Virtual Life Reset

It is hard to believe that I have been on SL for so long really, well over a decade and over those years life in a virtual world has been no less real than RL... in fact at times it has been a little more real.

Back in the early days, I loved the idea of how unlimited the prospects of creativity were on here and finding things to create was never a hard task. It was always made better by the friends and other creatives I had in my life. The Violet Studios build lab was always a hive of activity with everyone creating, sharing and inspiring each other.

However much as with everything in the real world, things change and I am not very good with that.

Friends move on, change careers and life as always evolves. By 2016 I have to admit I was finding myself in a creative blackout. I had done so much on here, but I was burnt out from the sheer effort and getting bogged down in ever increasingly complex projects that were reliant on other people's input and when they had moved on, it is clear that those projects started to stall.

SL was changing during that time too. With LL's focused on Sansar, Second Life was getting ignored far too much, developments on the grid were stalled and it had created a very apathetic feel to the grid, something that in combination with the more personal side of my SL, left me feeling utterly void of creative passion.

By the time 2018 arrived, I was probably at my lowest point on here and so I decided to go out in to the real world, get a job and sadly walk away from SL although not entirely. My biggest issue was "finding the fun" again, meeting new people and maybe finding some mojo. That's where I have been for the last four years.  I have been doing a real world job, although in hind sight it was not the best choice.

I have in this time done what I wanted to do though. I have had the time away from the grid and reconnect with the real world although I will say this quite frankly, it's not all its cracked up to be. When it comes to SL though I have had the time I needed to clear my head, find some fun and meet new people.  During this time I have also been pleased to see that LL's have finally decided to focus back on SL again, sold Sansar (which as I predicted in 2015 was an absolute disaster) and finally start bringing SL up to spec again. It did make me laugh that I pushed on my blogs back in 2013 the idea of using baked textures on mesh items and it took LL's 6 years to come up with the same idea with BOM. Things have changed on here and for the better.

In short, I have found myself excited at the prospect of building new stuff using the new tech and I have found my mojo again.

So I would say after a rather long hiatus from the grid, I am back.

I have probably got a few hundred products that I want to create on here and while some of them fall in to the "Big Jobs" category, most of them are fairly straight forward artistic endeavours. What are they? Well, you will have to wait and see, but VS will be taking a new direction to say the least with old products being brought up to date and ranges of entirely new products hitting the shelves.

Expect a new product or two every few days from this point on and I will say I am genuinely excited at the prospect of this.

It's nice to be back and to all those who have supported Violet Studios over the years you have my thanks.

 

Hemi Violet

Violet Studios Redux

So, this is what 2020 looks like. Feels better.

First off, a way of an explanation over what has been going on. The truth is since about 2015, and although I didn't want to admit this to myself, I was becoming creatively burnt out. This all started coming to a head in 2018. I was stuck in a rut, unable and unmotivated as I tried to go in circles with projects and ultimately getting nothing done.

To that end, I had no choice but to walk away, a clean break to do something entirely different. I couldn't stay on here as all that would have happened would have been that I would not have been able to break free or recharge my creative batteries.

Hence I pretty much disappeared from the grid. I am sorry about that but sometimes in life you need to do these things and I really needed to do that.

It is now 18 months on from that decision and it is now 2020 and I finally feel that I have broken free of that vicious circle. I have new ideas, new directions I want to take and yes, I will be doing some updating too, but I also needed to do some remedial work.

Over the next week, you will see things starting to change around the sims.

Those changes are already underway. Back in 2015 I decided to create the Caldera Project. In hindsight that was not so much of a good idea even if it seemed like that at the time.  Those who have been around Violet Studios since we opened will know the Demon Sanctuary Castle was always a prominent feature of the sim although when Caldera opened, I moved it.

Well, the Sanctuary is now back in pride of place where it always was. I have also moved the World's End Pub down to ground level although it will need some extra work before it reopens. The long and short is that Caldera is now officially gone as I bring everything back to where it should be.

Now... I could tell you what is coming next, but to be honest I don't know. The next 2 to 3 weeks will be spent trying to bring everything up to date. After that new projects will be here.

I guess what I am trying to say is this.

It's 2020 - Violet Studios is back in business.

Hemi

Violet Studios Marketplace Update

The Marketplace is something merchants have a hate / hate affair with mostly down to how it works and as such over the years I slowly found myself dreading going on to it and adding new stuff.

Recently I became truly aware of just how outdated my products were and decided to do something about it.

Firstly, I know many customers may have bought outdated items that were updated in world. For those customers there is good news. Head to the redelivery terminals in world and see what's in there. Everything that has been updated is now in the Casper Redelivery system.

Secondly, I have finally been able to take down all the insanely outdated products including my original demon skins (not even ADV spec and before you say it, I attempted to do this before, but the Marketplace kept throwing wobblies). Surprisingly by the time I had finished I had roughly 300 products still online.

Over the last month I have been tackling the market place - it is why I have been so quiet and the vast majority of Violet Studios best sellers are now on there!

Let me break it down:

LTX - Now full on the Market Place - if it's in world, it's now on there

Fusion - 95% of the Fusion product line is now on the Marketplace, male and female

VSX - oddly this was mostly up to date and on there.

vString - All the latest Verson 5 models are now on there across the Revolutions, Essential and Specials. Most of the range was still on version 4 or earlier.

Verotic - Now here is a surprise. The whole line up of Verotic Male and Female Skins are now on the Market Place.

Headmaster - I know a lot of the range is old, but I have put roughly 90% of the Headmasters line up.

Violet Cybernetics was on the market place and mostly up to date, but I have now put the Cyber hairs up too.

Hanabi 2.0 - I have put roughly 70% of the reworked Hanabi Worxx store up, mostly the best sellers.

Optica Eyewear is now fully up.

Finally... the Demon Studio.

This was always well catered for on the market place but as I mentioned, the skins were painfully out of date. I am pleased to say that all ADV2 Omega Advanced ready Demon Studio skins are now on the market place, male and female.

At this moment I have near enough 800 products on there. Nowhere near my full selection but my best sellers. I still have some work to do on this and I am hoping I will be able to get things sorted out soon.

Regular services and new products are now resumed.

Hemi

Hippo's Demise - The Fall Out

As customers you may well have heard that one of Second Life's biggest vendor systems, Hippo went under a few weeks back. Summing this all up, the servers they used to send goods around the grid effectively burnt out. They then said they were quitting the grid.

This decision on their parts has left thousands of merchants and customers high and dry when it comes to sales but worse redeliveries.

I saw this coming back in 2016 when there were technical issues with Hippo, and I made the decision to move away from the Vending system to Casper. As such the Hippo database of sales was migrated to Casper and I thought that was the end of it. I did however continue to use Hippo Update as for some reason I didn't realise that this was actually also linked to their servers.

What this means for customers is that any updater supplied with a Violet Studio Product is now borked. With the loss of Hippos servers, the system will no longer work.

Yeah, it left me in a pretty foul mood.

I have been working towards getting Casper Update operational since I found out about this and the first piece of this are starting to slot in to place. I have also with my team investigated if there was any way to get around the updater, but sadly the same systems put in place to stop people illegally breaking in to them also stop any form of remedial work. This leaves me with some problems, although it's not a complete disaster.

Any Product bought through the Casper System is logged to your personal account name. This means that if you bought an item in world, then you will be able to go in to my stores to the redelivery terminal. From there, you can go on to their service and redeliver the items.

This does leave the problem of the Market Place though, but thankfully Casper has a solution there too.

I have downloaded sales from 2011 to present and linked Casper up to the Marketplace so now if you bought an item on there, you can again come in store, go to the redelivery terminal and download an update.

So, there is hope... But I really need to look at where the updateable products are.

Fusion - All Fusion products come with an updater included. As Fusion is sold through Casper and the Market Place it means that you can go in world and simply grab an update from the redelivery terminals. The only exclusion to this is if you were given an item directly from me (gifts etc). In those cases contact me in world.

vString Implants - These are very much the same as Fusion. Head to the Redelivery terminal in world and gain drop me a line if that doesn’t work.

Demon Wings - I have to be honest here. I know these are now old school and they were all due to be pulled from sale this year and replaced. There has been no significant update to these since 2014 and I have Bento flavoured wings in development. As such, regardless these are now officially discontinued and there will be no more updates. If you still have a set of Version 3's that you desperately need updating let me know but Version 9 is the final version.

Violet Cybernetics - Again, these products have reached their ultimate versions. Although remaining on sale, there will be no further updates.

Violet Studio Skin - These cover Verotic, LTX, Verotic Male and Demon Studio. I released the 2.1 ADV2 applier some time ago and customers should have updates these by now. Sadly though I have been looking at the Starlight skin base now for some time and I have been looking at replacing all current skins I have on sale. There is nothing more I can really do with my skins. They have Omega built in and they are the pinnacle of my skin design process, on a technical level. As such, again while only a formality, as there will be no more updates, these have reached the end of the line, even if they are still quite lovely.

LTX Mesh Items - These have always been sold exclusively in world and sadly for that reason, there will be no further updates. I believe everyone should be up to date though as really the Forza line hasn’t changed that much.

And now, the worst is left for last...

VSX...

It is fair to say, VSX is probably one of my best sellers both inworld and on the marketplace.

The VSX line reached its pinnacle with Version 6 and at that point, there really wasn’t much more I could do with it. Transferred to Mesh with materials, the products were as good as they got while staying within the realms of their original design scope.

VSXM was also a product line I pretty much nailed from the outset. Currently on Version 1.51 the last update saw materials and Omega Support added for the bulge. This all said, since 2013, the products have really required only 3 updates and they were pretty minor ones at that.

I have been muttering to myself for some time that I should bring new products out in the form of the VSXR line which has been on the work bench for some time. This situation really does hammer home the point that it is time I got on with that project. With no new updates planned for VSX or VSXM, I have decided to stop development on them, even if there was development I had planned, which there wasn't.

There is one slight bit of good news though. If you bought from the market place, I have put them on Casper, so visit the redelivery terminal in world and get what you need.

I really don’t want to say this, but... if you are still using Version 2 or 3 of VSX, and you really want the update... contact me in world and I will see what I can do.

So there you have it. I will over the next few weeks, be swapping out the defunct hippo updaters on all products and replacing them with Casper Updaters. This will be for products that are continuing their development process such as vStrings or Fusion.

I wish I had better news than this, but sadly this matter is out of my control although I hope you can see I am making every effort to ensure customers are well catered for.

Hemi

Addendum... 
I have now completed the migration of Marketplace Sales to Casper. If you have bought any currently available product from Violet Studios on the Marketplace that has been updateable, if you go in store to the redelivery terminal you can now get the lastest versions there.
Hemi

Violet Studios Update System out of Action

Over the last week, many people have been contacting me saying that the Update System which is included with selected products was not working. Last night I investigated the issues and found that the customer were correct - the Updater system was not working. 

Checking in to this, much to my horror I found that Hippo, the company I purchased the update system from was out of action and unbeknownst to me, their update system was web enabled, which means with their customer site out of commission, the whole updater system collapsed.

Hippo on their website are being quite vague about what is going on or even if it is going to come back at all. Needless to say, it looks like a distinct possibility that the update system is now defunct.

So, where does this leave you?

Primarily for the most regular updated products such as Fusion or vString, you should be fine. Because I moved my vendor system over to Casper a few years back, you can use the redelivery terminal in store to get your updates.

If you bought your fusion or vString products on the market place you will be supported too. Casper does have a system where you can import sales from the market place and I will be sorting out customer updates there too. In other words you will be able to update your product via the redelivery terminal.

This situation is a mess and I am not happy to say the least. I will be going through all updateable products soon and installing new Casper Updaters to replace the defunct Hippo ones.

I can only apologise to customers but sadly it is out of my hands.

If you have a product that you need updating and you can't get it from the redelivery terminal, please contact Hemi Violet in world and I will try to get this sorted for you. 

Do remember I am only human though and even I can't do everything.