Impressions and Thoughts
Technically, and for the most part, Kitely is very smooth. The on-demand system appears to work very well and the platform doesn’t have much of an issue dealing with most V1.x-style or V3.2 Viewers. The blog provides a lot of good background information – such as setting the plugin to launch your preferred Viewer, and the website is clean and easy to navigate.
In terms of Viewers, I found that overall, performance on Kitely with either a V1-style (Imprudence) or V3.2-based Viewer (Dolphin and Exodus) was on a part with SL, frame-rates being very, very similar. Kitely may not be suited to all Viewers, however. I had problems getting Firestorm to work with the plugin, and a friend had no luck whatsoever – but Firestorm isn’t really recommended for use with other grids. If you have XML files you wish to use, then Imprudence is the best choice, given its upload capabilities. I used this for my own stuff, although I confess to swapping back to Exodus for building and terraforming, as I do much prefer the V3.2 UI.
In terms of building and content creation, I did encounter a couple areas of frustration:
- Terraforming seemed much slower than I’ve experienced in SL and other grids. There was considerable delay between using a terrain tool and seeing the results on-screen, and many operations required I perform them more than once in order to see a result
- The system exhibited severe problems when I was working with scripts. I would frequently be disconnected from the server and, a-la similar situations in SL), I’d have no idea I had been disconnected until it came time to save data or test a function. Given I was merely installing / tweaking scripts into objects when this kept happening, it did cause a fair amount of annoyance – and lost time.
This is where the pay-by-the-minute approach has disadvantages. Each time I edited a prim, created a new script instance within it and promptly got disconnected, I found myself eyeing the clock ever-more sourly. In the end – and to be truthful – I gave up on scripting doors, and simply left those I still had to do with the prims rotated as if the doors were open.
As to the payment plans, Kitely’s set-up is obviously substantially different to the rest of the market. For those who have a specific use-case for a virtual presence, the mix of options is potentially more attractive than the more “traditional” offerings from other grids. $50-a-month for some 8+ days of continuous access and up to thirty worlds to play with is impressive when compared to the $75-a-month, single-sim options of some of the other grids – the unlimited in-world time of the latter notwithstanding.
Currently it is not possible to link worlds together into contiguous land masses (or water / land combinations). As such, this may make the offer of having more than one world to use less attractive than it might first appear. However, again in keeping with the one-step-at-a-time philosophy at Kitely, the ability to build more complex worlds is on the roadmap. As such, and assuming this does allow worlds to be linked into what are effectively contiguous land forms, complete with recreational bodies of water, etc., having multiple worlds/regions available at relatively low-cost could make Kitely a very popular option.
Either side of the $50-a-month mid-point are the $20- and $100-a-month plans which present a flexible range of options to the serious user, with the $5-a-month plan offering a suitable means to access Kitely and have a home for the occasional user who requires a base of operations in-world, or for organisations / groups who wish to have a presence on the grid that can be largely self-managing.
The pay-as-you-go option may have difficulty in finding traction among more casual users who are used to “free” accounts elsewhere. Not all of these need / want a “home” within a grid, and are happy to wander and explore. It will be interesting to see if the $5-month “bronze” plan with 20 hours of in-world offers suitable enticement (it’s still less than LL’s Premium membership, and you get two worlds to play with) will offer sufficient attractiveness to such casual users when compared to the pay-as-you-go option.
One thing the Kitely does supply with relative ease is scalability. By using the Amazon cloud services, Kitely has effectively freed itself from two potential bottlenecks: asset storage (the S3 cloud is used for this, and provides almost limitless storage) and the need to provision servers as demand goods: worlds are supplied via the EC2 cloud as and when they are required. Another benefit of the cloud approach is that each world runs on its own instance of OpenSim – resources are not shared between multiple simulators, which increases overall stability.
Turning to the website, I found this to be relatively simple and easy-to-use, with information within easy grasp. There are a few minor niggles; moving between public world pages and the public worlds list returns you to the start of the list rather than the last page you were on, which tends to increase the amount of paging through the list when browsing for places to visit. However, finding one’s way around the site and getting to relevant info is very easy.
Overall, I’ve enjoyed my time in Kitely, having spent some 18 hours over the course of the last month. Grumbles aside over the terraforming and scripting, I’ve sorted out my land there and I know it’ll be there wherever I want to pop back and see how things are going. I’m really interested to see how Kitely fairs as time goes on – and how some of the more social aspects, such as welcome centres, user orientation facilities, etc., are addressed either by Kitely themselves or by individuals / groups establishing such facilities.
Related Links
- Kitely website
- Kitely ToS
- Kitely FAQ
- Kitely blog
- Reports on Kitely in this blog
- My “home” in Kitely (if you’re trying Kitely for the first time via Twitter or Facebook, please make it your first port-of-call and have a look around for 5 minutes or so *plug, plug* – might as well try and gain a benefit from the referrals system 😀 )
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
Hi Inara,
First, please let me say it was a pleasure meeting you inworld on Kitely 🙂
Once Kitely Plugin is installed it checks to see if it can find any SL or TPV viewer on your computer (it currently does so by looking to see if there is a SLURL handler defined and if that viewer is actually found where it is supposedly installed). Unfortunately, this method isn’t very robust so as a first step we enabled people to switch viewers by manually configuring a text file. As you stated, we’ll be rolling out a new plugin system soon (in 1-2 weeks) which will offer the following benefits:
– It will support many viewers which don’t currently work with our plugin, such as Phoenix and Firestorm.
– It will detect all the supported viewers installed on your machine (as long as they are installed in the default installer-recommended directories) and allow you to choose between them using a setting in your Kitely account’s Settings page.
– It will enable make installing the plugin optional and enable direct viewer logins so people on unsupported operating systems (e.g. Linux, iOS, Android) will be able to access Kitely as well.
Please note that Kitely Plugin turns the Enter World button into an “Install Virtual World Viewer” button when it doesn’t find any viewer. Pressing the button when it’s in this state currently sends the user an operating-system appropriate installer for Imprudence 1.3.2 (on Windows and OS X). We’re considering to replace this with Firestorm once our new plugin supports it.
Billing automatically stops once the server detects your viewer has crashed or was disconnected. This happens immediately when you close your viewer intentionally and should happen within 1 minute when it disconnects for some other reason. You can therefore remain confident that you aren’t charged for time it takes you to figure out you have been disconnected.
We’ll be upgrading to OpenSim 0.7.3 within a few weeks which should help speed up terraforming and should hopefully help eliminate the script-related bug you encountered as well. If that doesn’t solve this problem we’ll dig down and fix that bug ourselves.
Initial support for teleporting between worlds will be added in a few weeks (shortly after we roll out the new plugin system). This should enable you to move between active worlds without leaving the viewer. Support for automatically launching worlds that aren’t currently active when you teleport into them will come later (for the time being you’ll still need to press the Enter World button for worlds to be activated when they are offline).
LikeLike
I hope this will be coming as well 🙂 How about Setting Up a Minecraft Server in the Cloud and Converging It with Kitely Cloud? http://ow.ly/9CqGc
LikeLike
Ilan,
Thank you for dropping-by in-world and saying hi. Think the place has progressed a little since your initial visit, and probably looks better than it did then, while waiting for textures and stuff :).
Thanks for the clarification, re the plugin. My comments were based on results we experienced in trying to get things up-and-running on a computer without a Viewer, and sadly no prompt to install a Viewer was received – thanks for pointing out what should be there, I’ll do a quick edit to the piece to clarify.
The manual config of the plugin works well (and if I can follow the instructions, then it’s a safe bet anyone can 🙂 ). II found it extremely useful in being able to swap back and forth when needing to upload my .XML files. Looking forward to the upgraded plug-in to.
On the disconnect issue, it wasn’t so much whether billing continues beyond the disconnect period, it was more a case of “Grrr! I’ve got to do that again!”, sometimes two or three times, rather than getting on with other things (plus wondering if there is something wrong with my ISP connection that is causing some of the disconnects).
Looking forward to seeing the upgrades; I personally didn’t have an issue with using the world pages to move around. As mentioned in the article, it was a good way of learning about places to visit; some users have gone to incredible lengths to showcase their work through the pages. Nevertheless, people will want the convenience of teleporting directly, so that will be a big plus as it is rolled out.
One thing I didn’t mention – being too conscious of article length – was the history page; very useful for both keeping track of KC use, in-world time and (particularly) who has been visiting your own world(s).
Hopefully, will see you in-world again soon!
LikeLike
Hi Inara,
It’s unfortunate you didn’t add another page to mention the History page 🙂 it is one of our differentiators and very useful for people who wish to keep track of who visits their worlds. We’ve even seen educators use it for keeping track of inworld class attendance 🙂
Once we enable using Kitely Credits as inworld currency, your KC-related transactions will be added to the History page. We also plan to release an API so people will be able to keep track of their own custom events. The end goal for this page is to include advanced tools for analyzing how your worlds are used (a kind of Google analytics for virtual worlds).
I understand your frustration with the scripts-related bug. It is annoying and we intend to hunt it down and eliminate it soon. The fact that it still exists is not due to lack of caring on our part, simply due to us needing to prioritize what we work on first. Once enough people upgrade to premium plans we’ll be able to hire additional developers to help us accelerate our rate of improvement.
LikeLike
Thank you Inara 🙂
LikeLike
Ilan,
Problem with trying to cover a world is trying to do so in a reasonable word-count without it reaching a point where it becomes “tl;dr” for people – and God knows I can talk all four legs off a donkey and persuade it to go for a walk afterwards as it is! 🙂
Rest assured, I’ll be following-up on this initial article with future look-ins and updates, so will be able to report on enhancements and redress omissions.
LikeLike