Linden Lab – Page 135

November 27, 2013

Questions About New Tax Requirements For Second Life Garners New Information

When Linden Lab recently blogged about new tax requirements people still had several questions regarding many matters relating to those questions. Chief amongst those questions was what exactly a transaction is.

Over at SLUniverse Desmond Shang has posted some details from a response he received from Linden Lab:

“Thank you for contacting us with your concerns. As mentioned in the blog post Required Tax Documentation – Second Life, the reporting criteria for 1099-K is 200+ transactions AND $20,000+ in a calendar year.

Transactions are currently defined as sell orders placed on the LindeX and applies per person not per avatar. How that order is filled does not currently impact the transaction count. For example, if you place a sell order for L$5,000 and that order is matched with three different residents while being filled, it counts as one transaction.

Separately, IRS criteria on withholding taxes is only on the transaction count itself; withholding is only required if we do not have a valid W-9 or W-8BEN on file.”

So that clears up what a transaction is

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November 24, 2013

Rome Coming To Versu But When Will Versu Come To The Android Or Second Life?

Emily Short has a teaser on her blog for a new Versu title : Coming To Versu. All the teaser contains is an image and the word “Rome“. Now as we all know, Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor was the Versu port to Android. On that blog post someone asks:

“How’s the Android port coming along by the way? =)”

Emily replies: “I’m afraid I’m not in a position to announce a date on that. I hear you, though.”

Versu, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is Linden Lab’s interactive fiction product. There are plans to allow user generated content on the platform so it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Linden Lab don’t seem to advertise Versu that well, which is not going to surprise long term Second Life users. There’s surely scope for an official Versu blog of sorts to keep people updated. I’m also surprised that Linden Lab don’t use Second Life to promote Versu.

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November 22, 2013

Qarl – The Simplest Solution Is The Best One – And Collision Bones Are Indeed MUCH Simpler Than The Mesh Deformer

The arguments regarding the collision bones versus Mesh Deformer solution continue to rage in the Second Life forum. The problem with solutions is that better is very very subjective, both solutions have pros and cons and neither of them are the perfect solution.

Personally I’d have preferred to see a two state solution here because the Mesh Deformer and the Liquid Mesh type solution should have been able to work side by side as a server side value as to whether a mesh needs to be deformed was part of the Mesh Deformer solution. Therefore if a content creator went with the Liquid Mesh style solution, they would just have changed the value of their mesh to signify it did not need to be deformed by the deformer.

However when forming an opinion on solutions it’s useful to get feedback from people who know what they’re talking about and former Linden Karl Stiefvater (Qarl Fizz, formerly Qarl Linden) has responded largely positively to the news that Linden Lab are adding extra bones to the Second Life skeleton to aid content creators to make Mesh clothing that fits various avatar shapes. This is despite the fact that Linden Lab are not implementing his Mesh Deformer solution.

I say largely because Qarl has some complaints about the way his Mesh Deformer project has been received at Linden Lab and quite frankly I agree with him. However in a statement on the Mesh Deformer Jira Storm-1716 Qarl says:

“Several people have asked me – this seems like the best place to answer.

LL’s assessment here is mostly good. in almost all situations, the simplest solution is the best one – and collision bones are indeed MUCH simpler than the mesh deformer. as i see it, collision bones have two downsides: 1) they are substantially harder to use for the person creating the garment and 2) probably don’t track as well to the avatar shape.
in the end, the evaluation must be made by the content creators who use the tool.

i will reiterate that the two year delay and refusal to communicate are unacceptable.”

Are there politics at play in Linden Lab’s decision? I honestly don’t know but we’ll come back to that later. The fact of the matter is that Linden Lab have gone with a solution that will largely work as intended.

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November 21, 2013November 21, 2013

Forget PIOF, New Marketplace Merchants Should Provide Tax documentation

Over the last few weeks Linden Lab have announced some changes for account holders. The first, back on November 11th was that new marketplace merchants would be required to put payment info on file before being able to open a store.

The second was more recently, on November 19th Linden Lab blogged about required tax documentation. These issues aren’t linked but I feel they should be and in doing so, Linden Lab would be killing two birds with one stone.

Wait wait wait, the tax documentation is only for those who have gross income of USD$20,000 and make 200 transactions in a calendar year, right? Well not quite, the tax documentation is certainly required if people meet that threshold, but at that point Linden Lab will file a 1099-K with the IRS, the documentation is required for Linden Lab to be able to file a 1099-K, but Linden Lab can ask for this information anyway.

Amazon do this with Kindle Direct Publishing. I haven’t yet published my international best seller and award winning novel, but if I wanted to do that via KDP, I have to fill out a W8-BEN for Amazon to file. The W8-BEN is the non US Citizen equivalent of a W9 form. When I logged into KDP today I saw this:

An Image Should Be Here — Tax Information Incomplete

The missing account information was soon revealed to me after I clicked Update Now:

You may need to squint to read that so I’ll type it:

“Amazon is required by US tax regulations to request information regarding your tax status under US law. Required US tax identification and information has not yet been submitted. Complete your tax information to begin selling on Amazon.”

Let’s just bold that last sentence to emphasise the point: “Complete your tax information to begin selling on Amazon.” So that’s before I’ve sold a single book, before I’m anywhere near 200 transactions, indeed it prevents me from making 1 transaction.

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November 20, 2013

Linden Lab Launch Fitted Mesh Project Viewer

Linden Lab, whom have recently rediscovered the beauty of blogging about developments have unveiled a gem of a post today:

Making Mesh Garments Fit Better

This could be pretty damn epic, although the proof will be in the pudding. In unveiling this project viewer Linden Lab have decided to go beyond the controversial Liquid Mesh solution and Qarl’s Mesh Deformer Project and release their own solution. The blog post explains that there are problems with getting Mesh clothing to fit the various shapes of Second Life avatars, as opposed to system clothing which just simply fits. In the blog post LL discuss how users have so far been addressing the issue :

“Users have developed two approaches to address these problems:

Rigging garments to the “collision bones” of the avatar skeleton (often marketed as “Liquid Mesh”). This works in current Viewers for some body parts, but there are some avatar shape parameters that do not have corresponding collision bones, so garments do not adapt to fit everywhere on the body.

The “Mesh Deformer” project added code to the Viewer to dynamically compute how to modify each garment shape by looking at how the vertices of the avatar were changed from that of the female and male base shapes.

The Linden Lab development team has studied both approaches, and compared their effectiveness, maintainability, and performance. Neither approach completely eliminates the occasional need for an alpha clothing layer to prevent small parts of the avatar skin from appearing through garments, but both work quite well at resizing garments so that they fit the avatar and move naturally with it. While the collision bones method requires the creator to do some additional rigging, we have decided that because it leverages more of the existing avatar shape system it is likely to be the more maintainable solution and to perform better for a wider range of users.”

However don’t get too excited just yet, this project is far from complete and things could change that make your efforts creating a ton of clothing here, pretty redundant.

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