Ciaran Laval

February 11, 2012February 11, 2012

Kitely Announce Pricing

Kitely, the 3D virtual world which uses Amazon Cloud Services for delivery has announced its pricing plans:

Free plan – 120 minutes, 0 Kitely credits, 1 free world.

Bronze plan – $5 a month, 1200 minutes, 300 Kitely credits, 2 free worlds.

Silver plan – $20 a month, 5,000 minutes, 1,000 Kitely credits, 10 free worlds.

Gold plan – $50 a month, 12,000 minutes, 3,000 Kitely credits, 30 free worlds.

Platinum plan – $100 a month, Unlimited minutes, 5,000 Kitely credits, 100 free worlds.

Like in my last blog post, this one also requires a calculator! The way it works is that minutes can follow the user, so if you think you’ll only spend 5 hours a week in Kitely, then the bronze plan would be for you, the Gold plan gives you 200 hours a month, that’s roughly 50 a week, whereas the silver plan gives you around 83 hours a month, roughly 20 hours a week. Your minutes get used up as you spend time inworld, except when you visit worlds where the owner decides to pay for the minutes via Kitely credits.

This is where we need the calculator! If an owner decides to have his world set as free access, then he is charged 1 kitely credit per minute, per visitor, so if two users were in world for an hour, then that would cost the owner 120 Kitely credits.

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February 11, 2012February 11, 2012

Repeats, Offsets, Hellish Maths!

So I’ve been working for a while on trying to figure out how the bloody hell you calculate offsets and repeats to make textures play nicely in Second Life when it comes to applying the same texture across multiple faces. There’s an alternative method, which involves using planar texturing and using the extremely useful align planar textures option. Planar texturing has an additional performance overhead but this is largely considered to be negligible, according to the mesh/rendering weight article on the official Second Life wiki.

However I decided to go the painful route of doing this with default texturing, which took me to maths hell! Seriously. I wanted to use three prims to make a total prim size of 14 metres, two of these prims were just side walls, so their edges would be showing on my front and back wall and then in the centre would be the main piece. The inital size of the prims I set as 0.200 for the edge walls and 13.600 for the main piece, this sounded nice. Now this would mean I’d have to adjust the texture repeats for the edges, as they would not need to have a horizontal size of 1.000, it won’t render nicely if I leave it like that.

One quick way to get a rough idea of how to do this is to to copy your main piece, then untick resize textures and resize it. However I wanted pinpoint accuracy, the way to get a more accurate size of your needed repeats is:

prim size/total building face size.

So for example in this case my first edge piece is 0.200m, the total building face size is 14 metres, so I divide 0.200 by 14, this is where the first Maths problem arose, 14 doesn’t divide nicely into 0.200, it comes out at 0.014285714285714285714285714285714, if I use the unticking stretch textures technique it would come out at 0.014, because it rounds down but that’s not pinpoint accuracy, for pinpoint accuracy you need your calculations to have no more than three decimal places.

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February 9, 2012February 9, 2012

LL Receive Short Shrift From Bloggers

Linden Lab’s call for bloggers has received short shrift from quite a few bloggers, although I’m sure there will be some who will play ball. There have been negative posts from Inara Pey, Hamlet Au, Chestnut Rau, Crap Mariner (very humourosuly too) and another humourous take from Botgirl Questi.

On the official blog post there are also negative reactions, even Marianne McCann pours scorn on the deal, when Mari thinks something is a bad idea you really need to stop and think. Whomever came up with this idea must feel a bit like Andrew Lansley trying to get his wretched NHS bill through the house of commons, however to be fair, Linden Lab’s plan is nowhere near as evil as Andrew Lansley’s NHS bill!

I still think the idea has some merit, it’s not something I would personally participate in but there’s merit to the suggestion. Highlighting other bloggers and their views can help with reach, introduce people to new aspects of Second Life and demonstrate that there’s more to Second Life than a 3D chatroom, of course us Second Life regulars know there’s more to it than that but for someone investigating Second Life, the main website is a good starting point and should be full of the diversity of Second Life.

However, as with a lot of things Linden Lab have done over the years, it ain’t what they do, it’s the way that they do it.

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February 7, 2012February 7, 2012

LL Call For Bloggers

Linden Lab have posted a blog post, which is surprising enough in itself, but it’s also one that could be very productive. Linden Lab are asking for bloggers to submit posts to them for consideration to be published on their community blogging platform. The blog post is here. There are guidelines, which should be observed, the sticking point for some bloggers is going to be Linden Lab’s insistence that the content needs to be exclusive to them, I don’t really understand why they have that restriction.

However overall the idea is a good one because it allows a wider scope for Linden Lab to advertise their wares. I’ve spoken before about how Linden Lab could do with someone blogging about Second Life’s broad range of activities, having bloggers submit posts is one way of addressing that.

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February 2, 2012February 2, 2012

LL Should Consider Group And Event Pages

There has been a bit of a hoo-ha going on about Linden Lab throttling llGiveInventory to 5K per hour per owner, per sim. as explained in Jira-SVC-7631. This sounds like a reasonable limit at first glance, it sounds like an even more reasonable limit on second glance when you consider that a single script couldn’t do this before the throttle anyway. However the ever inventive users of Second Life have got around this limit to allow subscribers to send out announcements quickly. This has unfortunately exposed a security flaw that had to be urgently addressed.

A few things stand out here, one being why the hell do we need to send thousands of notecards and textures to people in the first place. Another, the issue of communications, in this case I’m with Linden Lab, they needed to address a security issue but there remain communication issues. This change will break content.

Reading the Jira, most of the concerns are from people who run mailing lists, there is one major exception in the shape and form of 7Seas Fishing creator Seven Shikami whose game uses llGiveInventory. However it’s mostly about mailing lists, with people concerned that if they use a large mailing list that hits the throttle, all items in a sim owned by them that use llGiveInventory will not work for a while, that includes any scripted vendors that use the function. I don’t know what would happen if the vendors used llGiveInventorylist instead, I’d imagine they’d still be throttled.

However this really highlights a flaw in the group announcement system, delivering inventory to so many users for an announcement, when really we should be just pointing people in the direction of the notice. Google + and Facebook both allow people to create pages for their business or communities, it’s time really to move group notices to the Second Life profiles website and implement this into the viewer. This would mean that instead of people having to have yet another landmark, notecard and texture in their inventory, they’d just follow the link to see the texture, be able to teleport from the link and see detailed information about any new product launch or event.

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