Cloud Party – Page 2 – Ciaran Laval

December 3, 2013December 3, 2013

Cloud Party’s Standard Definiton / High Definition Approach To Avatar Costumes

Although I’ve had a Cloud Party account for a while, I haven’t spent much time there. I have been there a little bit over the last few days playing with the inworld building blocks tools and they are a lot of fun, although my unpublished land currently looks like a rubbish tip.

However what caught my eye this evening was the avatar development kit version 1.0. This is intended for Cloud Party content creators who want to create clothing or animations for avatars in Cloud Party. Now clothing and animations are not my fields but I found this quote from the wiki interesting:

“One problem virtual worlds struggle with is letting users fully express themselves in their avatars while not causing performance problems for other users with slower computers who are nearby. We’ve come up with a way to address that problem: Standard and High Definition modes for avatar costumes.

Each costume part will have at most one mesh/material combination that can be marked as ‘Standard Definition’ (SD). This must be under a certain triangle limit (the limits are defined per slot further down in this document). The other mesh/material combinations will automatically be marked as ‘High Definition’ (HD). HD meshes have no triangle limit.

SD mesh/material combinations will always be drawn, but HD mesh/material combinations will drop out at a distance. The distance it drops out at will vary from user to user. Some users with low-end computers or mobile devices might never see the HD version of the costume.

It’s best practice to make most, if not all, of your costume piece fit within the SD triangle limits. If you don’t, that costume piece will disappear or maybe even never be drawn on certain lower-end machines, even if it’s a shirt or pants. We’ll be providing tools on the marketplace for users to easily see what they look like in SD vs HD. Also, certain costume slots REQUIRE a SD mesh.

An example of a good use of the SD/HD system is a coat with brass buttons. The coat itself should fit within the SD triangle limits and use just one material. The coat can have a separate material with shiny, reflective brass buttons and buckles that will not be drawn in SD.”

Now the first thing I’m thinking here is that surely it’s dangerous, to say the least, to allow people to create a mesh with no triangle limit, however on closer inspection it looks as if those around you won’t suffer if you do go buck mad in the triangle department.

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November 19, 2013

Why Don’t Amazon, Paypal or Linden Lab offer Virtual Currency Exchanges To Other Business?

One of the issues regarding Cloud Party is the inability to cash out. This is understandable as content creators are more likely to be tempted to engage if they can find financial reward. Cloud Party do allow you to pay for services such as island rentals using Cloud Party coins, so there is a degree of economic movement but it stays firmly within Cloud Party.

Kitely on the other hand allow people to list items on their marketplace with the option of a Paypal payment as well as Kitely credits. There’s no cashing out from Kitely but paypal payments are a way of a merchant getting cold hard cash. Again, like Cloud Party, the inworld currency can be used to pay for services.

However what people would really like to be able to do is to sell Cloud Party coins or Kitely credits in the same manner as Linden Dollars can be bought and sold. The beauty of this solution is that it adds an added level of consumer confidence, because when they make a purchase, they are doing so with an inworld currency, they aren’t handing over details to a stranger in a virtual land. That’s the beauty of the virtual currency.

Recent legislation in the USA has given platform providers the heebie jeebies about users selling virtual currencies, hence why they aren’t that widely available. However you would think that someone would seize the opportunity to tap into this market, be that Paypal, Amazon or even Linden Lab.

Now I’m sure plenty of companies would like the idea of selling virtual currencies to consumers, the part they aren’t so keen on is allowing users to sell that virtual currency. Linden Lab of course do this with the Lindex, so why can’t they expand this to offering a service to other companies?

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November 7, 2013

No Sex, No Drugs, No Wine, No Women, No fun, No sin, No you, No wonder it’s dark

“Learning providers can create entire campuses composed of multiple learning environments. Game designers can create custom games Virtual world providers can provide any type of environment (within similar constraints as the Entertainment Software Ratings Board [ESRB] content ranges, we intend to avoid the issues that Second Life is wrestling with due to the adult/erotic/pornographic flavor of so much of their content).” – Richard Garriott (AKA Lord British).

The above quote, which I covered in more detail back in June 2011 was to do with a project that Lord British was contemplating, that now seems to have morphed into Shroud Of The Avatar, an MMO, so the previous post is now well out of date. However the issue of adult content is rearing its head once more, this time in Cloud Party where more attention is bringing more questions.

Questions regarding adult and mature content in Cloud Party are not new, indeed they have been discussed in the Cloud Party forums more than once. Cloud Party’s community standards are pretty clear on the issue of mature and adult content:

“Sexually Explicit Content We do not allow adult content or behavior, or visuals of explicit sex or simulated sex on the platform.”

Yet there’s another side to this coin, it’s the whole icky factor some have of sharing spaces with children as young as thirteen. This happens in World Of Warcraft, you’re short of a player on a guild run, you advertise for one more and along comes a gnome warrior with purple hair who tells you “I’m 13” and the rest of the group are “WTF!” but of course, in a 13+ environment you’re likely to run into thirteen year olds!

A thread over at SLUniverse raises the issue of the other side of the coin:

“It has some very good stuff. But no cash out and the PG13 rule ..”

“There’s PG-13, and then there’s hanging out with 13 year olds.”

“The point remains though that in Cloud Party there’s no partitioning of age groups whatsoever at present. They could use a General (13-17) and Mature (18+) filtering themselves, even if they omit Adult forever.”

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, but can a happy medium be reached?

Continue reading “No Sex, No Drugs, No Wine, No Women, No fun, No sin, No you, No wonder it’s dark”

November 6, 2013November 6, 2013

I Got Two Turntables And A Microphone

I downloaded a Sinclair Spectrum emulator for the android the other week. After the initial buzz of seeing all those old game titles from the eighties my interest waned. The android is a bit clunky for such games, many games don’t work and time has not been kind to many of them. However it was a thrill at first. When I had a Speccy as a kid, so did lots of my school friends. We’d share games (piracy as my teacher scolded us, so don’t try that at home). We’d go to each others houses, we’d have fun not only due to the games but because there was also a social aspect.

I left the Speccy behind many moons ago, as I did the Commodore Amiga after that, and I have been looking to see if there’s a legal Amiga emulator but will most likely go through the same cycle as I did with the Speccy emulator, thrill, then flat and no social side to keep the interest.

As it’s my blog I can draw comparisons between the Speccy and Second Life, a bit of a stretch it may be but I can draw them. The Speccy was not the height of technology on release, there were better products around but the Speccy caught the imagination. Therefore software developers were alerted to it and stretched the Speccy to limits beyond what many thought it was capable of, Lords Of Midnight springs to mind here. The Speccy had the people and of all the ingredients that make a product a success, that is arguably the most important one.

Roll forward many years and Second Life is simply where it’s at in virtual world terms. Cloud Party has some very impressive concepts going for it. I like their royalty system on content sales whereby if you sell an asset with royalties enabled, if someone else then sells another asset whilst using your asset as part of the build, you’ll receive a royalty payment. Cloud Party has also had materials for quite a while now. Another impressive apsect of Cloud Party is that objects are not the only limiting factor in a build. In Cloud Party you can have x amount of objects, or x amount triangles or x amount of bandwidth, whichever you hit first will strike the build limit. This is a well considered concept as objects are far from the only issue when it comes to performance.

Kitely has some impressive offerings, such as putting sims to sleep when not in use due to using a cloud based system. Kitely is also not only cheaper than Second Life, but for those who may only spend a few hours a month there they have a time based billing option and under any plan you get at least one free sim to play around with.

Inworldz is also cheaper than Second Life, Jim Tarber and the team are also moving in directions Second Life isn’t, as can be seen in the Inworldz Techblog where they inform visitors they’re implementing physX and project Thoosa, which is aimed at making everything run faster and more efficiently. Inworldz has also implemented Qarl’s mesh deformer project.

However despite these advances in other virtual worlds, Second Life still has that magical community ingredient and what makes this all the more impressive is that Second Life still has the community despite the fact that Linden Lab have been actively distancing themselves from the Second Life community for a few years now.

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