Just How Bad is the SL Economy

yes, but there are still only X number of standard primitives, What you do with those Prims is where the creativity comes in.....and what they can be turned into. I don't need to visit the Ivory Tower for that. It's stll X number of types of prims to start work from

Sorry but the "technological ceiling" is an absurd argument and flat out wrong. There will never be a ceiling when it comes to creativity. Paint has been around for a veeeeeeeeeeery long time and yet I don't see anyone telling artists to pack up their brushes because at some point everything that can be painted will have been painted. We have always had a limited number of prims to work with and yet I see new, creative ways to throw them together everyday.

And as far as the copy/mod vs copy/transfer debacle. What does it matter? Is everyone trying to now dictate how everyone else has to do things? If you want to sell copy/mod then do it. If you want to sell copy/transfer then do it. People will either buy your product or they will not. If you want to try to tell me how I should set my permissions then go f yourself.

You really ignore the technological side of things, you think LL can endlesslyadd new features. Here is what a couple of Lindens had to say about certain new features that have already been introduced to the grid in tickets that I submitted.


"Hey Rene,
........
Textures: You really need to try to keep texture size to a maximum of 512x512 (256x256 if possible). I see a lot of 512x512 and 1024x1024 textures, this can significantly affect your region.

Temp rezzors: The butterfly scripted temp rez area can definitely affect your performance as well as the flowers that change.

Waves: Waves are known to adversly affect region performance

Sculpties: Sculpties are very pretty but too many can cause region performance issues

.........
Izzy Linden


or

Hi Rene........

You're right that you have very few scripts individually using too many resources. However, I do see the number of Active Objects changing every minute or so -- while I am the only person in the region. This means there are auto-rezzers rezzing objects. This causes a fairly big drain on system resources, especially when there is other activity going on in the region. The other objects to keep an eye on are the sculpties (I see several, just based on object names). These also cause a pretty big drain on resources, even though they rarely appear on top scripts.

........

Dee Linden


So you think LL can infinitely add new tools to the platform that will raise the bar in innovations. From reading the above....it seems sculpties already comes at a price!

It relates to shelf life Jesse....i'm saying a garment produced in 2009 might be able to be sold in 2010 or 2011 if there are no technological advancements in creating garments. i.e additional tools....as pure designs will be the separator and not the way the garment was made.

thats not the same a Brianna's example of hair or garments made in 2004 compared to say 2007 when flexi prims were introduced. The difference is huge. You would not buy a hairstyle made in 2004 when shopping for one in 2007

I hope the last part was not referring to me? The permissions argument was between a different group of people (Gabriele, Rha and Jesse and a few others)
and done with!

Im not a shop owner but if I was and I was giving away freebies to encourage people to my store. How do I get paid for the freebie ???

Go back one step. Why am I giving away the freebie ??? To get real people, mapped green dots, in my shop and increase my dwell. Hopefully this will attract more customers.

But I also want the person who comes and grabs only my freebie to pay as well ??? OK. They got no money. But they have got time.

In my vendor I have a script that tells me they are standing there. And in 5 minutes or so my vendor will give them the item if they are still there. They have paid me with their time. Thankyou very much. Nice doing business with you.

Camping ??? No its not. The price I set for this particular item was 5 minutes of the customers time. More expensive items in L$ costs more time. My time-paying customer will maybe even look at what else I have on offer and buy something extra while they are paying for the first item.

This is a common practice in RL malls when companies are promoting new products. How many sample lotions, perfumes, lippys, etc do we receive every day in return for our time gathered around the demonstrators stall. Heaps (well I do anyways ) We dont get this stuff for free. We pay for it with our time. SL is no different.

You don't know the answer but make a broad assumption called platform performance limitation, and then say you do not need to look up the answer because it is self-explanatory?

0+0 = 0

The limit is in place because LL did not want SL to turn into a music trading platform and in 2002 when SL was created there was still a LOT of crap happening with with copyright infringement and mp3 websites and by limiting how people could use sounds in SL, LL limited their exposure to any pursuit of copyright infringement from the music industry and their enforcers. Even with the 9sec sound limitation there were still music stores with over 100 full songs and and sometimes entire CDs being sold. But not nearly as bad as it would have been if creating full songs was far simpler.

I am however glad you have shown you do not mind making assumptions based on ignorance and assuming it as fact.

It is to whoever tries to say that anyone not setting perms the way they want is setting them wrong and I was not involved in the argument and 44 minutes ago is not "done with".
(Cool! I saved 3 periods this post alone)

I think 2^8388608 is bigger than that. Just estimating off the top of my head, I think it has around 2.8 million digits.

It's common knowledge that the most popular search engine these days and especially amongst new players is "All Search" where traffic counts for little. I don't even bother with Places Search....its just a competition of who has most campers or Bots. From my own survey which i carried out, i do not get many sales generating from Places Search, which is expected as i'm deeply buried in the most popular keywords for my sector.

Because of lack of effective SL Marketing tools a lot of shops resort to "Lucky chairs, freebies or dollarbies" as their main marketing strategy....and to be honest it's one of the easiest to do. I myself would prefer to hold a 50% sale or something over a limited period.

Well i agree with you...it's no ones business how i set my permissions for items i create and sell, even if its to my disadvantage...its my loss!

I have some non-prim pure-texture outfits from 2005, and they look really dated compared to the non-prim pure-texture outfits available today... I certainly wouldn't have paid hundreds of lindens for them. That's using the same technology.

Well theres at least one mud wrestling referee who might disagree with you about that

No Phil will agree with me. He knows ALL search is the important engine to focus on. Being high in Places Search is just additional gravy!

Beauty and quality are timeless. I personally never found flexi hair attractive, give me prim hair any day. I have bought a lot of hair since then but my favs are still Snood Hair from Rita Groshomme circa 2/06 and some ETD designs from that same year. After all of this time and all these improvements, my favorite dress is and will always be a dress I couldn't really afford to buy at the time. Blue Sparkle latin dress by swaffete Firefly. That dress is now 3 yrs - 11 months old and I still have not ever seen anything else quite like it.

And yet with 40+K of items in inventory, most of them really very nice and timeless, I still shop and buy.

That's improvement to designs and PSD templates over time. You would expect improvements especially from those earliers days. I'm talking technologial improvements by adding scupltie collars or shoulder pads or whatever to finish off your garment. Eventually most current designers will know how to make sculpties and apply textures to them and add them into their creations....the difference in quality will then come down to purely to designs, styles and textures used.

Um, yep, that's my point. That advances in skill and introduction of new techniques by designers will make older products "dated" even in the absence of technological improvements in SL.

That's not to say that technical improvements in SL aren't desirable, mind you, just that the importance of this "technological ceiling" appears awfully overblown to me.

Ya maybe. But as I said Im not a shopkeeper Im just a customer. And is only about 300 people who come to my place in SL every day who have bought clothes and stuff from shops in SL so in the great scheme of things I suppose where and how they shop doesnt really compare to the 1000s of people who dont come to my place.

Lol- a clever dick.............not!


How about seomething a bit more meanigful from extract written in Secondlife

"> In contrast - implementing actual in world sound ( i.e. not streamed from a
> shout cast ) seems to be highly limited – primarily by the 10s upload limit
> and the incredible difficulties in making sure that people hear them

It is also a bandwidth problem. As zero points out, the music has to
be delivered to all in the sim/parcel. We load already all the
textures and other info from SL. If your client does not yet have a
texture, you see grey. Same for sound files: not yet delivered to the
client, they cannot be played. Assuming you add a sound download of 3
MB or more that would either mean to wait much longer to see the
virtual world or have the sound playing very late.

Over all implementing larger sound files (and they will be used) would
take down SL performance a lot. And it is already slow...

The disadvantage loosing more over all performance would be much
higher than the advantage of having large inworld sound files.You
needed to listen in Sims without textures with avatars wearing nothing
or only all the same to reduce textures to be delivered."


I'll be inclined to believe the above then to listen to any further nonsense from you!

Thinking about it logically the above quotation makes a lot of sense. Even loading a current 10 sec sound file can inccur lag before it starts playing. I see that with a number of my gesture files which plays a wav file. just imagine trying to load a file that is 20 times larger. Its not feasable...and i don't think the SL platform could handle it even it wanted to.

Well lets say for the next 5 years nothing is added to the SL Tools. I would guess the difference between "how a product is made" during 2009 -2014 would be a lot less than the differences between 2003-2006.....thats not to say there won't be improvements, it just won't be at the same rate as during those earlier days...it goes back to the tapering off on the "improvement" curve.


You add a new cool tool (like a sculptie)...the improvement to production of garments will be a steep improvement with tons of new innovations....before it becomes standardised and all new creators coming into market will apply that same method to making their own garments....and thus the improvement curve from new innovations once again begins to taper off.

Actually things do change, all the time. I have only been in SL for about a year, yet I have seen evolution as far as 'fashion'. Even in the past few days I have seen changes, new styles which directly correlate to new styles IRL.

Here is an example of what I am talking about:



I have been seeing this skirt style lately IRL on fashion sites, etc. In the past 3 days, I have seen at least 4 dresses made in this style in the fashion blogs. SL fashion trends will follow RL fashion trends, and will evolve along with them. Never finished

Big changes happen too. Sculpted clothing parts for one. With the introduction of the sculpty, SL fashion was transformed. And perhaps at some point, the avatar mesh will be addressed? That would be another big one.

I declare Rene the winner of the sound file length limitation argument. Yay!

But it is still a moot argument. Creativity and the tools available do not go hand in hand. That ties into my paint example; So many improvements since then but 99.9999 percent of artists will never be able to do what Michelangelo did. Just because someone has sculpties doesn't mean they can make a more attractive dress then my old Blue Sparkle. Just because someone goes out and buys the latest PS with 3d painting doesn't mean they can create something better then someone with Gimp. The right tools in the hands of an artist do make creation easier but the right tools do not create an artist. I own 3ds max, Maya and Photoshop and Gimp but the only thing I can draw is flies(as my Dad used to say).

If products look "dated" because they're using old technology or just because they're using old techniques, they're still not going to outcompete the new stuff... so long as people keep building new stuff.

Limitations aren't always a bad thing. Limits can inspire creativity too by forcing us to come up with solutions. I know one of my favourite RL dresses came out of having only 1/2 a yard of the vintage fabric I wanted to use.