A couple of weeks back I was in Kitely, when CEO Ilan Tochner arrived to say hello to me inworld and we had an informal off the record chat. However, some of those off the record features that Ilan told me about have already been implemented! Oren Hurvitz blogged at the end of March about the new features, including world to world teleports and making the choice of viewer you use a less scary feature.
Oren blogging is nice to see because Ilan is the person most recognised by people outside of Kitely and nice as Ilan is, it’s also worth pointing out the amount of work that Oren Hurvitz is putting into Kitely, Oren is the VP of R&D as well as being a co-founder of Kitely, meaning he’s a very important person! There’s a team behind Kitely and it’s good that their work as a team is recognised.
The new features have already been covered eloquently by Inara Pey, indeed Kitely added a choice of viewers for Kitely based upon Inara’s excellent viewer reviews and roundups. I’m not eloquent like Inara, but I have taken a dabble with the new features and they work rather well, although one does need to remember that Kitely is very much in beta still and in many ways the publicity for Kitely arose earlier in the process than they would have liked, having said that, I’m sure Oren and Ilan aren’t complaining!
Teleporting works in a number of ways:
- Using the world map
- Using a landmark
- A friend Teleport offer
- The World Pages on the website
As Kitely is an on demand virtual world, it may be that the world you want to teleport to isn’t online, therefore the world needs to wake up before you can teleport there but this does not take long at all and does not hinder the user experience.
The default viewer for Kitely is now Firestorm, however whereas before you had to edit a text file to change your viewer of choice, you can now do this from your settings on your account, which makes the whole process a lot easier, the viewers Kitely now officially supports are:
- Catznip Viewer
- Dolphin Viewer
- Exodus Viewer
- Firestorm
- Imprudence
- Kokua Viewer
- Nirans Viewer
- Restrained Love Viewer
- Second Life Viewer
These are the viewers available from the dropdown menu in your settings, but only viewers you have installed appear as an option, which is sensible!
Kitely is evolving, world to world teleports are an important feature as closing down the viewer before going to a new world is cumbersome, this is an important step in making the place feel more like a world rather than single sims, if they evolve the way the owners hope, there are exciting times ahead for Kitely but they are ensuring they walk before they can run, which is a sensible approach. The creators of Kitely are investing both time and money into this startup and working 16-20 hour days, six or seven days a week, so they are serious about this and want to make it work.
Some of the features Ilan spoke to me about would really give Kitely a boost, but before any of them are unleashed they need to ensure they are feasible, won’t cause chaos with what already exists and that they have longevity, but I’d suggest you keep an eye on Kitely, it does have great potential and ambitious owners.
There are of course challenges ahead, not just for Kitely, but for OpenSim grids as a whole, I find the best place to keep up with what’s happening in the OpenSim world is Hypergrid Business. Maria Korolov writes many excellent articles and links to resources. However Maria also has a mention for Second Life too, OpenSim is not the enemy, even if you’re an extremely happy and proud Second Life user.
“OpenSim is not the enemy”. Very true. And equally, Second Life isn’t the enemy of OpenSim. Yet to hear some OpenSim enthusiasts bang on about SL – using any and every opportunity to take a shot at LL – falling sim numbers, tier, etc. – it would appear is if they will settle for nothing less that SL’s complete and utter demise. It’s unnecessary.
But… to turn to brighter things and Kitely: kudos to Ilan and Oren! The new updates work very well and make Kitely worlds even more accessible. I’m not sure if it is my imagination or whether work has been put into the scripting side of things, but that aspect of Kitely appears to be a lot smoother: a couple of scripts I had severe issues with last month are ticking over nicely as of today, so I’m once more putting-in the minutes at Laurel Highlands and adding the missing details to Fallingwater – and enjoying myself!
There’s more to come as well – as I believe you’re aware, and I’m really interested to see how upcoming features fit in to the overall Kitely model.
See you in-world there, sometime!
Yes some of the OpenSim folk can be very protective as can those in other grids and Second Life itself, I’m a more the merrier type person when it comes to virtual worlds so I’m happy to see other worlds process, it’s the way ahead.
I used your place for testing the teleports, it had to wake up but the process really was smooth and doesn’t really cause any problems, it’s online very quickly.
Hi Inara,
We actually fixed a script-related bug on Kitely a couple of days ago that was a cause of some annoyance. Your experience with scripts now working much better on Kitely is based on some very recent improvements, so it’s nice to see you noticed 🙂
We’re currently working on several updates that should make things perform even better, mainly an upgrade to OpenSim 0.7.3.1 running on a newer version of Mono (2.10.8) with some other improvements added to the mix. We want to thoroughly test that they work well with our proprietary asset server and cloud-based bootstrapping logic before we roll them out so expect to see them in about 10-14 days.
Once this is rolled out you’ll have many more OSSL scripts you’ll be able to use, including: teleport scripts, which will enable you to build gateways between your worlds, and NPC scripts so you can add some interesting bots to your worlds.
After that build, we intend to work on adding inworld groups and tying those into the world access control options you get for your worlds.
Hi, Ilan
Was just about to post-script my comment to say that I’ve just read the blog post on the script fix :).
Great that things are progressing so well. You and Oren get huge hugs from me! Just in the process of adding lights to the build at the moment :).
Thank you Inara 🙂
We look forward to seeing your worlds on Kitely make full use of our system’s current capabilities and it would be even more interesting once we start rolling out the improvements Ciaran mentioned… 😉
Hi Ciaran Laval,
Thank you for mentioning Oren’s contribution. Kitely is indeed a team effort and it wouldn’t exist without Oren’s amazing development talent.
I estimate we’ll be starting to work on the features I told you about before the end of the month. We want to make sure we do them right but we’re optimistic it won’t be too long for us to be able to start rolling them out.
Exciting times ahead… 🙂