Flea Yatsenko

SL mobile is going to have to play by Apple's rules if they want to appear on the App Store. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-states-of-america iOS is the majority of mobile devices in the US. You really don't have to shoot the messenger here, LL Is going to have to play by Apple's rule or else the mobile SL client is just going to be deleted from the App Store forever, with no way to reliably sideload. Like it or not the mobile client being on Play and App Stores is probably going to see a resurgence in something like a teen grid. You're free to look at the App Store guidelines or look at the App Store to see if you can find anything that remotely offers what you mention as adult content. Roblox has "17+" content and to access it you have to upload a government ID and I don't know how it works in iOS. Fact is because of Google and Apple's rules, you're not going to be able to download the SL mobile client from an app store and have the "full SL experience" some of you want. No need to kill the messenger, but Apple can tell LL they don't want SL mobile on iOS for pretty much any reason. If you think Apple is going to be fine with people having sex in private areas on their phones, you're nuts. That's pretty much porn. Again, you can stop with your laughing emojis or whatever. I'm not the one that's got a problem with this stuff, Apple and Google are. And LL is going to have to do something about it.

I looked a little bit about iOS and it's a nightmare, hosting your own local server, signing certificates every few weeks, etc. It's simply not feasible. I don't think a lot of G rated sims becoming popular in SL would be bad. I think it would be great, actually. Leave the adult/mature stuff alone and it could bring in a whole lot of new users and a different audience. And I think that's what LL wants. As long as they can leave the existing users alone and not change anything for them. Let's be honest, SL is for power users who have a high end laptop or desktop and that market is doing nothing but shrinking. No matter what LL does to make SL better, it's going to be stuck in a shrinking market. PBR, all this other stuff they add, it's amazing. But it's not going to bring in new users. Right now there's no reason to make a G rated sim. In fact it's discouraged. Why make a G rated sim and risk getting in trouble for breaking the rules when you can just make it adult and the same people are going to show up? Now, if you make a G rated sim and it means you get a lot of mobile users to show up and get involved, you're into something. And mobile users are generally pay pigs. I.E. running a G rated sim that mobile users like would probably become very lucrative. I'd actually like to see SL go back to that, that's how it was 10 years ago and now it's just sex everywhere. I'm not saying get rid of it, calm down. But to get more options for just social places and to make it so the people who run those places can make money off of it, that's what I miss about SL and I really hope mobile brings in new users who can bring that back.

Not as bad as you think. LL Hosts their own APK for android users to side load. It's a pain to side load on iOS, which is a bummer for iPhone users. But the versions in Play and App Stores are going to be massively limited, probably no adult regions at all. no adult anything on marketplace. I wouldn't be surprised if the app store versions were limited only to G rated sims and G rated sims suddenly became very, very moderated. LL has control of everything though, they could easily just flag sims as "App Store Approved Content" and the mobile client from the app stores could only access those sims. Lots of ways for LL to go about it, none are perfect. But if they host their own APK Android App, LL won't be held to any standards. But sideloading iOS is still a pain and it's going to be the biggest problem with letting mobile users get the full SL experience.

The rights holder has to contact LL for it to be removed. Copyrighted material on marketplace falls into three basic categories 1. Merchant has worked a deal with the IP holder of the copyright material and it's legitimate 2. The rights holder doesn't know the infringing IP is being sold and hasn't filed a DMCA yet 3. The rights holder knows the infringing IP is being sold and doesn't care because they'd rather have the advertising or whatever while someone makes money from their IP The rights holder technically owns the rights to everything on the grid that uses their IP, so if they file a DMCA and want it removed entirely from the grid, it can be. If they just want it removed from SLMP and being sold, it can stay in people's inventories.

The mobile viewer will be free, though. So it won't directly generate any revenue. LL's revenue comes from marketplace commission, tier, premium, etc. There will be no revenue from the mobile viewer. It only exists to get new users into the ecosystem to start paying. LL has to have something worked out with Unity, because there's a chance for hundreds of thousands of installs for $0.

Part of the TL;DW for that video is they are trying to find ways to not show highly outdated products. They are requesting marketplace to detect what kind of items are in the listing (mesh, prim, sculpty, etc). Also multiple variants for a single listing, but that's a dead horse we've been requesting for a very long time. I think what they really need is to pick a date, like 5 years ago, and mark older products as "legacy" content. Notify all merchants that their products are about to be moved to legacy status. Give them a chance to update them, like 3 months. Then make search only show non-legacy products by default and then let them show legacy only or include legacy if people want to when they are searching. Every 6 months or so, products move to legacy that are older than X years, merchants are notified they should update their products, and after a certain window the products that aren't updated are moved to legacy. All it really needs to do is even just have the listing updated, because merchants who aren't in SL aren't going to update their stuff and it'll be able to slide into legacy mode no problem. There are also plenty of other metrics you can use, like the last time the merchant logged in. I.E. if they haven't even logged in in the last 2 years, move them to legacy. Haven't made a new listing in several years? Move to legacy. Hasn't sold in over X amount of years? Move to legacy. Using a legacy content status allows older items to not show up in search while not deleting older content. I don't want to delete old stuff either. The more old stuff they get out of search results, the better search results will be for finding new high quality stuff. Time frames are up for debate, obviously. I don't know what's best. But LL needs to do something because the current search results actively discourage creating new quality content because older stuff will be prioritized in search. They are also talking about variants and how to get merchants to actually use them. My thoughts are simple, multiple variants in separate listings are hurting search results and quality of search. So, marketplace should search stores for similar listings where the title and text are very similar, and penalize listings that have other very similar listings in search results until they are merged into one listing with variants. Google, Bing, Yahoo, all will absolutely obliterate you if you're harmful to their search results and you're trying to rank in them. SLMP has like no penalties for bad behavior. And I'm talking things like spammy listings, not so truthful listings, etc. The simpler the solutions the easier it's going to be to create and the better results should be, in theory. Switching to legacy content listings should help.

It's using Unity game engine. Unity can make it work on Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS, and more. https://support.unity.com/hc/en-us/articles/206336795-What-platforms-are-supported-by-Unity-

I don't think people realize how bad that demographic is with computers. A lot of them only grew up with touch screen devices. I can't find the pictures or stories now, but there's plenty of content of college students using touch screen keyboards to code, not understanding how folders and files work, taking screenshots with their phones, etc. Current Second Life is completely inaccessible to that crowd, because they don't have the technical skills required to figure it out and they probably don't have a compatible device that runs Windows or Linux since they're probably on Android or iOS. Some of that generation are fantastic with stuff and some are absolutely clueless beyond Android or iOS. LL is going to have to meet Play Store and App Store rules, the mobile client you download from those stores is going to be neutered based on what content it can access. I am hoping they have a direct download on the website that doesn't have to comply with the regulations on app stores.

If you use copyright content, the rights holder can have it deleted from the grid at any moment. Do you really want to sell stuff to people when it can be deleted from their inventory at any time? Do you want to deal with customers wondering why their stuff they paid you for was deleted from their inventory? Are you going to refund them? Can you replace it with something that's not the same? It's not worth it, you might make a lot of money quickly but you always run the risk of stuff being deleted unless you can acquire proper permission to use it.

That's awesome Niran, that's the kind of little stuff that SL needs to get more wide stream appeal.

LL has done an amazing job of attracting great content creators and keeping them. Meta could only dream of having some of the content creators LL has in the metaverse. Look how many stores have been around for 10+ years. That's ridiculously good for a content creation platform. I mean to get random creators from all over the internet to to produce all sorts of content, and to continue to produce content, is honestly amazing. The place where LL hasn't done well is attracting content consumers. There are empty sims everywhere, major lack of people in tons of places. SL's biggest problem is lack of people to consume content and just spend time in world. Mainly because the barrier of entry is too high from a hardware and software perspective. It has a learning curve, you need a good enough computer to run it. The end result is a bunch of power users who would rather create content than make stuff and use SL as a social platform. But I think a lot of what LL creates for SL is focused on content creators. They need someone to come in and start pushing ideas for people to use the content. Social features, almost like Bumble-type stuff. They need an outside perspective to get SL to start attracting more people who want to use SL, not make stuff for SL. And that includes people who just want to make their own sims or in world places, not even mesh, textures, scripts, etc. I really hope this listing is a sign they realize they aren't ever going to grow if their business model is to get people to pay for sims and land that will be shut down because they weren't socially successful. It just has turn over at this point. Someone builds a sim, they have tons of content to pick and choose from, they build something really neat, no one really shows up, they realize it's not worth the money, then a new one shows up and the process repeats. The end result is just people replacing people and no real growth happening. Unfortunately this is a really easy problem to diagnose and not easy to fix. I think the idea is to have the mobile client try and fill that role. And I wouldn't be surprised if LL was realizing their limitation here. They have some great talent there but they are more like game engine designers than they are game creators. The mobile viewer is amazing for this and I hope it ends up on Windows, Linux, and Mac too. That said there's a lot of competition in that space. SL can do very well though, you can find practically anything for SL. Other platforms not so much. I really hope they are planning on putting the mobile viewer into an entirely different team's hands and try and target a completely different market while they continue to keep the SL viewer and the power user features going. I am optimistic that's the plan. At least I sure hope. As long as I've been in SL it's just been spinning wheels with places opening, closing, creator leaves, cycle repeats.

I'm actually not so sure about that anymore. I logged into beta PBR grid and changed my settings to low, and metallic PBR and a lot of materials are just black instead of their proper colors. I think it's still using PBR because when you change settings it does the screen dim and undim thing only the PBR rendering engine uses. I thought they were going to leave ALM in for low end computers, but I guess it really doesn't make sense as PBR renderer runs far better on my machine. Even if PBR isn't enabled on your region, you can use the PBR viewer to see how the new renderer handles legacy content. Also I can't believe I didn't say this early but thank you so much firestorm team. Now I don't have to run the SL viewer on WINE anymore for PBR stuff. And yes with a little bit of testing the PBR renderer works great on Linux for me with AMDGPU .

It doesn't. And you will be able to use the standard viewer with ALM instead of PBR. The old deferred rendering engine is getting removed and ALM will be the low end version. The content creators who think PBR is a replacement for textures are going to be very disappointed. LL can at least block older versions of viewers to get people on PBR quicker. But with ALM still being around I'm sure given the SL userbase there will be a lot of people who hate change and hate PBR and refuse to give up ALM. Anyone who was around for the change from prim to sculpty or sculpty to mesh knows that it takes a long time for things to change. Now if you are building a sim or even a little parcel or skybox, some of the stuff won't have PBR and some will. More growing pains. Standards take time to change. Yes legacy content will still look good. Yes a lot of people won't care that some stuff has working reflections and some are baked reflections (or something in between). But it's not going to be a clean break. I do not mean to hijack the thread about PBR. It's great it's landed in Firestorm since that's the only viewer I really use. But people who think we're just magically going to have PBR everything and everyone will use PBR are out of touch. Baking is never going away, it's a feat LL got the mobile viewer to look that good on what is basically a GPU/CPU around a low end celeron in performance, to think they will have PBR and all this other stuff on that sort of hardware is not reasonable. PBR is more about the lighting engine than the materials. Lighting, reflections, etc all look way better

the new mobile viewer is non-PBR. Basically, the existing diffuse textures will be the fallback if you don't have PBR enabled. It should look very similar and won't break existing builds, but it will have different lighting.

Best selling is going to be a mess for a while even if they fixed the code. Because the code doesn't have proper sales data to give good results. The larger the store, the worse it's going to be and the longer it's going to take to fix. And best selling works by number of transactions, not L$ earned or anything. Mine are a little funky right now too because some of the old cheap stuff was selling better. But the last week or so my newer stuff has been selling a lot more. But it'll take time for the sales data SLMP uses to calculate best selling to be updated and reflect the changes they made. Right now, only really immediate effects we're going to see are the results not showing horribly outdated products. After customers keep buying the newer stuff, it'll start to show in best selling results. But it's going to take time, and LL to not break anything before the sales data improves.

Seems to work a lot better now than it used to if you're using long keyword searches. Results were really bad before, like showing sculpties, gacha, and stuff. If they did really fix it, it's going to take at least two weeks before sales information updates and the data SLMP is using to sort and search (like sales data) catches up. The problem was very likely that SLMP was pushing older and outdated products in search, so more people were buying them, thus boosting their sales rankings over newer and higher quality builds. People are going to buy low quality stuff if it's all they can find. As the good stuff becomes easier to find, it's going to slowly work its way up. But you have to imagine, sales and all sorts of other factors LL uses to rank products in search has like a year of having low quality search results pushing low quality products. Meaning even if they fix search, it's going to be a while until customers correct it and give SLMP good data to sort, search, and filter with. Basically, the bad search results affects that data SLMP uses to sort and search which then causes more bad search results. It's an endless feedback loop that just makes search worse and worse. But if they did really fix it (which I think they've improved it), it's going to take some time and sales good products for their fixes to show up. No matter what LL does there's going to be some irrelevant results because of merchants abusing keywords. Best thing you can do is vote with your L$ for relevant results because AFAIK LL weighs search results based on sales, to some degree. I've been watching a few search terms for the last few months just to see the quality of what's returned. And it has gotten better, slowly. Searching for "blue shirt" used to return a lot of old style clothing items (you know, the ones that now work with BOM) and no mesh. Now it's mesh results. Some are not blue, some are not shirts, but you are at least getting things that are blue and things that are shirts and the first page of results is actually pretty decent looking stuff that's somewhat modern, showing 96 results per page. So by what I've been watching, search is a lot better than it has been. It was atrocious before. I gave up trying to buy things because it was futile. I felt it strongly in my sales. But things seems to be trending well. Search will not be fixed overnight, but as long as it's trending in the right direction it's a very good sign.

From what I've gathered reading the forums 1. The new marketplace search focuses on items like Gacha. Which I think is pretty terrible because LL is basically throwing content creators out while focusing on people who usually don't even create content. But I did see a post claiming the new algorithm was making LL more money. So from what I gather they are neglecting content creators for gacha because it makes them more money 2. Only the top selling 50k items on SLMP get a priority ranking. I think with the algorithm changes, the top 50k top selling items on SLMP has changed drastically and a lot of original content creators no longer find themselves in the top 50k and it's obliterating their sales (mine included). Because if you're not in the top 50k you're basically treated like every outdated and poor quality product on the SLMP. And if you sell anything remotely niche that's not mainstream, it's even easier to fall out of the top 50k. And I think SLMP uses total transactions to rank sales. So if you sell a gacha for L$250 10 times you will rank the higher than selling one product at L$2500, since it's 10 transactions instead of 1. I think their next step is to upgrade the SLMP servers so they can index more top selling products. But to be honest I think gacha is strangling content creators and niche product builders (i.e. everything that's not home, home decor, and avatar stuff). They need to legit just make a gacha marketplace and a traditional marketplace and keep them separate. The "do not show limited quantity items" checkbox works as a nice filter, but SLMP is still ranking your products against gachas selling for L$100 and if you're not moving enough quantity those gachas are going to bury you in search. Granted most of this is an educated guess. But I do think that's what's happening and it's why my sales were so filled with high volume, low cost items when traditionally my more expensive high end products are what made me money.

People are forgetting about the Unity Viewer. I fully expect it to run far better than the LL viewer. It won't have GLTF/PBR. I don't think making the current viewer more demanding is going to hurt low end users. In fact, a measly celeron is pretty dang close to an ARM mobile device that runs SL on the mobile viewer. I'd even bet a low end laptop or computer running the mobile viewer would be faster than the current SL viewer. I always advocated having two viewers, the current one being for power users and content creators and being more of an advanced viewer or editor and another being for the general population, lower end devices, etc. Unity view is going to solve a lot of problems SL has had, difficult interface, poor performance, etc. and it's going to do it without messing with the current viewer and making everyone angry. Like when they released viewer 2 with the interface change to be more appealing to new users which lead to a massive revolt. But they are trying to address a lot of the problems SL is facing. Maybe not all of them, there's a lot they still need to do. But the biggest problem I think SL has right now is they have too many content creator and sim/parcel owners and not even general users to fill these places up. It's why the grid is always so empty. The current SL ecosystem prioritizes power users and content creators. Which is a smaller portion of the internet population. SL needs to attract more "average" people. And I think they're addressing that. If they didn't care anymore they would just keep riding SL out until it stops making them money.

I think when LL was making Sansar, they viewed SL as the safe money maker they could leave alone and still have it pay the bills. So it did get kind of neglected. After Sansar basically failed (sorry), LL came back to SL and realized how valuable the content and the whole grid is and that it's worth it to keep improving it, even if it has over 20 years of code and people who wrote code and left behind it. It's really easy to look at SL and think that it's so outdated and things are such a mess after 20+ years of people working on it and technology changing and think starting from scratch could be better. But with all the problems SL has, those problems are nothing compared to the huge benefit it has from the user generated content. And as the internet becomes increasingly locked down and centralized, SL just gets more and more open and free compared to other platforms as time goes on. SL has been getting a lot of love from LL lately. I think they realized just how special and cool SL is, and how much potential it still has. In fact I think there's been a general tone shift on the forums and in general about SL being outdated and needing to be replaced. People seem more excited to talk about future things coming to SL and making improvements to it (other than the obvious "this is broken" posts). And look at what we're getting, PBR and a new rendering engine, new starter AVs, a mobile client. Hopefully we can get some improvements to grid/web stability and marketplace. Even though marketplace has been messed up and having a lot of issues for months I do generally feel pretty optimistic about the future of SL. I think right now we are feeling a bit of the pains of them neglecting SL for Sansar and they are working their way out of it.

They are fixing it. My products came back.

I got an answer to my ticket. They claim at least the missing listings aren't deleted and they are working on it. I was about to remake all the missing listings. They are still there do not remake them.

I am missing products from my Manage Listings page and my store. I have a copy of my store items from a month or so ago for slfind.com. When I copied them over, I had 330 public listings. Now I have 290 public listings and 320 in my listings editor. I was able to compare the listings, and found several items missing from both the public store front and the listings editor. In fact I am missing 40+ listings from my listings editor. Some of which are actually pretty popular products. I used regular expressions to filter the copy pasted results from the listing editor and just queried the database on slfind for listings and used an online list compare. I think just because you are listing and unlisting doesn't mean you are getting all your listings back.

I tried lowering all my prices for a few months and it did nothing. I raised them closer to how they were and the last few weeks have been an improvement from the previous months. I have a bad feeling LL makes more money selling gatchas than they do original content from merchants selling traditional items and that's their focus now on search. And given how much money those stupid gacha mobile games make it wouldn't surprise me at all. They came out and said they were making more money with the new search and all you see is gacha. Starting to think SLMP is just a gacha search engine at this point.

Templates and starting items should be in the library folder for new users (and everyone else). It instantly tells new users that content is user created and they are encouraged to create content. 99% of them who try will probably fail but it changes the new user experience from "I'm going to dress up my AV" to "Woah I can make stuff and make money! I have a long term goal of things to do in SL" I highly doubt it's going to cannibalize other sales. People spend money to look unique in SL and a mesh body, no matter how nice, if anyone has access to it, it's just not very unique. It's just a matter of time until it becomes the "noob body" and people are spending money on different bodies. So it only really needs to be good for new users to get them involved with SL. NUX has a chance to show new users it's easy, fun, and profitable to create content for SL. A big chance to show new users what makes SL so unique (user generated content) is being squandered here. I mean if you want to get good user retention, showing a new user you can make money in SL and giving them what they need to get started is a great way to give them a long term goal to stay in SL and to keep them logging in.

I would hope that upgrading from an 11 year old CPU would give you a huge performance boost.