We have an important announcement: Kitely now supports the Hypergrid! Kitely users can visit other grids, and users from other grids can visit Kitely worlds. Kitely is the only OpenSim grid that supports the Hypergrid and also has strong content protections that prevent unauthorized items from leaving the grid.

How to Teleport Out of Kitely

(This section is for Kitely users.) First, login to any Kitely world. Open the World Map, and in the search field enter the Hypergrid address of a region that isn’t in Kitely. For example, enter hg.osgrid.org:80:Wright Plaza to visit OSGrid’s central region. Then, click Teleport.

If your avatar is wearing any No-Export items then you won’t be able to teleport out of Kitely. Instead, you’ll see a message that tells you which No-Export items you’re wearing:

Remove or replace the No-Export items, and then you’ll be able to teleport out of Kitely. Hint: the default avatar that every user gets when they join Kitely contains only Exportable items, so you can wear it in order to teleport out of Kitely. If you’ve deleted that outfit then you can get other Exportable outfits in the Kitely Welcome Center.

A note to content creators: now that the Hypergrid is enabled, Exportable clothes and body parts are going to be in greater demand than ever. Please consider enabling Export on your products, if you haven’t already done so.

How to Teleport Into Kitely

(This section is for non-Kitely users.) First, find a Kitely world that you would like to visit by browsing the Explore Worlds page. When you’ve found an interesting world, click on it. This opens the world’s World Page, which shows the world’s Hypergrid address. For example:

Login to your home grid, open the World Map, and in the search field enter the Hypergrid address that you found above. Finally, click Teleport.

Kitely worlds are loaded on-demand, so if the world that you want to visit is currently offline then you’ll be teleported to a Transfer Station while the world is being started (this usually takes only a few seconds). Once the world is ready you’ll be teleported to it automatically.

Enabling Hypergrid Access

World managers can choose whether to allow Hypergrid users to visit their world or not. This is done in the Manage World dialog:

In this update we’ve automatically converted any worlds that were open to Regular users to be open to Hypergrid users as well.

We recommend enabling Hypergrid access to any worlds that aren’t private. This lets more people visit your creations, and it also makes the world more visible because worlds that are open to the Hypergrid appear first in the Explore Worlds page. We also recommend making all Hypergrid enabled worlds Fixed-Price Worlds (instead of keeping them as Metered Worlds). This will ensure that Hypergrid users will be able to continue visiting your worlds even if you run out of Kitely Credits.

The Hypergrid Logo

A few weeks ago we started looking for an icon that can represent the Hypergrid in our user interface, and were surprised to learn that there was no standard Hypergrid logo. We therefore asked the Kitely community to help us design a logo that people will be able to associate with the Hypergrid.

There were a number of submissions, and the final logo was inspired by a design by Amiryu Hosoi. We’re making our version of this logo free for use by anyone who wants it without restrictions (Create Commons Public Domain license). Here are several versions of the logo, in PNG format with transparency:

Content Protection

The Export Flag

Kitely is unique in allowing Hypergrid access to users’ worlds, while still protecting content from leaving the grid without authorization. Objects and items in Kitely are considered either Export or No-Export, and only Exportable items may leave Kitely.

How are items marked as Export or No-Export? There are two ways:

1. For items purchased from Kitely Market, the Export flag is specified explicitly in the product’s Permissions section. for example, this item is No-Export:

2. For objects and items that weren’t purchased from Kitely Market we use the following logic: if the item has Copy and Transfer permissions (abbreviated as “CT”) then the item is exportable. If it doesn’t have CT permissions then it’s not exportable.

How No-Export Items Are Prevented from Leaving Kitely

Kitely protects No-Export items from leaving Kitely by preventing them from being added into Hypergrid-enabled folders in users’ inventories:

• For Kitely users, we prevent No-Export items from being added to the user’s “My Suitcase” folder. This folder is special because only items in the Suitcase are available when a user teleports to another grid. Therefore, by preventing No-Export items from being added to this folder we prevent them from being taken to other grids.
• For Hypergrid users, we prevent No-Export items from being added to any of the user’s folders.

For example, if a Hypergrid user attempts to Take a rezzed object that is No-Export, then they’ll see the following message:

Avatar Appearance

The avatar’s appearance is a special case. The appearance contains several types of items: Body Parts, Clothes and Attachments. The reason the appearance is special is that an avatar may wear items that appear in any folder, not just the “My Suitcase” folder. Since users can wear No-Export items, we had to add further protections beyond just the “My Suitcase” folder.

Here’s how we protect No-Export items that are being worn by a user from being taken out of Kitely: when a Kitely user attempts to teleport out of Kitely we check that all of their Appearance items are exportable. If they’re wearing any No-Export items then we prevent the teleport. This was explained in more detail in a previous section, “How to Teleport Out of Kitely”.

Changes to “Export World”

In the course of implementing these content protections we’ve also tightened the rules that determine whether an object is Exportable according to whether it has CT permissions. Previously, during OAR file exports we only checked the permissions of the rezzed object itself. Now we also check all the permissions of the items that the object contains. In other words, a CT object that contains a non-CT item inside it is no longer Exportable. Therefore, it’s possible that some objects that were previously considered Exportable will now be considered No-Export. If you use the “Export World” feature then the next time you export your world, look at the Export Report to see if any objects that were previously included in your world’s OAR file are no longer included. (The Export Report is generated automatically each time you export a world.)

Kitely’s Export Permissions are Not Shown in the Viewer

When you view an object’s properties in the viewer, some viewers display an Export permission next to the Copy, Transfer and Modify permissions. This feature was added in the past to support an Export permission in OpenSim, but unfortunately that feature isn’t ready for production use. Kitely implements export controls in a different way, so the Export permission that you may see in the viewer should be ignored: it doesn’t reflect the true Kitely export permission, and changing the checkbox will have no effect.

First Teleport to a New Grid Sometimes Fails

There is a known problem with OpenSim that we wanted to mention: the first time you try to teleport to a new grid, especially if you’re wearing a complex avatar, the teleport may fail and you’ll remain in the current region. This happens because the destination grid has to load all of your avatar’s assets, and this can take so long that the teleport times-out. If this happens then simply try to teleport again: the second attempt will probably succeed, because by then the grid will already have your assets. This problem isn’t Kitely specific but we’re bringing it to your attention so you’ll know what to do if you encounter it.

Kitely Users Benefit from our Cloud-Based Inventory System while Hypergrid Traveling

Kitely developed its own cloud-based inventory system, which provides Kitely users with superior performance and reliability compared to that provided by the regular OpenSim inventory. These benefits continue to be available to you when you travel the Hypergrid with your Kitely avatar, since Kitely continues to manage your avatar’s inventory even when you’re visiting other grids.

Final Words

Enabling Hypergrid access in Kitely has been a massive project, and we’re very happy that Kitely users can now go forth and visit other grids, and other grids’ users may visit the wonderful worlds that have been created in Kitely. As always, please let us know if you find any problems.

We updated the system today with several bug-fixes to long-standing OpenSim problems. Of particular note are several bug fixes we developed for Group permissions in parcels. If you had tried to use this feature in the past and were frustrated that it didn’t work as expected then please try again; it should work much better now.

We’re continuing to revamp Kitely’s website and image, and today we rolled out a new website header. It has a more modern design than the old header, and allows easy access to the main parts of the Kitely website from every page. We also simplified the header by moving some of the options that were previously available as buttons (such as “History” and “Settings”) into the “Go to” menu.

We know that many of you are eagerly waiting for Kitely to support the Hypergrid, and we’re hard at work on that. Here’s some inside information about what we’ve already done, and what still remains to be done.

Here’s what we finished so far: First, we have proprietary cloud-based asset and inventory services, and it took some work to allow restricted access to them from the Hypergrid. Second, Kitely users have many more features than regular OpenSim users, so we needed a “translation layer” to allow Hypergrid users to coexist with Kitely users. Third, we wanted to let Hypergrid users visit offline regions, so we needed to be able to redirect them to a Kitely Transfer Station and then teleport them to the desired region once it’s ready. This was a lot of work, but it’s done.

Here’s what remains to be done before we enable full Hypergrid access in Kitely. First, we need to prevent no-export content from leaving Kitely. Second, if a Kitely user attempts to teleport to another grid while wearing any no-export clothing or attachments then we want to tell them which items they need to remove, and/or remove them automatically. And finally, we need to make various changes to the UI in order to show which regions are open to the Hypergrid, and at which address.

We’ve done about half of the work that is needed to enable the Hypergrid in Kitely, and we’ll finish the rest in a few weeks. We’re excited that soon we’ll be able to allow everyone in the metaverse to see the great builds that have been done in Kitely, and to let Kitely users roam to other grids. Great things are coming!

We have some good news! We upgraded the servers that we use to host OpenSim worlds, and this has improved performance significantly. The new servers have faster CPUs, and they use SSDs instead of regular hard drives.

Here’s an example of the performance improvements with the new servers. Universal Campus is a 4-region world with more than 43,000 prims and about 2,000 scripts. It used to take 1:25 minutes to start on our old servers, even with all of our performance optimizations (starting this world on a regular version of OpenSim would have taken much longer). With the new servers this world starts in just 43 seconds, i.e. twice as fast! We see similar improvements in other worlds’ startup times, as well as faster performance while the worlds are active.

This upgrade is available automatically to all Kitely users, at no additional cost.

If you need even more performance then consider changing your world’s type to an Advanced World, since they get more resources than other types of worlds.

In other news: in the last week we’ve donated over 40 patches to OpenSim. These are features and bug fixes that have been active in Kitely for a while, and now everyone in OpenSim will be able to take advantage of them starting with OpenSim version 0.8.0.

Even as we’re making more contributions to OpenSim, it’s important to keep in perspective the benefits of being a Kitely user. Over the last 5 years we’ve written more than 330,000 lines of code, less than 10% of which are OpenSim-specific. Kitely users will continue to have first access to the improvements that we make to the open-source OpenSim project, as well as exclusive access to our many features that aren’t part of OpenSim such as our powerful on-demand servers; fast cloud-based asset and inventory systems; intuitive HTML5 control panel; tight integration with Kitely Market; and more.

We updated Kitely today, and now everyone can use Kitely Market to buy items for any avatar on the Hypergrid! Other new features include: merchants in Kitely Market can download their sales report; we’ve made it easier for new users to start using Kitely; and we changed our logo. Another important update is that Kitely is now part of the OpenSim Core Group.

Kitely Market Hypergrid Delivery

This feature, which was introduced in a private beta two weeks ago, is now available to everyone. You can buy items in Kitely Market and have them delivered to any avatar on any grid that is open to the Hypergrid.

To use this feature, first add items to your Shopping Cart. Then, in the Shopping Cart, select to deliver the items to “Other Grid”:

Select the destination grid from the drop-down menu, and enter the name of your avatar in that grid. If your grid isn’t in the built-in list of grids then add it as a custom grid using the Grid Manager. (The built-in grids were chosen because they’re the top 5 grids that are open to Hypergrid, by number of active users. The list of built-in grids may change in the future if other grids prove popular.)

Once you’ve completed the purchase, your avatar will get an Instant Message:

Click on the link in the IM. Your avatar will then get the item itself:

Click “Keep” or “Accept” to save the item (different viewers use different buttons).

The item will now appear in your inventory. It will appear either in the “Objects” folder, or in the the “My Suitcase > Objects” folder. In some cases the item might not appear immediately; this happens in simulators that run an old version of OpenSim. In that case, restart the viewer and the item will appear in the inventory.

Rez the item. This creates a box that contains your entire order. Copy the box’s contents to your inventory; you will get one inventory item for each item in your order. Rez these items, and copy their contents to your inventory. These are the actual items that you have bought, and you can use them immediately! (The reason we use these container boxes is to support orders in which multiple items were bought at once.) Here’s what the boxes look like, along with the purchased item in the inventory:

A note to content creators: we recommend that you don’t place your Kitely Market items in boxes, because that would mean that users who deliver your products to other grids will have to open three boxes before they get to the actual items. Kitely Market already makes sure that items are delivered to separate folders (when delivering in Kitely), or in boxes (when delivering to other grids), so adding another box to the process is not necessary.

Show Only Exportable Items

Only products that have the Export permission may be delivered to grids other than Kitely. If you’re looking for Exportable items then you may want to enable the Export filter: this will ensure that you only see exportable items. This filter is located in the bottom-left corner of the main Kitely Market page:

Tools for Merchants

We’ve made it easy for merchants to test that their products work correctly in other grids. It has always been possible to use the “Test delivery” link in the Edit Product page in order to deliver the product to the merchant’s avatar in Kitely. This feature has now been extended to deliver to other grids as well. The way this works is that you go to the Shopping Cart page, and select a grid and an avatar. You don’t actually have to buy anything; just enter that information. Then return to the Edit Product page, and click “Test delivery”. The product will be delivered to the “foreign” avatar that was selected in the Shopping Cart instead of to your Kitely avatar.

Another feature for merchants is that in the Sales History, merchants can see which grid each sale was delivered to, because foreign avatars appear along with their grid: e.g., “Jane Vespa @ OSGrid”.

Download Sales Report

Merchants can now download a CSV file that contains all of their sales. To do so, click “Download sales report” in the Sales History page.

Easier Passwords for New Users

We changed the user experience for new users. The problem that we wanted to solve is that users didn’t know which password they need to use in order to login to the grid from their viewer. That happened because we generated a random password for the user. It was possible to see this password in the GUI, but this was still confusing.

Therefore, we made the following changes:

• For users that create an account using email/password: the password that they select during signup is now used to login to both the website and the grid (from the viewer). Previously this password was used only for the website, and the grid password was generated randomly.
• For users that create an account using Facebook or Twitter: we now ask them to choose a grid password during signup. Previously we had chosen a random password for them.

A note about users with an email/password account: we do still allow setting different passwords for the website and the grid; it’s just that by default, these passwords are now the same. The reason we allow these passwords to be different is that some users, e.g. educators, want to create accounts on behalf of their students. The students need to know their grid password, but they shouldn’t know their website password. Therefore, you can still change both the website password and the grid password in the Settings page.

New Logo

We’ve started a process of overhauling our company image. The first step was changing our company logo to the following design:

We created the old logo ourselves, about five years ago. It was playful and served us well, but now we want a new logo that better reflects our company’s professional, modern, and energetic vibe. In order to design this logo we used a contest on the site 99designs. We chose this logo out of more than 700 submissions, and towards the end we used Google Consumer Surveys in order to help us decide on the final design. We hope you like it!

OpenSim Core Group

On a personal note, I’ve been invited to join the OpenSim Core Group. I am thankful for the core developers’ confidence in me, and this level of access will make it easier for me and Kitely to improve OpenSim for everyone.

We updated the system today with support for Hypergrid delivery in Kitely Market. But this feature isn’t open for general use yet, so don’t look for it 🙂 . Hypergrid delivery is challenging because we need to interact with other grids, each of which might implement OpenSim in different ways. This can cause problems which don’t happen when we deliver items in Kitely (where we control every aspect of the process).

Therefore, we are now starting a Beta Test of Hypergrid Delivery. Please see this forum post for details about how to join the beta test.

Other Changes

We fixed a bug with permissions: when a user links together two objects, OpenSim used to set the permissions of the combined group to the permissions of the last selected group. But actually it should use the lower permissions found in either group; otherwise users could circumvent the permissions system.

We changed the maximum viewer password to 16 characters. We used to allow users to choose longer passwords, but some viewers don’t actually support more than 16 characters.

We fixed a bug in Kitely Market, where if a merchant deactivated or reactivated a product then its reviews counter would reset to 0. (The reviews were never deleted; only the counter was wrong.)

In World Pages, we added two Meta tags to the HTML. These tags may be used by automatic scripts to detect information about the world:

• maturity – possible values are adult, moderate and general
• account_type – which types of users can visit the world. Possible values are regular, premium and private. In the future we’ll add another value here: hypergrid.

By the way, if you’re writing scripts that check World Pages then you may be interested to know that world pages also have a “Permanent URL”. Normally the World Page’s URL changes whenever the world is renamed. However, the Permanent URL uses the World ID instead of its name, so it never changes. The Permanent URL can be found as a Meta tag in the HTML, called og:url.

We updated Kitely today with improvements to Kitely’s Advanced Megaregions, bug fixes and performance improvements. We also added features that enable you to troubleshoot physics-related performance issues in your Kitely worlds.

Scripting in Advanced Megaregions

We fixed several scripting functions to work in megaregions, as requested by our users:

llGround(), llGroundNormal(), llGroundSlope(), llGroundContour()
llWind(), llWater(), llCloud()
llSetRegionPos()
llModifyLand()
osSetWindParam()
osSetTerrainHeight(), osGetTerrainHeight(), osTerrainFlush()

New Function: osGetRegionSize()

We were also asked how an object can detect if it’s near the edge of the world (remember that in Kitely each world is a separate island). Normally the function llEdgeOfWorld() would be used to detect this, but it isn’t useful in megaregions because the entire megaregion is considered one region.

We decided to address this requirement in a different way: we created a new function called osGetRegionSize(). It returns the size of the region in meters, and works correctly in megaregions. E.g., in a 2×2-regions megaregion it returns 512×512 meters.

vector osGetRegionSize()

Return the size of the current region in meters. Most regions are
256x256 meters, but megaregions are larger.

Threat Level     None

So now the recommended way for an object to determine if it’s near the edge of the world is by comparing its position (llGetPos()) to the size of the region (osGetRegionSize()), and possibly also checking if there are adjacent regions using llEdgeOfWorld(). This will work both in megaregions and in regular regions, and presumably in varregions as well (although I haven’t tested them). This will also work both in Kitely (where worlds are islands) and in grids where regions are contiguous.

(Updated on Jan 29: osGetRegionSize() has been accepted to OpenSim, and will eventually be available on all OpenSim grids.)

New Grid URI

We changed Kitely’s grid address from osgrid.kitely.com:8002 to grid.kitely.com:8002. The name “osgrid.kitely.com”, which we had used since we began, was chosen rather poorly as it may cause confusion with OSGrid. Since we’re going to enable Hypergrid in the near future, the grid URI is going to become much more visible than before, because when hypergridding the avatar’s Grid URI appears as part of the avatar name. So we decided to change it.

We’re going to contact the developers of viewers that support OpenSim and ask them to update the entry for Kitely in their grid manager to the new URI. (If any viewer developers are reading this, please update your grids list even if we don’t contact you…) However, all currently installed viewers will continue to work even without this change because the old grid URI, osgrid.kitely.com, will continue to be supported for the foreseeable future.

Maturity Ratings Guidelines

Kitely is used by a wide variety of users, ranging from young children to adults looking for adult entertainment. This makes the use of Maturity Ratings important, to ensure that users don’t see content that they don’t want to see or is inappropriate for their age. We’ve discussed the issue of Maturity Ratings with members of the Kitely community for the past few weeks, and the result is a new document that describes Kitely’s Maturity Ratings Guidelines in detail.

These guidelines include input from many people, but we’d like to give special thanks to Sierra Jakob who created the templates that show which skins and clothes are acceptable at each maturity level.

Improved Detection of Slow Physics Objects

Physical objects are great for some types of simulations, but they’re also big performance hogs that can slow down the world and cause lag. You can tell if you have a problem with slow physics by checking the “Physics Time” statistic. You can view this statistic by pressing Ctrl-Shift-1. (Some viewers don’t show this statistic; the following screenshots were taken in Firestorm.)

For example, here’s a world that has a problem with slow physics. Its “Physics Time” is high, and its “Spare Time” is low which means that any activity (e.g., avatars moving around) might cause lag. (By the way, you should look at the “Physics Time” statistic and not at the “Physics FPS”, because the Physics FPS is deceptive: it will remain high right up to the point where the physics time becomes too much to handle in one frame, at which point it will plummet.)

Suppose you find that your world does indeed have a problem with slow physics: what can you do? The solution is to remove the “Physical” flag from objects that don’t need it, or at least simplify their geometry. But how do you know which objects are taking up the most physics-processing time? The answer is to use the Top Colliders dialog. You can view this dialog by opening the Region/Estate dialog (Alt-R); going to the “Debug” tab; and clicking the “Get Top Colliders” button. Unfortunately, until now this dialog did not return useful results: it neglected to show many of the worst-performing objects. In today’s update we’ve improved this dialog significantly, and now it produces accurate and useful information about which objects are slowing down the simulator. We recommend that all world managers take a look at this dialog at least once to see if there happen to be any slow physical objects in their world that they aren’t aware of.

For example, here’s what the Top Colliders dialog showed for the aforementioned world before today’s update. It showed only one object, and that object wasn’t even the worst offender (as we’ll see later):

Here’s what the Top Colliders dialog shows after today’s update. This time the slow objects are shown correctly:

Once you find which objects are slow, you have several options for dealing with them. First, you can click the Return Selected button in this dialog to remove them from the world and add them to your inventory. (If you do so then you might want to return one object at a time, because if you return multiple objects at once then they’ll create a Coalesced Object.) Second, you can click the Disable Selected button to remove their Physical status. This is a feature that hadn’t been implemented in OpenSim until today, but now you can use it in Kitely. And finally, you can Teleport to the object’s location to examine it and perhaps decide to do something else with it.

In the world that was shown above there was no intention to use physics anywhere. So we removed the “Physical” flag from all the objects shown in the dialog by clicking the “Disable All” button. The effect was immediate, and the Physics Time dropped almost to 0:

Other Improvements

When a region’s wind parameters are changed using osSetWindParam(), this change now takes effect immediately (instead of after a few seconds).

We made a few performance improvements. E.g., when users organize their inventory and move many items into folders, this will now work faster than before.

We’ve received reports that on rare occasions “ghost” avatars appear: the remains of a  user who had long ago logged-out, but still appears in the world. We made a change that might fix this problem; please let us know if it happens again.

When you start a purchase in Kitely Market using USD, we show a message at the top of the screen that reminds you of this fact and lets you cancel the transaction. This message is helpful if there was an error in PayPal and you find yourself back in Kitely without having completed the purchase. This message was previously shown only for some purchases, but now it will be shown for all purchases (as long as they use USD).

And finally, we added a link back from the forums to the Kitely homepage. We hope you enjoy clicking on it as much as we’ve enjoyed creating it. 🙂

Happy 2014! We’re starting the new year with big changes to how Kitely works. We’ve eliminated the concept of minutes and made Kitely free to visit. The only people who will now need to pay for access to worlds are the people who own those worlds. We’ve also lowered our prices to make Kitely your best choice for getting your own virtual worlds. Here are Kitely’s new pricing options for the new year:

No More Minutes

We got rid of “Minutes”. Until now, users had a certain number of Minutes that they could spend in-world; this was similar to the Minutes in a cellphone plan. Unfortunately, using Minutes had some downsides.

The biggest problem was that using Minutes caused anxiety among casual users: they had to count their Minutes and “spend them wisely”. But starting now, visitors never pay for visiting a world. It’s possible that a user won’t be able to visit a particular world due to the access settings chosen by the world owner, but if they can visit the world then it’s completely free for them.

The next problem was that Minutes added complexity, because we had three currencies in Kitely: Minutes, Kitely Credits, and US Dollars. Now we’re down to only two currencies, a 33% reduction 🙂 . This makes it easier to understand and use Kitely.

And finally, we wanted to get rid of Minutes in preparation for opening Kitely to the Hypergrid. Hypergrid users never have Minutes, and we wanted to make sure they’ll still be able to visit Kitely worlds. We’ve still got more work to do before we’re ready to support Hypergrid travel in and out of Kitely, but this was an important prerequisite.

Fixed-Price World Options

When you create a world in Kitely, you can now choose between three Fixed-Price World options, or a Metered World:

These options only affect new worlds: existing worlds continue to work unchanged.

You can change the world’s type at any time, by clicking a link in the Manage World dialog.

Account Types: Regular and Premium

Every user in Kitely now has either a Regular Account or a Premium Account.

The Regular Account is the default account for new users. The Regular Account includes one free region for creating your own Metered World. When Regular Account users visit a Metered World, the world owner pays 1 KC / minute for each such user.

The Premium Account, which costs $19.95 / month, allows users to visit any Metered World for an unlimited amount of time without costing the world owner anything. The Premium Account includes 5 free regions.

If you already have one of the old plans, a Silver Plan or a Gold Plan, then they are now called “Premium Account (Silver)” or “Premium Account (Gold)”, and they confer benefits above the normal Premium Account. See our previous blog post for details. Please note that if you downgrade your plan or stop paying for it then you won’t be able to get these special benefits back.

New Access Controls

The worlds’ access controls have changed. They are much simpler now, because we have eliminated Minutes, and we’ve also eliminated the ability to choose a special price for visiting the world (e.g., visitors must pay 3 KC / minute). That option was rarely used, and eliminating it has made the access controls easier to use.

Your main choice regarding access control is which types of users to allow to visit your world: Regular users, Premium users, both, or neither.

If your world is a Fixed-Price World then you will probably allow all users to visit your world, since you don’t have to pay for their visits. In that case, your Access tab will look like this:

If you have a Metered World then you will probably allow Premium users to visit it, since you don’t have to pay for their visits. You can then choose whether you want to allow Regular users to visit your world based on the amount of traffic you expect to get. When Regular users visit your Metered World, you pay 1 KC / minute for each such user. If you decide to allow both Premium and Regular users to visit your world then your Access tab will look like this:

You can further limit who may access your world using Groups. For example, if you have a group of friends then you might choose to allow only them to enter the world. In that case you will probably allow Regular Account users to visit your world, since only users from this group will be able to enter it and that will limit your costs.

Existing worlds have been migrated to the new access options according to their old access choice for “Everyone”:

• If “Everyone = Not Allowed” then the world is closed to all users.
• If “Everyone = Normal” then the world is open only to Premium users.
• If “Everyone = Free” then the world is open to both Premium and Regular users.

New Users

New Users have a Regular Account, which includes one free region for creating a Metered World. New users also get 6 free hours to spend in that world, in order to try it out. After that time runs out, if they want to keep spending time in the world then they must either buy KC; upgrade to a Premium Account; or change the world to be a Fixed-Price World. But even if they do none of these things, the world remains in their account and can be visited by other users.

Other Changes

There is now a fixed price of 150 KC for these OAR file-related operations: Export World, Replace World, Create World using an OAR, and Copy World. Previously these operations had a price of 10 KC / region, but that price didn’t reflect the amount of resources that are necessary to execute them.

As before, Fixed-Price Worlds don’t incur any of these costs, with the exception of Copy World (since the result of Copy World is a new Metered World).

We’ve added a limit on the number of items in a folder in the inventory: folders can now contain at most 1,000 items. (This number includes both real items and subfolders.) This limit was added because the viewers load the avatar’s entire inventory when they start, and loading very large folders can cause a slowdown for both the incoming avatar and other users.

To be precise, the limit isn’t really on the size of the folder, but on the number of items that we return to the viewer. So folders can still have more than 1,000 items, but viewers will only show the first 1,000. This means that users who have folders that currently contain more than 1,000 items still have all of their items; they just aren’t shown. This can be easily fixed by moving the first 1,000 items into a subfolder, at which time the next 1,000 will appear in the first folder.

By the way, this limit has always existed in Kitely Market: when you choose items to add to a product, the web-based inventory dialog shows only the first 1,000 items in each folder.

In the beginning of 2014 we’ll be making several significant changes to our offering, in order to simplify using Kitely and to provide even more affordable options for having your own virtual world. As part of these changes our existing plans (the Bronze, Silver and Gold Plans) will no longer be available. However, users who are Silver Plan or Gold Plan members at the beginning of the year will be able to keep their plans, and we’ll even upgrade them with significant benefits that will not be available to people who join Kitely later. If you aren’t already on one of these plans then order one before the end of the year so you don’t miss out on this limited-time offer.

The New Premium Account

On January 1 we’ll eliminate the Bronze, Silver and Gold Plans, and replace them with just one plan called the “Premium Account”. A Premium Account will cost $19.95/month, and will include 5 free time-based regions and the ability to visit any time-based world (your own or anyone else’s) for free. This last part means that groups of Premium users will be able to visit each other’s time-based worlds without anyone paying extra for these visits.

Bronze Plan Canceled

The Bronze Plan has been discontinued effective immediately, and is no longer available for order. Current Bronze Plan users will remain on the plan until the end of the month, at which time they will be automatically downgraded to a Regular Account (this is the account type that will replace the existing Free Plan). You don’t need to do anything to make this happen: shortly after this blog post is published we’ll automatically cancel the subscriptions of existing Bronze Plan users. If you’re paying us via PayPal then your PayPal subscription for our services will be canceled.

Silver and Gold Plans Grandfathered In, With Extra Benefits

The Silver and Gold Plans are also being discontinued. However, unlike the Bronze Plan, existing Silver and Gold Plan subscribers will be able to keep using their plan if they wish. So if you are a Silver or Gold Plan subscriber, and you do nothing, you will remain on your plan even after Jan 1. The plan will continue at the same price as before, for as long as you continue to pay for it on time. As an extra benefit we’ll even upgrade your plan, as follows:

If you are a Silver Plan holder then you’ll continue to pay $20/month for 10 free time-based regions, and we’ll also give you unlimited free visits to time-based worlds (instead of the 120 hours/month that you currently get).

If you are a Gold Plan holder then you’ll continue to pay $35/month for unlimited free visits to time-based worlds, and your plan will now include 30 free time-based regions (instead of the 20 regions that you currently get).

New Fixed-Price World Options

We’ll be replacing the current Unlimited Free Access world options with several new yet-to-be-announced fixed-price options. All existing Unlimited Free Access world users will be grandfathered in, so you’ll be able to choose whether to keep your existing world option or switch to one of the new options.

Some people are on the Bronze Plan and also have Unlimited Free Access worlds. If you are one of these people then we will send you an email regarding how you can keep your Unlimited Free Access worlds even after we’ve canceled your existing subscription.

Act Now! (Excuse the Cliche…)

We encourage you to take advantage of our limited-time offer to upgrade to the Silver Plan or Gold Plan before the end of the year and get the extra long-term benefits that will be provided exclusively to those plan holders. This offer will not be available after Dec. 31, so if you want these exclusive benefits you should order now.

We updated Kitely today with many performance improvements. These changes make worlds start faster, and eliminate some performance problems that were introduced when we upgraded to OpenSim 0.7.6.

Worlds Start Faster

Over the years we’ve made several non-trivial optimizations to the OpenSim startup sequence to enable Kitely worlds to start faster than regular OpenSim regions. Today’s update includes several additional optimizations that result in significantly reduced startup times for worlds that contain many meshes, sculpties, and/or assets. The lag that sometimes occurs when a new world starts has also been reduced, so newly started worlds will become responsive much faster than they do on regular OpenSim.

Better Maps at No Performance Cost

One of the big changes we’ve made is to how we create the world map. At the same time as the update to OpenSim 0.7.6 we also switched to a new module for creating world maps, called Warp3D, that produces much better results than the old maps. However, we underestimated how much CPU power is required to create these maps, so this change consumed a lot of resources that competed with running the regions. To solve this problem, we now create the world maps on different servers from the servers that run your worlds. This means that you’ll still enjoy the very high quality Warp3D maps, but now without incurring any performance hit as a result.

Materials Work in Kitely Market

Another important update in this release is that we changed the way Materials work. The new implementation (which we’ll contribute to OpenSim) takes less storage and works faster, especially if the same material is used in many prims. This is almost the final iteration of Materials that we’re planning, so it is now okay to start using them in Kitely Market products. Please note that materials that you create in Kitely will not be visible on other grids (e.g., if you Export OAR and then Import on another grid) until OpenSim integrates our changes.

Other Improvements

We fixed the following user-reported bug: when changing the material for a single face of a prim, sometimes this changed the material for the entire prim instead. This fix will be contributed to OpenSim.

By user request, when users edit terrain we now consider them to be active, i.e. we won’t disconnect them due to inactivity.