Archive for the ‘Public service announcements’ Category

No one will miss it.

I would like to add, maybe a dozen drawings to the KDC Doodles & Strikes, so send me your suggestions, I’ll pick the best ones and add them in the next update!

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The past two weeks have been extremely stressful due to some RL issues that are taking a toll on my “sanity”, it’s sapping my energy and my drive and I struggle to remain somewhat productive.

Summary of the good stuff:

• The body doodle & impact engine for avatar 2.0 is pretty much code complete, that is, the prototype has all the required features implemented and it appears to work without any bugs. I will explain what it actually consists of at some point I swear…
• I’ve also started a “cleanup” on the documentation wiki, the translation function was a bit broken and I’m trying to make some of the illustrations clearer and to remove outdated instructions, filling up some of the missing pages too.

I will be away for a few days, if you have a problem with any of my products, you can drop me an IM in world: all my IMs are forwarded to email. Alternatively, use the contact form, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Those who follow my products have probably noticed a slight change in my product picture template, so I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to explain it a little.

Primitives where a nice and “simple” metric, the problem is that they did not account for many important factors. And I don’t think it’s enough to “just” present the prim count/land impact anymore.

Land Impact

This estimates the object complexity and the burden it places on the region, the physical shape’s complexity is what impacts this value the most, objects that are very small or very big are negatively impacted. It’s the replacement for the old primitive count, and while it is available for most products, there are numerous ways to lower this metric to a point where it doesn’t mean much anymore.

Script count

They have a huge impact on the health of a region. Many avatar accessories have more than 10 scripts to do seemingly mundane functions.

Script count is only one side of the story, it doesn’t tell us how complex those scripts are or how much strain they put on a region, but it will give you an idea of how much memory your object is using.

Draw Weight

This metric is a measure of how taxing this object will be for your (and everyone’s) graphic card and accounts for everything graphical including (but not limited to):

• polygon count.
• material settings.
• texture count.
• texture size.
• whether a mesh is rigged or not.
• animated textures.
• flexi-prims.

You don’t need to know the exact formula, a lower value is almost always better for your SecondLife experience. If you are curious about the draw weight of something you are wearing, simply right-click > edit it and click on “More info”, the “Display Weight” is what you are looking for.

How do I use this?

I Believe that, It is better for SecondLife as a whole if you have all the information available before you decide to support a designer. You don’t have to be a 3D expert to make an educated purchase, but designers should provide more data than the  primitive count.

Wherever and whoever you are 🙂

The parent company of Desura and IndieRoyale appears to have filed for bankruptcy and there has been some issues with Desura not paying developers. I would advise everyone to activate their remaining steam keys and grab their DRM free installers while it is still possible.

I really really need to finish the migration to the new one as that was two whole days of items not getting delivered at all. If it happened to you, IM me and I’ll give you your purchase.

A while ago, when I started this blog i used to rely on a couple of plugins to perform a few basic functions: Visitor statistics, Spell checking and a couple of other things. At some point down the road most of these got merged into “Jetpack”. Jetpack is kind of an official “megaplugin” that gives you access to a bunch of excellent features and let you piggyback on some services provided by WordPress.com. But there is a catch:

It’s extremely slow.

What you’ll actually use is in the glove box.

It might not matter on a professional, high capacity server, but the reality is that this is not what i have access to. I can “barely” run an unmodded Minecraft server. Jetpack introduced a huge latency both for visitors and for me when publishing, yet some of its features (Stats, automatic social media publishing, spell-checking, contact form…) where invaluable to me. Followed several years of damage control, trying to optimize the site’s response time with all kinds of caching and preloading voodoo.

Today somehow was the last straw, I say goodbye to Jetpack and hope that i will never have to come back. Now for those who are curious, here are the plugins i now use in replacement (subject to change), and YES it’s still faster.

• WordPress Contact Form Maker
• Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
• NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster
• TinyMCE Spellcheck

Fuck you jetpack

As it turns out, when you try to use Twitter/Facebook and other social media APIs as an individual, without using any kind of intermediate service/company, the procedure goes from mildly annoying, to utterly impossible: Google for example doesn’t want to hear about you, Facebook and twitter both want your cellphone number, Plurk was by far the most convenient so far… but who use Plurk anyway?

I though it might be useful to get a few things straight about how I handle customer support, if you have a problem with a product, please follow these instructions:

I can only reply in French or English.

If you need to contact me, please try to use one of these two languages. Sure I can use a translator, but for precise instructions it’s going to turn into a catastrophe.

Do not send me notecards

I don’t know who decided that notecards where the “superior” way of contacting shop owners, but it isn’t! Send me an I.M. instead, those arrive in my mailbox and I can reply to them quickly. If for some reason you cannot send me an I.M. (overzealous RLV settings for example), there is a contact form on this website, just don’t forget to put your avatar name then.

Be brief and clear.

I don’t need a copy of the entire marketplace transaction, the transaction ID, buyer name and date is all I need.

Be patient.

Give me at least a day to reply, I’m not always in SL or browsing my emails.

Talk to me before giving me a bad review.

I’ve had several customers drop me a 1 star review on a product, it hurts, it’s the wrong way to attract my attention, and I usually end up solving your problem in the end.