that's causing it. Sometimes when I would re-rez my magic boxes, things would be better or they'd be worse. I really think it's kind of random and I wonder how many people have given up selling things in here because SLMP wasn't working properly.
With magic boxes, I could re rez them and the system would be better. I don't know of a workaround like that for DD, since the code is all running somewhere where we don't have control. I don't even know how it's implimented.You might try resending objects from the merchant outbox and re-assigning them, but if we don't know how DD works, there's no way to come up with a good solution. It was somewhat straightforward how magic boxes worked. LSL scripts and a web server communicating with each other. Server sends items to website. Done.
Whatever the case, I hope everyone gets this figured out. The website has been running really odd for me. Sometimes it just times out.Other times it takes a while for it to load. Either way, people are discouraged from shopping when it takes 10 seconds to load a page. It really hurts their confidence that the transaction is going to complete and it makes them worried they're going to have their L$ taken and then end up messaging a store owner who doesn't reply and won't resend the item.
-
This removed a lot for me but it didn't remove all. If you remove items one at a time it'll remove them, but the website is crazy slow right now. It feels like a database isn't indexed properly. I've dealt with stuff like this developing web apps. They will probably figure it out or what else is wrong soon enough.
When you remove multiple items, the page is probably exceeding execution time and going to that error page. It's one of those things that you have no idea is wrong when you're beta testing with a tiny percentage of the total population and you just flick a switch and turn it on for everyone. LL should start staggering releases for users. I'm pretty sure that's what Facebook does.
-
I had this too, and then I only sent a few items at a time and it seemed to work. My sales have completely tanked, however, but I chalk that up to the way marketplace is running right now. I hope nothing is broken too bad.
-
Sera's method worked. Thank you! Everything is going smoothly so far except for the SLMP site is loading slowly, but that's to be expected.
-
Sorry for jumping the gun. I'm just excited about DD. No one gave a time, I expected them to have everything in order and for it to just be a switch to flip.
-
Viewer: Second Life 3.3.1 (250772) Mar 8 2012 03:47:05 (Second Life Development)
Server: Second Life Server 12.02.24.249991
Whenever I open the Merchant Outbox, it tells me I need to create a store, I've had one since 2007. It won't let me drag or drop anything, I just get the NO icon.
I'm just grabbing objects from my old Magic Box folder and trying to put them on the Outbox. Any help? Or have I already found a bug? Or is it just not rolled out completely yet?
EDIT: I tried resaving my store information, and that didn't help.
-
I've been having a lot of problems with this too. Today I had someone tell me the marketplace took his L$ and he never received the product. I looked at my transaction history and there was no record of him purchasing. He broke down and bought it at my in world store.
Needless to say a lot of sales are getting lost. I never got the L$, he never got the product. I have no idea how many times this has happened. A lot of people get scammed out there and just move on without saying anything.
Yesterday, the marketplace wasn't working in FF7 either. I don't know what LL is doing but the marketplace is really hurting.
-
Thanks for clarifying. I should have stated that you should only do this if you're having problems with custom physics meshes. That's all I'm using it for and it's the only reason why you should be on an older viewer.
The problem in Blender for me started when i shift+d copied an object and its physics mesh. After that, it all stopped working.
-
This is so annoying, and I couldn't find anything on the Jira talking about it. I'm going to make one now.
Anyways, the best solution is to roll back to a previous version of SL.
Here is a download link for 3.0.1 http://download.cnet.com/3001-7540_4-75592526.html?spi=b6626a14dbc626bedf5610e2e91cf9fa
WARNING: It has some sort of crapware cnet downloader. You can probably find a better version to download, but this one works I think. Make sure to turn off automatic updates in preferences.
-
I couldn't agree with you more. LL creates a restraint which is going to affect everyone, and then they only tell a fraction of the people what's going to happen.
It's going to be interesting to see how the general population of SL responds to this change.
But you're right. This isn't our responsibility, we don't even really like this feature, to be honest. It's foolish to think that the entire community of mesh builders is going to be completely knowledgeable about mesh as soon as it comes out and that it's our responsibility to educate people.
Mesh is going to change when it comes out. There's going to be growing pains. All of us aren't going to be able to keep up with the latest news and keep everyone informed. LL needs to make a formal announcement of PE Weight to the general population as soon as possible so they are aware that things are going to work this way with mesh. To have mesh instantly deployed and then go, "hey, by the way, if you make this thing bigger it's going to use more prims."
I understand that PE weight being affected by scale has to do with the LODs, but I'm not ready to explain to customers that the object doesn't look like it's changing when you make it bigger, but the cost is still going up. As far as game design goes that's purely anti-fun and it will make a ton of people angry. There will be people who are angry enough to ask for sculpty versions instead, which will only consume more triangles and completely bypass LL's solution to low client FPS sims.
-
I'm making a dancefloor that can have programable tiles. The sculpty version required the dance floor itself (which was like a rounded off hexagon), and another one slightly larger around it inside out shaded a different color to give a cool cell shaded effect. Each tile was two prims.
With Mesh, I was able to make a single mesh hexagon (with sexy sharp corners instead of smooth shaded edges), a border, and a joint between the border. Since I could assign different materials, I made one object with three different materials and control them via script.
Each tile was 3 PEweight, but when linked it is a little over one per object. I saved about 1300 triangles per object and halved the number of prims.Considering you will need about 50 or more tiles for a floor, you're looking at saving around 65k triangles people won't have to render.
PE Weight is finally becoming fair enough to give people a reason to use mesh over sculpts when mesh is far more effecient to render.
-
That's a valid point. I guess when we market it we're going to have to give PE Weights at different dimensions.
We are going to need this feature implimented in the marketplace.
-
Overall I'm somewhat concerned about the customers who aren't as well educated when it comes to mesh. We've all been following everything in here pretty closely, because it all greatly affects us.
The general SL population has no idea, other than "mesh is coming and there's going to be new stuff." They don't know PE Weight or anything we've been discussing with LL.
When I made this post, I wasn't completely sure where I was heading with it. I knew there was a problem where the prim count changes with scale. It's a radical new idea that a lot of people aren't going to understand. It's also opening up a lot of doors for abuse from merchants. It's also opening up a lot of problems. Do I sell my tree at 5 meters, which is an acceptable tree size? Or do I make it more realistic and take a huge PE Weight hit?
Everyone is going to be doing these things, and there is not going to be any confidence in PE Weight when you buy from different vendors.
Even if I do do things honestly (which I plan on doing), there are going to be people who don't do things honestly, and will have a higher triangle mesh marketed as lower PE Weight because it's smaller than mine.
We understand PE Weight. We've all been experimenting with it and mesh (I have been for months upon months), the average consumer has no idea.
We have all been so focused on the engineering aspect of mesh that we've completely forgotten about the marketing aspect. There is huge potential for the general population to become very upset with mesh, between no longer being able to resize their objects without a penalty and getting burned by merchants who market their PE Weight in an overly-optimistic way.
My biggest fear is that is that the average consumer will be duped by these sorts of issues they don't have to deal with with sculped builds or in world prim builds, and mesh will gain a negative perception and will be avoided on the marketplace, making it essentially a dead technology for things outside of attachments.
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
YouTube
Flickr
Pictures in Marketplace lead to another website
in Merchants
Posted
Cloudfront is Amazon Web Services. You're not getting hacked or anything, the server is just messing up when it sends you a file. Either that or the website is malfunctioning and not using the fancy code to make the images popup, and is instead falling back to just displaying the image.