Kitely Mentors Group Meeting, 1 May 2013: summary

[Dot Macchi]

Attendees: Ilan Tochner, Sally Cherry, Minethere Always, Marstol Nitely, Revlon Lunasea, Cider Jack, Clare Atkins, Dot Macchi, Virtualbelfast Ireland (Stio)

1 Update regarding the availability of the Kitely Market merchant control panel.
2 Update regarding lag in the Kitely Plaza world.
3 Continuing discussion of a design of an ad campaign for Kitely on Second Life focused forums. For background see: http://forums.kitely.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=298

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1 Update on Kitely Market merchant control panel (Ilan)

We expect the Kitely market merchant control panel to be ready for deployment by end of next week. If all goes according to plan we'll roll it out on Friday. So merchants will be able to start creating their marketplace stores in about one week.

The merchant control panel is a big step but we need to finish the buyer-interface before we can roll out the entire marketplace. This is expected sometime next month (it will depend on how many bugs are found in the merchant control panel, other issues we have to deal with, etc.). So merchants should have about a month to create their products before the early bird discounts run out.

We've put in a lot of nice features so it should be fun. For example, when you select items from your inventory for a product you do so from the website -- there's no need to upload them via the viewer.

It's all done by direct selection from inventory and direct delivery to inventory -- no magic boxes

Once a product is defined, the Copy, Transfer and Modify attributes for the product are automatically set based on the items the product includes, so there's no confusion about what the buyer can do.

For example if a product includes many items and even one of the top level ones is Modify, then the product will be listed as Modify. However, in order for the product to be Copy or Transfer, all its components need to have those permissions.

Setting Export will be done via the web-based control panel. The merchant can give clarifications in the description but this will give buyers a good idea of what they're getting without possible merchant mix ups.

Discussion:
Dot asked whether Export would allow the bought item to be saved in an OAR. Ilan explained that items bought inworld will use the existing Copy+Transfer method for filtering content from OAR files and, in the future, Hypergrid travel. Items bought in the Marketplace will use the Export permission flag thus allowing merchants to sell full perm items that can't be exported from Kitely.

Once a file leaves Kitely it can be hacked and have its permissions changed so you can prevent an item from being included in OAR files created by Kitely, but you can't prevent items that are saved in OAR files from being used outside Kitely.

More details:

http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world-new ... rmissions/
http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world-new ... promotion/

Sally asked if this meant that items sold in the Marketplace had to set as Copy+Transfer. Ilan said, no, they can be whatever permissions you want. If you want people to be able to take items from Kitely then either sell them inworld with Copy+Transfer or sell them in the Marketplace with Export. The Marketplace gives you more fine-grained control of which perms to give while retaining the item Kitely only.

Sally explained she was selling "limited" editions of her artwork, and so would not like to see a lot of copying being done. In this case, Ilan suggested, the perms should be set not to allow copy. "If they can't copy it inside Kitely we filter it out from OAR files and from worlds that are copied using our interface. However items sold via the marketplace will use just the Export flag to decide that so you can sell items with no perms that can be exported (if you want)."

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2 Update regarding lag in the Kitely Plaza world (Ilan)

Ilan mentioned the puzzle of Kitely Plaza sometimes being very laggy when much more complex worlds have no lag. Investigating this will require the addition of debug hooks into OpenSim so that the source of the problem can be traced. This will be done for the next build. The problem is that the performance varies greatly without any apparent cause: the world can be at 30% (of one core) one minute with a server load average below 1 and be above 120% in another minute with load average approaching 10 -- all for an empty world.

Those at the meeting suggested various possible causes: mesh (but other worlds with more mesh are fine, especially after the optimisations introduced by Kitely), rotation scripts, timing scripts.

Kitely copied the world to a dedicated private server to rule out DOS attacks, but not much changed. Next step is to start making one change at a time. Given that there are over a thousand scripts and more than 33,000 prims, this is going to be a challenge. The extra information from the OpenSim debug hooks will help.

Solving the problem of lag in Kitely Plaza is a priority.

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3 Continuing discussion re ad campaign

It has not helped that discussions on the forum have regularly been sidetracked. Unfortunately, while brainstorming works in a face-to-face meeting, with a quick flow of ideas and text, it makes the next stage of narrowing down and refining the material that much trickier, which is where a forum thread should come into its own.

After further discussion, the meeting decided on the following.

The focus should be on material to fit in the 728x90 pixels and 160x600 pixels ads. The top banner is the most prominent, and has room for two short lines of text at most.

The text needs to be decided first (this will be done in a fresh forum thread), and from that the graphics should flow (in a later forum thread).

The text should be a "call to action" rather than just a slogan (which Kitely already has: "Virtual Worlds on Demand").

A call to action requires the reader to do something, for example "Get L for M", "You want P, do Q", "Do X, get Y" -- so it might include words like "get", "make", "build".

[Ilan Tochner]

Thank you for a great summary Dot

[Graham Mills]

Re: lag on the Plaza

Stating the obvious (as usual), presumably you could try narrowing it down by deleting chunks at a time and seeing whether that makes a difference?

I have encountered lag (and mentioned it to Miney at the time -- she said my avatar was ghosted which has me also wondering whether there's some weird bandwidth effect).

My recollection, however, is that initially there wasn't significant lag so working backwards chronologically from the date lag was first mentioned would be another strategy (or one you could use for chunk deletion).

Checking obvious stuff like the effect of having MOAP on or off in the viewer as well.

Also, there are a few apparently redundant prims, e.g. the Roman baths or whatever they are.


I see Miney already said most of this in a different thread http://forums.kitely.com/viewtopic.php? ... 2086#p2086

[Marstol Nitely]

Thank you Dot. Wonderful summary!