FlexMarket

OPEN BETA ON THE SECOND LIFE GRID HAS NOW BEGUN!

FlexMarket has had a rocky road from its very inception.  A site this ambitious takes a lot of planning, coding, testing, and usually there’s an entire team working on it.  Unfortunately, I have been the only guy working on this site, so it’s crucial to test the crap out of everything, and ensure that everything works as planned.  Thus, we are making use of an open beta, where people are going to test everything before I open the site to the general public and start advertising like crazy.

(And yes, I said it was a closed beta, but I’ve realized that isn’t going to work so it’s going to be open sicne there are more people available and I can test load better.)

To begin, register an account, and go to my shop at Heavenly Sky, click on the terminal, and associate with your account.  You can then go get a PDS.

REPORT ANY BUGS ON THE FORUM OR DIRECTLY TO FRED ROOKSTOWN SO I CAN FIX THEM ASAP.

Talk to Fred Rookstown if you wish to have a Terminal installed at your store.

Closed beta begins at 12:00PM PDT.

Register quickly!

We’re moving our shit to another area, which is actually cheaper and has 368 prims instead of 51 (!). It’s also a class-5 server, so MUCH less lag.

The new store in Heavenly Sky

Almost done, just tweaking the terminals so I don’t need a bank server (Economic Core will manage all Terminals). Closed beta will begin soon.

Our current shitty store if you would like to drop by: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Heavenly%20Sky/76/194/23

Don’t expect much, selling some half-assed radars and crap to make up for rent.  There’s also a PDS that’s in operation, but it doesn’t do anything beside look pretty and display the sim FPS, although all the backend stuff is in place.

90% of the Products Listings system is complete.  I fixed a few display bugs, enabled picture uploads, and have almost finished the listing addition form.  Tests are ongoing, still have to set up the product delivery system, so no buy buttons yet.

In the meantime, I am working on a pricing structure for the various listing plans.  Here’s what I’ve whipped together so far: (OS$ == whatever currency the local grid uses.)

• Basic Listing: Standard listing, no bells or whistles.  Completely free.
• Basic Plus Listing: Standard listing, but with bold text.  10 OS$ a week.
• Bronze Listing: Tan-tinted border, bold text.  20OS$ a week.
• Silver Listing: Soid tan border, larger text.  50OS$ a week.
• Standard Banner Ad: IAB 468×60 banner ad.  $5 a month/$2 USD a week. (Paypal)
• Oversized Banner Ad: 728×90 banner ad.  $10 a month/$5 USD a week. (Paypal)

This is not the final pricing structure by far. In fact, I’m wanting to hear from you before implementing any pricing system whatsoever, so if you have suggestions on stuff to add, adjustments on pricing, etc, go ahead.

That box entry at the bottom is the culmination of months of work. Fuck Yeah.

The FlexMarket Inventory Cloud is a system to aggregate all accessible items from all of your alts so it is simpler to find and shove into a product listing.  Now that it is working correctly, 80% of the work on FlexMarket is complete. Everything else is now mostly front-end work, like forms, and some minor features here and there.

Finally got a lot of work done on the Product Distribution Server (PDS) core. My labors established a working protocol for FlexMarket <-> SL-based entities, and have produced a working control panel for PDSes in the user dashboard.  The PDS prototype downloaded and stored settings from my webserver in a split second, which includes time during which FlexMarket itself logs the PDS and the local sim’s FPS for load balancing purposes.

This is only a first step in getting the PDS functional; Still a lot of work to do and I’m going to bed for now.

PDS Prototype lit in green for the first fucking time.