Items for sale

Thank you Linden Lab. Not.

According to this lovely post from Colossus Linden and the Commerce Team the customers demand that they not be allowed access to free and cheap items and that even more expensive items aren't charged enough commission on sales.

I can continue to sell my numerical best selling items - each of which are dollarbies - as long as I'm willing to pay Linden Lab L$2/sale net. I think not. In addition, every item L$1 and over will cost L$10/month to list. I list about 100 items. OK, paying £2.50 per month or so to have those 100 items available isn't dire and I certainly shift more than L$1000 in sales every month BUT I already 10% commission on that. Now they're going to add an extra flat fee and they're going to punitively charge on anything less than L$60 that you sell. That is actually a lot of my sales that are about to be punished for not being expensive.

I shall be moving my items to Apez.biz since I already use their service for some items. Having looked at my sales over a few weeks with Apez I coughed up the L$3000 up-front for a commission free service. If Linden Lab decides to alter its current policy and charge such a flat fee, I might reconsider. I shall certainly be looking at other alternative ways to make my items available in-world via the web. I believe there are a couple of other competitors already.

I am not the only person to take umbrage. Ordinal Malaprop for one has already stopped all her listings. It will be interesting to see what the ultimate impact of this is. I suspect a fair number of "dead" items will remain, because their account holders no longer use Second Life and won't care that their account balance becomes negative. In the meantime, Linden Lab is nicely moving out at least some people who do well items via their service - if they move a sufficient number of them they'll end up with the lovely effect of concentrating the deadwood rather than their avowed intent of clearing it out. Way to go!

Linden Lab is finally biting the bullet and addressing a range of issues around content control, multiple grids, intellectual property and the like. There's a long post laying out the start of their position on their blog. The post, if you're interested, links out to five forum threads that discuss it too, in the headings that Cyn identifies.

I'm not going to say that I necessarily agree with everything there, although I need to think about it before I dive into the forums once again. What I will say is that it looks like a reasonable start to a very thorny issue and unlike some other "discussions" this one looks like there are still a range of questions so there is a real chance for discussion rather than LL presenting their solution and then never deviating from it.

So if you're concerned about IP and content in SL, including reasonable and unreasonable copying of content, there's a good place to share your ideas now. And who knows, if Linden Lab get a decent lead on this, you might help shape the way the legislation forms around the world as MUVEs become integrated into the legal system.

If you're a biologist you might recognise the shape of these graphs in a shot. If you're an endocrinologist or a reproductive biologist or similar I would hope that you do. The curves show the cycle of hormones in a normal menstrual cycle.

As becomes more obvious when you follow the big red arrow and squint at those few sandy, blue and tanned pixels at the bottom - they're DrDoug Pennell standing talking to me (if you squint really hard you can see a few pale pixels that are me, but my dress blends almost perfectly into the platform we're on) - these are the hormone graphs writ huge.

This is the latest highly visible project I've delivered in Second Life™ and it is a project that combines the ability to stand back and look at the graphs (which are hosted inside a giant ovary along with other materials to support DrDoug's teaching, location to be announced later, when he has finished building) with an ability to explore the graphs up close and personal as you walk/fly along their tracks and ideally take part in the quiz en route. What is not obvious in this picture, is that near where we're standing is a start button. Pressing the start button will make the graphs vanish and show the starting quiz question on each of the four hormone routes. Answer correctly and the quiz panel vanishes, the next section of track appears and you can walk along it to the next question. Complete all the questions and reach the end, race your friends... have fun.

There's more here than meets the eye - if you want to know some of the problems and solutions keep an eye open for an update to the Eloise Pasteur Educational Designs project pages coming soon.

This hasn't been all I've been doing since my last post about my work, but I've been working on a number of activity capture systems. Things that record where avatars spend time, what they touch and the like. It's good bread-and-butter work, but it makes for very dull pictures - here's a script I've been working on, here's another script... and fairly dull reporting, because once it's got this long, you've got the whole report. I've also been working with Ramapo on the Teen Grid but the work there is also, so far, unphotogenic - a security system that is part of the school's requirement to keep students out unless teachers are present.

Over the next few weeks, there are some interesting projects on the way. They're varied in size and impact mind. I'll be making a ruler to test numeracy skills and let people practise that skill, making yet another quiz tool, and making some magic tricks. More on these as they roll off the line.

Following the announcement that Linden Lab has bought XStreetSL and OnRez and is basically closing down OnRez - including their lovely in-world vendor system in 4 weeks time, I will be making some changes to my in-world systems, but hopefully these will be quick and easy.

First, I shall make sure all my products are listed on XStreetSL as well as OnRez, and update the products index page to show this. It's not going to be remarkably quick as there are quite a few products only listed on OnRez, but it shouldn't be too bad because all of the information is there and it's only a cut-and-paste job.

Second, if the grid ever comes back and allows shopping (I was trying this and the grid went down due to VPN outages apparently) I will be testing a new web-to-SL and networked-in-SL shopping system (new to me anyway) called Apez. It appears, from what I read, that you can set up in-world vendors and anyone can shop from them (much like the OnRez system) without being a member of Apez. If this works nicely and the vendors are reliable, I will be rolling this system out in place of my current vendors in all locations (save the ICT library where I use their commission paying vendors).

Once that decision is made keep an eye open here for an announcement, plus except my products index page to undergo a revamp where OnRez is removed from the page and Apez replaces it.

If you'd like to comment on this purchase, or like reading flames and drama, there's a forum thread about it.

The JIRA contains an issue regarding moving_start() and moving_end() events not firing correctly (even more than usual).

This causes any swings using this to fail to reset their position and rotation most times (in my test about 85% of the time) and so to jump out of their frame.

There are two solutions to this problem using the current script: you can either move the swing and reset the script (this should always work), or you can move, test, move, test and repeat until the event acts as it is meant to and your swing behaves properly.

There is an alteration to the script that can change this behaviour, but this is currently not available in-world. I am considering how to distribute it, given I have a number of people telling me they are acquiring my script as a freebie despite the licensing conditions. If you would like to contribute to the discussion, I have opened a
Get Satisfaction page for this product.

I was asked if I made a scorer tool and the answer was, sadly, a no. So, I made one. I quite often make things in this way - simple requests for items that are generally useful so I stop and make them and sell them at Linden Dollar prices.

This score system features:

• You, or a nominated scorer, can easily keep track of scores in games and contests up to 999.
  
• The colours can be set to any of white, red, blue, green, yellow, cyan and purple. This affects the front and top of the panel as well as the colour of the numbers.
  
• There are three different scoring buttons so you can set different scores easily. This will handle penalties scores too.
  
• There is a system to let you nominate the scorer so the owner can play games without affecting the scores directly.
  
• The scorecard is copy and modify so you can resize to your hearts content, apply logos to the sides and fronts if required etc. You can rez as many as you like - one per team maybe, or different scorers at different places for different games.
  

This tool is available in world in all the normal places, and on SLEx and OnRez

The Get Satisfaction page for feedback is up too.

Today I have managed to put up for sale two new items.

Item one is a texture organiser HUD. It features:

• 49 possible categories of textures
  
• 7 X 7 display area
  
• Easy to use
  
• Name Categories
  
• Simple Hide/Show function, works for any HUD position with basic building knowledge
  
• Powerful search tools for phrases within words, at the start of words and across all categories
  
• Zoom mode shows tiling as well as larger texture
  
• Accidental delete prevention: you will be offered copies of deleted textures and categories in case you click the button by mistake
  
• Options to display category names and texture names
  
• De-duplicate tool
  
• Sculpty display tool
  
• Retrieve texture key (UUID) tool for scripters
  
• Delete textures that are not full perms
  
• HUD is provided as copy/modify (although the scripts are all no-modify)
  
• Built in update tools
  

You can read more about this tool at my wiki page and soon in my products section. This organiser is ideal for the serious texture user: builder, photographer etc. as it allows easy access to so many categories. It is also suited for the educational user who can group student work or separate projects easily as they prefer. This item costs L$1000.

Also released is the long awaited movie screen and HTML-on-a-prim screen with category storage. This system allows you to custom create up to 8 categories of movies or 7 of movies and 1 of webpages and by simple to use controls access any movie or webpage saved to your bookmarks. There are access controls so you can create stand alone screens for asynchronous viewing or control the screen personally in a classroom setting. You can read more about this screen on my wiki too. This comes in 3 different sizes (4m X 3m, 10m X 7.5m and 20m X 15m) and in multi-packs at a 10% discount to the single pack price of L$500.

These items are available from all the normal outlets:

• My minimall
  
• the School Store
  
• The ICT Library.
  
• OnRez
  
• SLEx
  

Thank you to all my beta testers!