I have closed the Buckaroo store for the time being.  I may resurrect it at a smaller place with the idea of donations + support fees for answering questions.

Before I make any sort of announcement, I want to thank my customers past and present. They are an inspiration. Thanks for checking out my store and using my products.

I am going to change the business model of my store, Buckaroo. I have some RL constraints on my time, and want to be careful about how I spend it in SL.  I have not decided when this takes effect — just “sometime soon”.

The model is going to be: get items by coming to the store and optionally leaving a donation, and payment for support.

I have written very good documentation for my products on this site. I hope people will find the answers they need here. If they cant find what they need, I may be able to come out and answer questions personally. My fee will start at 500 Lindens.

By essentially giving stuff away, my products get out there, and some who use them will be able to help each other. I get a wider base of active users, and this in turn can lead to interesting future work in SL and elsewhere

I will be changing permissions on my products to be mod only. If someone wants copies, they can get what they need individually.

I needed to look around for a prefab house recently. I wanted something different than a Cory Edo, Barnesworth Anubis, Juro Kothari, Botha, or Kongo design (to name a few of my favorites).

Oh my …

It had been a year so since I looked around at prefabs. It’s amazing what people put out there and charge money for. In some cases creators want over 10,000 Lindens for a house that’s full of mistakes.

Like what, you say?

Glad ya asked :) Here are some handy things *not* to do when you build a prefab that you are going to sell:

Fit and Finish

• Flicker - caused by overlapping prims. Tuck prims slightly behind each other to avoid this
• Gaps - c’mon - just pay attention here …
• Walls sticking out of sides
• Lots of obvious ‘by eye’ building - walls at 88 degrees etc …

Doors

• Too big - no, you dont really need a door 8 meters high for a McMansion
• Too thick - I see doors .5M thick all the time. It’s amazing.
• Same texture on side of door as front and back, but compressed
• Doesn’t quite line up, is not as wide as opening, etc
• Door Textures - doorknob at neck height or higher
• Door Textures - doorknob at knee caps
• Door Textures - really stretched out and/or cut off or repeating
• Doors that are next to each other, where one opens one way, and the other one goes the other way
• That’s enough about doors …

Windows

• Using the right texture, but starting it way too high off the floor
• …or way too far down
• Tinting - tinting the inside instead of the outside for privacy …
• Tinting - tinting the outside, but then tinting the inside as well so that you can no longer see out
• Running a separate script for every single window in the house

Stairs / Ramps

• Each step really high? - test it. Now test it with 5 of your friends.
• Ramps that are narrow and easy to fall of of (hint: use an invisible guardrail prim)
• Spiral staircases and ramps look nice, but are almost always painful to use in practice
• Suggestion: Use a one touch TP to go between floors

Textures

• Really stretched out
• Dont match up
• Different repeat pattern on the same wall / floor / etc.
• Way out of scale
• Compressed on the thin side of something (like the inside of a window or doorway

Spatial

• Room too small, camera angle goes outside
• Spaces fine for RL need to scaled up for the average sized Avatar
• This bathroom is the size of Kansas

Summary

Going to charge for the prefabs you put out there? Look around at the good ones first. And… look at the not so great ones. There is a lot to learn from out there. Keep building and keep smiling :)

Alrighty You Wonderful Avatars Out There!

I had fun doing the Easter sale. There was one problem with it though …I neglected to use it as an opportunity to get people subscribed to an update list!

So it is time for the “reimburse people who sign up” sale. Up to 500L back!

—- Look See Do —–

1) Go to Buckaroo

2) Find the group signup kiosk. It looks like this:

It is Subscribe-O-Matic,not the silly Linden groups. I’m not going to compete with the Social Currency of being cool enough to be in Your 25! Click and get the occasional blurb from me. No big whoop. You will be given a notecard when you join. Hang on to it.

3) Buy Items. You can get reimbursed for up to 500L. One reimbursement per RL person. See the notecard for details.

4) Update the notecard with your name, and send me a copy. Get the notecard back to me by 11:59 PM SL Time, April 6, 2008.

5) I look it over to see if it qualifies for a reimbursement. There are certain things that wont fly well (dont “New Note” me, dont IM me your demand for reimbursement, etc). Most people are pretty groovy about it, so I am not worried.

That’s pretty much it! Get to my store by Friday, join, buy, save, and be happy!

Wow, a week later and I have not gotten around to commenting on the Buckaroo sale…

It went well!

Just to recap, it was a sale where people came in, bought whatever, and sent me notecards for reimbursements for up to 2000L. It ran for 4 days — ending on Easter.

I took in 54,000L, and reimbursed most of that. But… the important thing to me were the contacts I made. They are so much more important to me than the money. (ok, well the money is nice too, and I did get to keep enough to make me smile :-)

So … I am going to do it again — although in a revised format. That comes up in the next blog post.

Some thoughts:

• this was wonderfully audacious. It gets the products out there, and it gives me a ton of feedback. I wont sit still — you know I will step up and iterate on the products and the docs…
• OMG, some people dont frikken read! I got a “New Note” notecard. I got a notecard basically saying “may I have my reimbursement?” with absolutely no other info. It was very tempting to just toss these. Sure I can wade through all of the transactions and piece together what someone bought — but hey people — you are getting it for FREE! Accounting 101 is appreciated :)
• One person came in, maxed out the 2000L, and then came in as his alt and almost maxed that. How can I tell? Almost the exact same AV profile pic with a multigadget earpiece! No, I didn’t ban him, though it was tempting ;) People, if you need the discount that badly, come and talk to me. I am a really accommodating person.
• I made a huge mistake! I didn’t have any means of getting people to sign up for my product updates group (slaps forehead). Blown opportunity there. I could have had 75 people sign up…
• … but of course, I learn from my mistakes. I have a group with Subscribe-O-Matic and will do promotion to get the list going. That will be in a post I do pretty soon. The gist of it will be: join the group - which will give you a notecard with instructions, buy stuff, send me the notecard, and get up to 500L reimbursement.

Why am I doing this?  Simple - to get the word of my store out there! 

Slider 3.0 is available at my store.

It displays textures, and allows a lot of flexibility for what you can do and offer for each one:

• display textures - slideshow mode + manually advance / go back
• resize foreground and background per texture, as well as control over alpha, color, repeats, offsets, rotation, etc
• give out items per texture (Landmark, Notecard, Object, Texture)
• go to web addresses per texture
• Amazon web site shortcut per texture

Documentation: Slider 3.0 Documentation

Go to my store: Buckaroo

Giddyup :)

p.s. I know I gave out some samples where the background textures weren’t copiable — whoops, my bad. It’s not an error in the script, just a silly permissions issue. Contact me and I will give you one with the corrected permissions (and yes, this only applies to the people I already gave this to :)

VidMon is available at my store.

Per-Person Video with menus.  What does that mean?  You and others can see:

• same or different videos
• same or different screens
• same time
• you only see one video at a time

Menus, searching, notecards, and more..

300L

Documentation: VidMon 3.x Documentation

Go to my store: Buckaroo

Giddyup :)