Inventory Servers

I'm working on an inventory server and working my way up to a web-based vendor. My goal is to have a bunch of vendors throughout different malls to start taking in sales. I'm tieing them into my sales logs so that I can consolidate all of my reports as well as track if the in-world sales are doing better or worse then web-based sales. So far, my inventory servers report the items that they contain, and deliver when asked. The next step is to build up a database of products associated with the items. This will add some additional details to my reports such as the ability to categorize sales. Last, I'll work on the vendors themselves.

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Junk 101: How to sell it

I have quite a few items in my shop. A few of them seem to be "dated junk" in my eyes. They never sell. I had considered just removing them from my store all together as I felt that they were embarassing. It appears that my price markdown a couple weeks back has had an affect. Lots of people are buying my junk compared to previous reports. It's super cheap, but it's still some L$ comming my way that I wouldn't have otherwise had. So lesson learned. Ones junk is anothers treasure - for the rite price. I have this hope that if more people purchase from me, there is more potential that someone will come back. Maybe I can make a report to tell me, and how quickly after the first sale.

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Sales Imported, Reports Reporting

I got all of my sales on SLX, XStreetSL, and the marketplace since 2006 imported into my database. 13,428 sales to be exact. I changed to using bar charts, and the viewer is able to display them just fine. One thing I noticed rite off the bat - when XStreetSL was closed, I lost roughly 33% of my sales. Things have been picking up a little in march. With a concentration of effort in June, the sales are starting to pick up. I'll be mucking with the reports a lot more as they are very useful to see the big picture of what is going on. Maybe I can import my old sales from Apez, OnRez, and JEVN. Perhaps even my SL account transactions as well.

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Charting Sales

I've got my sales database for the marketplace moved over to a different host. For now, I'm starting to look into building a sales report to graph how well I am doing from month to month. Google Charts is doing a great job of this. I got something working on a regular web browser, but the lines are not showing up with the in-world browser. If I hover over an invisible line, the "dot" shows up telling me the exact value of L$ I made for that month/year. I often come home looking at the marketplace trying to add up how much L$ I made for the day, and converting it to US currency. Graphics are better than a table of numbers.

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Messages from the nether

Things seem to be moving along quickly. Once the dyanamic url service was setup, I was able to quickly put together another service to send messages to avatars without having to log in. I simply tell an object in-world to send the message on my behalf. The primary goal here is to contact people after purchasing an item from me on the marketplace to follow up. I'll also need a way to make sure it only happens once and that the message is relevant to their purchase. As an extra precaution, I've also slapped a password on the service to avoid unauthorized use.

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Breakthrough!

I've got the whole process down in registering objects with a website so that you can hand out perminent links to your in-world objects. It's similar to how email messages work, in that you send data to your object key. So if my object key is 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001, then my external url would be http://services.lewismoten.com/sl/dynamic-host/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000.... You can add on a path, query string, and even pass POST data and it will all come in-world to your object. Registering is simple. You just replace that object id with "register", and post a "url" parameter with your objects URL. Your object will be pinged and remembered.

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.htaccess

I found another host of mine (not godaddy) allows me to request remote web pages on non-standard http ports. Moving on, i'm attempting to rewrite my url's so that any url passed to my website is transformed to an in-world path. This all hass to do with htaccess, and I think I finally broke through a barrier. Run for the hills - here it is.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /dns
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/dns/register$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ register.php [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^/dns/register$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ proxy.php [L]

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Portable Problems

I've fixed up my ANS so that I am logging marketplace sales again. It appears that my PHP was upgraded on my host and broke support for parameters passed by reference. I started working on a web accessible object to send me messages from the outside world, but kept running into problems when trying to contact it through PHP. I've tried fsockopen, file_get_contents, and curl_setopt. I get timeouts without hitting the box, but my web browser hits it just fine. I suspect that my web host (GoDaddy) is the culprit blocking all ports except the standard 80/443. I'm pulling my hair out tring to access ports 12046/12043 since those are the only ones provided to me.

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Where was your first land?

Back in 2005, I purchased my "First Land" in Dagger. I've since moved on to bigger parcels, but I keep returning to take a look every now and then. I used to walk around meeting many of the people who lived in the region and even made a land scanner to find owners. Today I saw the place where Twisted Tardis used to live up on auction. He was the first who seemed to have disappeared, but his build of planets seemed to remain forever. Days seem like weeks in this place. Many of us began to worry and soon talked about our memories of him. I remember the day when he told me how everything was disappearing from our grid. Thankfully the Lindens got things back up and running. I still miss the guy.

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We have a winner!

I figured out how to determine if a ball has stopped inside of the basket. I was starting to look at bounding boxes, but the idea of applying rotations and manually getting the bounding box of a root prim was proving to be a tall order. I ended up using the collision event to monitor the velocity of the ball while it is colliding with the bottom of the basket. Once it slows down, then I can safely assume that it is not possible to leave the basket. I've also found a much needed use for the llRegionSayTo method that came out last night. It helps reduce the spam to people who are not playing the game. I just tell the player how many balls they have remaining, and if they won. Game almost done.

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Viewer 2.7.2 with more cache

VIewer 2.7.2 has come out. After much mucking about with errors getting it to install, I finally got it up and running. We now have a much larger cache limit of 9984 MB (9.75 GB). Um... wow? Next is a new method for llRegionSayTo. It works just like llRegionSay, but can be directed to a specific target. Now your objects can send messages to each other without eves droppers or the complexity of email/web/xml-rpc. You can also talk to avatars on PUBLIC_CHANNEL zero no matter how far they walked away (within the same region). It seems to be received similar to llOwnerSay since it is that same yellow color when an avatar sees the message in their official 2.0 viewer (default settings of course).

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SLCC 2011

I haven't been to the SLCC since 2007. I'd like to go this year, but there is a problem. It's in California. Train or bus would take about 3 days. Driving non stop would take under 2. And walking it would be 38 days. The real heart of the problem is flying 6 hours. I just get this feeling in my stomach just thinking about it and have this strange idea that I would just panic. It's affected my career, vacations, and simply prevents me from having fun at amusement parks as well. Maybe I should get liqured up or take muscle relaxers before I go on a plane. I wonder what can this community do to help me out here. There seems to be lots of people with different problems that get help here.

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Physics Driven Development

Let's face it - the physics in this virtual environment are just plan silly. I found that when the ball bounced off an object, another object behind it was recording the collision. I kept trying to move the objects further apart and still had problems. In this virtual environment, one object was not necessary. Gravity doesn't exist for non-physical objects. I've now got the game setup to detect that the ball hit the board first, before going in the basket. I even have a ball dropper setup as well to keep throwing balls while I tweak the code. Balls clean up too fast once they collide, but I've got a trick up my sleeve to check for a win even when the balls are still moving.

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Board Bounce Basket Game Progress

The new game is comming along quite fine. I've also figured a way to implement an easy way to setup making money through the games rather than relying on an additional vendor. There seems to be a trick to making the game easier based on how far the basket sets out from the board, so I may make that adjustable by the owner, or an option to self adjust based on how many people have been winning/losing. I added some holes to the sides so I could see if the ball made it in. At the moment, anyone can walk up to get a free thrower and try to get the ball in on their own. (sorry, no winners!) I'll work on detecting an actual win tomorrow. I also setup the board so owners can change the texture.

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Makeover Moment

I went clothes shopping today. I still have blue hair, but rather then the 5 year old model, I went with something new. I haven't had much luck in the past in feeling comfortable with mens hair, but I'll give it a shot. I also got the hair in dark brown as well. I picked up an animation overrider (a rare thing for me), as well as some glasses. I went with a look that normally goes with my real life appearance, as I'm often wearing jeans and polo shirts around the house with black tennis shoes.

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New Machinima for the Dunking Booth

I put together a 15 second machinima demonstrating the victorian dunking booth. [youtube=http://youtu.be/XK-SgTRw84s]

These videos tend to take a long time editing the footage and putting it together. My video capture program seems to have some issues with its own drivers sometimes as well. I'm glad it is finally over and done with. I also created a small GIF89a animation of the product spinning around 360 degrees. The new shadow feature really helps show the depth of the product.

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Update: Victorian Dunking Booth Complete

After much work, the victorian dunking booth is ready for sale. There are so many things that went into this product that it is essentially a new product on it's own. I found another hidden prim left over from the old model that wasn't needed, so now I'm down to only 9 prims (a 25% savings) and 1 script (90% savings). Just like the pie throwing game, I added a dialog menu to get to the manual, rules, thrower, and marketplace page. I also worked on a pretty lengthy manual with lots of pictures on google docs. Tomorrow will be video shooting for the 15 second machinima advertisement.

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Prim Oven Texture

I'm finding that it is very difficult to texture objects created with the prim oven. It appears that it is assumed that you will only use the same texture for each face of the object. The idea of having each face have it's own texture is difficult to do. I'm finding that each face is composed of two sections that are 192x4 in different locations of a 1024x1024 area. I'm not quite certain if I want to proceed and map it all out or not. I may have to reconsider how I approach this.

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Now with bubbles!

The new victorian dunking booth will now have bubbles when someone falls into the water. A ladder is built into the tubs wall in order to help people get back up. The dunking booth will also be made of 10 objects (2 less than the older model). The majority of the work is done. I'm down to texturing the booth to see if I can improve it's look. After that, I'll be working on product advertising and a machinima advertisement.

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Inventory on Display

I've spent most of the night setting up product vendors and demonstrations of the products that customers may interact with. I will not put all products out. I've updated a few after noticing a few new options that the Linden Scripting Language offers. For example, the dance floor has consolidated 16 scripts into 1 now that I can animate textures on any object within a linked group using llSetLinkTextureAnim. I love the idea that I can see how much memory my scripts are taking up while being on the main land. This was one of the justifications I had when I purchased my first sim - debugging memory, as only estate owners could get access to information like that.

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Happy RezDay Chestnut Rau

Skylar Smythe invited me over for a suprise RezDay party for Chestnut Rau. Today, her avatar/account is 4 years old. I popped on over and found a lot of people that I used to hang out with. Zachh Cale was playing the keyboard and singing live. I like his rendition of the song, "Your love is better than ice cream". He then broke out into an ad-hoc "happy rez day" song for Chestnut that was pretty impressive. Chestnut was a bit surprised that there was a party just for her.

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Drawing Ball Update

Natiel Bailey contacted me regarding the drawing ball. She said it was anouncing that someone was picked, while remembering that someone else was chosen. I looked at the code and saw something that didn't look rite. I brought out the big guns and started logging in with my test accounts to verify the problem. Sure enough, it was there. It appeared to always be picking the first person remaining, but announcing a random person chosen. I fixed it up and confirmed with the test accounts that things were in order. I also updated the script to compile with mono.

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Dunking Code Complete

In just a little over 300 lines of code, I was able to consolidate seven scripts into one as well as reduce the need for an extra prim. There have been a few additional functions added to LSL to allow me to do this. I've also picked up some techniques along my many projects that enabled me to move an avatar as a linked prim. I'm very happy with how the logic within the game is comming along. I'll be making some changes to the bottom part of the tank, creating some textures, and addressing the need for the "water rezzer". Hopefully that's another thing I can get rid of.

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Victorian Dunking Booth Makeover

I'm giving my victorian dunking booth a makeover. The look of it just cries out to me as being out dated due to it's texturing and simplicity. Scripts are going to be updated to be compiled in mono and revisited for tweaks. Some of the prims are being converted to sculpties and adding extra detail while retaining the same (or less) prim counts. It will have a ladder on the back now, a roof to protect against the sun, and a sign inside behind the cage. The seating has changed to have two planks meet each other and then drop the person down as they both unlatch - just like real dunking booths. The ball vendors are getting a makeover as well to appear like the comment boxes that I make.

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Projecting Yourself

Another feature that came out today is projected light sources. Is this amazing or what? We can now have spotlights lighting up our buildings, advertisements projected on walls, and best of all ... working mirror balls for dancing! Watch as the beams of light go round and round traveling on objects of all shapes and sizes. One possible method of abuse that I see is that people can now project images onto other parcels and buildings from 20 meters away.

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Viewer 2.7.1 has Shadows

Wow. I can't believe shadows are finally here. I remember back in the day when people started finding code for them in the source code. Afterwards, people found ways to get them up and running through ther viewers, in which Kirsten's Viewer was the virst. Later you could do it through the debug settings in the official browser, but I had problems getting shadows to work. When I did get them to work a year later, I had problems getting them to show up in snapshots. This is probably going to have just as much impact as windlight.

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Working with AJAX and http_request

I had an idea to start working on a web-based interface that communicated directly to objects in-world using only AJAX. AJAX would be preferred, as the processing would be done within a clients web-browser rather than the server, and it opens up the ability to host everything on a static web site. I found staticloud was a great site that is free just for this purpose. It turned out that http_request receives the request, but the web browser ignores the response. I tracked it down to a missing header on Linden Lab's end. I filed a feature request (SVC-7038) and ask that you vote on it.

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Lookout tower completed

I've finished working on the lookout tower. It seems that this little tower took most of the day to work on. In just 21 prims, this tower features many details. 15 of the prims represent up to 16 prims each. The majority of the work was done with the primoven, but I also used Tatara to modify some of the rendured sculpties from the oven. The tower is composed of two groups of linked objects - one for phantom objects and the other for physical collisions. Ideally, I would prefer just one group that would allow me to set individual prims as being phantom. There is an open feature request (VWR-12837) for this behavior.

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Building a watch tower

I'm still having much fun with the prim oven. I'm finding that I can build very complex objects now that I would have avoided using due to the high prim count. I'm building a spectators tower that sits above the trees and looks over the road. The view from inside is amazing. This tower yeilds a high prim count without sculpties. I estimate it would be about 180 prims. With the prim oven, I'm able to boil it down to 13. I don't even need to texture anything or pull my hair out over alpha clipping. I do see a few odd things with the lighting when two flush surfaces sit next to each other, but the benefits outweigh this lttle problem. Also, I am getting creative in how to avoid it.

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Sculpted shop

I was having a tough time getting ideas for my shop when looking at what other people have done. The only thing I brought away from it was to have a big open area. I started playing around this morning with some different ideas. The shops footprint is 56x56 meters (3136 sq. m.) I starting working with some ideas for walls, then the railing on the sides, and lifted it up just above the clouds. Afterwards, I started working on a roof. I didn't like the idea of a flat roof, as I felt like the space seemed smaller, no matter how high the roof was, so I went with a dome. It reminds me a bit of an airport hangar now. The store alone is taking up 86 prims (74 sculpted, 1 megaprim)

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Storefront ideas

I've been traveling around to a few in-world gadget shops trying to get some ideas of how to layout my store. I'm seeing a common theme in that many seem to have a large area of space. The store here has a greeter bot that follows you around when activated and gives you information once you click on him. I'm still looking though. I want to find something that really inspires me.

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Now on Facebook

The gadget shop now has it's own page on Facebook. I need quite a few people to like it before I can get a custom URL, but in the mean time, you can access it here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dedric-Mauriacs-Gadget-Shop/153827441354586. I prefer this over subscribe-o-matic since there are no costs. The only downside is that I can't send out objects through a facebook post.

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Fiamma Blu is back again

About a year ago, Mastermind Parx had put Fiamma Blue on the market, a mens clothing botique that he claimed to own. I had a look, but expressed some concerns. Tonight he contacted me over a year later stating he just saw the article I posted, didn't sell the business, removed the alts, and lowered the price. Odd, as I quickly pointed out that someone claims that Fiamma Blue had already been sold. Oops! He didn't quote the new price, but from what I gather, it wouldn't have been worth it.

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Pie Throwing Game now available

After much work, the pie throwing game is now listed on the marketplace a day ahead of schedule. Anyone subscribed to my subscribe-o-matic will see a pie thrower show up in their inventory. I'll tweak the listing a bit this week, come up with an instruction manual, as well as begin work on a video to demonstrate how the game is played.

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Game On!

I've finnished the game! The scoring system for the pie throwing game is based on accuracy, speed, distance, and movement. I also got the permissions setup properly and brought in an additional avatar for testing. All that is left is the packaging and listing it on the marketplace. I'll have that done by the end of the week. Better watch out, or you may have some pie in your face this weekend.

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Pie Scoring

Not much work was done on the pie throwing contest today. However, I did figure out how to setup the scoring system. It will be based on accuracy, speed, and distance. I've gotten the system to also recognize where the partition is located as well as wait (within reason) for the last thrown pie to hit something after it was thrown. Once I tweak the scoring system, the pie throwing will be ready to begin. I'll have a special treat for anyone who is subscribed to my subscribe-o-matic to celebrate the release. If you're extra special, you'll even get a cherry on top.

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Pie in your face!

The majority of the game is setup. A table of pies hands out free pie throwers to anyone who wants them. You can then throw the pie when entering mouse-look mode. The pie will leave a pie smear where ever it hits. As each pie is thrown, the pie on the table disappears. Each person gets 5 pies to throw in the game. Since people can still throw pies outside of the game, the table doesn't count those extra pies. The last part of this seems to be comming up with a point system.

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Rotating Sculpties

I was having a tough time with my pie throwing in that no matter how I would tweak the scripts, the pie that I threw would never face the rite direction, or it made a difference in what direction the avatar was facing. I soon discovered that the problem was based on the rotation that the sculpty was rendered in. In rokuro, it creates a sculpty around the Z axis. To solve this problem, I found that sculptypaint is able to rotate existing sculpties. In no time at all, I had a sculpty pie being thrown the correct way, no matter what direction I was facing. I didn't need to rotate my existing texture either.

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Eight Lock Canal

DrFran Bobcock demonstrated her eight lock canal to me. It's been something that she has worked on for a few years. Its based on the actual Canal du Midi in the South of France. I recommend that you take a little ride through the tunels and overpasses. The gates actuall fill up and drain to allow the boat to travel up over a hill.

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Pie Partition Ready

I got the animation setup with my pie throwing partition and tried my hand at a little bit of artwork. I'll need to make a few more pictures for people to choose from, but it's a start. Once I get the pie throwing itself setup, it will be ready.

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Pie Throwee

In no time at all, I had setup a new pose for my pie throwing contest using AnyPose. I've made the partitian semi-transparent so that I could see the pose better from the front. I'm starting to get silly ideas of being knocked back if you get hit with a pie.

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Making poses in-world with AnyPose

Phate Shepherd dropped in on me while I was looking at in-world pose builders. He's got an interesting feature in that it can generate BVH files outside of the virtual environment. His solution also allows you to edit multiple frames so you can make walking animations. The tool allows you to modify an avatars joints in-world and see what the final pose will look like. This makes it easier to position animations to the exact location for use with your products. I need to make two BVH files - one to stand behind a partition to look out of a hole, and another to throw a pie. I may make two more for tinies.

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Pie Throwing Game

I've been working quite a bit on my next product. It's based on a simple pie throwing contest. Many aspects of it will work just like the victorian dunking booth that I made. I've been working on creating the perfect cream pie with the assistance of Rokuru and AvPainter. The table was made with Prim Oven. I'm just about to the part where I start making the interactions to throw a pie at someones face. I'll still need to come up with some artwork and a standing animation for the pie shield that people stand behind.

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Lossless Sculpties

I recall when scupties first came out, it was pretty hard to get objects imported with near perfection. I was reminded of this again tonight when I forgot to check the lossless compression when uploading a table I had made with the prim oven. I got what appeared to be a spider web of sorts with a garbled up table (right). My 12 prim table (left) is now just one sculpty (middle). Although some of the edges appear to be a little rounded. It should be okay though. I don't want to be sued if a kid splits their head open if they fall down onto the edge of the legs.

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Market updated, prices dropped

For the past two days, I've been going through all of my listings in the marketplace updating prices, descriptions, keywords, and related items. Most items have had their prices dropped due to comparisons between competitors. Enjoy.

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/2422

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Marketplace Freebies?

There was a big stink a while back about the Lindens charging people to sell freebies on the market. As a result, I had changed many of my free items to sell for a few lindens to make sure I wasn't penalized. I'm getting back, but I can't find any information about the final result. Will I be charged if I sell freebies on the marketplace?

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