The LL Mesh Avatars

To expand on my last post here are the current Mesh Avatars from LL

Like I said the Monsters are cool and some you just cant get with out Mesh

Now the people are they that much better? Then system people?

Is Mesh avatars good for Second Life?

Linden Lab is famous for doing things they think are good that causes a problem and makes a ripple that is felt for years. Like removing last names made a division between old and new members and took away one of the ways people made communities around the names, They thought getting rid of magic boxes would be good because anyone can now sell on Market Place. But the down fall is now you don't need land to keep your magic box so no need to become premium to get your 512 or linden home or even the need to rent land. Hence lots of abandoned land.

Now don't get me wrong I love mesh! You can make things in mesh that would be hard to do in just prims and sculpty is good but can be a PIA. Sure the system hands suck so replacing them with mesh might be good so you can walk around flashing the peace sign. and Mesh feet..... Well the ladies do like there shoes in SL as much as RL so that is easy.

Next is Mesh clothes. The big claim to fame for Mesh clothes is they don't look tight like system clothes. But I just know many of the fashion bloggers who are clamming this is SL are sitting there in RL wearing yoga pants. So with Mesh clothes to get that loose fit to mimic what cant be as tight as system clothes you have to use standard sizes, alpha layers to change the shape you love so much and worked to hard to perfect. Liquid Mesh may fix this but that is way to new.

You all know I am big on SL for cheep because I think more people are a good thing in SL and not everyone wants or can spend money to play. Mesh is still new so it cuts down on the variety of clothes available and worst it takes away years and years of freebies that were available.

Sure with applying more mesh designers may come around but lets face it they are confusing. If they don't do Omega or Slink your limited not to mention all the other brands. We all know the one thing we all need more of to keep people playing SL is more confusion.

Now past the clothes we have full mesh avatars. Sure they have a place. The monsters (LL calls them vampires) are cool and with out mesh you are not going to get them but human avatars? Can you not get the same look from moving sliders or buying a shape? Now LL is putting each new member in Mesh as soon as they come in world. How long before they go to Yars and get tons of free stuff they can't wear?      

Save the Hippos!!!!

There was a Easter Egg in SL that if you hit ctrl-alt-shift-h it would say "Hippo". Hippos date back to the beta of SL and the story was the hippos would stomp the bugs. This was removed from one of the recent viewer upgrades.

there is a JIRA on it. They have said if they get 1000 votes they will add it back in.

PLEASE save the Hippos!!!!!

Plurk

I just joined Plurk it has lots of SL members and you can even pick second life as a country.

you can find me at: http://www.plurk.com/jdtrue

If you want to join easy it will also add you to follow me: http://plurk.com/jdtrue/invite

Second life lexacon 2

SLex - noun Sex in second life. Virtual sex in second life is one of the most commonly talked about aspects of the world that is talked about by the RL media. Well it was sex or at least a SL product line the SexGen line of beds that lead to a RL lawsuit so that I am sure got there attention. Heck Reuters, wired and Popular Science all reported on it.

This word I even know the origin of. It came from a blog by DesertWolf Longstaff .

Second life lexacon 1

Dollarbie noun an item that sells for 1L$. 1L$ is often synonymous with free even though it is not really zero lindens. The practice started in the early years of SL when people wanted to track how popular something that wanted to give away was. If you make an item free to copy you cant see how many people take it. Even to this day you can have SL not show you 0L$ transactions.

Also one of the web shopping sites Onrez (formerly SLboutique) or Xstreet (formerly SL Exchange) had a policy in the past that you could not send a 0L$ item to another person. Merchants that wanted to make gifting there free items easy had to ether list 2 items. 1 at 0L$ and 1 at 1L$. Many of them over time just removed the 0L$ one to make item management easy. I believe this was done at that time to stop Item spamming (when you just send a bunch of stuff to a person).

I Want to Half Thank Linden Lab

Last week 1/20/09 LL announced it had bought both Xstreet SL and OnRez on their blog.

Unlike many people I was not upset by LL owning them. I was not calling it a monopoly. I did not care if they would keep the quicker exchange from L$ to US$. The idea of putting Xstreet on the home page and making it part of SL made some seance to me after all SL's search in-world sucks.

What did get my panties in a bunch was the part about closing down Onrez in 3 weeks (2/11/09) (22 days). I did not care about them closing the one that did not charge a commission; that is called business. I cared because I, like many people, use Onrez for their vendors.

LL asked on their forums for input from residents about what they wanted. After a full day of posting, 64 pages and 930 posts they closed the thread. The only thing LL said about the vendors missing from Xstreet was, "We understand that the Onrez vendor system was a feature that the Residents valued and we are looking at the best approach to a networked vendor solution."

Well it's all fine and dandy that they are going to look in to it. But I have 325 items on Onrez and many of those items I sell in-world with their vendors. It was as if LL was telling me in 3 weeks we are going to take away one of the ways you sell stuff.

Heck I would have not cared if they had said we bought both and plan to close Onrez but we won't until we see what features are missing and need to be added to Xstreet first. I would have waited for them to add vendors to Xstreet and just keep using Onrez for their vendors but I did not have that choice.

I can't wait for them to look at the best approach. I can't hope they add vendors to Xstreet before the 22 days are up. I can't even wait now if they said they would have them up by the day they close Onrez. It takes time to move items. It takes time to set up vendors.

So I only had one choice and that was to look for another vendor system. I had all but forgotten I had signed up for an account on the site Apez.biz over a year ago. It was one of the projects I had said I will some day use. I guess what stopped me was the idea of spending all that time setting up to sell my stuff on a third site so it just never happened.

Well I went back and looked at them again. (The truth is Marykay went there from a list of other options I had sent her and told me "It looked promising.") I went there to check them out again and to my delight they had improved a lot since the last time I was there.

1. They had the web interface I wanted that Onrez had.
2. They had servers/drop boxes just like Onrez. In fact Apez's look cool!!!
3. They were for the most part FREE. At least for me. They have free vendors that charge a commission or you can buy a commission free vendor for $L1740. Most of my stuff is commission free anyway because I sell it for only 1L$ and you can't take a commission from that. Besides Xstreet has taken a commission from sales all along, so I was not losing any thing.

So for the most part they were the same as what I was losing from Onrez.

And then it got better! For the most part Onrez had two vendors, one with search and one without. (I say they had two but they really had four because they had black and silver in both types.) I used the no-search one. It had less prims and only sold my stuff.

I was happy with the Onrez vendors until I saw what Apez gave me. Vendors, vendors and more vendors.... Flat vendors, angle vendors, one to 20 prim vendors, vendors with preview, vendors without, vendors with info buttons and vendors without.

The Onrez vendors were great but lacked some things -- like preview screens. With the Apez system I can pick the vendor I like for a particular product line. For example my zodiac shirts are all the same for each sign. Right now I have one vendor for each sign and people can page through to find the color they want. With Onrez that would be four prims used each time. Now I can use the Apez two-prim vendor (FP0 two) that is flat panel, zero previews and only two prims (after all they are only cycling through different colors of the same shirt).

For other products I may want a preview to show other styles and now I have that choice. Heck I could even sell my paintings in a vendor now. I currently have two servers with almost 100 paintings in them and more on the way. If I wanted to use a vendor to sell them I could use the FP17 200 -- flat panel, 17 preview screens, able to handle 200 items.

Some other nice stuff they do is throw in a few preloaded vendors with different stuff in them like clothes, animals etc. that match the categories on their web site. What you are doing with these is selling other people's stuff and getting a commission. People are always buying those "business in a box" things. Well this is even better because it can earn you money without having your own content. This is not something I can use in my store now but it sure would have been nice to have when I first started out.

Now in conclusion I want to get back to my title "I Want to Half Thank Linden Lab." Even though you (LL) basically told me -- and hundreds if not thousands of other Onrez vendor users, many of whom are loyal premium members or even land holders in Second Life (I pay $75 per month in land fees) -- oh well you have to give up your vendors on the 11th of February. And with nothing more about it from you than "We are looking at the best approach to a networked vendor solution." A solution that may never happen, may suck (just like in-world search) or may come along evenutally, but not in time for the closing of Onrez. However your making me look helped me find another option and rediscovered Apez, and in so doing I found a great vendor system that even if you tried you could only copy.