Options in the Market

[border regina]

Hello I wanted to know if anyone else thought the Kitely Marketplace should offer more ethnic options. I would adore being able to buy hair with a variety of textures and more skin tones and types.

[Tess Juel]

Hello I wanted to know if anyone else thought the Kitely Marketplace should offer more ethnic options.

Yes, it should.

But who's responsibility is it? We have to remember that nobody makes any money worth mentioning from KM, it's essentially voluntary community work with a symbolic reward both for the merchants and for the Kitely owners. All we can hope for is that somebody who knows how to make skins and hair decides that this is something they want to do.

[Chris Namaste]

Hi Tess,

The total number of people who use OpenSim across the Hypergrid nowadays is very low (tens of thousands of unique monthly active users). However, there are still a few Kitely Market merchants who earn more than a thousand dollars per year from our marketplace. That said, these people are, unfortunately, the exception and most OpenSim merchants earn less.

[Chris Namaste]

as creator & artist, i feel lately what Ilan wrote, many of us do

i had very dark male skins,for a long time,i took them down since no one has ever bought one of them (and the pics were oldfashioned,so i wasnt proud of my product anymore) i hope to bring them back w new photo's when rl permits

also i offer goth skins - variations of them, pale skins, children skins, fantasy skins, suntan skins, chinese-asian style-japanese skin on avatar etc etc

the ones i sell most is suntan and pale and children skins, it depends taste ofc as well, ALL have free demo's (it asks alot of work to create demo's),
it's always possible to try a free offered demo even if the picture does not appeal

i think i do what i can,kind regards, christa

PS to Tony El : what tones did u have in mind?

[Ada Radius]

Another problem is that inworld lighting is not kind to darker skins. It's better than the old windlight, but not better enough. I'm experimenting with removing all ambient occlusion shading and letting EEP do the work, but darker skins still need a local light to show up.

[Christine Nyn]

Another problem is that inworld lighting is not kind to darker skins. It's better than the old windlight, but not better enough. I'm experimenting with removing all ambient occlusion shading and letting EEP do the work, but darker skins still need a local light to show up.

My partner in Inworldz used a dark skin and had some success with using highlights as a tattoo layer to provide definition. Might that be something to investigate further?

[Shandon Loring]

... a few Kitely Market merchants who earn more than a thousand dollars per year from our marketplace...

Is anybody at all interested in a concerted Community effort to outreach to SL creators and educate them as to potential, and security, of selling on Kitely Market? Absolutely no disrespect to our wonderful Kitely creators, but certainly the more the merrier.

We all have our own worlds and things we like to do, but a concerted Community effort to build up Kitely Market even more would benefit the designers, as well as our kind landlord! And that is good for everyone!

[Ozwell Wayfarer]

Is anybody at all interested in a concerted Community effort to outreach to SL creators and educate them as to potential, and security, of selling on Kitely Market? Absolutely no disrespect to our wonderful Kitely creators, but certainly the more the merrier.

This has been attempted various times in the past. We have had a few well-known brands test the water but it didn't really come to anything, which tells you they didn't see the numbers they wanted. Sadly, the financial incentive is just not there.

I have made quite a chunk over 10+ years, but the truth of the mater is that it would not even cover 1 year of my expenses. It has been very nice pocket money, but had I not been interested in Opensim for my own reasons, the effort vs reward calculation makes very little sense. And most of my products are fairly simple static mesh objects. There is some scripting here and there but not much and its basic.

Unfortunately, this problem becomes even more acute when it comes to avatars. Opensim has fallen really, really far behind SL on this front. Now, by far and away the most popular way to make an avi is with heavily scripted multi-mesh parts and a few mesh body creators have a complete stranglehold on the market.

So if a skin or clothing creator wants to come from SL to OS now.......how? We dont have the most popular mesh bodies which all of their stuff is designed for.

Skins do tend to have "Bake on Mesh" options, which match the old SL avatars UV maps, but even that is now falling out of favour for custom UV's, especially for heads (LeLutka being most popular). Nobody is making stuff for system avatars anymore.

Then OSSL and LSL are also not the same. So any scripted attachment beyond the most basic will likely need re-scripting to some degree. People also want to take their avis cross-grid, so that precious complex scripting would all need to be exportable (and therefore, vulnerable).

So increasingly its just not the case that someone can easily port content from SL to OS and the time investment to do it becomes bigger and bigger.

I dont wish for this to come across as a negative post, but we have to acknowledge our issues if we ever hope to overcome them. I certainly dont have any easy answers.

[Ada Radius]

Yes, except on mesh heads. The highlighting won't move with the EEP lighting, but it's not a bad fake.

Another problem is that inworld lighting is not kind to darker skins. It's better than the old windlight, but not better enough. I'm experimenting with removing all ambient occlusion shading and letting EEP do the work, but darker skins still need a local light to show up.

My partner in Inworldz used a dark skin and had some success with using highlights as a tattoo layer to provide definition. Might that be something to investigate further?

[dominic elliott]

Hello I wanted to know if anyone else thought the Kitely Marketplace should offer more ethnic options. I would adore being able to buy hair with a variety of textures and more skin tones and types.

Yes, I agree