Author: Ilan Tochner

Kitely Market supports sales campaigns that help merchants promote their products, and help buyers find great deals in our marketplace.

To ensure that buyers get truly discounted rates, we have a policy that a product can’t be always on sale: once a product has been put on sale, the merchant must wait at least 60 days before placing the same product on sale again.

However, this limitation is currently preventing merchants who had a Halloween sale from placing the same items on sale again for Black Friday. We’ve decided that these are both legitimate occasions for sales, and therefore we’re temporarily reducing the waiting period between sales to 14 days. This limit will be raised back to 60 days after Cyber Monday (December 2, 2019).

The website Hypergrid Business is now holding its tenth 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!

The website Hypergrid Business is now holding its ninth annual OpenSim grid survey, and we need your help to be able to attract additional people to our growing community. 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 content creators to list their items in Kitely Market and more people to join our community. Your continued support this year is crucial for our continued growth.

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

InWorldz, one of the oldest and largest OpenSim grids, has recently shut down. Since then, many InWorldz residents have moved to other grids in search of a new home. Thanks to Kitely Market, we now have some hard data that shows the scope of this exodus, as well as which grids were the preferred destinations for InWorldz residents.

We have seen a remarkable 300% spike in Kitely Market sales since InWorldz has shut down, as users that moved to new grids began restocking their avatar inventories. InWorldz didn’t allow its residents to use Kitely Market, so for many of these users this is the first time that they’ve been able to buy from our marketplace.

We saw Kitely Market sales begin to rise on July 26, a day before InWorldz shut down. The graph below compares sales from the week since InWorldz shut down, to the average weekly sales in the three weeks before that. Kitely’s own grid experienced the biggest growth in absolute numbers, but DigiWorldz and Discovery Grid experienced the most growth relative to their previous sales levels.

Kitely Market delivers to all Hypergrid-enabled OpenSim grids. This page explains how to buy items from Kitely Market and have them delivered to your avatar on another grid.

If you are the owner of a closed grid and you want to allow your users to buy from Kitely Market then follow these directions.

We are proud to announce that we’ve passed a new milestone: with significant growth over the past year, Kitely Market has sold over $100,000 worth of virtual goods to date.

Kitely Market first opened to the public on August 2013. Over the past few years, Kitely Market has become the main marketplace serving the OpenSim metaverse (the Hypergrid).

Here are a few noteworthy stats:

• When Kitely Market first opened it had under 1,000 product variations listed. It now offers more than 17,000 product variations.
• Kitely Market’s sales revenue last month was over 16 times higher than its sales revenue on its first month in business.
• When Kitely Market opened, Kitely was still a closed grid and only Kitely users could buy from it. In March 2014 Kitely Market started delivering to the Hypergrid, and has since delivered to avatars on more than 170 different OpenSim grids.
• Our top merchant has sold more than $10,000 worth of virtual goods.
• Our top 10 merchants have each sold at least $1,300 worth of virtual goods.
• More than 100 Kitely Market merchants have each sold at least $100 worth of virtual goods.

One of our main goals for Kitely Market was to enable content creators to easily make money selling their creations to users from multiple OpenSim grids, without having to manually deliver their goods to all of those grids. Kitely Market’s growth over the past few years demonstrates that talented content creators can see a nice return from selling to an open metaverse, even when it still includes only a few tens of thousands of active users, which are spread between hundreds of different grids.

Thank you for using Kitely Market! Your help in spreading the word about our marketplace is what enabled it to grow and provide you with more content buying options. With your continued support, we believe that this year we’ll be able to serve even more buyers and content creators.

An important part of the Kitely experience is the Kitely Welcome Center. This world is the main entry point to our grid, and it serves to introduce new users to the wide range of services and destinations available in Kitely.

We are happy to announce that today we rolled out a new and improved version of the Kitely Welcome Center. This updated version was created from scratch, with the goal of retaining the spirit of the previous welcome center while improving its usability and performance.

Acknowledgements

The Kitely Welcome Center is the result of an ongoing community project that was first launched in 2013. The current redesign was made by the following people who generously contributed their time:

• Ozwell Wayfarer: designed and built the new Kitely Welcome Center, using as inspiration the design that Paislee Myrtle created for the original welcome center. Most of the items in the new welcome center were contributed by Ozwell from his Kitely Market store, Worlds End Landscaping & Roleplay.
• Dot Matrix: was the project coordinator and created the information signs.
• Serene Jewell: provided usability feedback early on, and was later joined by more than a dozen other Kitely community members in testing the new world.
• Tocy Sweet: was not directly involved with this project, but she deserves credit for the graphical design of the signs in this world (which were created by Dot), since they’re based on her design for the Kitely Market advertising campaign. Tocy’s Kitely Market store is Sweet Distractions.
• Dundridge Dreadlow: was not directly involved with this project, but he deserves credit for creating some of the scripts that were taken from previous versions of the Kitely Welcome Center. Dundridge’s Kitely Market store is Dundridge Dreadlow Developments.

Update Your Landmarks Now

If you have any existing landmarks for Kitely Welcome Center then they will no longer work, because this new world replaced the previous one. Please visit the new Kitely Welcome Center by using its world page or its Hypergrid address (grid.kitely.com:8002:Kitely Welcome Center), and create new landmarks to replace your outdated ones.

Likewise, if you’ve previously set the Kitely Welcome Center as your Home in the viewer, then enter the new Kitely Welcome Center and reset your Home to the new world.

Thank You Again

We want to give special thanks, yet again, to Ozwell Wayfarer who spent hundreds of hours creating this new world. While many other people played a part in creating the new welcome center and the ones that preceded it, Ozwell did the lion’s share of the work in making this new iteration possible.

Thank you to all past and current contributors who’ve helped build this wonderful virtual world. We welcome everyone to come and visit!

We are happy to announce that Kitely has a new world template option: Kitely Evergreen Island. Now whenever you create a new Kitely world you’ll have the option to start off with your own free copy of this beautiful Alpine island. Kitely Evergreen Island includes optimized mesh content from some of Kitely Market’s top selling merchants.

Introducing Kitely Evergreen Island

Whenever you create a new Kitely world, you select a template that determines the initial contents of the world. Two of these options are to start off with just some empty land, or to upload your own OAR (OpenSim Archive) file. In addition, we provide a couple of options for fully-functional worlds. Before today’s update, these world templates were Universal Campus and OpenVCE. These templates are based on freebie content that is quite dated, and also widely available in many other OpenSim grids.

We felt that you deserve more. We wanted to be able to offer you a pre-configured world full of high quality mesh content that is professionally laid out and optimized. We wanted it to be comfortable enough for you to feel at home immediately, but with enough possibilities that you could tweak it and make it your own. We wanted you to be able to change everything in that world and reuse it in other Kitely worlds. And we wanted to be able to offer you all of that content for free.

Several Kitely community members have stepped up and created Kitely Evergreen Island to address these needs (see the next section for acknowledgments). The result is a world that contains premium content from some of Kitley Market’s top selling merchants, which you can reuse in all of your Kitely worlds.

All of this professional content is licensed for use for free anywhere in Kitely. It has Copy/Modify permissions, so you can simply pick up pieces in your copy of this world and use them in other Kitely worlds. However, this content can’t be exported to other grids, using either the Hypergrid or the Export World option (which creates OAR files). You can get exportable versions of these items by buying them in Kitely Market from their creators (see the list of stores below).

Kitely Evergreen Island is an example of how a great looking world can also be highly optimized. This world starts up in seconds, and requires very little CPU resources to run.

This new world template replaces the OpenVCE template, which we are no longer offering. We still offer the Universal Campus template, however, as it’s still the best starter option for a large world that can host many people.

Acknowledgements

The creation of Kitely Evergreen Island was a community project that involved several people who generously contributed both their time and items from their Kitely Market stores:

• Ozwell Wayfarer: designed and built Kitely Evergreen Island. Almost everything included in this world is a contribution from his Kitely Market store Worlds End Landscaping & Roleplay.
• Zuza Ritt: contributed a cabin from her Kitely Market store 21strom.
• Dot Matrix: was the project coordinator and created the information signs in the cabin and the landing point.
• Tocy Sweet: was not directly involved with this project, but she deserves credit for the graphical design of the signs in this world (which were created by Dot), since they’re based on her design for the Kitely Market advertising campaign. Tocy’s Kitely Market store is Sweet Distractions.

Updated New World Dialog

The New World dialog now shows a screenshot of each world template option. This makes it easier to understand what you’ll get with each option, especially for new users.

Final Words

We want to reiterate our gratitude to Ozwell, Zuza, Dot and Tocy. Their generous contributions of time, skill, and content made it possible for Kitely to offer you this great new world template free of charge.

To get your own Kitely-hosted copy of Kitely Evergreen Island, with Copy/Modify permissions for everything in that world, go to your My Worlds page and create a new world using the Kitely Evergreen Island template.

Kitely supports worlds that have more than one region. Currently, such worlds can be run in one of two modes (selected by the world manager): Multi-region, or Advanced Megaregion. This will change on December 9, 2015: these worlds will be converted to VarRegions, and the option to run worlds in Multi-region or Advanced Megaregion mode will be removed.

This post explains why we’re making this change, and how it will affect you.

Historical Background

Three years ago OpenSim supported two ways to create big worlds: 1) By placing multiple separate regions next to each other: this is called “Multi-region mode”. 2) By combining multiple small regions into a single big region, called a “Megaregion“.

Multi-region mode suffered from many problems. First, there were slowdowns and errors when avatars and objects (including vehicles) crossed region borders. Second, it was wasteful in server resources, making worlds operate slowly. Megaregion mode was more efficient in using server resources, although still not great. It didn’t suffer from region crossing problems, but it did have other limitations that prevented it from being a good alternative to multi-region mode. Kitely’s solution was to develop Advanced Megaregions, which were both more efficient than regular megaregions, as well as solving many of their limitations.

Two years later, at the end of 2014, OpenSim 0.8 introduced a third option for creating big worlds: VarRegions. VarRegions behaved similarly to Kitely’s proprietary Advanced Megaregions, but they had some important limitations. First, they didn’t support the ODE physics engine, which Advanced Megaregions did support, and that was then (and still is) the most dependable OpenSim physics engine. Second, they required all users to upgrade their viewers, since older viewers didn’t support VarRegions. Third, they were less flexible than megaregions in selecting region settings for big worlds. We therefore decided that it was premature to switch Kitely from using Advanced Megaregions to using VarRegions.

Recently, however,  OpenSim 0.8.2 was released, and it has fixed the biggest problem with VarRegions, by allowing them to use ODE. In addition, OpenSim 0.8.2 has deprecated support for megaregions.

Since Kitely’s Advanced Megaregions depend on a part of OpenSim that is no longer maintained, we were left with two options: either we keep the old code, thus making it hard for us to remain compatible with future OpenSim releases; or we migrate all Kitely Advanced Megaregions to use VarRegions, and thus maintain our ability to remain compatible with the standard OpenSim branch. We chose the second option.

Upcoming Changes

The switch to VarRegions will have the following effects:

(This affects only worlds with more than one region.)

All big Multi-region and Advanced Megaregion worlds will be converted to VarRegions. The option to switch between Multi-region and Advanced Megaregion mode will be removed. This means that even if you didn’t use Advanced Megaregion mode before the upcoming change, your big worlds will still be converted to VarRegions.

Importing an OAR file that contains multiple regions saved in Multi-region or Megaregion mode will result in the contents of the OAR file being automatically converted to use VarRegion mode. Exporting big Kitely worlds will always create a VarRegion OAR file.

The region settings of the root region will now be used in the entire big world. This will happen regardless of whether that big world had used Multi-region mode or Advanced Megaregion mode. These settings include terrain textures, water height, etc. This means that if you had set different region settings for different parts of your big world, then the settings for all of the regions except for the root region will be lost. The settings in the root region will be used throughout your world.

Some landmarks might stop working, although this should be rare. Landmarks that were created in a non-root region of a Multi-region world will stop working, because those regions won’t exist anymore. Landmarks for the root region, as well as any landmarks that were created in an Advanced Megaregion world, will continue to work. Since most big Kitely worlds are using Advanced Megaregion mode, this change should have very little effect on most of the landmarks that people have created in Kitely.

Things That will Remain the Same

All other world management features provided in your Kitely account control panel will remain. This includes the ability to change world sizes, change the physics engine, etc.

What you Need to Do

Most people don’t need to do anything.

If you want to have a backup of your world in Multi-region or Megaregion mode then you need to Export your world before the upcoming change. This will create a Multi-region or Megaregion OAR file. You’ll still be able to export your world after the change, of course, but at that point the OAR file will use VarRegion mode.