New Trader Item

{ November 20, 2009 @ 10:43 PM } · { Turtles }
{ Tags: , , , , , , , } · { Leave a Comment }

Home, home on the rage
Where the turtles gallop and graze
Where seldom is heard an un-turtle-y word
And shellers are non-physical all day!

That’s right, our latest trader item is over 50% complete, but instead of the normal clue, Grim and I decided to just flat-out tell you what the item is, and we’re extremely excited about it.  This item will be something that allows all of your turtles to become non-physical and stay within a certain radius.  This will make it so that they will not create ANY collisions, and will also make it extremely easy to have “free-range” turtles.  This also means that they won’t stay within enclosure walls unless their range stays within the enclosure, which is why this is something that will be completely optional.

This is such an important thing, though, that Grim and I have decided that this should be free for everyone and not cost any points.  What will the lottery winners get this time then, you may ask?  Each of our five lottery winners will get TWO boxes of hatchless food, valued at L$2900.

While the home item will be distributed as an item, Grim and I definitely hope that people take the script and make turtle habitats with the script in it that are pre-made non-physical enclosures for peoples’ turtles.  There will be more details about the actual usage of the item coming soon.

Weekly Update

{ November 17, 2009 @ 1:20 PM } · { Turtles }
{ Tags: , , , , , , , , } · { Leave a Comment }

Hey everyone!

Last week’s show proved to be extremely tough, but we still got a nice variety of entries.  Congratulations to our winners:

  • Salmon TPKB (owned by Trystan Parx) with 689 points
  • Charlie (owned by Quenlay Myrtle) with 655 points
  • Valencia Flame (owned by Tabitha Miranda) with 651 points

For this week, we chose to do a much more accessible color and can’t wait to see the scores.  This week’s colors are:

  • Body: (100, 60, 60)
  • Top Shell: (100, 60, 60)
  • Bottom Shell: (100, 60, 60)

I can’t wait to see what you guys are able to breed for this week!

The first new point item from the trader was released this past weekend.  It allows you to revive any turtle that starves from now on.  Along with this, there was an update to fix a couple of bugs related to the point item.  Thanks to server optimizations that Grim made last week, the update went very smoothly.  The trader’s meter has once again started back up.

Affiliate Vendor Issues

{ November 12, 2009 @ 4:36 PM } · { Turtles }
{ Tags: , , , , , , , } · { Comments (1) }

Hey everyone,

Early this morning, Grim and I had to take down all affiliate vendors, leaving only the vendors at our store in Shark active.  This is because of some Linden Lab bugs that we have no control over that cause security issues.  Recently, there has been a large increase in the number of blog posts from the more dubious parts of the Second Life community about how to scam any affiliate vendor, which would of course include ours.  We found out this morning that one of those holes was being exploited, which forced us to act immediately and without warning so that this person could no longer get any Petable products they wanted for free.

After looking at the many options available to us (including having only a small number of approved people able to own affiliate vendors or Grim and I having to place all affiliate vendors for people), we are deciding to work on a back-end monitoring system that will allow us to compare the products that people actually pay for contrasted with what has been given out.  Anyone who is discovered to be exploiting these Linden Lab bugs will be banned from owning affiliate vendors immediately.

We definitely regret having to take down the affiliate vendor system without any warning, but hope that you realize how crucial it was to do so.  Grim hopes to have the new affiliate vendors done by tomorrow, but it will depend on what other Linden Lab bugs he runs into in the process.  There is a way that you guys can help, though.  Linden Lab has a system called JIRA where you can vote for bugs and features to help them know what people care about.  Something that will fix these issues has been there since 2007, and has never been addressed by the Lindens.  If we can get a large influx of votes toward this issue, the Lindens will hopefully take notice and work on this issue.  Grim and I would ask that as many people as possible go to this ticket and vote for it.  To do so, you have to log in with your Second Life account (it is a page on secondlife.com, so it is safe), and then click the Vote link.

Thanks for your help and your patience as we work on this tracking system.  We will have the new version out as soon as possible.  While the affiliate system is down, food and all other products can still be purchased at our main store in Shark.

Mid-Week Update

{ November 10, 2009 @ 1:54 PM } · { Turtles }
{ Tags: , , , , , , , , , } · { Leave a Comment }

Hey everyone!

We’ve had a lot going on over the past week, so I wanted to give updates on a few of them.  First, congratulations to the winners of last week’s turtle show:

  • Yellow352 (owned by Jupiter Turbo) with 765 points
  • Rustella TPKB (owned by Trystan Parx) with 755 points
  • Crash Rebound (owned by Helpless Frog) with 757 points

The target for this week’s show is once again a matching set for all 3 sections of the turtle.  The colors for next Sunday’s show are:

  • Body: (255, 80, 125)
  • Top Shell: (255, 80, 125)
  • Bottom Shell: (255, 80, 125)

Good luck getting these colors!  Grim and I can’t wait to see what you guys come up with.

The trader meter is also rising very quickly.  This is due in part to our compensation for the issues the other evening (we donated 5 turtles to the trader for each person, giving everyone 5 free raffle tickets and boosting the trader about 15%), but also because of a huge amount of turtles that have been coming in from you guys.  The trader has sent along a couple of messages to us about what will soon be available for points.  First, he said, “I have been studying turtles auras and spirits. He has found them to be hearty creatures ineed. So hearty that the spirit does not rely on the body for consciousness.”  Late last night, the trader informed us that the item is nearly complete, and that it will be something that is consumable by turtles, that they can use more than once under the appropriate circumstances.  This also means that our raffle winners will each get more than one of the item once it comes out.

Have a great day!

Show Results and Numbers

{ November 4, 2009 @ 1:21 AM } · { Turtles }
{ Tags: , , , , , , } · { Leave a Comment }

Hey everyone!

Sorry that this post is so late in coming this week, I’ve had a bit of real-life drama that I’ve been having to deal with.  This past weekend’s show had a great turnout, with a last-minute winner to keep us on our toes (and had that not happened, our first-ever tie for third place).  Congratulations to our winners:

  • Absynth MaXy (owned by Tamara Petrov) with 801 points
  • Green Acres (owned by siouxie Severine) with 791 points
  • Dusty Miles (owned by Mistic Miles) with 777 points

Next week’s colors are a very seasonal shade of orange.  Once again, Grim and I decided to make the three body sections match.  The colors are:

  • Body: (255, 125, 0)
  • Top Shell: (255, 125, 0)
  • Bottom Shell: (255, 125, 0)

Hope to see you all next Sunday at the show!

Update: Version 01.02.00

{ October 29, 2009 @ 11:31 PM } · { Turtles }
{ Tags: , , , , , , , , } · { Comments (1) }

Hey everyone!

After almost a month of working on it (including some very intensive testing), Grim and I are finally ready to release Turtle version 01.02.00.  This is one of our biggest releases yet, including the following changes and additions:

  1. Fixed a bug in eggs used with an unreachable egg attractor
  2. Fixed a minor bug involving prolonged sim downtimes
  3. Added Trader functionality to turtles
  4. Added various new special turtles (details to come)
  5. Added new point items (details to come)
  6. Various performance optimizations
  7. Hatchless food changes

I’ll pull out the larger changes one-by-one to describe them more.  The Trader functionality has been described in great detail over the past couple of posts, but I’ll quickly reiterate it.  You will be able to turn in any turtle that you own, regardless of who bred it.  When you turn in turtles, a meter at the main store will raise.  When the meter reaches 100%, a new point item will be released.  Each turtle that you submit will be worth one raffle ticket, with a drawing for 5 winners that will take place when the point item is released.  These winners will receive the new point item for free rather than having to purchase it with their points.

There are three new special turtles that are available via breeding your current turtles.  I’m not going to reveal the secret of how to get any of these, but as usual, Grim and I will be allowing you to figure them out on your own.  There are also FIVE new seasonal rare turtles that will be described a little bit later in this post.

Full details on the point items in this release will come out as the items are unlocked via the Turtle Trader.  There are definitely some great ones coming up, though, that Grim and I know you’ll enjoy, including one of our other most-requested items.

Hatchless food has been changed to try to lower the number of “oopsy babies” that people experience.  Rather than now being on a 12 hour timer, the effects of hatchless food will last until a turtle eats generic food.  Rather than being a bug fix, this is just a functionality change in order to reduce the confusion that you guys have expressed around hatchless food.

The actual update process tomorrow will be different from all previous updates in order to reduce the load on our server during the process.  The update will begin at approximately 10 AM SLT (depending on any last-minute issues that come up in testing tonight and tomorrow morning).  Before the update begins, Grim will send out an updater via group notice to both our chat group and update group.  Though it will not be active yet, please rez this updater.  The update itself will be divided into 12 hour-long segments.  Our customers will be divided into 12 different groups alphabetically by avatar key.  This was the most random and fair way we could come up with to do this.  When the hour that you can update during hits, your turtles will contact your updater as usual and will update themselves.

To reduce server load, the click-to-update functionality will no longer work.  This is to lower the number of communications to our server from people whose update group has not yet hit.

There will not be a way to check which update group you will be in, but if you know your avatar’s key (or have the Emerald browser so you can see it in your profile), you can estimate which one you will be in.  For example, my avatar key begins with a “df”, so I will be in one of the earlier groups.  Just to re-iterate, once you set out the updater that Grim will send out tomorrow morning before the update, the process is completely automatic and you will not need to do anything.  Grim and I definitely thank you for your patience during the process, and have been doing everything we can in advance to make sure that this will be as smooth of a process as possible.

During the update process itself, if you experience any issues, please fill out a bug report form by clicking the “Bug Report Form” link in the left column on the blog.  Grim and Shelly will be in-world and monitoring the situation during the day; I will join them when I am able to get home after work.  The rolling update will conclude at approximately 10 PM SLT tomorrow night, just in time for a very special day.

Every Halloween, something very spooky seems to happen to turtles.  Eggs that are laid on that day to certain turtles may hatch to be ghosts!  Rumor has it that there are five different kinds of ghostly turtles that can only be hatched from eggs laid on Halloween.  If you want a ghostly egg or two, you would be wise to pair together breeding turtles that exhibit special traits.

Late Update

{ October 27, 2009 @ 12:31 AM } · { Turtles }
{ Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , } · { Comments (3) }

Hey everyone!

I know this is coming a little bit late, but that’s just because Grim and I have been trying to cram as much as possible into this next upcoming update.  First, though, we had an extremely tight turtle show last night with the following three winners:

  • Violet Sinclair (owned by Angelina Sinclair) with 734 points
  • Passion TPKB (owned by Trystan Parx) with 713 points
  • Punky 60% GV (owned by Venus Dumpling) with 712 points

Congratulations to all three of them!  Next week’s colors are a first for us — it’s the exact same color on all three color regions of the turtle.  The target is:

  • Body: (0, 80, 80)
  • Top Shell: (0, 80, 80)
  • Bottom Shell: (0, 80, 80)

Grim and I have gotten a lot of feedback about the turtle trader that is coming soon, and have decided to tweak it a little bit.  Instead of doing the top donors of winners, we have decided to do it as a raffle system.  Each turtle you donate to the trader will be one ticket in a raffle that will be done when the meter hits 100% before it goes up for sale.  Grim and I are also discussing a couple of other possible tweaks to the system, but there’s nothing definite yet.

Finally (for tonight), our fishing hole at the store has been such a hit that Shelly has made three more awesome custom catches for us.  Many people have experienced “oopsie babies” from their turtles getting hungry while laying eggs on hatchless food.  These custom catches are a trio of oopsie babies that you’ll definitely want to catch.  All three are set at the “rare” level, and will be continue to be available past this month and for the foreseeable future.

We’ll have a lot more information coming about the upcoming update soon.  Grim and I are extremely excited about everything that we’re piling into this update — it’s going to be extremely feature-rich and most definitely worth the wait.

Fishing Custom Catches at Petable!

{ October 19, 2009 @ 9:52 PM } · { Turtles }
{ Tags: , , , , , , , } · { Comments (3) }

Hey everyone!

For a very, very long time, Grim and I have been intending to actually put custom catches in the 7Seas fishing hole at our store in Shark.  One of Shelly’s many talents that we didn’t know about when we hired her is that she makes some incredibly cute custom catches, and she has been kind enough to make 3 for us!  2 of these will only be around until Halloween (that’s less than 2 weeks away now), and represent things that Grim and I both enjoy about the holiday.  For Grim, there is a Grim Reaper turtle holding fishbones.  For me, there is a turtle representing a devotee of the Great Pumpkin, from my favorite Halloween movie growing up, “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”!  In addition to both of those, Shelly made an adorable turtle on its night off that has to be seen to be believed.  All three of these can be attached to your avatar to swim around and have some great sound clips attached.  Photos of all three follow.

To kick things off tonight, I’m hosting a fishing night at the store in Shark.  Come on down and hopefully catch one or more of the custom catches!  We’re going to have more in soon, perhaps including some exclusive turtle stuff!

Halloween Custom Catches

Turtle's Night Off Custom Catch

Show Update

{ October 18, 2009 @ 10:10 PM } · { Turtles }
{ Tags: , , , , , , } · { Leave a Comment }

Hey everyone!

We just finished up this past week’s show, and it ended up being much harder than planned!  Congratulations to the top three, though, who were able to come very close:

  • Theory Zen (owned by Goldenstar Sands) with 711 points
  • Sara AC (owned by Inya Sulluf) with 682 points
  • 2g blue YeosSh (owned by Thanatos796 McCallen) with 675 points

For next week, Grim and I decided to do a color family that we know some people are directly breeding for — purple!  The exact color target values are:

  • Body: (125, 0, 125)
  • Top Shell: (205, 0, 205)
  • Bottom Shell: (50, 0, 50)

Good luck on getting these colors!  The registration table is currently up and taking entries at our store in Shark.

Huge Announcement

{ October 17, 2009 @ 11:50 AM } · { Turtles }
{ Tags: , , , , , , , , } · { Comments (9) }

Hey everyone!

In recent weeks, there has one thing that has been requested more than any other: for the Trader to accept turtles as well as eggs.  Grim and I decided that if we were going to do it, we didn’t want to just do more points, but instead do something more creative and unique with it.  So, here’s what’s happening.

With our next update (no date for it yet), there will be a turtle vortex released.  This will allow you to send your turtles to the trader’s secret lab.  There will be a meter at our store in Shark that will fill up as more and more turtles are sent to the lab.  As turtles are received, the Trader will do research on something new and different that will only be available for points.  At different points when the meter goes up, more detail will be revealed about the item that the Trader is creating, with the actual item itself being revealed near the end.  When that meter reaches 100%, the item will be available for points at our store in Shark.

To add a little incentive to the mix, there will also be a scoreboard near this meter.  This will track the top turtle donors for that round of the Trader, with the top 5 receiving the new item for free rather than having to buy it with points.  To make this even a little bit better, you’ll be able to turn in turtles of yours that have been bred by anyone except for Grim or me, so if you have a turtle that you purchased and no longer need, you’ll be able to send it in as well!

Grim and I are really excited about this and all of the opportunities that it creates for new point items.  I hope you guys like it too!

« Older entries