Please Help Kitely by Participating in the Hypergrid Business Annual Grid Survey

The website Hypergrid Business is now holding its eleventh annual OpenSim grid survey, and we need your help to be able to attract additional people to use our grid and marketplace. If you’re willing to spend a few minutes to help spread the word about Kitely then please answer this short multiple choice survey.

Last year many of you participated in the survey and your endorsement helped convince more people to join our community and attract additional content creators to list their items in Kitely Market. Your continued support this year is crucial for our continued growth.

Please take the time to complete this survey. Thank you!

Enabled Land Sales and Improved Terraforming

We’ve updated Kitely today with several highly requested features for land sales and terraforming. You can now sell parcels to other users; upload and download terrain RAW files quickly; and easily create Ocean worlds.

Selling Land

After we introduced huge Mega Worlds a couple of weeks ago, we received new requests to enable selling land in Kitely. We’re happy to announce that it’s now possible to sell parcels in your worlds to other users. This lets Kitely users become landlords.

If you’re a world owner, here’s how to make a parcel available for sale (click to enlarge this image):

And here’s how to buy a parcel:

Land sales are only available in Advanced Worlds and Mega Worlds. This page explains how this works.

Land Rentals

Land rentals aren’t a feature that OpenSim or Kitely provide: instead, rentals are implemented using scripts.

Land sales are the only way to transfer ownership of a parcel to another user, which is important for implementing rentals. There are already a few rental scripts in Kitely Market, but since land sales hadn’t been possible in Kitely until now these scripts may need to be modified to take advantage of this new functionality.

Download a World’s Terrain

OpenSim supports uploading and downloading a world’s Terrain from the viewer. But these features are extremely slow for the large worlds that Kitely supports (up to 8×8 regions, or 2048×2048 meters). So we’re now introducing replacements for these features, which work much faster.

When you click Download RAW terrain, we now provide you with a URL for downloading the terrain file. This is much faster than the standard OpenSim method for downloading the terrain.

Replace a World’s Terrain

When you click Upload RAW terrain, we explain that this feature now resides on the Kitely website, through the Replace World feature. Previously this feature only worked with OAR files, but now you can give it terrain files, too. If you upload a terrain file then we’ll replace only the world’s terrain, and leave its objects, parcels and region information unchanged.

For example, I wanted to replace my world’s terrain with terrain #016 from this page. The terrain is supposed to look like this:

To do this, first download the terrain file to disk. Then go to your “My Worlds” page; click on the “Manage” link for your world to open its Manage World dialog; switch to the “Files” tab in that dialog; select the RAW file on disk; and click “Replace World”. This screenshot shows the terrain file being uploaded to Kitely:

Replace World will inform you of the progress of the operation.

Once the process was complete, my world looked like this:

Please note that the world will be updated immediately with the new terrain, but the World Map may take between a few minutes to a few hours to get updated.

Tips For Working With Terrains

If you want some free terrain options then take a look at this page, which includes RAW files for islands in various fun shapes.

L3DT is a utility for editing terrain files. This page and this page explain how to use it.

The OpenSimulator wiki has a bunch of information about terrains, as does this article by Kitely user Graham Mills.

If you created a good terrain, why not share it in the Kitely Forums?

Ocean Worlds

Some users want to create worlds that are mostly ocean, with a little land thrown in. This is useful for sea-based activities such as sailing, or to provide room for aquatic creatures to frolic.

Until now creating such worlds was a chore, because by default Kitely worlds contain land in their entire area. This required users to manually terraform their world using the viewer tools, which can be a long and tedious process.

Now there’s an alternative: when you create a new world, we’ve added an option to create an “Empty Ocean” world.

There’s another way to get mostly-ocean worlds: if you resize a world and make it bigger, then you can now choose whether the new area will contain Land or Ocean.

Support for 6×6 Mega Worlds

As mentioned previously, we’ve recently introduced Mega Worlds, which can be up to 8×8 regions in size. But some users have asked to use an intermediate size of 6×6 regions, so we’ve now made this option available.

(If you want your own Mega World then get it now, because we are only offering them until November 30!)