Kitely Mentors Group Meeting, 13 March 2013: summary

[Dot Macchi]

Thanks for explaining the thinking behind the current design, Ilan. That is helpful.

The problem is that the result is a bit like designing by committee. The individual elements are fine, but together they don't quite gel, so that the final result is less than the sum of its parts.

Boredom is not the only possible negative reaction to try to mitigate.

Hopefully, with the explanation of what Kitely was trying to achieve with the current design, others will be able to come up with an alternative that works for all of us.

[Ada Radius]

I do agree with Dot - the temporary portal design is awful (sorry Ilan! You have other amazing areas of expertise) because the textures are nooby no good. It's better to have no textures than bad textures. It's difficult for artists and designers to communicate these kinds of things, except in the effective and brutally honest collaborations between artists. I've done enough live shows in SL, running art teams, to be painfully aware of the need to use small textures and simple prim builds so that viewer side rezes fast on every machine and viewer, and how difficult it can be to get less experienced builders to figure out how to do that, or even follow directions.
Specific suggestions - get rid of all of the textures you have there, except for the sign, which is fine, until you get a graphics designer to work on it some more. Blue and white are great for your colors, plus the orange and red in the kite logo. Don't make the sky texture move, it's kind of queasy. Make it look like the home page of the website, which looks fine.

[Dot Macchi]

Hi Ada,

If I send you a copy of the station can you change it to what you think it should look like (a final textured version we can use, not a mockup)?

[Ada Radius]

Absolutely! I'm planning on being inworld most of today.

[Graham Mills]

Generally the transfer station approach has worked well with Kokua. However, it routinely fails with Lumiya and interestingly(?) I found my avatar can fly out of the sphere for 10-20 sec before getting disconnected (this is not normally possible). When you try the second time, it works.

Anyway, this made me wonder why flight is enabled at all?

Incidentally, Lumiya also fails on inter-world landmark-mediated teleport so weirdness was not unexpected. Now, however, the failed teleport works on the second attempt. I don't recall that happening previously so that's progress of sorts as well.

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Graham,

Flight is disabled in the transfer stations world and so are inworld teleports (using code we added specifically to prevent them).

I think Lumiya has problems with server side teleport updates, which explains why they wouldn't work in the transfer stations or for offline worlds.

If what you say is true, it seems that Lumiya also enables flight in places where flight is disabled. Ignoring this flag would enable apparent avatar movement because the viewer renders avatar location before getting movement confirmation from the server (which is why you sometimes see avatars jumping between points when there is communication lag between a viewer and OpenSim). This predictive rendering is usually good but if the viewer also ignores the no fly flag then you could fly outside the bubble before the viewer communicates with the server and gets your server-calculated coordinates which snap you back inside the bubble.

[Constance Peregrine]

as to flying, and it being disabled [and of course I do not know what additional coding you folx have done] [and I am waiting for my hair to dry so I can go get food, so I am just rambling, really]

I found in opensim when I fly before tps, using impy anyways, I can fly in regions set for nofly.

I always find this amusing when people say, "hey, how u do dat??"

Similar to getting items out of boxes in no-build areas. Simple wear the box and drag the wanted items to your inventory. I always find it amusing when ppl say, "oh, ur such a noob", when I do that-))

Or, using imp, type gth 5000 [as an example of a meters height] and be at 5k almost immediately-)) [the later doesn't work in some instances for some reason I have not been able to figure out].

or even, gtp 128 128 100

Or, using impy, when you go to a new place, using the map, tp to like 100 meters height, and then focus on someone where you wish to go and let the textures rez in for you...saves on lag time when you tp to them or double click tp next to them...sl has disabled this "feature" which I find very annoying!!!

I think Astra does this also as it does have chatbar commands like impy and it has a nice radar similar to imp, but I have only used it in Aurora so far...I don't know about other viewers in these regards-))

[Graham Mills]

Thanks, for a comprehensive answer, Ilan. Excellent though it is, Lumiya still has some rough edges.

Hi Graham,

Flight is disabled in the transfer stations world and so are inworld teleports (using code we added specifically to prevent them).

I think Lumiya has problems with server side teleport updates, which explains why they wouldn't work in the transfer stations or for offline worlds.

If what you say is true, it seems that Lumiya also enables flight in places where flight is disabled. Ignoring this flag would enable apparent avatar movement because the viewer renders avatar location before getting movement confirmation from the server (which is why you sometimes see avatars jumping between points when there is communication lag between a viewer and OpenSim). This predictive rendering is usually good but if the viewer also ignores the no fly flag then you could fly outside the bubble before the viewer communicates with the server and gets your server-calculated coordinates which snap you back inside the bubble.