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.

Anyone wanting access to the LSL script can find it on pastebin @ http://pastebin.com/kG2qFN5j

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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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More crazy carnival ideas

I’m starting to mess with a few more ideas. Throw a ball and get it to fall in a hole of a certain color. Horse shoes (try to get 3 around the post), can throw – try to knock all the cans down in one shot. Also playing around with a cannon game idea to shoot something into a container. With the different ideas comming along, I may need to create a universal “thrower” so anyone playing could walk from one game to the next without the need to get a different thrower for each one.

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Carnival Games

I started looking at some carnival games and found one that was pretty interesting. You bounce a ball off a board and try to get it to land into a basket. I setup a simple mockup and found that it was actually a bit hard to get the throw just rite. Even when I got one to go in, I couldn’t get the next one to go in when I was lined up properly. It’s a tricky game, and at L$5 for 3 balls, I think it could make for some interesting fund raising. Unlike my dunking booth and pie throwing games, this one only needs one player.

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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.

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.

View the Victorian Dunking Booth Product Listing on the marketplace. View the Victorian Dunking Booth Manual on Google Docs.

 

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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 192×4 in different locations of a 1024×1024 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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