Author: Oren Hurvitz

We updated our service today with several user-requested features, and infrastructure improvements that are required for the upcoming Kitely Market.

Email Notifications for Offline IM

If you receive an IM while you are offline then we’ll send you an email.

To use this feature you must first enable it in your viewer. For example, this is what the option looks like in Firestorm:

People Search

We enabled the “Search” feature in viewers and it now allows searching for avatars.

Better Support for Uploading Many Items

We’ve had reports of users who were disconnected for being idle while uploading a large number of items using Second Inventory. We now recognize when items are being uploaded and consider the user to be active (not idle) while that is happening.

“Likes” in the Forums

We updated the forums to allow users to “Like” posts. This is done by clicking the Thumbs Up button:

The list of all the people who Liked a post is displayed under that post.

Website Improvements

We made a number of improvements to our website. These improvements only affect modern browsers that support HTML5: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and IE10. Most of our users (86%) use such browsers. The remaining users use mostly IE9, which doesn’t support HTML5, so for them the website will continue working as before. We will continue supporting IE9 as long as it’s widely used.

The most important change is that we made the website faster. This is particularly noticeable when moving from the Public Worlds or My Worlds page to a World Page and back.

Another change that you might notice is that our URLs look different: they no longer contain the hash character (“#”). For example, the URL of our public worlds page changed from https://www.kitely.com/#!search to https://www.kitely.com/search. This change makes it easier for search engines such as Google to index our site.

We updated the service today with several bug fixes to the way the sun works in OpenSim, and fixed a physics bug related to sculpties.

The Sun

Each region and estate in OpenSim can have their own sun settings. These settings determine whether the sun is fixed in one place or moves throughout the day, and if it’s fixed then at what hour. Each region can furthermore specify whether to use its own sun settings, or the settings in the estate.

Note that the distinction between region and estate settings is only useful for worlds that contain more than one region. In such worlds, if you set all the regions to use the estate’s sun then you can easily change the sun for all the regions at once. However, in 1-region worlds this distinction is less important because it’s the same amount of effort to change the settings in the estate or in the region.

We fixed a bug that prevented the setting “Use Estate Sun” from working. This is the setting that says that the region declines to set its own sun settings but instead wants to use the estate’s settings.

We fixed another bug that occurred when moving between regions that have different sun settings. The proper behavior is that every time the avatar enters a region, the sun immediately changes to the settings used in that region. But before we fixed this bug, in some cases the sun remained on the settings of the previous region.

A combination of these bugs could cause the following “interesting” behavior: when a user moves between regions, the sun suddenly changes position, and after a few seconds returns to the previous position. We became aware of this bug thanks to Ener Hax who demonstrated it here: http://iliveisl.com/megaregion-environmental-time-issue-video/.

The final change we made related to the sun is actually a new feature, and not a bug fix. From now on, if your world is in Advanced Megaregion mode and you change the sun settings in any region then this change will automatically affect all of the regions in the world. This saves time because you don’t have to go to each region separately and change it. If you do want different sun settings in each region then disable Advanced Megaregion mode; change each region as you wish; and then re-enable Advanced Megaregion mode.

(If you’re interested in changing the sun position using scripting then see Change the sun settings using OSSL in the Kitely forum.)

Scupltie Physics

We fixed a bug (reported here) that sometimes caused scuplties to have the wrong physics shape. The sculpties’ physics shape was stuck on the basic shape (sphere, cube, etc.) instead of matching the sculptie’s appearance.

We’ve improved Kitely today with a new, easy-to-use forums system, and several improvements to OpenSim and our website.

Kitely Forums

Ever since we started our beta, people have been asking us to create user forums to make it easier to connect to other Kitely users. We’re happy to announce that as of today, the Kitely forums are officially open and located here: http://forums.kitely.com

To make it easy to use the forums, we’ve implemented a single sign-on system: any user that is logged in to the Kitely website is automatically logged in to the forums as well. We hope that this will make the forums a convenient place for discussions among the Kitely community. Please visit the forums now and introduce yourself!

You have the option to “subscribe” to individual forums, and if you do so then you’ll get an email notification whenever someone posts something to those forums. We encourage you to subscribe to the forums that interest you and become an active participant.

Our previous support site is now deprecated, so please switch to posting your support questions in the new forums. We’ll keep the old support site up for a few more months, since it contains information that may still be useful, but eventually it will be shut down. If you’ve previously posted information which you think is still relevant to other Kitely users then please repost it in the new forums.

We would like to acknowledge the efforts of two Kitely users: Margaux Lapointe and Dot Macchi, who have been kind enough to setup their own Kitely user forums when we had none. Despite being “under the radar” these forums have been quick to attract passionate users and produce great discussion. Dot’s forum in particular, http://forum.kitelyusers.net/, showed us how much good a forum can do and pushed us to add an official Kitely forum. Thank you Margaux and Dot!

Choose World Wind Settings

In one of our recent updates we changed the default type of wind used in OpenSim from “Random Wind” to “Configurable Wind”. We did so at the request of some of our users, but since then we’ve been told by other users that they prefer to use Random Wind. We’ve therefore added a checkbox that lets you select which type of wind to use in each of your worlds. All existing worlds are now using Random Wind by default, so wind behavior will return to what most people are used to. If you rely on Configurable Wind in your world then please make sure to enable it.

Improvements to OpenSim

We’ve implemented the ability to return objects from the Top Colliders and Top Scripts dialogs. This feature simply hadn’t been implemented in OpenSim yet, so we added it, and submitted it for inclusion in regular OpenSim as well. This should not be confused with the ability to return all the objects that belong to a particular user; that feature has always worked.

The following two OpenSim improvements rely on our proprietary cloud-based infrastructure and will therefore benefit Kitely users only:

Sometimes offline users appeared as online to their friends. This problem should appear much more rarely now, and will repair itself automatically after a while.

Some of our users encountered a problem where they had accidentally created a prim with a size of zero in one or more of its dimensions. Such prims are extremely difficult to delete because viewers don’t allow selecting them. We’ve added a self-fixing mechanism to Kitely: whenever a world is started we find such prims and change their size from 0 to 0.001. That is enough to make it possible to select those prims in the viewer, and edit or delete them.

Removed Support for Internet Explorer Versions 8 and Below

As of today, we no longer support IE version 8 and below. These old IE versions were used by just 0.05% of our visitors, so this change will have a minimal impact. However, supporting those old browsers was a chore so dropping support will let us focus our efforts on more modern browsers.

Other Improvements

We added a section called “My Subscription” to the Settings page. This makes it easier for users to see their subscription status at a glance. That information was previously found in the “Get Credits” dialog, but that placement was counter-intuitive so we moved it to a more prominent location.

We updated Kitely today with system improvements that make Kitely perform significantly better than regular OpenSim: worlds start faster, assets appear more quickly, and lag after login has almost been eliminated.

Worlds Start Faster

Kitely worlds are not always on, so sometimes they need to be started when someone enters them. Kitely was already much faster at starting worlds than regular OpenSim, and today we improved startup times even more, especially for complex worlds.

Assets Appear More Quickly

Kitely’s cloud-based asset system had already provided superior performance to regular OpenSim’s assets service. We’ve spent the last few weeks optimizing it further and now it performs even better, especially in serving textures to viewers.

Significant Improvements to Login Lag

Entering an OpenSim region is often accompanied by noticeable lag while OpenSim downloads assets and inventory. This lag affects everyone in the region; not just the user that entered. Our newly improved cloud-based assets and inventory systems almost eliminate this lag, providing unparalleled responsiveness when entering a world. Try moving around when you just entered a world to experience this for yourself!

Important Note Regarding These Optimizations

The aforementioned login-time optimizations require some preparation for each world. These preparations will run automatically the first time you start the world. This means that the optimizations will only take effect starting with the second time that the world is started.

Other Improvements

Following user requests, we added an option to remove a world’s picture. You can find this feature in the Advanced tab of the Manage World dialog: next to the picture you’ll now see a link called “Remove picture”.

Following another user request, we added Angstrom to the list of viewers that the Kitely Plugin supports.

World pictures now appear faster in the Public Worlds page, enabling you to see the search results page with less waiting.

We rolled out a new cloud-based inventory system today, which offers significantly better performance than the regular OpenSim inventory service. The new system leverages the infrastructure we’ve created for our cloud-based asset system. This continues our commitment to providing unique features and improved performance over regular OpenSim grids.

Our new inventory system provides several benefits:

• Avatars enter worlds faster, and experience less lag while inside.
• Avatars that are already in a world experience less lag when someone else enters the world.
• Opening large inventory folders is much faster.

Additional Changes

We changed the wind module to Configurable Wind. This was requested by some of our users, as it’s used for sailing simulations. Use osSetWindParam to change the wind’s behavior.

Following another user request, we added a confirmation dialog when you export a world to help you avoid starting this time-consuming process by accident.

We’ve updated Kitely today to use OpenSim 0.7.4. OpenSim 0.7.4 includes many bug-fixes, and a few new features such as improved Windlight support and more OSSL functions. The full list of changes is located here.

As usual, Kitely’s version of OpenSim includes our proprietary technology such as Advanced Megaregions and our faster cloud-based assets system. We’ve contributed some more of our patches to the OpenSim community; they are currently under review.

Please contact us if you encounter any problems.

We’re proud to announce today the most significant update to Kitely since our launch: we now offer unlimited-access worlds for a fixed monthly price!

Since Kitely was founded, our focus has been on providing virtual worlds on a pay-per-usage basis. This type of billing works great in many cases, but many people still prefer to pay a fixed monthly price for unlimited use of a world. Starting today we support both of these options.

Two Ways to Pay For Worlds

We now offer two ways to pay for your virtual worlds:

• Fixed Monthly Price – pay a fixed monthly price, and then everyone can visit your world for free.
• Time-Based Billing – instead of a fixed monthly price, pay only for the time spent inside your virtual world.

Until now we offered only Time-Based Billing. We continue to offer this type of billing, so if you are an existing user then you can continue using your account just as before. However, you can now also choose to pay a fixed monthly price for your worlds. This option is configurable on a per-world basis.

Pricing

Thanks to our unique cloud-based solution we are able to offer the best price for hosting high-performance OpenSim-based virtual worlds! The price for hosting a world depends on the size of the world (the number of regions):

Our virtual worlds run on powerful multi-core, 7.5 GB servers, and each world can support up to 100,000 prims and 100 concurrent users. This means that our 1-Region worlds, which cost $40 / month, are both cheaper and more powerful than equivalent private islands on other grids, which cost up to $75 / month. And if you decide to host larger worlds then the price becomes ridiculously low, costing as little as $6.25 per region for a 16-region world. Remember that these are not regions running on overcrowded or underpowered servers: each of our cloud-based servers hosts between 1 and 4 worlds, depending on the amount of users in the worlds. This means that if your world has enough users inside it then it will get its own dedicated server at no extra cost!

We’re able to offer such low prices because our virtual worlds are only active when someone is visiting them. When the worlds have no visitors they are taken offline, at which point they cost us almost nothing. When someone tries to enter the world it is brought back online.

In addition to being free to visit, fixed monthly price worlds also include unlimited free import and export of OAR files (OpenSim Archive), and they don’t count against the number of Free Regions in your plan.

Creating Worlds with Unlimited Free Access

The Create World and Manage World dialogs now have a new checkbox, where you can enable or disable Unlimited Free Access for the world:

Disconnecting Idle Visitors

For some time now, we’ve been offering a feature that automatically disconnects visitors that have been inactive for a long time (30 minutes). This feature was enabled by default, because it helps protect you from running out of Minutes if you forget to exit a world when you leave your computer. This feature is also important for Unlimited Free Access worlds, because our low prices depend on the fact that sometimes worlds become empty and can be deactivated. If people can “camp” in a world then it will never become empty. We’ve therefore decided to remove the ability to disable this feature in order to add the fixed monthly price option.

As of today, Kitely no longer supports the Second Life Viewer. We had to take this step because Linden Lab, the creators of the Second Life Viewer, have released a new version that no longer works with OpenSim. Since the Second Life Viewer automatically updates itself, most people will get this viewer “improvement” even if they don’t want it.

If you’ve been using the Second Life Viewer to access Kitely then you will need to change to a different viewer. If you have any other supported viewer installed then your existing Kitely Plugin will automatically detect this viewer and use it. If no other supported viewer is installed then Kitely Plugin will help you install our default viewer, the Firestorm Viewer.

Linden Lab’s decision is a desperate attempt to curb the growth of OpenSim, which they view as a threat to their business model of charging very high fees for virtual land. It’s easy to understand their reaction when you consider that Linden Lab charges $295 / month for a private island, while a similar island can be had for about $60 / month on professionally run OpenSim grids (and even cheaper on Kitely’s on-demand system). However, Linden Lab are trying to close the barn doors after the horses have already bolted: there is a vibrant community of developers that have created third-party viewers, such as Firestorm, that have chosen to continue to support OpenSim.

To give you a sense of how much this is a non-event for Kitely, here are the most commonly used viewers on our grid in September 2012:

We can live without the Second Life Viewer. Buh-bye!

We changed our default avatars today. When users join Kitely they get a default avatar, and until now we were using the avatars from the Diva Distribution (Ken, Paula and Jessica). We replaced them with seven new avatars, using modified assets based on the ones provided by the designer Linda Kellie. These avatars are better-looking than the previous avatars, and will help newcomers to Kitely to make a good first impression.

Meet the avatars

We’ve updated the service today with improvements and bug fixes for megaregions. Kitely’s implementation of megaregions is significantly better than regular OpenSim, so we’ve decided to give it its own name: “Advanced Megaregions”. (See our previous post for more information about Kitely’s support for big worlds.)

Advanced Megaregions solve many of the problems that occur in regular OpenSim megaregions. One of these improvements is that parcel media works correctly throughout the megaregion, whereas in regular OpenSim it only works in the South-West region. Advanced Megaregions are also faster than regular megaregions, so the user experience is better.

Easily Enable or Disable Advanced Megaregion Mode

Some OpenSim features don’t work with megaregions, e.g. changing terrain textures. This is due to a limitation with the viewers. Kitely solves this problem by allowing you to temporarily disable Advanced Megaregion mode and modify each region separately. If you try to use a feature that doesn’t work in Advanced Megaregion mode then you’ll get this message:

If you click on this link then your browser will automatically show the world’s Manage World dialog, where you can disable Advanced Megaregion mode by simply unchecking a checkbox:

This will change the world to normal (non-megaregion) mode, where you can modify each of the regions separately. When you’re done changing the terrain settings you can re-enable Advanced Megaregion mode by simply checking this checkbox.

When using regular OpenSim megaregions, you will encounter problems if you try to disable them: landmarks may stop working, objects won’t show up without additional manual work, etc. Kitely’s Advanced Megaregions don’t suffer from these problems: the world remains fully usable when not in megaregion mode. You can set landmarks in a world and they will continue working even if the Advanced Megaregion mode is changed. Similarly, objects will appear where they were placed no matter how many times you enable or disable Advanced Megaregion mode.

Speed Improvements

We have made numerous improvements to OpenSim to make big worlds work faster on Kitely. These changes reduce OpenSim’s CPU usage up to 80%! This makes the user experience smoother and allows for the use of more complex worlds and more avatars than regular OpenSim. The following chart shows how much we reduced CPU usage compared to regular OpenSim. These tests were done on a world running in its own server, with one avatar in the world.

Kitely uses powerful cloud-based servers to run OpenSim: they have multi-core CPUs, 7.5 GB of RAM, and high-speed I/O. Each server runs between 1 and 4 worlds. Worlds that have many avatars in them automatically get a larger portion of the server’s resources, so when your world needs it it will get its own dedicated server automatically.