Ciaran Laval

January 21, 2013

Kitely Market Has Early Bird Offers

Kitely are currently developing a marketplace for their virtual world, one they hope will also be able to serve other virtual worlds. They have recently blogged some information about how their market will work and they are offering an early bird promotion for merchants to apply for, the details can be found here.

The Kitely market will be different from the Second Life marketplace, for a start there will be listing fees, although I’m unsure how often you have to pay a listing fee, or whether it’s a one off fee. The listing fees are:

Add product: 100 KC
Add variation: 25 KC

KC being Kitely Credits. Now the reason for the variation fee is because variations will be listed under one product, so instead of seeing umpteen different listings for a shirt in different colours, you’ll have a listing with variations.

Kitely are also offering some early bird offers to try and encourage merchants to start setting up shop:

Early-Bird Discounts for All Merchants

There will be a 50% discount on listing fees until the market opens for buyers.

In addition, we will provide a special free world that registered merchants (see below) can use for creating their objects. Since we don’t charge upload fees, this means that even users using the Free Plan will be able to create items without any cost except for the listing fees. This world will only be available until the marketplace opens.

However if you’re an established merchant, you can apply to be a featured merchant and get even better discounts.

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January 21, 2013

Second Life General Discussion Turning Into Schoolyard Farce

I don’t use the Second Life Forums as much as I once did, many reasons for that, the first being that the forums lost their charm when Linden Lab decided to ditch Resident Answers and move from real forum software to an all singing, all dancing, more than a forum software. Since then they’ve moved onto a second version of all singing, all dancing, more than a forum software and it’s still rather cack to me, but these things happen. People who used the really old forums didn’t like the transition to the version of the forums I enjoyed.

The creation forums are generally good and full of helpful advice. The merchants area is an area of healthy and vibrant discussion with some spiky threads and healthy disagreement. The technology forums are full of good information and whereas people can disagree, there’s good participation from Lindens there, which make it more useful. General discussion is an area where you’d think you’d gone back in time to the days when you were at school, with obvious cliques, trolling, flame bait and what seems to be bullying. I refrain from calling it outright bullying because I don’t know if there’s some sort of forum cartel at play feigning injury in order to whip up discussion.

The really sad thing though is that some of the participants in these playground antics have forum ranks of Helper or Advisor, they are supposedly responsible residents and yet they are fully engaged in these silly antics, which quite frankly they should be embarrassed about.

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January 21, 2013January 21, 2013

Dwarfins Creators Unleash Dwarfins Avatars

The creators of Dwarfins, the breedable game, have unleashed some avatars to accompany their breedable Dwarfins, so that you too can look like a Dwarfin! This has manay advantages, some of which I’ll get to later. The avatars are rigged mesh and come in three styles for males and three styles for females. The styles are Peasant, Farmer or Viking, which are the traits of the breedable version of Dwarfins.

Each style comes with a choice of four outfits, eye colours, hair colours, skin colours and if you’re a male, beards, female Dwarfins don’t have beards, they do however have chestpieces! There’s also a weapon!

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January 20, 2013

The Trouble With Mesh

I haven’t yet released much into the wild in terms of mesh and the reason for that is largely me being a fussy bugger. The trouble with mesh is also part of the beauty of mesh, you have extra control over mesh and this leads to me constantly deciding I can do this better and never actually finishing my build, ignoring the advice I was given years ago in Second Life that at some point you have to say to hell with it, that will do, or you’ll never finish your build.

Years ago that was with relation to the dotted lines that appear on builds when you have certain settings, I would try and find ways to avoid it, someone then said to me that you just have to roll with it. I’m back there now with mesh, not with regards to dotted lines, but with worrying that I could be more efficient, that I can make the inside a lower LOD than the outside, as the inside doesn’t need to be seen from so far away, whether I should worry about inside faces in the roof space that probably won’t be used …. but what if someone wants to use it? Arghhhh!

I can then build a very basic roof, with insides, all in a low land impact modular roof, but you can’t rez inside said roof, you can drag things inside and rez them that way but that means any scripted items that rez inventory won’t work. This constant second guessing of use cases becomes stifling in the creation process, but I realise it’s me whose stifling myself.

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January 17, 2013

With Linden Homes In Short Supply, Is It Time To Bring Back First Land?

Whilst tier is too damn high for many of us, one area where people don’t seem to be able to get enough of homes is with Linden Homes. I’ve seen a few posts now in the forums complaining about the lack of choice and availability of Linden Homes.

Here’s one: Lindens advertising Linden Homes but there is none

“Why are Linden homes being advertised on my dashboard when there is none presently available at the moment. This is supposed to be an AVAILABLE benefit for premium users. I’d rather have a home then an airplane lol.” complains the OP, but that’s not the only thread I’ve seen about Linden Homes.

I think Tyche said recently that Linden Home occupancy had dropped slightly, but was still a very healthy 97%. However the last thing we need in Second Life is for Linden Lab to open a new land mass, so what can be done to help people find their Linden Homes?

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