Kitely Mentors Group Meeting, 26 June 2013: summary

[Marstol Nitely]

Attending the meeting:
Ada Radius
Allen Partridge
Brian Roberts
Brigid Yoshikawa
Cider Jack
Dundridge Dreadlow
Equus Staedler
Ilan Tochner
Marstol Nitely
Mat Mahogany
Min Tigerpaw
Minethere Always
Sally Cherry
Stiofain MacTomais

At the beginning of the meeting Ilan announced that the ISTE SIGVE has selected “A Real-Time Interactive 3D Virtual World” machinima, (recorded in a Kitely world) as the winner of the People’s Choice and the Digital Storytelling (Educator) categories at the SIGVE EduMachinima Fest 2013. For more information, check the following link: http://sigve.weebly.com/edumachinima-fest.html

Minethere informed those present that Virtual Christine, who gets 15,000 hits a year, will be doing a story about the free aspects of Kitely.

Buyer Side Marketplace

Kitely has almost finished implementing the buyer-side product view/search pages and will be rolling that out shortly. Hopefully by the end of the week if there are no unforeseen delays. Initially it will be limited, so that people can only see their own stores.

Merchant Guidelines

According to Ilan, there are some people who ignore the listing guidelines. “We'll give them a short grace period but will have to resort to suspending products if they don't fix things,” said Ilan. “We need to get people used to the conventions from the get go so this doesn't plague the marketplace later on.” An example would be, people who create spammy names: all caps, a lot of non-word characters etc.

Ilan said “Some people also spam the Attribute values, trying to stuff listings into unrelated color, material, etc., search results.” As a general rule, merchants should not list more than two values for the same Attribute and then only if both are equally dominant. “A red shirt with small yellow dots should be listed as Red not as Red and Yellow, (for example),” said Ilan. “If two colors are equal dominance then you can list them both, but if there are more than two dominant colors, either choose two or just leave it as N/A. As people seeing your item may not think the colors you choose apply.”

Permissions

Ilan clarified that the Copy/Transfer/Modify/Export filters work on a product level, not a component level. Modify isn't affected by subcomponents, but Copy/Transfer/Export are. If an item is Modify then it can include a no-Modify sub component and still show as Modify in the marketplace. Copy/Transfer/Export require all items and their components to be Copy/Transfer/Export. The values the user sees are the Next Owner perms. Merchants should check to make sure items have the permissions and are delivered as intended by completing a “Test Delivery”. Once copied into the marketplace product listing, the item instances are separate from the inventory items so whatever is done in inventory doesn't affect the marketplace listing.

Ada pointed out an Opensim bug that Minethere had mentioned in the past. “Setting perms in inventory is not enough.” You must rez it inworld, set the permissions there and then bring the item back into inventory for the permissions to stick.

There was a discussion about which permissions were best for notecards and if notecards were best, or if it was better to give links to a website with information, so that a notecard couldn’t be changed. There was also discussion about putting a no-mod license in each prim of an item. Ilan advised against this approach, saying it could degrade user performance because of increased/unnecessary data needing to be transferred to people’s viewers.

Q&A

Allen had some good questions during Q&A., which were mostly answered by Ilan.

While doing skins there is an odd shadow on the inner thighs which seems to be a product of the viewer. Is it an Opensim issue?
Turning off shadows or changing lights was suggested.

Do I have to have a Gravatar sign in to get a picture/profile?
You can have a picture show if you sign-up with Facebook/Twitter or create a Gravatar for the email you use to sign up for Kitely. It shows in your world page and when people view your name.

I can only get search of avatars?
You can’t currently search for events, but you can search for places in the world map. The recommended option is using the public worlds page on the Kitely website. http://www.kitely.com/search

How can I learn about more Kitely community events - like this one?
Twitter, Facebook and the Kitely forums are the best way to go.

Flipping an island

Dundridge mentioned terraforming his beach on the “wrong” side of an island. Minethere told him he could flip x and y axis in SOAS by typing in the opensim console - terrain flip x=45|y=45, “or 90 or whatever... play with it.” Sally said “I am not touching that button, my world disappear. lol.” Ada advised her to save the OAR first. http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world-new ... plemented/

Meeting was adjourned at 3:00pm PST

[Marstol Nitely]

Thank you for writing the meeting summary Marstol

[Constance Peregrine]

Good job-))

[Dundridge Dreadlow]

Of course, it was also pointed out that the console is not available in Kitely and flipping needs to be done in external tools. I "fixed" the beach by simply moving the sun

[Allen Partridge]

Can't you just rotate the *.raw file 90 degrees? Bake terrain in Region tools. Download the raw. Open the Raw in a graphics tool. Rotate it. Reupload the *.raw - seems like that would work wouldn't it?

[Constance Peregrine]

Can't you just rotate the *.raw file 90 degrees? Bake terrain in Region tools. Download the raw. Open the Raw in a graphics tool. Rotate it. Reupload the *.raw - seems like that would work wouldn't it?

I think that would work also, tho i have not tried that myself...

[Dundridge Dreadlow]

I tried the rotate thing, but it was a 2x2 and it didn't work out WELL. I also tried some out of world edits too with limited success (couldn't get it right, etc). Altering the raw externally does work - however, it seems seem better to scan the region with a tool and modify a smoothed version instead of the jaggedy raw.