Question about voice quality and best fee

[Pixellada Com]

Hello

New to Kitely so please be patient with me. Just three questions here.

I am planning 5 lectures in virtual world. I am looking for friendly environment with excellence voice service. If anyone have had already voice lectures in Kitely please share your experience. Was it working well?

Second question is about best fee. Users don't need place all the time, just for 5 meetings in 3 weeks. The number of users will be around 55.

Is it possible to get invoice?

Greetings

[Graham Mills]

No relevant experience but it might help to have some background. Have you done this kind of thing before, e.g. in SL? Are your users experienced with SL or OpenSim? Is the presentation simply voice or will you be showing slides, rezzing objects, etc?

If it's important to get users inworld quickly it may be worth pre-registering students using the gmail trick: http://www.kitely.com/forums/viewtopic. ... 86&p=13955. While I've found Kitely to be very educator-friendly, you could in principle add the pre-registered avatars to a closed group and then configure the island so that it is only accessible to that group. Quite a lot of work for 55 avatars though. If you go down this route you may find the group-joining script useful (see the end of this thread http://www.kitely.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=2408).

I'd be slightly concerned about possible lag with 55 avatars on one world though again I should stress I have no relevant experience. Maybe consider using something like Teamspeak instead of inworld voice. That would allow you to use multiple worlds as a fallback though you would need to sync any display. I'd also consider having text chat of some kind as a fallback. Again handy to have groups active on that account.

Hopefully somebody will chip in with firsthand knowledge.

[Graham Mills]

For 55 avatars you are looking at an Advanced World ($99 per month) or signing up as Premium ($19.95 per month; gives you 5 free regions) and then paying at a rate of 1KC per minute per avatar (5 sessions x 60 mins x 54 avatars = 16500 KC) where $50 will buy you 15000 KC. You can easily close the world between sessions if that's an issue. Hopefully Ilan will check my math -- I've been known to make misteaks before.

UPDATED with correct Premium rate

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Pixellada (and Graham ), the cost of a Premium account is $19.95/month. Otherwise Graham's math is correct. If you plan on having 55 people inworld then my recommendations would be:

1) Get an Advanced World, instead of a Premium one. Advanced Worlds get more guaranteed server resources than Premium Worlds. To save money schedule all 5 meetings during the same calendar month and switch your world to be a Premium World before the end of the month - or delete it if you will no longer require it (Kitely bills on the first of each month).

2) Premium World costs may be higher than what Graham indicated if people stay inworld longer (arrival time, time after the meeting). You'll therefore either need to buy more KC in advance to prevent people from being kicked out of the world if your KC balance runs out or use a fixed-price world (such as an Advanced World) instead of a time-based-billing one (a Premium World).

3) To get good performance with 55 people inworld Use a simple 1-region build with no moving parts, no physics, optimized scripts, etc. If you contact me I can visit your world with you ahead of time and help you eliminate components that can create lag.

4) Instruct people to sit during the meeting. Sitting avatars require the least amount of server resources.

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

[Pixellada Com]

Graham, Roxy and of course Ilan - nice to meet you and thank you for answering fast.

I have a lot of experience with SL, some experience with Open Sim so I hope to adjust to Kitely fast.
Yes I plan to set up a closed group for a sim and actually when I write 55 I am thinking about all avatars present at sim. There will be around 100 unique users probably. Thank you for confirming that closed group is working here Graham.
As for the lag I suppose I can set a place in 4 corners of sims. Would it work as in SL and help to avoid the lag (but at the same time voice needs to work for all). I would like to avoid any external software as the group already have no idea about the virtual words and the lecturers expect all to work the same as in SL. It teamspeak.com really neccessary?
Roxy I have asked about fee concerning the Kitely fee as there are several fee schemes. I probably confused the readers with this question.
However I am going to display slides. Are there more problems with texture display than in SL?

Coming back to fee schemes. I assume that with Advanced World I have to have Premium Account to allow lets say 120 duirng a month avatars of users who doesn't pay any fee, to visit my place in Kitely? Or there can visit only 100 during the month? I understood that there can be 100 avatars at the same time but maybe I am wrong. A payment which would allow free users to visit the place will be around 122 USD all together?
I don't think that Premium World will work for me because I would have to transfer money to every registered avatar of lecture participants and that would be too much work for one person. I have also no control when they are logged in and out between the lectures or what they visit.

Referring to Ilan's post -If I start let's say on 27th of April and finish 25th of May I assume I will have to pay for two months as these are dates in two different months? It doesn't matter that I will use it 30 days?

[Duke OfUrl]

Kitely worlds are like separate islands inSL, they can't be placed adjacent to each other. Regions inside the same world are hosted on the same simulator so splitting things on sim lines doesn't help reduce load.

There is no cap on the number of avatars that can visit a world per month, just on the number of avatars that can do so concurrently.

Vivox voice works in Kitely the same as it does in SL so you shouldn't have to install anything extra to use voice on Kitely (assuming everyone has an OpenSim-compatible viewer installed - please don't use Imprudence or any other v1 viewer as they use UDP instead of HTTP for many things that are optimized for HTTP transfer, resulting is lag for everyone in the world).

The world owner is the one charged for visitors time in his or her Premium World so you don't need to transfer KC to your visitors to use your Premium World.

The scenario you listed (April 27 until May 25) will require you to pay for two month's subscription, as stated we bill by calendar month. Please note that prices are pro-rated based on the time you create the subscription so the first month's bill will be for a lower amount (you pre-pay for the reminder part of the month, the following months will be billed at the full price). This means you'll only be charged a proportional amount for the few remaining days in April and then the full amount for the month of May.

[Graham Mills]

Texture display is much the same as in SL except you don't pay for upload.

UPDATED: Teamspeak is not the norm (as Ilan says), just an option used for the recent VWBPE conference for some reason. Serene may know why -- and yes, it did cause some confusion (for me, at least).

[Dot Matrix]

Hi Pixellada!

Referring to Ilan's post -If I start let's say on 27th of April and finish 25th of May I assume I will have to pay for two months as these are dates in two different months? It doesn't matter that I will use it 30 days?

If you buy something part way through the month Kitely only charges for what is left in that month. So if you start on 27th April, the cost for April will be 4/30 of the monthly fee. Then on 1st of May you will be charged the full fee for the month. If you cancel anything before the end of May, you'll still have access to it for the whole of the month, but then not get charged again on 1 June.

Coming back to fee schemes. I assume that with Advanced World I have to have Premium Account to allow lets say 120 duirng a month avatars of users who doesn't pay any fee, to visit my place in Kitely? Or there can visit only 100 during the month? I understood that there can be 100 avatars at the same time but maybe I am wrong. A payment which would allow free users to visit the place will be around 122 USD all together?

You don't need to have a Premium Account to get an Advanced World.

Any number of avatars can visit at different times during the month, providing the number in your Advance World at any particular time does not exceed 100.

So the monthly payment for an Advanced World that allows free users to visit the place at any time will be 99.95 USD.

If you get one on 27th April, you will be charged about 4/30 x 99.95 = 13.33 USD for the rest of April.
Then on 1st May, you will be charged the full 99.95 USD for all of May.
So that would be a total of about 113.28 USD in this case.

(cross posted with Graham and Ilan)

[Pixellada Com]

Thank you for help. I think I got the answer for all my questions.

[Shandon Loring]

Saw 'voice' and just had to comment!
Seanchai Library has been presenting stories in Live Voice daily in SL for 8 years, and regularly now in Kitely for 1 year (as of May 2nd!).

Vivox yes, as in SL. Our experience with Kitely voice is fabulous. Periodically we have had issues in SL, but not in Kitely. We have even sent SL guests to our Kitely Estate on occasion when SL voice was botched and Kitely was working great!
We have had a few minor issues with HG folks coming in and voice not working, but I think we got that about beat, thanks to the cleverness of one our frequent guests.

Of course you can use Stream in Kitely too, which we do for dances and ambiance on certain parcels. But for live presentations Voice always works better for us, largely due to timing issues, especially when we have simultaneous multiple performers.

The Kitely Calendar has lists of live events (including ours) if you may want to have a listen somewhere.

What you are planning sounds exciting, best of wishes to your endeavor.