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[EightBit Biologist]

Hey all! So now with the change in the plans I am wondering which would be best for our school as we begin to develop OpenSim resources for our kids. We don't need that many regions (10, maybe 12) but we will need to have a class there are a time (20-30 kids). So we need the access for all of them, and then of course, the regions. Suggestions on what would work best? It is possible for multiple classes to need access at once but our desktop availability will keep it to less than 25 for the foreseeable future.

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi EightBit,

The plans provide unlimited access for single users. You can get a plan for each of the students but, depending on your usage scenario, you may be able to save money by going for one (or more) of the fixed-price worlds (which provide free access to all the people inside it) instead. The new fixed-price world options have yet to be announced but most of them will cost less than the existing Unlimited Free Access world options (though they will have different resource allocations than the existing offerings).

[Graham Mills]

Thus far I've mainly used regions that are time-based/on-demand rather than always-on*. This is largely because the sessions and homework are fairly focused and I don't anticipate students being inworld for extended periods. An additional advantage of the always-on* world is that students won't be routed via transit stations although I believe Kitely were going to ensure people going to different worlds were separated (or did I imagine that?). Of course, time in transit will be, um, transitory in time-based worlds if the teacher goes inworld before the start of the class.

What's happening to the always-on* regions in the new scheme from Jan 1st 2014?

Also, will we still be able to create one-off worlds, e.g. for testing purposes or lag mitigation, on top of the normal allocation?

Last, but by no means least, where is Kitely up to on opening to the hypergrid?

Graham

* [should be: fixed price/unlimited free access world; see Ilan's answer below]

[Selby Evans]

Hi Graham,

First, I'd like to clarify a few things:
1) Only Kitely Welcome Center and Transfer Station worlds are always-on worlds. All other worlds are on-demand regardless of how you pay for them.
2) When logging into an on-demand world that is offline you get transfered via a Transfer Station. Each world that is booting up gets its own transfer station allocated to it so only people heading towards the same world will share a transfer station. With the recent improvements to world startup times, people aren't likely to spend more than a minute in a transfer station, and often just a few seconds as viewers take time to login to the grid before attempting to login to a particular world.
3) If a teacher logs in a couple of minutes before the students then the world should already be active when the student attempt to login and they'll be logged into it directly without going through a transfer station.

As that is the case I'll assume you meant to ask what will happen to fixed-price worlds (Unlimited Free Access) as opposed to Metered (time-based) ones. Come Jan 1, we'll stop offering the existing Unlimited Free Access world options and replace them with new fixed-price world options. Existing Unlimited Free Access worlds will be grandfathered in on their existing feature set so nothing changes for them unless you want to change them to one of the new options we'll be providing.

You'll be able to continue creating as many Metered worlds as you want and pay for their time-based usage, using our existing world-manager pays rates. OAR file-related operations, such as Copy World, Replace World, and Export World, will cost a fixed 150KC/operation instead of 10KC/region/operation that they cost now (these operations will remain free for fixed-price worlds).

Hypergrid access is VERY high on our todo list. It would have been implemented by now if not for the roadmap delays we incurred due to the upgrade to OpenSim 0.7.6 and all the OpenSim optimizations we were forced to develop as a result. The next items on our roadmap are (in this order): update our system to support the new pricing options, finish development of the hypergrid-delivery system for Kitely Market, and finish developing support for hypergrid access (our cloud-based inventory and asset systems need to support it). All these tasks require both user interface and backend changes so can take 2-3 weeks each.

[Graham Mills]

That's great, Ilan, and apologies for the confusion.

Graham