Kitely Mentors Group Meeting, 20 March 2013: summary

[Marstol Nitely]

Attending the meeting:
Ada Radius
Anna Adamant
Bladyblue Bommerang
Brigid Yoshikawa
Daniel Voyager
Dennis Albion
Elizabeth Burleigh
Ilan Tochner
Marstol Nitely
Ramesh Ramloll
Virtual Belfast Ireland (Stio)

There were some technical difficulties with logins at Kitely Mentors Group Hangout, so after a delay the meeting was moved to Kitely Plaza.

Ilan began the meeting telling people a little about the behind the scenes work Kitely has been doing this week. “One of the things we’ve been working on this week has been adding better real time monitoring of our worlds and servers.” This will help Kitely to react faster to server problems and allow them to better analyze problems and develop bug fixes.

Ramesh Ramloll wondered if instances were not supposed to be independent. “So if one crashes, no impact to the others, am I right?”

Ilan explained that there are up to 4 OpenSim instances per server. It changes dynamically depending on those worlds’ load. Each world instance is tracked and automatically restarted independently and so are the servers. There is also access control which prevents people from being in two worlds at once. Therefore it can take a few minutes to be authorized to enter a different world if a viewer crash is experienced and the server hasn’t detected it yet. Attempting to enter one world while being inside another usually results in a successful teleport, but in some rare circumstance this attempt can be blocked until the system detects the user’s viewer has disconnected from the grid.

Ilan took a moment to tell those in attendance about where they were standing. Kitely Plaza <http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world/Ila ... tely-Plaza> is a free access, always “on” world that is being created by the Kitely community. “It isn’t officially open yet, but you can already see the progress.”

There will be several places to display art in the Modern City area of the plaza. There will also be in world shops and greeting areas. As well as areas for fashions shows, classes, and other activities.

The Kitley Plaza Coordinator Bladyblue Bommerang arrived a few minutes later. Bladyblue conceived the plaza and is coordinating the building of and organization of several aspects of Kitely Plaza.

The discussion moved to the design of the transfer stations. The transfer stations enable people to wait in-world for their destination world to start. They are only active when signing onto Kitely. Not when transferring between worlds. If the world loads before the viewer is ready to begin the login process, the transfer station is bypassed. Each world has a transfer station, but they are currently non-configurable, meaning they all share the same design.

Transfer stations allow people transporting to the same offline world to be inworld together in a secluded area until their destination world is ready. Voice and text chat work with other people in the same transport station but not between people in different stations. Direct IM’s and direct voice calls are available for communication with those in other worlds or transfer stations. Click the following link for more information on how transfer stations work <http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world-new ... -stations/>

As for the design, each transfer station should be neutral in theme and shouldn’t clash with any destination world theme. They are prim only and very low on both prim and texture count. This allows the station to rezz very quickly.

Some residents have expressed dissatisfaction with the existing transport station design, so Ilan wanted some feedback. Most of those present either liked the design or at least had no problem with it.

Elizabeth Burleigh said, “Nice clean design, easy to view. I like it.”

Anna Adamant suggested having a contest that allowed residents to build transport stations from which a default transport station design could be chosen.

Bridget Yoshikawa suggested as an alternative, a virtual representation of Kitely itself, “like a bunch of wires or glowy lights as if you are waiting inside the computer’s guts.”

Dennis Albion said “… a time space warp vortex ala any sci-fi movie would be cool.”

Other ideas included a fake progress bar, a doctors waiting room, an airport lounge, a park bench with a tree, an empty black box with a sign, a tin can, a black box with moving stars that look as if you are moving through space… What was neutral for one type of world was not necessarily neutral for another.

Everyone came to a consensus about having something in “space”. There was a good deal of discussion about building something with a star field and perhaps nebulas that appeared to be in space. Would it be better to have it on a platform floating in space, a planet surface with craters, or a platform on the surface? Would it appeal to those with educational, business, or other themes?

“I think business people should be fine with it too, there's nothing objectionable about space images,” said Ada Radius. Everyone agreed and felt it could be considered educational as well. When no consensus could be reached on if the transfer station should be floating in space or on a planet surface, the discussion turned to Anna’s suggestion of a contest.

The biggest problem with a contest seemed to be viewer design constraints: 128m sphere (64m diameter), 40-48m platform, 48m from the bottom of the sphere. The landing point in the center of the platform. The sign has to take up most of the monitor screen. The equivalent of 4 1024x1024 textures and sculpt maps total. No more than 300 prims total for everything in the station including an invisible perimeter to cage the user with invisible prims. It has to load very quickly and can’t have more than a handful of textures or people will have to wait too long to see the sign. It needs to not include non-phantom hollow prims. The sphere itself is phantom. the current station has a non-phantom platform, and invisible walls all around it - no ceiling so people will be able to more easily navigate with the cam. Ada Radius had been experimenting with a possible station and found that sculpt maps should be no more than 64x64.

Discussion concerning the transfer stations ended when a few involved in the discussion had to sign off.

Stio wanted to know if Ilan had talked to the individual developing PixieViewer. Ilan said he had not and that he was waiting to see what type of license he intends to use for the viewer. If it isn’t open source that enables commercial use, it will be less attractive. “The metaverse needs a solution that isn’t controlled by any single entity and that people will work together to develop,” said Ilan. “Plus, at this time, I’m not sure whether it is even connected to OpenSim or just a VW architecture that has its own backend and will potentially in the future have some module to connect to OpenSim.” There are various more advanced HTML5 open source VW solutions that don’t connect to OpenSim, such as realXtend and Sirikata, to name a few.

Toward the end of the meeting people thanked Daniel Voyager for his recent story about Kitely Plaza. He surprised them with a link to his latest blog post covering the meeting they had all been attending. <http://danielvoyager.wordpress.com/2013 ... irst-time/>

Stio thanked Daniel for posting the Virtual Detroit video with bots. He ended the meeting sharing a link for a recent video “with loads of bots”. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yINOep_hRqs>

Note from Ilan: Please let us know what would be a theme-neutral transfer station design. We can’t make everyone happy but the more people we hear from the more we’re likely to find a solution that will work for most people.

[Constance Peregrine]

"Ilan explained that there are up to 4 OpenSim instances per server. It changes dynamically depending on those worlds’ load. "

This is a nice load and with the other not-always-on concept you folx have, is very forward thinking. Is why lag is pretty much non-existent server-side.

How many regions per opensim instance?

I once heard sl has 20 regions per instance, dunno if that is true tho.

Nice write-up-))

[Marstol Nitely]

Thank you Marstol for yet another great meeting summary

[Constance Peregrine]

Hi Minethere,

Each Kitely world runs inside its own dedicated OpenSim instance. This means that the number of regions per OpenSim instance can range between 1 and 16 (the currently supported world sizes).

[Constance Peregrine]

Hi Minethere,

Each Kitely world runs inside its own dedicated OpenSim instance. This means that the number of regions per OpenSim instance can range between 1 and 16 (the currently supported world sizes).

very nice-)) and very smart....as I have seen so far, I have not noted any comments related to region lags, as I can recall...the way you run them, in this regard, being a primary reason...nice to have one less thing to bother with...lol

Of course, the level of activity in assets would tend to drag a normal instance down, but your cloud asset balancing seems to solve this, I like-))