SLExchange becomes Xstreet SL - Nothing else much changes.

This change has been put out there on other sites, but since I'm an SLX merchant I thought I should share, this dosen't change anything, you can still use the link on the left there to buy my products and it's still a safe and reputable Second Life Company. You can get my products here. The email they sent is reproduced below for completeness sake and to help others who may be considering using them as a business tool:

Dear Noelyci Ingmann,

As of October 1st, 2008 SL Exchange has become Xstreet SL!

When SL Exchange was formed in 2004 it was never intended that we would operate solely within Second Life. "SL Exchange" is a service name owned by Virtuatrade, LLC and the intention has always been to create new service names as we expand into other areas. When Linden Lab announced their trademark licensing changes earlier this year we decided to take the opportunity to re-brand, with our sights set on the future.

The name Xstreet was chosen because it represents our purpose, being the crossroads of exchange between buyers and sellers within virtual worlds. That purpose and vision has been at the core of our endeavors since the very beginning, to which our main Avatar's name, Exchange Street, can attest.


Frequently asked questions regarding our name change:

1. What is your new URL?
http://www.xstreetsl.com/

2. Was SL Exchange bought out by someone else?
No. Xstreet SL is a service of Virtuatrade LLC which is primarily owned by Apotheus Silverman who founded SL Exchange in 2004.

3. Do my SL Exchange links still work?
For now, yes. For one year, all URLs pointing to slexchange.com will be redirected to xstreetsl.com. We highly encourage you to hange your bookmarks to www.xstreetsl.com and uncensored.xstreetsl.com (for those wishing to view our adult content) as soon as possible to avoid any webpage redirection delays.

4. Are my L$ still safe with Xstreet?
Yes. Nothing has changed but our name and URL. All of your account information has remained unchanged.

5. Are my items and item listings still safe?
Yes. Nothing has changed but our name and URL. Your listings have not been affected by this change.

6. Do I need to download a new Magic Box?
Eventually, yes. The current Magic Boxes will continue to work but we encourage you to download new Magic Boxes as soon as possible. In the near future we will announce a schedule to which we plan to decommission older Magic Boxes over the next 6-12 months.

Magic Box Link:
http://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=14129

7. Where can I get new Xstreet logos?
New Xstreet SL Logos are available here:
http://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&CategoryID=390

8. Will the Terminals still work after the name change?
Yes. The Terminals will display the new Xstreet SL logo within the next few weeks but they will continue to work as always.

For more detailed information on how this change affects you, please visit this link:

http://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=69568

Regards,
Xstreet SL (formerly SL Exchange)
www.xstreetsl.com

This message was sent by Xstreet SL. For help with your account (or with this message), please contact us by mailing to support@xstreetsl.com.

Cuter diabetic then me!

Go check out Pheobe, she looks much cuter with my Insulin Pump then I do.

10/9/2008 Update: I added the photo here...

Second Life's First Insulin Pump, I think.

The brochure:Thank you for buying/acquiring the Insulin Pump created by Noelyci Ingmann of Ingmann Design Group.

The idea behind this Insulin Pump is to educate you and those around you to a small portion of what it means to be diabetic. The pump is a visible symbol of being diabetic and may prompt questions. This is a teaching opportunity. On top of this the pump will remind you every 90 minutes to test your blood sugars. If you want to reset the timer and do it earlier then the alarm you can by touching it, thereby resetting the timer to another 90 minutes. Many diabetics pick times that are advantageous so that they don't have to do it with friends, but you will have to remember to do this or the avatars around you will see you testing.

I hope this gives you a taste of what it means to be a Type 1 Diabetic. To learn more, or to support the search for a cure please visit:

http://www.jdrf.org/

Created by Noelyci Ingmann
http://www.ingmanndesign.com/


And you can get your copy for 1L, in my store under the stairs....

Asaf Outpost ~ Arabian Fort!

So I promised a look at the other texture of the Maero Arcis, this is it, the Asaf Outpost, exactly the same prims, but a layout for Gorean or Arabian sims, not much more of a story other then that someone wanted the look of the Arabian Dreams in this layout, so not going into full build details. Here's the picture and brochure:

Brochure: Asaf Outpost is a direct descendant of my most popular build, the DarkRayne Fortress. It's slightly smaller in length and is much more intimate with a layout that includes a master suite on the second floor, a see through dance floor, a dining area downstairs. And best of all a fully secure wine cellar with lockable storage for those special vintages. This isn't a small build at 30x40 but it does fit on a relatively medium sized parcel and is beautifully textured. When you tell people it's 159 prims they will be shocked. As always it is mod/copy so you can change textures as you wish. If you prefer a more gothic look then check out the Maero Arcis, same layout, different textures.

Visit my site to see my other designs: http://ingmanndesign.com

Maero Arcis ~ Gothic Flavor with Wine Cellar!

The Brochure: Maero Arcis is a direct descendant of my most popular build, the DarkRayne Fortress. It's slightly smaller in length and is much more intimate with a layout that includes a master suite on the second floor, a see through dance floor, a dining area downstairs. And best of all a fully secure wine cellar with lockable storage for those special vintages. This isn't a small build at 30x40 but it does fit on a relatively medium sized parcel and is beautifully textured. When you tell people it's 159 prims they will be shocked. As always it is mod/copy so you can change textures as you wish.

The Story: The DarkRayne as you know is my very first castle. It holds a special place in my heart being the first product I came up with, however, people keep asking for something a bit smaller and I wanted to see what I could do with what I learned. So I built this. The windows are better as I finally got an understanding of how to avoid flash in different viewers. (Hint: 1mm isn't enough of a difference to prevent flash in the most recent viewers.) I also used sculpted stairs instead of ramps in this one to give it a bit more realism. It's a simpler build, not as spread out with small cloisters as the DarkRayne, instead having a 'master suite' upstairs and a decent dormer downstairs. But the real crowning achievement of this build is the 'wine cellar' basement. I managed to use my prim torture techniques to make that dungeon while still keeping it low prim. It's really a gorgeous build and has become one of my favorites.

By the way, the name means Fort of Sorrow in Latin, or my closest approximation thereof.

In a day or two I'll show you the other flavor it comes in.

Low Lag - Efficiency - and Endless Nights.

So I promised you some talking about how I designed and built a full combat/rp sim and managed to keep the lag to levels very low. It's helpful to have some background information and Gwyn has of course spoken my thoughts in a more elegant way then I ever could. First go read her post here.

Now Gwyn is talking about the absence of limits, but the important thing to remember is that we do have limits and that the basis of low lag design currently will always produce lower lag design in the future. The math is stated in Gwyn's paragraphs here...

Let’s take a simple example. A cube has one polygon per face; 15.000 cubes would be 90.000 polygons to be rendered, assuming that all cubes are not tortured prims. The higher the prim torture, the higher the number of polygons on that prim; as a rule of thumb, worse-case scenarios are torii and sculpties, which can quickly get to a thousand polygons each. But avatars are even worse — they count almost 7.500 polygons each (not counting attachments, of course)! Now do your math: one scene with 15.000 prims, all of them sculpties, and a hundred avatars (not to count attachments) will quickly have about 16 million polygons to render.

Is that a lot?

Well, low-end graphics cards — the ones that power perhaps 80-90% of all computers in the world — tend to be able to render about 5 million polygons. Per second. So the scene just described above — all 15.000 prims in front of your screen with a 100 avatars dancing in front of them — would be rendered at 0.3 FPS. Now you know why.

So how do other virtual worlds deal with this nightmare? They do the maths the other way round: knowing that the low-end cards can render 5 million polygons per second, they know they can, at most, have scenes with 200.000 polygons in sight (so that the card can easily do 25 FPS without stress), but possibly even less. That’s why World of Warcraft’s avatars just have 1.500 polygons (and most of the MMORPGs do the same). They rely on insanely good graphic designers to get the most out of those 1.500 polygons — and get some help from the current generation of graphics cards to do a lot of special effects without any extra “cost” in GPU processing. These games look awesome because the graphic designers and 3D modellers can figure out beforehand what path your avatar will take, and make sure that all scenes are rendered with just 200.000 polygons. Granted, sometimes you get hundreds of avatars in a raid or so, and your graphic card will start to skip frames due to the extra polygons that suddenly require to be drawn, so lag exists elsewhere in the Metaverse, too!

So, how do we as sim designers deal with this in an intelligent way that keeps the dual seemingly opposing natures of good art and good programming? There are lots and lots of answers to that very complex question. For me and my designers here are a few things we did on Endless Nights.

First, talk to your client very clearly about what is important: Feeling of the Art, Efficiency of the Lag, or Detail of the Design.

These aren't opposing concepts, rather complimentary ones... If you can find out how people rank these then you can determine what's truly important to them. You never want to sacrafice one for the other, but it gives you a priority. Using Endless Nights as an example, the clients determined that the Feeling and Efficiency were the top two things they wanted. The detail was important as well, but it was third on the list. This gave us the freedom to not be concerned that they wouldn't like the 'look' of low prim design as long as we textured and constructed it well and kept the 'feeling' of the sim in place.

As a result we ended up creating all the major builds of the sim and the infrastructure of paths and trees and such in under 3100 prims, most of which were cubes. So using the math above:

7 * 3100 = 21700 polygons

That's being efficient. Then we start to look at the textures that we used. A technique if you are building an homogeonous sim is to use a very low number of textures and strategically offset or color them to make each build look different. The difficulty with this for Endless Nights is that we had several different 'regions' for the hybrid nature of the sim. We have a medieval setting, a semi-modern but rundown city, a more natural area... You see the issue. So we use the same idea in a localized way. Each area uses around 10-20 textures. The benefit is that once the texture is downloaded into the cache of the client, it dosen't have to request it again from the server. So if you are in the city, the city will load quickly from then on, if you move to the medieval portion of the sim, it may slow for a few seconds but it won't have to reload every time you have to go around in that area and look at a new building. So, knowing this I made sure that all my textures were 512x512. So again, this is about the efficiency of getting the client to perform quickly and not mess up the ability of the avatar to run or shoot or enjoy the roleplay.

So I hear some of you thinking, "How do you do a whole sim in 3100 prims? That's gotta look horrid!" The answer to that is that it's a tradeoff. My personal machine has two SLI top of the line video cards in it. So I can see everything anytime, it's very rare that I lag in SL. However, for a mass audience you have to design correctly... We design low prim because we're good at it and we don't see the point of wasting the resource limit that we currently live under. Believe me, we can be prim wasters if we are told to or want to. I made a plate of onion rings in Endless Nights that is over 60 prims, that's more then some of the buildings. We just don't do it as standard operating procedure. We start from a point of optimization and move towards the unoptimal as discussions with the client indicate we should. The majority of people seem to find our builds 'pretty' or 'beautiful' and don't notice the techniques that are different,

We like our low prim designs, we think they add charm and that the tradeoffs are worth it. But again, our job is pleasing the client. Don't hesitate to get ahold of us and let us please you, by doing something low prim like Endless Nights, or by using every single prim on a sim in one massive castle.

Contest Reminder - I Love Your Eyes. -Ends tomorrow!

Reminder 1000L and fame forever up for grabs, you only have until Sunday!!!

So, here are what you can choose from:

Here's the contest - take a shot with one of my eyes, you can purchase on SLX here or at my store in world here. I want to see how sexy you can make my eyes look. This will be used for advertising and you'll be the poster girl or guy for my eyes for life! In addition I'm offering 1000L to the best shot. This contest runs until the end of the month. Winnners chosen on September 6th. So... want to be famous? Put up all over the world and in this blog? Get those shots in.

Technical details:

1. Shots must be no bigger then 1024x1024 pixels.
2. Shots must be full perms and dropped on me in world with "IDGEyesContestEntry -Avatar Name" as the title.
3. Post Processing in Photoshop or whatever is fine, be creative and go nuts.
4. Artistic nudity is fine but XXX rated shots will probably be edited for advertising or stand a lower chance of winning.
5. By submitting a photo to this contest you are granting IDG and Noelyci a use liscence to use the image for advertising and promotion. You retain all rights to the photo outside of this liscence.
6. UPDATE:: Just to let you all know, you can submit as many photos as you like, since someone asked me that. (8/13/2008)

Be creative and have fun!

Contest Reminder - Ends Sunday!

Reminder 1000L and fame forever up for grabs, you only have until Sunday!!!

So, here are what you can choose from:


Here's the contest - take a shot with one of my eyes, you can purchase on SLX here or at my store in world here. I want to see how sexy you can make my eyes look. This will be used for advertising and you'll be the poster girl or guy for my eyes for life! In addition I'm offering 1000L to the best shot. This contest runs until the end of the month. Winnners chosen on September 6th. So... want to be famous? Put up all over the world and in this blog? Get those shots in.

Technical details:

1. Shots must be no bigger then 1024x1024 pixels.
2. Shots must be full perms and dropped on me in world with "IDGEyesContestEntry -Avatar Name" as the title.
3. Post Processing in Photoshop or whatever is fine, be creative and go nuts.
4. Artistic nudity is fine but XXX rated shots will probably be edited for advertising or stand a lower chance of winning.
5. By submitting a photo to this contest you are granting IDG and Noelyci a use liscence to use the image for advertising and promotion. You retain all rights to the photo outside of this liscence.
6. UPDATE:: Just to let you all know, you can submit as many photos as you like, since someone asked me that. (8/13/2008)

Be creative and have fun!

Reminder - Contest, I love your eyes!

So, here are what you can choose from:


Here's the contest - take a shot with one of my eyes, you can purchase on SLX here or at my store in world here. I want to see how sexy you can make my eyes look. This will be used for advertising and you'll be the poster girl or guy for my eyes for life! In addition I'm offering 1000L to the best shot. This contest runs until the end of the month. Winnners chosen on September 6th. So... want to be famous? Put up all over the world and in this blog? Get those shots in.

Technical details:

1. Shots must be no bigger then 1024x1024 pixels.
2. Shots must be full perms and dropped on me in world with "IDGEyesContestEntry -Avatar Name" as the title.
3. Post Processing in Photoshop or whatever is fine, be creative and go nuts.
4. Artistic nudity is fine but XXX rated shots will probably be edited for advertising or stand a lower chance of winning.
5. By submitting a photo to this contest you are granting IDG and Noelyci a use liscence to use the image for advertising and promotion. You retain all rights to the photo outside of this liscence.
6. UPDATE:: Just to let you all know, you can submit as many photos as you like, since someone asked me that. (8/13/2008)

Be creative and have fun!



PS. Happy Olympics day.

IDG Brag Session - Endless Nights

So, we just finished the first full sim build we're allowed to talk about other then our main store location of Natalis. If you are one of my smart dedicated readers, one of the select few, then you know I've mentioned it before. But now you can read what one of the principal clients has to say about it. Neit has talked about how pleased she is with the results here.

A couple of fast quotes from her gushing praise:

"What he's created is an amazing sim full of surprises. He took his prefab buildings and did some modifications - some minor, some major - and finished the entire build in just over 3000 prims. The whole sim (minus furnishings and some landscaping) could fit on an open