UPDATE Sept. 28th: For a current, up-to-date list of free or inexpensive options for mesh avatar heads and bodies for female Second Life avatars, please see this blogpost. For a current, up-to-date list of free options for free and inexpensive male mesh avatar heads and bodies, please see this blogpost.
Altamura often has special deals for mesh avatar heads and bodies at various Second Life shopping events, and the current round of the eBento event is no exception. This time, Altamura is offering the same great deal for both male and female avatars: a Bento mesh head for only L$350, and a Bento mesh body for only L$500!
These items are all Omega compatible, so you can use Omega skin appliers with them. I have found that the Altamura female mesh bodies work very well with clothing designed for Maitreya Lara mesh bodies, so clothing should not be a problem.
You do have to join the Altamura Design/Mesh Avatars group for L$50 in order to get these bargains. I would suggest that you join the group and stay subscribed, because Altamura offers these sorts of deals regularly.
Yesterday, Eliot, the Community Manager for Sansar at Linden Lab, hosted a product meetup at the Zen Garden experience. A total of 35 avatars showed up, and many had questions for the Linden Lab staff who were present, including Linden Lab’s Chief Product Officer, Landon.
Eliot, Landon, and a couple of boars
I tried and failed to embed the Twitch livestream of the meeting to my blog, so here is a link for you to watch. (If anybody reading this knows how to properly embed a Twitch video into WordPress, please let me know, thank you!)
I did ask Landon whether this meant that Linden Lab was going to increase transaction fees in Sansar, and Landon said that he couldn’t promise that transaction fees and other sources of income for Sansar wouldn’t be increased in the future, but he added that increasing the number of experiences was a stand-alone decision to allow for greater creativity in Sansar. So this is notthe same as the situation in Second Life, where Linden Lab lowered land fees (both mainland and private estates), and raised the Linden dollar purchase fees at the same time to (at least partially) offset the loss of that revenue.
Landon also mentioned, in answer to my question about when a comprehensive licensing/permissions system would be available, that he hoped to be able to make the first part of this work available in the next release of the Sansar platform. This is much sooner than I expected, and very good news to the many content creators who have been long awaiting such a permissions and licensing system to be put into place before starting to sell items on the Sansar Store.
One of the announcements at the meeting was that this week, the Sansar team at Linden Lab had a hackathon to see if they could create cool new features for the platform. Among the things people worked on, Landon reported, was a potential future feature for the Sansar Store where you could rotate an object view in 360 degrees in a Sansar Store listing.
Another thing that caught my ear: Landon said that Linden Lab was having a few internal discussions, to consider releasing at least some of their software as open source! Again, I am surprised that they are considering doing this so early in their product development. One of Sansar’s biggest competitors, High Fidelity, is open-source software.
As usual, I will leave it to Inara Pey (who was present) to report on this meeting in greater detail. When she publishes her blogpost, I will link to it from here. She already covered a few points raised at the meeting in this blogpost.
Overall, it was a great meeting and we learned a lot. Thank you to Eliot and to all the Linden Lab staff who showed up to answer questions; it was very informative and very much appreciated!
