Mesh and Cash

Well, we have now heard that mesh will start to be 'rolled out' on the SL grid from July/August. As the basic advice from top entrepreneurs is to get your product out into the market even before it works, we can expect a long series of complaints and fixes and etc etc so that September/October might be more realistic.

I was reading one of Maria's posts on mesh and followed a link to TurboSquid and searched trees there... one was $350, and far better than anything I could ever imagine making myself. It is 1.1 million polygons. Blender will make mesh but it looks increasingly like Maya and 3dsMax users will be the ones providing the best mesh.

Maya and 3dsMax cost around 3000$+ to buy.....so it's little wonder than no tree on TurboSquid costs less than 7800 L$, the top one mentioned above being ca. 80,000L$....(although, in reality, it would maybe be the only tree you could plant on a sim before crashing the whole grid...and could take a month to rezzz, I guess...) ...oh, by comparison, I don't think I've ever charged more than 2000L$, 500 -900 being my normal pricing.

I have complained before about the chickenfeed pricing of objects for sale in SL (Iwz the same) and the prices put on Art by the makers, similarly the wages offered by people who think that, because you are in VW's, you are prepared to work for silly money. So, it will be interesting to see if the costs associated with producing the top mesh content will actually make this less of a peanut economy, more related to RL pricing.... or will people simply not buy mesh??

I once paid 3300L$ for hair, and I was feeling very wealthy at the time.... thats probably the top item I ever bought.

Maybe the TechnoCommunists will make some free mesh trees and undermine the new mesh economy ...( they are a bugger to make with Google Sketch-Up)...

Now, as I've been busy I haven't kept you up to date with the latest SL blunders.... well.. it could be considered that the worst thing LL could do is to change their system of International Payment from one that works to one that doesn't work.... and I would have to agree that that is pretty bad....but...Client Data Leaks??....

...according to Inara Pey there are concerns about privacy and credit cards.... the possibility that DragonFish (the company now dealing, or nearly dealing, with International Payment), may have been compromised. It's only natural that such concerns come to the fore after Sony's spectacular breaches of recent weeks.

Now, her main point is that FJ Lined brushed aside the concerns, basically implying that it's down to spyware on the affected users computer, and behaving exactly like Tateru describes ...here... in a post entitled "you've got to take our word for it"... or to paraphrase "trust me, I'm an expert". The idea that any top company could have leaky security must be stamped out immediately it shows it's ugly head or a PR disaster could ensue.

The thing is, after having politicians lie to us for decades, and seeing the scandalous behaviour of top companies, saying "you can trust us"...isn't really good enough.

....and the way Inara has been attacked for suggesting such a thing... as Miso says "I'm only here for the LOLZ"...

The thing is...I have, genuinely, been getting a lot more spam recently.....and Indigo Mertel, who is a very reliable person (my email accounts are all a bit mixed up) I trust a lot.... and she's posted on the forum about this problem ...here.

well, it will, no doubt, all blow over...but a good PR machine could have helped...

What a messh. (sorry).

:))