Redundancy

The Grid All Hail The Central Grid has become windy of late so I decided to set the trees’ flexible wind setting to 0.3 from 0.5 but, discovered that when the parent script changed the setting, it immediately reverted to the old value. After all, an old LSL bug bit me on the backside. When a user specifies a new height, the tree sections have to deactivate their flexibility in order to resize and move toward, or away from, the center. Of course they then have to reset their flexibility to waft in the virtual breeze; and they were individually doing just that to counteract the parent’s new flexible parameters.

Realizing what was happening not only solved the problem of the phantom flexible wind value, but also afforded me the opportunity to take that code out of the child scripts so that all they do now is size and move themselves. llSetLinkPrimitiveParams() is a wonderful command that now allows my parent script to do everything except resize the plants. Global sizing doesn’t work because the sections must always be .01m thick. It’s just another Second Life example of something that doesn’t scale.

Explore or Shop?

The Fate Gardens sim is built around and into a mountain with an ancient stone forum area, a swampy boardwalk, a dwarven mountain gate, a little hidden cave, a super sekret laboratory, and a couple of quiet beaches to explore.  Unfortunatley, the comments and behaviours I’ve compiled indicate that people have a hard time shopping in the sim.  Having items scattered throughout the build, requiring people to walk or fly around to various areas, is confusing and unameniable.  Another odd item that’s been mentioned regularly is that, although the product is fully functionally visible on the landscape, in such a unique fantasy setting, people can’t envision the trees placed in their “real world” home and office environments.  My attempts to provide some virtual-style entertainment seems to be cutting into the sales that support the sim in the first place.

Much as I dislike the idea of scrapping the environment that’s evolved from my imagination, it seems that the business needs a more traditional build, in which the trees are quickly found and seen in a familiar type of setting, in order to survive.  Granted this is likely not the only reason figures have slipped over the past couple of months.  One is the holiday listings of Christmas Trees and such that are already disappearing from Search.  But I believe, based on what people have said and done, that a complete rebuild of the sim will make a difference to a number of shoppers.  Ideas and suggestions are of course welcome.  In fact, a few comments on the blog will be nice in general.

Metaverse Exchange

Metaverse Exchange seems a nice change of pace from other listing sites. So far the uploads and edits have been intuitive and instantaneous; the speed and colour schemes are nice; and there seems to be a bit more activity than I’ve seen on the others. I’ll list the same items there that I’ve put on metaLIFE and see how they perform side-by-side for a couple of weeks. Will let y’all know the results as soon as they’re tallied.

The Fate Gardens Apple Tree Listing on Metaverse Exchange

metaLIFE

The Fate Gardens brand is now listed on metaLIFE. So far I’ve added the seasonal Ice and Mardi Gras trees, and am in the processes of adding the falling fruit trees to the listings. My plan is to sell via the website with only one vendor on the homestead to provide an inworld gifting option. I really really like the ease of content management and especially the use of existing texture UUIDs to provide graphics for the web and vendor displays. After delisting from XStreet, and having surveyed all the available options of web-based malls, this one seemed the most tailor made to fit my needs. We’ll see how successful the brand proves to be and report back here in a month or two.

The Fate Gardens Mardi Gras Tree listing on metaLIFE

Metaplace

Metaplace will be closing January 1, 2010 after a fair attempt at producing a 2.5D platform.  They didn’t seem to put much effort into community building; a few tools were there, but no incentive to participate.  I created an account around the time its release hit SLU forums and tried my hand at building a garden “world.”  The look and feel didn’t particularly appeal to me.  The idea of selling assets for game coins didn’t either.  If I’m going to work as a virtual world hobbiest, it has to at least pay for itself with real currency.  Otherwise, these environments only serve as 3D Facebooks and aren’t really worth replacing melted video cards annually.  Below are a couple of pictures for the sake of recording:

Painting the Ground: wish we had this feature in Second Life

Three copies of the Acer each displaying one of the textures