Misleading advertisements?

I was in a furniture store recently and they boasted their rugs and beds to have hundreds of animations in them and thus they charge more lindens for more animations. Out of curiosity I decided to count the number of animations in a rug that said it had 139 animations/poses.

So I went to "Buy" the product and waited for the list to appear of all the items in the contents I would receive if I were to buy it. I counted the number of poses in the contents and only came up with (if I can remember,..83?). I then "Tried" the product only to find that you can use around 42 poses in the menu that comes up. I couldn't, for the life of me, find any other poses in the menu system.

I asked an employee about this as I was later counting the poses in the beds, and he didn't really have an answer for me as the owner/maker was not in. He tried to say I was counting the wrong bed and showed me another, so I counted that too, same thing......I left a little discouraged to think this store is selling their products for thousands of lindens. The last bed I checked was selling at L$5999 and said it had 566 poses. A counted again and only came up with (if I remember, 373 poses?) in the contents and again the menu options only allowed a set number of poses.

Am I the only one wondering if this is misleading? Am I paranoid? Maybe there's another explanation but I haven't been able to find one yet. By the way, I was checking simply because I myself wanted to make an animated bed to sell too and I wanted to see how they were put together, so to speak.

Has anyone else experienced this? What did you find out? I won't post the vendor here but if you'd like a LM to the area, let me know.....curious...

Could it be that animations does not equal poses?

Ie, by combining animations in different ways they are arriving at the high number? Still doesn't explain only 27 in the menu though.

I can think of four possibilities for the issue with number of poses, in addition to the one Mitzy suggested:

1. The creator is deliberately exaggerating.

2. The creator did not actually count, and is just guessing at the numbers.

3. The system is acting up, and not all contents are loading for you. This unfortunately happens from time to time.

4. Some of the animations may be referenced via UUID in the script, in which case their presence in the prim contents would not be necessary.


As for menu behavior, my best guess, assuming the creator is not dishonest, is that the script is only capable of handling 27 animations at a time, but that the user can change something simple, such as a notecard list, to determine which 27 out of the total hundreds that is. If that's the case, then it wouldn't be untrue to state the total number of animations as the usable total. It would just be a little incomplete not to mention explain the menu limitations.

That certainly helps to understand what's maybe going on, I was just in the store and made a recount to be sure of my numbers, I changed the rug info...

Are you sure all the menu choices are animations and not ways into a sub menu? I've been misled that way, thinking that the name on a menu button was just one animation when in fact it opened a sub-menu with several animations in.

Raunchier pose selections may be hidden in menus that are only accessible to the owner. The precaution is sometimes used in stores to prevent cheapskates using the wares for impromptu rumpy-pumpy sessions.

Also products based on the MLPv2 and XPOSE systems have a 'Play' feature whereby quite a number of poses may be arranged to play at preset intervals or they may be selected by means of 'Forward' or 'Backward' buttons.

I recently made a 'wearable' that has 132 poses entirely arranged as play sequences. There are only 15 pose selection buttons. In two cases fifteen poses are selected by a single button each. Also something like 20% of the animation files are used in more than one combination to create new and very different poses.

Basically there are any number of ways that the product may not match its description on a cursory examination, in which case you should contact the creator if you have any doubts or questions.

If he or she does not respond within a reasonable time frame then forget about making the purchase altogether.

it is quite common to "brag" about the sheer number of animations used in a piece of furniture, especially sexbeds. The (way smaller) number of resulting selections in the menu is kept moderately secret.


let me elaborate:

a bed, with three cuddles for couples, three sex poses for couples, a threesome, and a foursome.

that makes 8 choices in the menu.
but inside it has 19 animations.
now, what looks more impressive, "8 animations" or "19 animations"?

bye,
LC

I wish this was the case, but unlike a texture an animation can not be started by referencing a UUID, unless it is one of the built in animations it must reside within the prim.

It can however be stopped by UUID.

Most likely, it's gross exaggeration, either by intent or neglect. I would be suspicious of any unverifiable claims made at this shop.

As Beverly points out, only standard animations can be started by UUID, and counting those would be slimy. In general, unless SL is lagging on content display (which IS a big problem with big inventories!) the advertised anim count should match the content.

There are cases where this isn't true. A product can have anims inside a non-root prim, in which case, you can't count them. This doesn't seem to be the case here, since you can see them. But, if the product has more than one prim to click to get a (different) pose menu, it's possible it has multiple engines and hidden animations. (I sell a hot tub that has two duplicate engines, configured for each side of the hot tub and running independently. But, they have the same animations, so I couldn't claim double the count with a straight face.)

I remember seeing a bed that claimed 50 poses. When I checked it out, it had only 25, so I asked the creator, who said "SWAP!". I consider that slimey, but unfortunately, it's probably not as unusual as it should be. Latest MLPV2 allows configurable swap and up to 6 avatars, so one pose could be counted as 720 poses, by that method! (OK, you probably couldn't actually configure that many swap combinations ...)

Chaz Longstaff wrote a script that actually counted things for MLP/MLPV2, for "truth in advertising". You might be able to find it in the MLPV2 wiki page (SL wiki, under content creation, inworld builder tools). But that's only helpful if you can drop the script in -- it's intended to be used by content creators.

Sorry for the necropost, but just saw this for the first time, looking for something else.

It's perfectly reasonable for a maker to advertise the number of animations, rather than poses. But in any case, the numbers don't matter, the quality of the content does. It's relatively easy to find hordes of free and ripped animations and load a bed up with hundreds of animations carelessly strung together in hundreds of poses. It's a lot more work to make a product where the animations fit the product, with artful sequences of poses suiting a variety of uses.

It's impossible to make one that fits all avatar shapes, so I advice against buying any no-mod menu furniture that you plan to use extensively, unless your avatar shape is fairly typical and you're happy with defaults. (Even with adjustment, many poses can't be made to fit unusual shapes.)

I have seen some consider the position of the av -for example ...from "male on top" to "female on top" using the switch ball feature- considered a "new" animation for counting purposes.
So you have 30 "animations" switching the user on the balls suddenly makes it 60.

Right? I don't think so.

As always try before you buy and if you are dropping 5000L then try before you hit "Pay."

Oh, I didn't know that. Thanks for the info, even if the thanks is a bit late.




Great information, Lear (as usual). I definitely learned some things from this that I didn't know before. I, for one, am glad you made the decision to necropost in this case. Thanks.

Yeah. Virtually all the multi-pose things I've seen in world have that. Even if you look at the old freebie MLP thing - they claim 64 poses or whatever, but you really only have 32 buttons - 32 actual "pairs of animations". On our multi-pose stuff I always advertise how main "pairs" or "animation sets" are in there. Typically we will reuse a few poses in different positions, but it still comes out to a number that is far less than the actual number of "animations/poses" that are in the bed.

Does it hurt my business to have stuff with more anims than many beds/items, but advertise that we have left? I dunno. I don't care. I'm after the customer satisfaction rating anyway. lol

(I did notice one time that as I can't run my graphics program and SL at the same time - I had logged out to make the graphic for the item and realized that I hadn't counted. I knew that there had to be at least 40 in there, so I just put "Over 40 Pose Pairs!" in the advert. When I logged back in I realized that there were actually over 60. Since I had under estimated, I just left the graphic as it was - it does have over 40 pose pairs. Though I haven't heard much about that item, I suspect that customer satisfaction is quite high there... they are getting 50% more poses for free in their minds).

It's no different from "1000 bytes in a kilobyte" disk capacity.

If it takes 60 animations to implement 30 sets of poses with two avatars per pose/scene, then that's 60 animations. Just remember what the rules are, and verify what you really get according to the rules.

It's a good thing for us animators that it's this way.

It's helpful that you can get the list of animations running by UUID, for debugging or for stopping them (and for AO purposes). It's handy to be able to stop them by UUID, for "stop all animation" tools.

But given we can get a list of all animations, it's good that you can't start an animation by UUID. Otherwise, animation theft would be rampant and far worse than it is today. (It would be as bad as texture theft, back when you could simply use control-alt-shift-T to print the keys of all textures on a prim.) This is beside the point that for value-added sales purposes (i.e., selling to content makers), animators have to sell full perms. Let's not go into that mess here!

When counting, I count one pose per pose button (or, for sequences, one per sequence step, when they don't appear separately as buttons).

I count one animation per animation.

I have a number of poses that reuse animations, so don't be surprised to see "60 poses and 80 animations". And I generally say "over xxx" because I add stuff all the time, but rarely update the literature.

These days, I mostly skip the literature and let folks play. But then, I'm a marketing moron. I'd rather have fun than maximize profit in any case.

Yes, I've made my beds and I layed in them too, hehehe. So right now I'm using the MLP and have only counted the buttons in the menu as 1 pose even tho they are couples poses. I thought this way people would be happy with the product should they buy it. I also made the beds mod and copy, but the animations and scripts no mod, no transfer. This being my first kick at animated beds, I hope I've done my research, thanks everyone for your posts, it really helped me understand a lot!