June 1st was to be the migration deadline for Linden Lab's spiffy (read: broken as shit*) new Direct Delivery system. Personally, I never had any problems with my Magic Box, but I won't get into that here. Anyway, I popped over to the Marketplace to confirm that the migration date hadn't changed. And what to my wondering eyes should appear...
"One other question that has come up frequently as we get close to June 1, is around Direct Delivery migration dates. We will not be requiring Merchants to migrate to Direct Delivery before August 1, 2012, and will give at least a 4 week notice for any shutdown dates."
(I called it, Bronxelf. I so totally called it.)
But instead of procrastinating for another two months, I decided to go ahead and kill two birds with one stone: get my store's inventory migrated over to Direct Delivery, and add a slight update. That update being petites. To strangers of SL and its trends, this means really really small avatars. Like around half a meter small.
Many merchants immediately jumped on the bandwagon and started making petite versions of their merchandise, old and new. I wasn't one of them. It's not that I don't like them. I do, though I'll probably never own one and I'll never make anything specifically for them. I have two reasons for this: one, anyone who really knows me knows that I don't follow trends. I can't say it's because I'm Goth, because even Goth isn't immune to trends. I'll cut that rant short and get to my second reason: I don't cash in on trends, either.
I opened a shop in SL because I think building is fun. I mix my prims and textures like paint on a canvas. I didn't make the paint or the canvas or even the brush, but the art is still mine. I put it up for sale as a (admittedly faulty) gauge as to how well my creations are liked. Direct praise or criticism is few and far between. On the other hand, I have creations that have never sold a single copy, but I'll never take them down because I like them. I promised both myself and a beautiful soul I miss dearly that the moment I stopped having fun and cared only about my sales was the moment I would close shop. I'm losing focus of my topic here, so I'll get straight back to the point: cashing in on trends goes against the nature of why I do this.
All that being said, I'm not averse to change. A friend of mine named Skyler Glasswing passed me a script which is a modded version of the one I was already using to resize my items. This version allows for both extremely large and extremely small resizing of linked objects, even smaller than they could normally go. I figured, what the hell, I need to transfer my entire stock over to Direct Delivery anyway, so why not update all their scripts while I'm at it?
But I needed to test it out. So I grabbed a demo copy of the Fallen Gods petite avatar, slapped in the new scripts into one of my smallest offerings (a nose stud) and one of its companion pieces. After a minor repositioning of one prim...
And here's a size comparison with a regular avatar for reference wearing the same chain (hard to see, but she is, promise!):
So to wrap up this rather long blog post, I'm very satisfied with the results and I'll continue updating my wares with the new script. While I still won't be making anything new specifically for petites, I will continue designing future product with my goal of being able to fit as many differently-sized avatars as possible.
Peace,
☥ Stacey
*Linden Lab has a well-documented history of half-assed implementations of new features. While I'm optimistic enough to believe that most of the bugs will be ironed out eventually. For now though, yeah. Broken as shit.
