Loki's Backyard

A few words on mesh imports

2011-08-27T18:36:00.004+02:00

Earlier this week the mesh import feature was enabled on all the Second Life server channels, the new official viewer also started to be able to render the new poly mesh models and the Marketplace gave green light to selling mesh content. Three of the four major conditions for mesh import creativity launch have been fulfilled. The last one, mesh support in 3rd party viewers, will enable the experience for everyone at last and we're all looking forward to it.

Last year Prefabrica brand was split in four divisions - IMAGE for textures, SOUND for sound effects, CODE for programming solutions, and most important one - MESH for 3D model resources. Why "MESH" in March 2010? Well, technically every 3D object is a mesh, including sculpted prims of course. So, where's the big difference one might ask. It's actually not as big as it might seem, but from our point of view mesh import brings:

- the end of models created exclusively for SL - we now can use the work we've been doing for our other games and projects in SL (and vice versa). This was not possible with models made of sculpted prims - and you will see the fruits of this possibility very soon in our stores.

- improvement of workflow, as polygon mesh models are easier to texture due to custom UV maps and multiple faces. Also the 3D creative process itself is a bit easier now.

- rather smaller improvement of the quality of the 3D content. Actually there's few things polygon mesh allows that couldn't have been done with sculpties as well. The best old fashioned sculpted content looks as good as the mesh content to the end user in most cases.

- avatar appearance - here of course the biggest changes are awaited. Mesh objects can be rigged to move along with the skeleton and many see the posibilities here. However, the limitations are still present. Are you thinking about a mesh skirt? Well, probably forget about your own shape then. The thing is that the skirt (or other clothes) will adjust to a wider pelvis as the joint distance is in play, but not to a larger butt, as it doesn't affect the joints. So prepare for your belly to go through the mesh shirt, your breasts to stick through your mesh jacket and so on. Have a try yourself - we've prepared a free rigged mesh t-shirt model in the PREFABRICA mainstore. So knowing the limits and counting with them, mesh will be very helpful in some applications where sculpties couldn't compete - like sleeves and alike. However, if you're thinking complete avatars, mesh is a blessing. We've prepared first two full mesh avies: the Flufee and Yobee creatures in Dirty Lynx - and I really love the way they look and behave. (See the videos - Flufee and Yobee on YouTube) This opens up the door really and I'm looking forward to see what comes out of this.

- generally - I think there's not going to be any influx of free 3D content from the internet to SL. The amount of work and skills needed for a good performing mesh model is still about the same as before. It's only opening the doors to the new means of creation - which is a positive by all means :)

What we're up to in the nearest future "meshwise":

- we'll be releasing at least five new mesh cars in Prefabrica very soon. The Corse GP racing track will be full of them I'm sure.

- we have scheduled first mesh fullperm prefabs for release in the coming week. Sci-fi vehicles anyone? Motorbikes? The packaging is in progress now.

- taking advantage of our proved download system, we are going to provide full source downloads for all our mesh prefabs. You can get the .obj, .dae and .psd for the mesh t-shirt now in the Prefabrica mainstore.

- Dirty Lynx will continue the new avatars line and we also have some more apparel coming. Mesh in game too here.

Mesh avatars coming to Dirty Lynx

2011-08-18T11:54:00.001+02:00

Mesh beta btg video

2010-09-24T10:05:00.000+02:00

Posting just a short demo video of mesh import feature in action. We do love Ninjas in BTG :)

Search. Enough is enough?

2010-09-13T15:39:00.003+02:00

Today again, I found out that all our locations have fallen significantly in the search results. Obviously, another update in the GSA ran live recently, resulting in all the previous SEO work being worthless or even counter productive. Now, I do understand that all the systems in use evolve and change during time and I also think that the merchant's ability to adapt to the changing environment is one of the greatest advantages. But seriously, the thing is getting a bit out of control lately.

Since April, showing or not showing in the search has been one of the biggest concerns of any business in SL. Constant changes forced the owners to spend countless hours tweaking the parcel description and the description of objects on it. In my case, it's well over 600 records to be tweaked and updated. Doing it for the first time is an adventure, the second time is a must, but third such round is really ridiculous waste of the time and resources.

First, all our products had self-explanatory and clear descriptions and everything worked fine. After the "great maturity checkboxes bug" appeared, it was a bit trickier, but IF the search found us at all, we were ranking on the top. Then the picks were removed from the ranking process and more weight was put on the description of the objects on parcel. Fine, although all the descriptions remained very 'descriptive', I added the keywords in them (still obeying the english grammar rules and keeping the descriptions easy to read). Our locations with nice SEO-wise descriptions were scoring high again (yes, among records like "airport airport airport"). For a month maybe. Now, everything is different again, it seems that you can get the top position for any keyword with just an empty parcel with no description whtsoever, no objects in search and NO SEO at all. The good and readable descriptions that are advised by the Lab seem to actually LOWER your ranking. I understand the need to filter the crap out of the search, but so far, the efforts mostly meant just work for the honest merchants and some stellar results for biab freebie places.

So why is the economy not growing? In my opinion it's not the viewer wars, and neither it's the horrible first hour experience that would be the most important factor. In my opinion, it's the common user's inability to find good quality content in SL. Why would you spend time inworld on the crappy places search takes you to? Why would anyone buy L$ to purchase the worthless junk? One would think that this is the most pressing matter in the Lab, rather than introducing Display Names and other problematic shinies.

I've always supported the steps the Lab has been taking to improve the user experience in SL. I was very happy with the Viewer 2.0 introduction, our whole team has been working hard on a product based on the SharedMedia features... Only to find out that a couple of months later the product is still not ripe for a release - with just about 10% of users able to see the web on prim, it would be a fail, obviously. Lost time, lost efforts, lost money.

The new Marketplace seemed like a wonderful idea in the begining, and I still think it's a good move. However the style in which the transition is being made is totally repelling. The new system doesn't work right, most merchants didn't bother to update their listings on this BETA as the ridiculous amount of work could easily render fruitless with yet another migration wave. And yet we see the Marketplace BETA live, with access to live funds, with possibility to sell and a Big button on xStreet diverting customers to the New Marketplace. This period of two, not fully synchronized systems, employed at the same time, the confusion around them and the bugs of the premature BETA are really damaging the businesses and I'm starting to feel like a laboratory rat that's being experimented on without the painkillers.

How can anyone focus on creating new cool content when most of the time needs to be spent on simply staying visible? How can you compete by quality, when you're not to be found? Why should I pay tiers for 4 sims, and pack them with fun content (and fun content it is, 3 of our locations got featured in the Destination Guide), when I'm run over by an empty 512m parcel? I'm increasingly confused and fed up - also a reason for limited releases under our brands lately. Should we waste more energy or make the decisive move?

MetaCloud - part one - Genesis

2010-06-11T13:54:00.001+02:00

Not enough with the regions/avatars new showcase yesterday, I happen to have another video to share toady. We've been working hard the whole last year, invested a lot of time and resources into a project we'll be rolling out soon. I hope that it might actually in a way redefine the way we use and interact with the metaverse. It changed our ways, that's certain. I cannot post too many details as of yet, except for this first teaser. This is the background, our data center, monitoring HQ and playground in Second Life. In here we're creating clouds...

Avatars - machinima

2010-06-10T16:56:00.001+02:00

I'm sharing a very cool machinima shot by Tera Gearz. Taking place on Bytegang & Prefabrica, featuring our new lines of apparel - the Ichiro and Sayomi line. Enjoy and come for a visit :)

Support portal live inworld via Shared Media

2010-02-25T17:37:00.005+01:00

We're proudly launching the support solution we've been working on for quite some time. From now on, it's supereasy to get either information or direct support for any of our brands' products. Thanks to the wonders of Shared Media technology we're able to run big live screens directly inworld. Checking our knowledge base and getting in touch has never been easier :)

This is just a first step in the great adventure that the 2.0 version allows us to start. I can share only little bits of info at the moment, but we have several projects being developed that are taking advantage of the coming features. Oh and by the way... have you heard the rumors about some kind of a revolution that's coming this spring? We have :)

A gentleman will walk but never run

2009-11-24T19:16:00.001+01:00

Two weeks ago I was talking here about the need for xStreet change and here we go with the first step it seems. The Lab announced a new pricing plan for xStreet with the proclaimed purpose of reducing the clutter on the Marketplace. All listings will have a monthly 10L$ fee associated with them, the minimum xStreet provision from every sale should be 3L$ and of course, the highly discussed and emotional topic: every freebie will cost 99L$/month to be listed... The horror. Exodus from xStreet. Crash. Number of apparel listings on xStreet fell from 400k to 370k within a week (omg! :)... Everybody's leaving and #fail messages flourish on Twitter.

Well... we're not removing any of our 329 items. We're not moving towards slapt.me or any other e-commerce site as yet either. And I actually do understand the move by Lab. It's not just about freebies, but freebies are an important aspect of the whole halo.

Freebies. I'll tell you something about them, we have distributed next to a million free items both inworld and through xStreet, so I know my bit. Freebies 'sell' like hell. First thing I had to do for every free item we listed on xStreet was to turn off the sales notifications for them. They would eventually end up in spam filter otherwise, because of their brutal frequency and they'd take all the important messages sent from the same e-mail with them... Considering the pressure on my mailbox, I can quite imagine the load it imposed on the Lab's infrastructure. No wonder they're trying to solve this.

The Lindens say that freebies are often a way of free advertising... I'm not sure about that, I mean, they certainly help to raise your customer satisfaction level, they might increase the traffic and they improve your brand's image but I doubt they would be too important in a serious advertising scheme. My view of the high quality fullperm items we give away in PFB was always sort of "Look, we can afford to give away good quality - that others would sell - for free to the people, and look, we can even advertise the free items on the xStreet homepage - you're dealing with a strong, established brand, feel assured" - for us it's a way to tell our customers that we're serious about what we're doing - along with having a dedicated non-rented full sim for the brand, having a serious web presence and clear EULA for example. We don't have many freebies in PFB, but the ones we have are valuable products with thousands of high ratings and good reviews. And if I have to pay lousy 99 spacebucks a month to keep them listed on the ONLY relevant e-shop nowdays, to keep the wonderful reviews they got, then be it, I'm paying 900 a week for some of them just to be enhanced. What's the big deal. I understand the concerns of the truly altruistic individuals, who list their items out of pure goodwill and don't feel like paying for the listing. But then again, do such items really need the free exposure on a premium e-commerce site?

The non-freebie part of the unrest over the fees is a bit ridiculous to me. If the item is not able to earn enough to cover 10L$ a month from sales minus provision, then what's the point in having such item listed on an e-shop? For what, to make it impossible to find anything? I'm really fed up with browsing through the endless variations of the same worthless crap, really, aren't you? Testing, whether the various colors of the same ugly hairstyle will end on page 4 or 8 of the search results? We're one of the bigger stores, yes, and we're talking about the expenses of some 3-4k L$ a month, now really, what's the big deal again?

I think that although it might not seem so initially, the changes will prove to be a good thing in the end. Free services never work too well. I'm willing to pay for a quality service and I hope the changes we're experiencing will indeed bring more quality into xStreet marketplace. The question is how many merchants see it the way we do - with quite a short timeline for the new pricing's introduction, we'll see soon enough whether they'll bring a polished, more friendly to use marketplace, or an empty abandoned mall. And I favor the first option.

Elite visions

2009-11-06T11:31:00.003+01:00

I'd like stop for a moment at the latest big thing, or rahter two things that have been announced by the Lab recently. All the infochannels are full of it, so to no surprise it's going to be about the introduction of Nebraska and the SL Work Marketplace. The info on Nebraska and it's specifications can be found on the official blogs and is nicely summed up in Dusan Writer's article here. Briefly: The Lab has introduced a stand-alone solution for the corporates, able to run on corporate hw, behind the firewall, not connected to the main grid. It supports up to 8 regions simultaneously (up to some 800 avs), allows an advanced environment control ('rezzing' and derezzing premade sims instantly, sort of a reg api for custom avatar names, etc.), and is said to be blazing fast. With the price tag set at 55k USD, it's aim at the business use scenarios like conferencing or virtual collaboration is quite obvious.

Along with the introduction of Nebraska, another very interesting service was uncovered: The SL Work Marketplace. We're talking about a separate marketplace where the content for the Nebraska servers will be offered to the corporations - most probably in the form of whole downloadable themed regions packed with content - initially available only to the Gold Solution Providers, but intended to be more open eventually. This is something for the content creators to really watch closely - although the conditions to be met to accomplish the content transfer are quite strict (a good thing) - the benefits can be really worth the effort. I mean with a price of over 50k USD being set just for the PLATFORM licence, there really should be a correlation with the prices of the actual CONTENT for the platform.

The fact that the programme should be limited to the GSP initially had provoked some predictable reactions... the Drama and the Protests were obligatory - but to my amusement I've also seen "the Average Joe unable to meet the Gold Solution Provider requirements" argument show up - leaving me with a surreal projection where hordes of plumbers try to sell content to IBM :) Those fancy egalitarian views remind me strongly of the times 20 years ago in my country - and yes, we were on the eastern side of the iron curtain.

Let's look at the situation of content creators from the perspective of "elitism". With the virtual goods market growing rapidly, we are going to see more serious companies entering the business and I'm also quite sure the market will change as a result of that. We do need another way to distinguish between a trusted source and the piles of junk (aside from just the strong and trusted brand). The marketplace today is still bearing the burden of the old times when most of the content creators were just enthusiasts or small start-ups. It's not just xStreet, but it's very obvious there.

xStreet doesn't offer many possibilities for larger or even mid-sized businesses so far. Personally I'm missing more advertising options, exclusive campaigns, more ways for the merchants to customize the content classificaton and to personalize the look and behavior of the "e-shop" (think eBay)… we need that all and more :) What's increasingly annoying is the constant flow of petty attacks on the creators. Be it plagiarizing of products, concepts or even corporate identity, shameless advertising in the reviews by competition, fake dramas on the forums... I've also seen some senseless acts of malice recently - not just the Burning Man halo, although this one was the most obvious of them. I totally understand that such forms of business and such atmosphere rather discourage serious creative enterprises from entering the field...

A good thing that could help the marketplace reach more solid ground again might be the trusted seller (or whatever the name) label. I've read rumors and seen not much more than mist around, but if the Lab decides to do it, I'll be sure to do my best to meet the criteria, and perhaps enjoy some enhanced services. I surely wouldn't mind to have an according fee associated, if only just to rise the entry requirements and add some weight to the whole thing. And it's not just about xStreet, there's whole wide world inworld there…

In my opinion, in the end everyone profits - while the creative individuals would still have the opportunity to enter the virtual goods market and start their dream, the serious businesses and established brands will be easier to recognize, thus bringing more shopping comfort and security to the end customer majority, and with a good model of operation there will be the revenue to the Lab as well. After all - haven't others been doing that with success before? The "IBM business partner" logo that I've been placing in various webdesigns for years seems to be a good example to me :)

So my applause to the SL Work Marketplace, my support for the identification of serious developers in the Solution Provider programme (I'll have to put down the list of our corporate projects and apply soon), and good health to Nebraska!

Video from the event on Shiva

2009-10-15T20:53:00.003+02:00

I've finished the promo video from the last job we did on Shiva. I'll really have to learn to make a better machinima, but with the footage that I had, not much more could be done, I'm afraid :) Anyway, I certainly had to appreciate the advatages of CS4 while making it, I was still in a kind of limbo concerning the video editing, and preferred my old mac with FinalCut to do the job. I'm a switcher now for sure!

Proof of concept - Second Life mixed reality events

2009-09-25T13:56:00.006+02:00

We have finished the project on our Shiva region. Some promo videos are being prepared, but briefly, it was a success and we've earned a nice proof of concept for Second Life live conferencing. Now that the whole project ended with a success I'm more free to talk about it. Our job was to prepare a mixed reality event with over 20 participants IRL and some 6 staff members online. We prepared a themed full region, custom built, with significant branding elements and attention to details. We worked hard on appliances fit for the client's individual presentation needs including custom live video streams controlled via HUDs, live http communication and custom 3D modeling. One of the aspects of the project was registration and custom design of 20+ avatars. We also provided the real life on-location support and live online aid during the event itself..

We learned about a couple of things to mind when dealing with such RL/SL projects...
Don't even think about trying to run some good 20 clients on laptops in one space connected via wifi as we did. It's a nightmare. We finally employed three AP's and the machines ceased to log off in two minutes intervals and somehow seemed to be able to stay inworld. Voice and streaming video was another story though. We were wise enough to bring our own infrastructure hardware along with our machines so we have set up an improvised LAN to lend the streaming servers some solid ground. A thing to remember. It's not just the client. It's the quicktime plugin too. The more machines you use the better the chance that quicktime will install in a weird way and the media content won't stream. Then you can try your luck determining whether it's a network problem, trouble with the streaming server, or the client machine itself.

Running voice for 20 clients in a single room is a dangerous enterprise too, I must admit. I won't go deeper into explaining the difficulties we went through, but I was lucky enough to bring Frodo from Prozeta Broadcasters with me, apart from the fun from watching him declass the congress hotel IT staff, he was one of the key elements of the purely magic experience when we got it all up and working. Admittedly after some five hours of sweat and blood :)

We have a decent use case scenario to show off, everybody is happy, and the event itself was fun and fresh experience. Now, in the atmosphere of satisfaction, we're thinking about what to do about the space now, when the event is over. There's a couple of paths we're considering right now. We're thinking about making some decent roleplay estate. Something to really show our abilities in. This is coming no matter what, but the recent development brought my attention back to serious custom applications of the virtual environment. I'm considering some more corporate projects and actually the newcomer friendly Shiva could be a good base for something like this. Anyway, there's a lot of fun coming before the end of the year.

In Prefabrica we're about to produce some new texture packs soon along with a little surprise to come... Also I'm considering a sub-brand of non full perm gadgets as we got some of the prefabs into a state where they're attractive not just to the content creators... And yeah, we're still running DL and HB, and yes, we're preparing some releases there too :) I'm going to blog a bit more about the content market but I'm still kind of summing up my conclusions from the recent meetings I've had and articles I've read. I'm free to play again, and it's going to be a pleasure :)

Just an update post

2009-08-27T13:07:00.011+02:00

So this is it. My first post in english. I'm not going to tweet anytime soon I guess - so I decided that this place should really become more of a personal blog and less of a 'world sl news translation to czech service'. My english is really bad, my writing even worse, and let's get personal :)

To begin with, I'm starting to feel weird. I guess that when you seem to be getting hate mails because of your business regularly, you actually got two ways to approach the matter. Either you give them a consideration and let them troll you down, or you get kind of a microsoft feeling, moderate the comments and take it as a part of being in the business. First option not being an option really, I'm trying to comfort myself in the m$ style aura now - wish me luck ;)

I've met with Lindens from the Customer market development team recently. A very interesting and I also hope that mutually enriching hour it was. Thinking about it now, the talk along with the current changes have quite shifted my view of the things to come in the SL content market. I'll blog about my points once I got it better summed up. For now I'm enjoying the exploration of the new designs of both LL websites, which from my professional point of view I find quite well done. Integration is surely a good thing and I'd like to see even more of it - just don't take away the express withdrawals on xStreet (ok I know they'll be gone one day, you can't have everything, but I'll miss them :)

Inhouse, we're currently working on two major challenges - the support portal which is almost ready for a public beta, and the codename 'Shiva' project - which I unfortunately can't tell much about now. Anyway the summer's uber busy here. I'm afraid we're putting a bit unbiased accent on Prefabrica lately, so you might as well be able to see some news released under Dirty Lynx and even Hanzo Blades... I have to admit though that I really am impressed by the success of Tera's textures line in PFB, I might have found another playground to step into myself.

So much for today, I'll be spitting out more soon :)