Marketplace Frustration

Marketplace Frustration

Written 9 March, 2013

Quite a few months ago the Lindens sent a notice to avatars with products on the Second Life Marketplace, warning us that magic boxes containing product lines would eventually be phased out. I ignored it.

This month I received a second message saying all 388 of my products would be removed by mid-April if I hadn't migrated them to direct delivery..

The alternative is to re-list everything using direct delivery. That requires the official Linden viewer, or, happily, Firestorm.

I downloaded Firestorm, installed the Phoenix skin, and tweaked things until I was able to stand it. (I hate, hate, hate the damned toasts!) and went to work on the marketplace.

On the surface migrating items is fairly simple. One puts everything in a folder (subfolders are allowed), and right clicks and selects Send to Marketplace. A box pops open and you click a second button and the folder is transferred to one's store at the Marketplace. There you can quick fill using an already existing product as a template.

Sounds easy, doesn't it?

The monkey wrench in the engine is the horrible performance of the Marketplace website. About half the time items sent don't arrive. You never know if they actually did arrive or if the Lindens are just telling you they did-- so you might find five or six copies in the unassigned box when you visit the website.

About half the time attempts to start a listing for a newly-migrated item results in failure. The website is that horrible.

Quick fill is annoying because it doesn't migrate the photos that illustrate the product. That means you have to dig up photos you might not have seen for five or six years-- or capture new images.

Deleting an object from the product list can take a full minute-- and there's no way to select more than one at a time. Idiocy.

The real nightmare begins when you try to delete the old magic box items. Before you can delete them from the website you have to remove the item or items from the magic box, then go to the old SL Exchange website and update the box, because updating from the box itself no longer works. It can take as long as five minutes before the update is finished; meanwhile, the SLEX site is unavailable. Then, from the website, you syncrhonize the web contents with the boxes (happily, this doesn't take long). THEN you can delete the items from the Marketplace.

We all know the Lindens are horrible with databases. Look how long search has been broken! The only thing they seem to be able to keep up with (thankfully) is avatar names and (usually) inventory. I'd give anything to have SLEX back.

Bitchy Profile

Bitchy Profile

Written 5 March, 2013

I like the jewelry at Uzuri in Second Life, and I absolutely love my Hanu dress, in brown, but I'll no longer be shopping there.

Why? Because of creator Bella Bombast's profile.

The sentence that lost me to Uzuri products is just below the text that shows in the About box. It reads:

MALL OWNERS & MAGAZINES: forget me!!! You all grow up on creators head. I don't need you.

Keeping one's products out of malls might make sense, but Second Life's fashion magazines have an avid readership of fashionistas who spend big money on couture. They promote designers, both by way of advertisements and by featuring a creator's work and the creator him- or herself-- and they don't ask the creator for money. It's a symbiotic, win-win relationship. It's just stupid to consider it parasitic.

Which is probably why the Uzuri store is no longer in world.

Karma can be a bitch.

Our Seventh Valentine's Day

Our Seventh Valentine's Day

Written 5 March, 2013

February 14, 2007 was my first Valentine's day with Sweetie. I had been in world less than four months and I had no clue what I was doing, but I managed to make her a giant rotating crystal heart with an arrow sticking through it and comfy seating.

Since then it's been cards and jewelry.

We broke the tradition this year. Since I'm always talking about her deadly swordsmanship, I bought her a scripted katana.

That Horrible Stumping Sound

That Horrible Stumping Sound

Written 7 March, 2013

I just hate that stumping sound avatars make when they cross obstacles higher than about .5 meters. Don't you?

Here's a short little script that will squelch that collision sound. Just put it in a script and drop it in the root prim of any linked set-- and no more sounds.


// Simple Stop Collision Sound by Cheyenne Palisades

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        llCollisionSound("", 0.1);
    }
}

In a comment, Handy Low suggested limiting the script so collision will be re-enabled. I suppose there would be instances when one would want the lack of sound to be temporary, but I don't ever want to hear STUMP STUMP STUMP when walking up steps. Here's a slightly revised version.



// Simple Stop and Start Collision Sound by Cheyenne Palisades

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        llCollisionSound("be582e5d-b123-41a2-a150-454c39e961c8", 0.0);
    }
}

Interestingly, setting the sound level to 0.0 (as opposed to 0.1 in the first example) suppresses collision particles as well as sound. So yay!

If you ever want to turn collisions back on, set 0.0 in the above script to 1.0. If you don't want to turn collsions off later, you can safely delete the script.

View Through Windows

Rethinking a City

Rethinking a City

Written 5 March, 2013

Earlier this year I took a commission to make a full-scale version of a nonmodifiable model.

The client wanted an exact replica, which was of course impossible without modify permissions, but I came remarkably close, as evidenced in prior blogs.

The client, who was on the spectrum, wanted a huge city exactly like the original, including flaws, and that's what I made for him. As we had agreed, I made an exact copy, and flaws were considerable. It was, after all, a model. Prims were misaligned, there was texture flicker, the walkways were camera traps, and most of the textures were placeholders, some as small as 32 x 32, making them a blurry mess even on the model. In the end the client refused to pay because he didn't like the flaws he had insisted upon. I was smart enough to not give him the city.

When our business was concluded I just couldn't stop without making the build right. And so I have spent several weeks tweaking it. I gave the buildings a granite texture, got the proper window texture, thanks to the kindness of Alia Whitfield, changed the unworkable roofs and walkways, and added round windows to some of the buildings. Here's what the build looks like now. I call it Metro City.

Broken Links

Don't you just hate it when links in your outfit folders break?

They can't be searched, apparently. I had to to through each outfit to remove the broken Mystitool links.

Create a Character Challenge

Create a Blogger Challenge

or

Sweetie: Messing with the Fabric of the Metaverse

Written 9 February, 2013

Second Life blogger Pancake (thanks for the heads up, Iris Ophelia!) has issued a challenge to other bloggers-- and non-bloggers as well: create an intriguing character in Second Life. Check it out.

It occurred to me I have already created just such a fictional character-- the notorious, the infamous, the one and only Sweetie!

That's Sweetie, above, sitting, as is her custom with her face away from the camera. We can admire her couture, but her face? That's private. Notice how I'm looking on adoringly from the background.

Sweetie came about because someone I'm close to both in Second Life and in the real world asked me not to use her avatar's name. Mine was not to question why, mine was but to blog or die. Since I wasn't allowed to use her real virtual name, I call her Sweetie in this blog.

Although she's an avatar de plume, Sweetie soon took on a life of her own. She's rather like her doppelganger, only more so. Much more so. She manages to project an air of innocence and menace at the same time. I've no idea how. Perhaps it's her katana. She works in her fortress of solitude, poking at the boundaries of Second Life by doing things like seeing how deep she can bury her cache of exploding lipsticks inside nested inventory folders. Things start to get wonky, she tells me, at level 72. She says she's just keeping the world safe. Her most unstable cosmetics, she tells me, require at least ten levels of subfolders to be stored properly. Here's my post about her subfolder experiments.

The Result

The Result

8 February, 2013

Unless one uses Copybot or a pirate viewer, it's not possible to replicate a no-mod build in Second Life. The sizes of the prims are unknown, the spatial relationships between prims in the linkset are unknown, the textures can't be copied, and if the textures were imported at a low density, it may not even be possible to guess what they look like.

So of course I accepted the challenge.

I was to make a full-size build of a scale model which consisted of four buildings, walkways and waterways on the ground, and elevated walkways. Think 700 prims, every one nonmodifiable.

After I started building the client made it clear he wanted the model duplicated EXACTLY. And EXACTLY meant fuzzy 32 x 32 placeholder textures, claustrophobic walkways, misaligned prims, prim flicker-- EXACTLY.

And so that's what I built. It frequently made me wince, but I forced myself to do it. I have to say, though, when I just couldn't stand it, I made a few changes.

I mean, the original build was a model, constructed to give a potential client an idea of what a full-scale version might look like. So of course it was sloppy. Why shouldn't it be? It was meant to give an idea of what it could become, not to be a small and identical version of the finished, larger build!

The model was sloopy (and I'm not blaming the builders, they did a great job and understandably didn't add spit and polish. And since the model was sloppy, the full-scale duplicate was sloppy. The final product was a blown up 96x96-meter version of a tiny model with only an hint of texturing.

Here's my approximation of the texture used by the model maker for the buildings. The original has to be 32 x 32 pixels.

At the top of the blog are are overhead photos of the model (left) and my build (right).

Some changes I made:

* The water in the full-scale version is more blue, as the gray water in the model disappeared against the walkway. I made the four fountains at center more realistic, as well. I made the movement of the water in the walkways circular rather than linear, as in the model the water was rushing from north to south for no apparent reason.

* I made one large park area instead of two smaller ones. Those tiny squares in the scale model are picnic tables.

* On the center prim, Sweetie made a design that reflected the relative size and position of the buildings-- at left. At right, she decides to use the prims as personal adornment.

* I didn't recreate the poseballs that noted the landing zone and the relative sizes of the buildings.

* I didn't duplicate the elevator shaft in the smallest building because I had the client's okay to omit it.

There were a few other changes, all small-- in the upper walkways I removed prims that captured the camera and would trap tall (and everyone in SL is tall) avatars.

I was able to reach Scar eventually. She was kind enough to give me permission to duplicate her build. I made close approximations of the textures used on the walkways, and rooftops, but when Scar gave me the name of the woman who had supplied the textures for her build, I stopped my attempts to duplicate them. She was willing to sell them, and they were her creations, so it wouldn't have been right to continue. As a placeholder, I used a simple grid of windowpanes.

Below the fold are more comparisons of the model and the full-scale product.