The next BIG thing in virtual worlds that support content creation by Residents: 3D meshes

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

With Halloween and Día de los Muertos just behind us, coupled with a dolorous week of Openspace drama, I'm weary of talking about virtual death and virtual taxes.

For a change of pace, I thought we might delve into one of the more interesting technical developments that avatars can look forward to in the months to come: support for 3D mesh objects in-world.

While the buzz about this within the sculpty community is not yet deafening, support for 3D meshes is expected to jolt content creators into a new building frenzy, and consumers will appreciate the ramped-up visual interest and detail in items, which will cost even fewer prims than before.

Sculpty magus Aminom Marvin first came to my attention when I learned that he was making good 2 prim sculpty trees about a year ago; reason enough for me to teleport immediately to see them because - and this must be said - I have had an aversion to Linden trees from the moment I layed eyes on them. The way they sway! :o Take them away!

So powerful is my contempt for Linden trees that, and I know that some will consider this heresy: I cannot love Baron Grayson's new Nameless sim because of them.



Today, Aminom is renown for making the finest sculpty bridges and staircases, among other things, in Second Life®. I especially admire a 5-prim double-helix model he developed a year ago, which features two staircases that are woven together but do not meet.



Sculpty makers point to Aminom when talk of quality modeling comes up, so I turned to him to learn more about 3D meshes.

Tell us a little about yourself. Where in the world are you and did you come here (Second Life) with experience in 3d modeling?

Aminom Marvin: I'm in Sacramento, California. I don't have any formal training in anything 3D, just messing around here and there. Before Second Life, I was working in fast food and was a biology student; worked in customer service.

I read in your profile that you started making sculpties in Photoshop.

Aminom Marvin: I started sculpting soon after sculpted prims were released. My friend, Karanadas Banjo, showed me how to make a simple sculpt plane in Photoshop, and then "paint" something somewhat like a height map. Soon after, I made Second Life's first sculpted stairs which, compared to today's standards, are very crude. The idea of this approach fascinated me, and I spent the next few months in the Beta grid, experimenting and creating sculpts entirely in Photoshop. At first they were very simple things - architectural components, basic shapes, and the like. However, this approach allowed me to discover things that were difficult to figure out in other programs - sharp edges, disconnected multiple objects on a sculpt, and how the individual polygons in a sculpt alpha sort.


"This spacecraft is sort of the culmination of that approach. It was created entirely in Photoshop," said Aminom

Aminom Marvin: From there, I learned Blender, which I selected because Domino Marama's scripts for that program were the best. They gave what I needed: flawless import and export, complete accuracy in position and representation, and relative ease of use. To this day, I still use Photoshop for sculpts a lot, often switching work to and from Photoshop and Blender, and often creating base shapes in Photoshop to be fine modeled in Blender.

Why do you prefer Blender over 3DSMax, for instance? You've been clear why you like it, but compared to other programs, how do the features and benefits stand up?

Aminom Marvin: Domino Marama has added every possible thing I can think of and more to her scripts :), including obscure things, such as making the sculpt maps optimized for the way images are compressed. Now, it's important to note that while for general 3D modeling, 3DSMax is superior, for simply designing sculpts, Blender is superior. Also, the fact that it is free and open source is good. You don't have to pay thousands of dollars or feel guilty about pirating software.

What is up with 3D mesh and why should we be excited?

Aminom Marvin: Let me (first) explain what an oblong sculpt is. Normal sculpts are fundamentally the same: analogous to a square piece of polygon "paper," 32 by 32 polygons in size. Oblong sculpts are "longer" on one side; common sizes are 16x64 polygons, 8x128 polygons, and 4x256. Oblong sculpts are useful because there are many objects that have much more detail in one axis than another. Things such as ropes, stairs, chains, and beams. In addition, they can be "cut" into many multiple elements to make very complex things.



In my own work, oblongs allow me to do what I did before, but about twice to four times better in every way. These chains are an example. The yellow chains are made using normal sculpts, and the grey ones use oblongs. Both are optimized to get as many links possible. The oblong versions have twice as many links for their respective construction types (one is more "polygonal" than the other but has more links), and they also texture much more efficiently and retain shape better from afar.

Oblongs can even be useful for complex organic things. This hand is an 8x128 sculpt cut into 8 pieces, each something like 8x13 polygons. Five of the pieces are used for the fingers, and the other three are "graphed" together to form the hand. In short, what oblong sculpts do is allow complex sculpts to approach more closely the efficiency of 3D meshes.

Moreover, making complex things with this is actually easier using oblongs than normal sculpts, which formerly could require some very complex sculpt origami. It reduces my own advantage with sculpts, but I've been pushing for oblongs for a long time because they are so useful and easier to use :)

To your knowledge what percentage of builders working with sculpties on the Second Life grid are working with oblongs?

Aminom Marvin: Not that many as of yet. It'll take a bit more time for the numerous plug-ins, scripts, and sculpt tools to integrate them.

Why then was it important to preface with an explanation about oblongs before plunging into why you are excited about 3D mesh?

Aminom Marvin: There's a chain of progression from normal sculpts, to oblong sculpts, to meshes. Complex oblong sculpts waste a certain number of polygons to form multiple disconnected shapes. Also, the texturing is tied to how the polygons stretch - which means you either have to live with the texture stretching, or waste more verts to make it texture acceptably. Finally, the major thing is that the precision in vertex values of sculpts is limited to 256 values per axis; i.e. the smallest "jump" from one vertex position to another is 1/256 of the sculpt size. This is a huge pain. To make this house, for example, I had to spend more than half the total time just working with this, often moving vertices by their smallest possible values. 3D meshes don't have these precision limitations, and so right there it would mean an increase in quality and less time spent just to make something look good.



Aminom made this Tudor house with 250 prims. Nearly everything is sculpted. "It has the visual detail of approximately 3000 prims. That is, it would take 3000 conventional prims to replicate," he explained



Aminom Marvin: 3D meshes would give one total freedom in how the 3D model is constructed, how individual polygons are textures (UV mapped), and use of numerous other 3D modeling tools that you can't use on sculpts. To model something with a sculpt, you can't extrude, add geometry, or anything else; you can only manipulate vertex positions. In addition, you wouldn't have to use all 1024 polygons. You could only use what you need.

Originally I was worried that by allowing mesh import, it would result in the mass piracy and importation of content from 3D games and websites. This still worries me. However, many of these models are either not optimized for games, or optimized for Second Life. I think creativity and innovation will survive because those who model for Second Life will always make the best stuff. There will be limitations of some kind, of course. For example, each "mesh prim" could have a maximum of 2048 tris (triangles) on high LOD, 512 on medium, and so on.

I have heard that rendering 3D mesh objects in Second Life is going to be very hard on people's systems. Your opinion?

Aminom Marvin: They won't be more hard than sculpts. In fact, they will be less hard, as it will encourage and allow much, much greater efficiency.

Openlife is expected to enable 3D mesh imports as soon as December. I have no idea what the schedule is for Second Life. Is there any possibility that you may stray for a while to experiment?

Aminom Marvin: Definitely, if not just to see how they implement meshes.

You seem very positive about this, other than your expressed concern regarding mass piracy and importation of content from the web/games (which would, indeed, be serious). Do you have any other concerns?

Aminom Marvin: It seems everything comes back to the Openspace issue. When meshes are introduced and widely used, it will mean that content rezzed on land such as buildings, furniture, and landscaping will be hyper-low-prim and very efficient. This would make low-prim land very attractive, as people would need space more than prims. I'll be interested to see how the Openspace issue changes when this happens.



This entire staircase by Aminom... every bit of it, is one prim.



Who is the key Linden liaison for this? Qarl Linden? If so, do you attend his office hours? If you were to hazard a guess then, when do you think LL might enable support?

Aminom Marvin: Qarl Linden. I try to attend his office hours frequently. He is one of the most innovative Lindens in my opinion, and is also one of the (Lindens) most in touch with the community. However, he makes sure not to promise or suggest things that he or Linden Lab are not ready to fulfill, so no idea :)

A wise move on his part, to be sure. But if you were a gambling man... C'mon, give us a wild guess. If Opensims can do it, what would hold Second Life back?

Aminom Marvin: Uhm... a year maybe? They'd probably want to focus on the way Second Life works with materials and textures first (something that is planned), so that when they add meshes, they can take advantage of texture/materials enhancements. Second Life is a lot larger platform than Openlife, and needs to account for that, and also future scalability, so naturally, you'd see a lot more immediate innovation on smaller projects like Openlife.

Moving on to other topics, please tell us about the monument you've created to Gene Replacement and placed at your store, Sculptomancy. I found it especially interesting since NPIRLers have been asking Linden Lab for scaleable megas for over one year. In fact, for 8 months we kept a daily count of how many days had transpired since Michael Linden had initiated a discussion on the Second Life blog asking if Linden Lab should keep megas or do away with them. There is an interesting chat log posted here.


A gagged and blindfolded Gene Replacement... The plaque reads: In Memory of Gene Replacement

Aminom Marvin: Gene Replacement was an alt of Plastic Duck, who was the most famous "griefer" on the grid a few years ago. However, he was also a fiddler and very creative, and did much good for Second Life. For example, he found a serious bug that allowed a modified LibSL client to pay another avatar negatively, and in effect take money from an avatar. This bug, if abused, could have shut down the Second Life economy massively for some time. He reported it to Philip Linden instead, who thanked him, and the Lab implimented a fix before anyone else discovered it and abused it. He also created the original megaprims which, to me, are the most important resident-created building tools Second Life has ever seen. A lot of my products would have been impossible without them, and Desmond Shang has commented that without the prim-saving ability of megaprims, turning a profit on Caledon would have been almost imposssible.

I notice you belong to many in-world groups devoted to sculpties. Is there any one group that you would most recommend to the beginner who wishes to plunge into sculpty creation?

Aminom Marvin: Sculpties is the "main" sculpt group, I guess, and would be the best place to ask for general help, such as where to find learning resources. Sculptie Dev is more technically minded.

Finally, where did your name come from?

Aminom Marvin: I made my Second Life account and just came up with a random psudo-word, not expecting that I would be heavily involved. Of course now I'm stuck with it ;)


You can visit Sculptomancy, Aminom's store, by teleporting directly from here.

Fun with prim math - What would YOU do if you had 45,000 prims at your disposal?

While many of us are agonizing over how to cope with Second Life®'s upcoming 750 prim limitations for the same Openspace sims that were sold to us with 3,750 prim allocations, I can't help wondering what you would do if you had FORTY FIVE THOUSAND prims to play with on your sim.

Consider, too, that each of those 45,000 prims is scaleable to 100m....

Indeed, you can purchase a single Openlife Grid region within a private cluster for $145 with $75 monthly tier.

And yes, your ankles will often sink into the grid, your avatar may bounce dizzingly, and even endless Ctrl Alt R's (rebake) won't save your often sorry bald self from a bad case of the greys. It's not a grid for the vain. Yet.

No charge for texture uploads, either. Yet. I imagine this will change when Openlife's new economy kicks in by the end of the year.

Many thanks to Osiris Indigo who sent in this photograph of a playful moment over at one of the more viable alternatives to Second Life, the Openlife. He reports that it was "rather easy and stable," to do.


45,000 prims! by Osiris Indigo (Click to see large)

Seriously, what would you do with 45,000 prims on your sim?

Earth Primbee's reaction to Linden Lab's revamped policy on Openspaces

Earth Primbee is, among many other things, a NPIRLer, a talented machinimator, and a co-creator of the much loved and spacy Inspire Space Park (teleport directly from here). After reading Mark Kingdon's (Linden Lab's CEO) latest missive on the Second Life blog regarding revised policies for Openspaces, Earth wrote this guest blogpost, which reflects his opinions of the situation.


by Earth Primbee

I'll be the first to admit sometimes you don't know you have a problem until it blows up in your face. In the case of "openspace" regions in Second Life®, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I had no real concept of the amount of these regions that were in use by residents. I did know that my obligations to keep Inspire Space Park alive prohibited me from having any private land of substantial size to build my "home" on. I rented around the grid and lived in some great communities. Ultimately however, I found myself wanting more space and less stuff.

When a good friend of mine bought two of these style regions and offered half of one to me I jumped at the chance! I gladly accepted the prim limits and ended up building a nice natural area with a submarine to live in under the water. It worked out perfect for me and my share of the tier was comfortable enough to endure for some time. We had maybe 4 people max in this space at once for the months I lived there. I was very happy!! It seemed like a perfect product. I suppose it is true that some things are too good to be true.

When the first proposed changes came out and seemed so set in stone I was pissed!!! I know I wasn't alone, but the main problem I believe was the perceived lack of concern for how this would affect my fellow residents and I but mostly I. Coupled with the "abuse" connotation as justification for the changes this was quite enough to motivate a red alert. There was no way I could afford the tier increase let alone the estate owner.

I and many others expressed through various ways other changes that could accomplish the same goal as the proposal. Judging by today's announcement, it looks like our voices have been heard. I do understand the technical challenges faced by a virtual world of this size and complexity. Nothing is ever easy and everything takes a lot more work than anyone who hasn't seen under the hood can imagine.

It is good to see this new direction. To see feedback heard, considered, and acted upon. I don't know if I will be able to afford the July 2009 price increase but I do suspect that many who haven't already dropped their openspace regions may now hold on to them. I can say I'd be much more likely to purchase a homestead than a private island unless my $ituation substantially changes.

This situation reminded me so much of my last virtual life in another virtual world before Second Life. I'd placed all my virtual eggs in one basket and that meant that any changes to this world became very personal. It is VERY important to remember that these worlds contain people who just like in Real Life become emotionally entrenched and attached to places and things they love and create. When you mess with that, you are messing with people's emotions. This is why such fiery backlashes such as we have seen flare up. It is not just a bunch of pixels that have no meaning. It is part of people's lives and in a lot of cases their business!

Following this line, I do wonder if I branched out to other virtual worlds would I be less apt to cry foul if major changes happened in one or the other. An international corporation has many advantages over a company that solely exists in one country. Even a stock portfolio spread out in multiple markets and companies has some advantages. So the real point I want Linden Labs to remember is actions like this openspace situation, feel a lot like a "taxation without representation" kind of thing. It shakes people and sometimes wakes them up to a reality they didn't see before for better or worse. This is why you see people rushing off to other worlds and looking for alternatives to the unacceptable situation they are faced with cause when will this happen again? How long till another unacceptable situation comes up that they have no input on?

I applaud them for taking a moment to step back and listen to what people are saying but more so for taking real action to attempt to bridge the gap. Despite what has occurred that is a good sign that the customer is important. If Linden Labs stays true to the goal of bringing the community input into decisions and problems like this one, it will go a long way to reestablish trust. People put so much into this world they deserve to have input. Our creations are only as fantastic as people believe they are. Without people believing in your world, you will find it empty very fast.

When I came to Second Life, I told myself "never again" will I become so caught up in a single virtual world that it will hurt me if it suddenly changes. Well I did! The community of Second Life and the power of thousands of full time developers working alongside thousands of part time developers is intoxicating and a wonder to behold. The concept to creation ratio is higher than I have ever experienced. I rarely find myself saying I wish the "devs" would make this or that because I can do it myself. This Openspace region issue was one of those rare times when I wished the Second Life "devs" would do something different. It looks like they are. I appreciate that and no matter what other worlds I take part in, as long as they keep that up, I will maintain a presence in Second Life.

Can Linden Lab stop the exodus?

I dropped in on my new friends over at the Openlife Grid this afternoon and learned that they've enjoyed 30,000 sign-ups and over 1,000 land orders, just this week.

Meanwhile, Hamlet Au (aka Wagner James Au) has just reported that in his phone conversation today with Mark Kingdon, Linden Lab's new CEO said that "in the next few days, the company will post an update to this policy which will incorporate feedback from Openspace owners."

Too little, too late?

* Second Lifers have banned together in the many thousands to protest... well over 5,000 in the SOS group alone, and that's just one of four groups that I'm aware of.
* The LeavingSecondLife email address has received dozens of fascinating emails already from people that, while not claiming that they are leaving Second Life® for keeps, have made it clear that they are upset and looking elsewhere, especially on the Opensim grids.

Is Kingdon just putting a finger in the dam?

The Gentrification of Second Life®

As most of us are these days, I too am much preoccupied with the recent developments regarding the new pricing of Openspaces. This is not something which directly affects me at the moment but I can see that it is seriously shaking up a world which I hate to see subjected to such tremors.

My contacts list: There are maybe 10, - 15 at the very most, that I can count on to be online more or less everyday - and every single one of them is someone engaged in creative activity of one kind or another. A good few are builders, some of whom are artists and others designers, while the rest is made up of writers and bloggers. So, what is so remarkable about that you might well ask. After all, I am myself a builder and birds of a feather do tend to flock together and hardly surprising that quite a few if not indeed all of my contacts in Second Life are engaged in creative activity. Right?

Wrong! My contacts list in Second Life® is enormous. I have hardly ever deleted anyone that I have befriended from my newbie days onwards. There are names in there that stem back to my days on Help Island, women I met in the changing rooms of NCI Plaza, people encountered in malls and at concerts, in the distant days when I had not even yet managed to purchase my first AO. I have kept them all. Avatars whose handlers came from every imaginable walk of life. None of them around anymore. Only the builder/writer folk seem to have stayed the course.

And now, every then and again, while logging in I get this little notice from Linden Labs calling out to the business world to use Second Life as a virtual platform for meetings, product simulation and so forth. Needless to say, I am talking totally out of my hat here: I have no data, no market analysis or stats to know whether any of my assumptions hold up in any way. But, I really wonder whether this strategy is paying off in a big enough way to get Second Life out of the red? Does it really work?

Can it really work even? It would seem to me that for Second Life to survive and to prosper Linden Labs would first need to deal with the colossal fall out rate, of which my friends list is but a humble example. Makes for a most unattractive sales pitch you know? Most of my "friends" are gone for ever. And as for the precious few others that do make the rare appearance: A person who logs in every 3 months or so to attend a virtual meeting doth not a true Resident make. Cultivating the involvement of a strata of society from which would emerge true hardcore Residents would seem to me the only way to salvage the situation here.

In other words bring in the artsy crowd...

And no, I am not talking about the "full-time-acknowledged-in-Real Life-professional-artist" here. I know a few of those, and they seem to me to be even worse than the business types. With them it is all about running in, rezzing a "project", shooting a quickie machinima or two, to be shown on an LCD display at some "important" Real Life art event or other, and then rushing back out again. And all of this faster than you can chat the word "biennial" at that!

I am not talking about going to art educational enterprises either. I happen to be smack in the middle of all of that particular malarkey and trust me - again, it would be a huge big waste of your time. For my idea to really work, the artistic individuals in question would need to be motivated enough to stick around, to become part of the social, which would mean the metanomic fabric of a virtual life. And those would be the ones that are doing so already - only elsewhere.

What I am talking about is Web 2.0 creative activity. Web communities that gather around portals such as Deviant Art. How many subscribers does Deviant Art have? Millions for sure, but exactly how many millions? And how many more of these communities are there the world over? Hundreds? Thousands? That, I think, is precisely where your potential client base resides oh ye good Lindens! And maybe you have already made outreach efforts and I am just babbling on about the obvious here? But then again maybe you haven't?

Now, this is of course a long-term strategy: Small budget Residents, as these persons will in all likelihood be, may or may not be in a position to buy land. Or those that do may only manage to be modest small parcel holders - initially. So, in terms of land purchase activity, obviously getting some wonder corporation to sign up and buy 20 islands straight off the bat has a glamorous ring to it that my little plan here could in no way match - initially. And what's more, you may even have to provide quite a few more sandbox islands - initially...

However, my guess would be that a good portion of this new blood would very quickly start designing stuff to be sold in-world. (Just take a look at the 3D modeling pages on Deviant Art and you will see evidence of what I am talking about right there). So, maybe not straight away but in due course they would seriously be bolstering up metaverse economy, which would necessitate the purchase of land for shops and entertainment venues where the purchased goodies could be flaunted; which would brighten up the real estate market, and so on and so forth... And who would be purchasing all of these nice new products, you want to know? Well, that is the beauty of the whole thing: They themselves would, of course. Isn't that precisely how all of these portals survive? Members sell things - prints, posters, skins, widgets, gadgets - which other members - who in their turn sell things also - buy! Teeeeee heeeeee...

And then secondly, artists also do this wonderful thing called the gentrification of decayed city spaces in Real Life. You turn loose a sizable group of artists in a totally run down inner city area: They fix up, they renovate and of course - indeed most importantly - they also bring style and coolness to the place. Next thing the realtors step in, the artists get ousted out - the neat little cafes and things stay (of course) and the fat wallet types move in. The earliest example I guess would be SoHo, NYC but there are literally thousands of examples of this the world over.

Thus, once bitten twice shy, all of these communities would be wise to demand some serious reassurance (preferably in writing) that land prices would be guaranteed and that policies would remain stable. In other words, that what happened to their counterparts in Real Life would not also end up happening to them in a virtual world.

So, Dear Lindens, this was my two cents worth of input to your, to me fairly obvious, conundrum. If you promise to not to throw us all out on our virtual ears once we have gentrified the place, please do take advantage of what our ilk has to offer! Anything we can do to help - really and truly...

Mark Kingdon - Come down, come down from your Ivory Tower and listen to your Residents: A dose of perspective

The first 100 days as the commander of a company should be a time for absorbing information, discovering the strengths and weaknesses of the team, and putting all those puzzle pieces together. You became Linden Lab's CEO and adult supervisor in mid-March of this year, which would put you at about the 225 days mark, or 8 1/2 months.

225 days later, Mark Kingdon (aka M Linden), I'm disappointed in you. I was so optimistic about your arrival, too.

To make matters worse, the way I see it, Linden Lab owes me $950US + a reimbursement for my time.

Shall I just email the bill over to you? Oh, you don't know what I'm talking about? Well, come on down from your Ivory Tower, dear man, and let me catch you up on things.

Just one week before your arrival, Linden Lab introduced a new product called Openspaces. The official description of the product reads as follows, and there was no mention of special rules:

What is an Openspace?

An Openspace is a type of private island intended for light use countryside or ocean. Unlike normal regions that effectively get a CPU to themselves on the server, there can be up to four Openspaces on a single CPU, sharing the resource (hence them being ‘light use’).

Back in those days, I was the care-free owner of a bit more than a quarter sim upon which Chakryn Forest (V2) sat. I had purchased that island land about 8 months before, and paid a creator several hundreds of dollars to make me the virtual forest of my dreams.

A few days after the Openspace announcement, my friend thomtrance Otoole offered me an Openspace to create a new, sim-wide forest. My only financial commitment was to pay tier... $75US a month. This was rather enticing, because at the time, I was paying $125 for about the same number of prims but not nearly as much land. I gratefully took him up on his very generous offer, and put Chakryn Forest up for auction.

Now then... by this time, the fever for Openspaces was gripping the Grid, and many people lost interest in buying regular island land or mainland. I don't mind telling you that it got so you couldn't give away regular island land, cause Openspace tier was just so much cheaper.

The forest and I got lucky. A dreamer and forest lover like me purchased my land and the forest for less than what I had paid for the land, but he promised to keep the forest intact and that, in my mind, made it a good deal.

By then, Openspace Chakryn was mine, and for two months I rolled up my sleeves and worked with Andrek Lowell and Eshi Otawara - two of the best creators in Second Life - to develop a rich and enchanting forest brimming with secrets and its own special lore. Because I value these creators and their time, I paid them for it and as generously as I could afford. Several hundreds of dollars later, and on July 15th, I proudly opened the new Chakryn Forest to the public for everyone's use and enjoyment.

Oh, I should mention that Andrek Lowell worked tirelessly for many extra hours to create the entire sim-wide forest with only 1,400 prims. Why? Because it was my plan to showcase great virtual art throughout the sim and I needed every last prim. He delivered, and just last month the art shows began with a great installation by Glyph Graves:


Music: Narayanam, performed by Suchita Parte
Video: Bettina Tizzy

It made me proud to see the daily traffic numbers, which average 5,000. Now, was this hurting anyone? I don't think so, because Chakryn shares the server with at least three other Openspaces that I know of that hardly get any traffic at all.

Did I act with evil intent? Certainly not. In fact, all along I thought I was being an upright and conscientious citizen and providing Second Life®'s Residents with a park.

Then, out of the blue... an announcement from our government, regarding a certain "policy change:"

"Beginning 1st January 2009

We will increase the monthly maintenance fee from USD$75 to USD$125 per month. This price increase will apply to all owners of Openspaces on January 1st as well as new purchases after that date. There will be no grandfathering of Openspace maintenance pricing."

That's $600US you want to bill ME extra, every year?! Why, not even George W. Bush is ... enough to pull a stunt like that: increasing our taxes by 67% for an 8 month old product!

Now over at GigaOM, Wagner James Au (aka Hamlet Au of New World Notes) has just published your statement in response to the outrage you are hearing after the stinging blow you have dealt us. Part of it reads...

“To be clear,” Kingdon continued, “this price adjustment affects only a portion of land in Second Life; it does not apply to private islands or regular mainland property. We made this change to ensure an optimal Second Life experience for all Residents.”

Um...

I can give you the actual breakdown for my bill in person, and at your convenience, but here is an overview:
- Cost of developing Chakryn Forest (V2), which I never got back
- Cost of tier for two months while Openspace Chakryn was in development
- Cost of developing Openspace Chakryn (many hundreds of dollars)
- My time (like Mastercard says... it is priceless)

Come down, come down from your Ivory Tower, dear man, and take stock of the situation.