Updated Signup Bonuses

During the beta period we give free Kitely Credits to new users. We used to give a different amount of KC to users depending on the number of Facebook friends they had: 50 KC if they had at least 20 Facebook friends, and just 10 KC if they didn’t. We had chosen these amounts in order to prevent people from abusing our system to get a lot of free Kitely Credits using throwaway Facebook accounts.

However, this policy prevented many honest people from trying out Kitely, and now that we’re topping off peoples’  accounts to 1000 KC each week it doesn’t even serve its intended purpose anymore.

Therefore we’ve decided to increase the number of free Kitely Credits that we give to new users to 200 KC regardless of the number of Facebook friends they have.

We’ve also updated the World Manager bonus to 400 KC, so that new users who create a world can get a total of 600 KC to play with without needing to contact us or wait for the weekly KC top-off.

Kitely Plugin 1.2.0 and Export World

We’ve made many updates and added two of the most commonly requested features: the ability to select which virtual world viewer to use, and exporting worlds to OAR files! Read on for the details.

Choose which virtual world viewer to use

We’ve updated Kitely Plugin to version 1.2.0. You can now choose which virtual world viewer will be launched when you click “Enter World” in a world page. Normally, the default viewer is launched; that is usually the last viewer that was installed. However, it is now possible to override this setting by entering the full path to the viewer in the file kitely-config.txt.

For details, see How can I choose which virtual world viewer to use? in our support site.

This feature is currently intended for advanced users, as they are the only ones likely to have more than one viewer installed. In the future we will make this feature accessible using a GUI instead of requiring you to edit a file manually.

Digitally signed plugin

The Windows version of Kitely Plugin is now digitally signed. This provides peace of mind when downloading the plugin. In addition, some anti-virus programs wouldn’t allow you to install the plugin because it didn’t have a digital signature (we’re looking at you, Norton AntiVirus). That should no longer be a problem.

Safari on Mac OS X

Kitely Plugin now supports the Safari browser on Mac OS X so you’ll be able to use your Mac’s default browser with Kitely.

Get notified when a newer version of the plugin is available

We’ve added notifications to the World Page so that you’ll know when a newer version of the plugin is available even if you missed our blog announcements and Tweets.

Export World

We’ve given you the ability to export worlds. Exporting a world creates an OAR file (OpenSim Archive) that contains the complete state of the world. You can download this file to your computer for backup.

To export a world, click on the “Export” link that appears next to its name in the My Worlds tab in your account. This can take a while (up to 15 minutes for large worlds) and you’ll be notified once the OAR file is ready.

Exporting and copying worlds can require a lot of server resources for a significant amount of time. We’ve therefore decided to set the price for both these actions to 10 KC.