And what are the financial implications of sculpties?

At L$10 per image file upload, we'd better have our UVmap right first time! Or is there a way to view them fully shaped and mapped offline?

There is a sculptie preview option before you upload. And 10L is about four cents US. Not something to fret over too much I don't think.

Beta grid uploads are free.

so thats what the beta grid is for






I love the beta grid cuz i run around to every store and buy everything so i can play with it for free

This may sound like a stupid question to you guys but once you upload one ( and i did get a free one to try it ) what do you do with it? How do you use it?

Elinah

But I can't even log into the beta grid - I joined after they copied our names! Bamboozled at every turn

Financial Implications?

Well if the scupltie map is sent to the client as a texture, we all know that there are people here that will undoubtedly rip those using techniques already documented in these forums.

So I would hazard a guess that sooner or later scupltie textures (for single prim objects,)will appear as freebies or near freebies and thus drive down the price of those type of sculpties.

However I imagine that the better designers will incorporate a sculptie prim into a more complex set of linked prims. Those types I would imagine will hold their value.

And sculptie avatars would be "gold pressed latignum" of the SL world

10L for each new prim shape can add up to real money after awhile.

Personally, I'm for MUCH higher upload charges.

Why?

Because I hate server lag.

Guess what happens every time you load a texture. It's stored. For a loooooong time.

Then, when you want something, guess what - it's gotta be looked up; picked out from aaaaall the other stuff ever made and used in the world.

Or when you enter an area - everything rezzes slowly due to the deluge of textures pouring in to you.

This is one form of "lag pollution" of our world... sooner or later, it's going to be an ugly, ugly problem. Gb of textures, then Tb then... I dunno what they call it. And I'd bet 95% will never be used again, or used only in 1 or 2 instances that nobody cared about any more.

I think it was Flip that proposed charging X $L per texture, where the bigger it was, the more you paid. Really good idea, folks.

Ah, and as for what to 'do' with the higher upload charges - no need for it to be a pure economic sink... consider dividing it by 100 and making a monthly, gridwide Lottery or something? It's not like the winner would go wild with textures...

No different to how it is now. Maybe they need a file size limit instead.

One way to reduce endless production of more textures would be to build a good texture browsing, searching, purchasing system, with tagging and tag search, into the interface, so people are less driven to make near duplicates of things they would be willing to buy if they could just find them easily.

I'll bet there's at least a thousand copies of the flag of theeach nation which have users in SL, as one example, which might have been avoided if people could just put flag France, flag Germany, etc., into a search field and poof! there's a flag of France to buy for a few lindens.


A maximally useful sculptie previewer would allow the user to walk around the object, look at it from all sides, like one would do once it's in existence inworld. The same could be said for clothing too, a maximally useful clothing previewer would allow you to put the clothes on your avatar, sit down and see how the skirt looks in a sitting pose, check to see if the texture part of the clothing matches the sculpty prim skirt, etc., before uploading the data to the servers.

Actually it's a silly idea. No matter how big the texture is, it's still referenced by a 36 digit UUID. Searches in the database will no be faster or slower depending on texture size. Searches are done via UUID. And contrary to popular belief, LL does do garbage collection. Once an item, be it a texture, prim, sound, notecard, is no longer referenced by anyone's inventory or anything in world, it is deleted from the database.

Elinah--
Once you have the sculptie texture uploaded:
- Rez a new sphere prim
- Edit the prim
- Change the prim type to Sculpted (it will show a generic Sculpted texture)
- Left click the Sculpted texture
- Navigate your inventory to find the sculptie texture you uploaded and select it

That should do it