Question about building ,clothing, scripting?

I have always wondered... why is it free to build and free to script, but you have to pay to make clothing? Not only to upload but you need an entirely seperate program...

To be fair, many of us scripters are pushing to be able to use external tools to edit and manage scripts. In fact many people already do (UltraEdit, SciteEz, etc).

"But Scite is free". Well, GIMP is actually available for free and works rather nicely, though I'm no expert on texture editing, so I could be wrong, but other people who are good at texture editing have confirmed it works rather well.

Azelda

Have to pay to create and upload animations as well, so it's not exclusively clothing that costs. Have you priced Poser lately?

Building things means having land, which implies a monthly tier fee.

$L10 or US$20/month?

LF

My wife uses GIMP pretty much exclusively - When I convinced her to use Linux for 5 years, GIMP was pretty much the decider - since migrating back to Windows (thanks to work and SL) she's continued with it -- She actually prefers it to Photoshop.

So yes, it's a more than adequate alternative to those with the low income blues.

Siggy.

Also - there used to be a 10L$ per prim rezzed cost - although you got that back when you deleted the prim.. there were also taxes for keeping prims in world - $1 per prim per week (adjusted by height and some properties).. At one point building was quite expensive.

Building and scripting also often rely on things like uploaded textures, animations, so also can cost...

Not quite true though, Sens

You *can* make clothing for free, just by using the in world sliders and currently available textures.

If you want to make clothing more customisable, just like creating an object with a texture, then you have to pay to upload an image.

So you could say building isn't free either

Scripters get all the breaks - just about every big release I think

Oops, I was logged in as Washu

Is anyone else finding the "friends" login page to not be working either? I tried this account but it kept rejecting my password r something, so I tried another and it did the same.

It must have worked though, as the above post shows >.>

Ther are public sand boxes..

but there is an upload fee...

And animations, I spaced those out lol... there is no choice but to make outside of game,and then there is upload fees.

Um, building is free and clothing isn’t?

Sorry, but I see a lot of builds out there with custom texture work. Where do you think those textures come from, the texture fairy? Builders have the same costs clothiers do. We use 3rd party programs such as Photoshop and Paint Shop and spend hours out of game on our textures. We also have countless test uploads and fittings at 10L a pop just as clothiers do.

Frankly, I don’t see a difference.
KX

Texturing I believe is an entirely different class of creations.

Yep
www.cnet.com, search for limewire, download limewire, search for poser, install.

Wasted 20 minutes of my time, and THAT costs alot to me!

I have no argument there, they are different skills and different goals, apples and oranges if you will.

But, your original complaint was the COST.

The outside programs we use are identical... same cost
The upload fees are identical...same cost

Again, I fail to see the difference… we all pay to play.
KX

its not so much the cost, and its not a complaint, was simply an observation... as someone mentioned, animations, there is no tools in world to do this, but the Lindens do provide a variety of free textures so building can essentially be done with no cost.

So if that’s good enough for us then why aren’t the clothing and textures that come in that same inventory also good enough?

Making clothing outside of SL is an option not a necessity. And thank the SL gods for giving us that option.

Sure we builders could just use those textures everybody has in inventory and you see everywhere. But what a stale boring place SL would be. We make our custom textures for the exact same reasons clothiers make theirs. It’s not out of necessity, that there isn’t another option given to us for free, It’s because we want more, better, unique, our own.

Why are you trying to divide us on this? We dress prims, they dress Avatars. We both want to make SL a more interesting and dynamic place to be. And we too pay hundreds of dollars for an outside program to do it.

KX

Lol this isnt a slam against builders, you are missing the point entirely.

A slam no, just not acknowledging the costs of what we do. You are a builder, you hire other builders, you know what is involved in custom work.



What point did I miss? Your question inferred that only clothiers have this extra burden. What I am saying is we are one and the same.

*Grin* come on Sensual, are you saying you products are all textured in default game textures? Just give us our due. All the furniture maker, decorators, gardeners, home contractors… all us builders have the same costs the clothiers do. We might not get the prestige the clothiers get but the tools and the costs are the same.

edit for me build but can't spell

Keith I dont know what your problem is or why you are putting words in my mouth, I was curious to know why there is a fee for some things in SL and not for others, your need to defend builders is not necessary.

Sensual,

I believe the simple answer is that items that are brought into SL from external sources incur a cost, while items created purely inworld do not for reasons of resource storage costs. Textures, sounds, animations, etc... uploaded take up storage space. The fee was originally intended probably as a way to control the uploading of massive amounts of stuff and leaving a bunch of crap on the servers. $10L was a lot when we had taxes and other things that completely ate up our L$. The fee doesn't have the same intended control factor that it once did.

I also agree wth you that texturing is separate from building, even if one generally involves the other. Scripting is useless too without building, but they are separate things. Clothing is is a weird hybrid in that it involves texturing, but also involves slider settings in appearance, so it is separate as well from the underlying concept of texturing. Interesting question.

I think Cristiano has it right. Uploaded textures, sounds, and animations all take up space in the assets database; if there were no cost associated with uploading them, it'd be easy for someone to fill up the database with gigabytes of stuff. Prims used to cost L$ to rez; now prims require land ownership, which costs money. In both cases, this acts as an impediment to someone creating thousands of new entries in the assets database, because the cost of that storage is being passed along.

It doesn't cost L$ to make a script, but there's no real danger of anyone creating thousands of scripts; there aren't any available on the web for uploading.

Various script calls -- like llEmail -- have delays built in to them, to keep scripts from using too much of Linden Lab's bandwidth. In his recent Town Hall, Cory Linden suggested that higher-performance RPC might have a small L$ cost associated with it; again, this would pass along the costs of the bandwidth. And if we ever get a way to create notecards via a script call, I think it's likely that it will have a small L$ cost associated with it.

Which still makes me wonder as WHY... lol
I mean scripts use resources, but is free to make.. so do prims etc etc... again I am not complaining... its only $10.. I just dont know why lol

Ahh I just read Jakes post, and its becomnig a bit clearer I suppose.

Y'know, in a way, it does seem strange to have to pay for uploads. My initial reply was talking about editors, hence my discussing the fact that scripters tend to use off-world ones in any case. However, the cost of upload shouldnt be any larger than the cost of download? This is especially true since if the line is symmetric (?), then Linden would have spare inbound bandwidth, since most of their date is outbound streaming?

One could argue that the cost is the cost of storing on the asset server, and one could argue that it is the cost of the streaming the texture down to the clients after the upload.

However, the cost of streaming to clients is independent of the number of different textures, merely of the number of textured objects.

The cost of storage on the asset server is an ongoing cost, not a onetime cost.

As far as strategic issues, charging for uploads is penalizing content creators, which may or may not be a good thing. Argument for penalizing content creators: the main target market of SecondLife is content creators. Argument for not penalizing content creators: the target market of SL is social users, and the content within SL is a key Selling Point.

Tentative conclusion: maybe charging for upload should be abolished?

Azelda