I’m not that active in Cloud Party, although I do log-in from time to time, largely because Claudia222 Jewell has a workshop there and I love slipping in and seeing what she is doing, and also because Maxwell Graf tends to be busy there as well.

Nevertheless, Cloud Party appear to be very much aware of me, as I discovered they’d e-mailed me about their first art contest. Entitled the “Monumental Work of Public Art”, it is being held to mark the platform’s first first anniversary, and it is open to anyone to enter.

On offer is a $1,000 USD prize for the overall winner, and a 2,000 Cloud Coins prize for the “Community Favourite” entry as judged by Cloud Party residents. In addition, all artists entering the contest will receive an in-world studio workspace in which to create their entry.

The e-mail announcement reads in part:

Cloud Party is pleased to announce a very exciting community event to celebrate our first year. In collaboration with Ben Davis, editor of Artinfo Magazine, we are sponsoring an Art in Cloud Party contest. Our theme is “Monumental Work of Public Art” with a first prize of $1,000.00 (USD)! The Community Favourite prize, as voted by our community, takes home 2000CC (Cloud Coins virtual currency).

If you decide to enter, you’ll get access to your own virtual studio space for a month to create your masterpiece. Entries will be judged on the following criteria:

• Originality of concept
• Personal voice
• How well it takes advantage of the virtual environment
• Overall coherence of vision.

In addition, the Cloud Party blog provides further information, stating in part:

The rules for what you create are pretty wide open. It can be visual, interactive, collaborative – whatever you come up with that meets your definition of art and reflects our theme. Since this is a subjective topic we intend to be pretty open-minded, but do keep our Terms of Service in mind and that this is a 13+ website.

Key Dates for the Contest

• The contest opens at 12:00 noon PDT on Wednesday May 8th, 2013
• Last of contest and first day of community voting: 17:00 PDT Wednesday June 12th, 2013
• Official winner and Community Favourite winner announcement: 12:00 noon PDT Friday June 14th, 2013.

The overall winner will be judged by Ben Davis, editor of Artinfo magazine.

How To Enter

• Those wishing to enter must submit Art in Cloud Party Entry Form after the competition has formally opened at midday PDT on Wednesday March 8th, 2013 – any entry forms received before this time will be ignored
• Entrants should receive confirmation of their application and be granted access to their Cloud Party studio workspace within 24 hours of their entry form being received
• Once an entry is completed, an Art in Cloud Party Submission Form must be submitted in order for the piece to be considered in the formal judging and Community Favourites contest.

As always, there are also Official Contest Rules which should also be read through.

So, if you’ve ever wondered what Cloud Party might offer you as an artist – now might be the time to take the plunge – and perhaps be rewarded for your efforts!

Related Links

• Cloud Party
• Contest announcement on the Cloud Party blog
• Artinfo Magazine

As per their promise at the start of the beta, Cloud Party have started offering island for rent.

Two island types have been initially offered, the wording of the FAQ suggesting more may be in the pipeline. These are termed “Private” and “Deluxe” and have the following specs:

Each island comes with its own URL – allowing you to access it directly from any web-browser (logging-in to CP in the process). Currently,  there is no access control for islands – they are open to anyone using the navigation option or who “bubble hops”, although access controls are a promised future feature. This point aside, island rental does give you:

• “Full” control within the bubble surrounding the island, so you can alter the colour / direction of the light, change the time of day and the look of the sky in general
• The ability to remove the default island itself and replace it with something you’ve uploaded, such as a space station or “underwater base” or whatever captures your imagination.
• Build rights, and the ability (as of July 4th) to define who else has build rights on your island (see below for further details).

Additionally, deluxe islands have the option to rework the external mesh of the bubble itself from the default transparent sphere.

Give the volumes quoted for the islands would appear to refer to the bubbles surrounding them rather than the actual sizes of the islands themselves, it’s hard to get a grip on the physical surface area available with each type of island. However, I’d estimate a private island has a surface area of around 6,000 sq metres and a deluxe at around 190,000 sq metres.

I base both calculations on the maximum circular area available within each sphere (again, taking the quoted sizes of 100 and 500 metres as diameters, rather than radii) and then allowing for a small “gap” between the islands and the sphere boundary and making an allowance for the irregular shape of both islands. The “gap” allowance seems reasonable  given it is possible to “fall off” the edge of an island rather than hitting the sphere boundary  (you get returned to the middle of the sphere if you do, presumably after “hitting” the boundary of the sphere).

Even at 6,000 sq metres, the private island would seem to provide enough room to establish a comfortable home and should suit most personal requirements. The deluxe island appears to be around the same size as the residential islands that were rolled out at the start of the beta, and which offer individual homes available to those with Facebook accounts. As such, they do provide an appreciable amount of space that could be put to a wide variety of uses.

Each island type includes a set of quota for building. This is defined in three ways: objects, dynamic objects and triangles. Mesh elements can comprise up to four material faces, each of which itself actually counts as a single “object”. So while it may appear to be a single object, it comprises a material face count (just like an SL linkset comprises prims and sculpts), and it is the material face count that impacts an island’s object quota, not the mesh object itself (just like the objects in a linkset count towards land impact in SL, not the linkset per se).

Displaying information on objects is potentially confusing at present. Right-clicking on an in-world object and displaying an information pop-up for it, for example, only reveals the triangle count. Going to the Build mode, however, does provide counts for triangles, objects and dynamic objects – but also introduces a further category, that of “large objects”. Quite how this relates to the primary object count is unclear, and as I don’t have build rights myself in CP, it is not something I’ve been able to investigate in any real detail.

It’ll be interesting to see how objects and goods are defined when the Cloud Party marketplace is rolled out. From a purely lay perspective, one would suggest that the baseline measure should be “material faces”, as this seems to be the most accurate means of comparing actual content with the object allowances of each island type. However, it is probably fair to say that triangle counts may also be a contender from a technical perspective.

Search and Build Permissions Updates

In introducing the rental islands, CP have also updated the Navigation option of the Cellphone to include a basic search option, allowing you to search for locations either by name or user name.

On July 4th, Cloud Party added the capability for those renting islands to let friends build on their island. This can be enabled via the island information page (Cellphone->Navigation-> Personal Tab->Current Island->Edit Info button). This now includes a Build Permissions: Edit button. Clicking this displays a list of Facebook friends with Cloud Party accounts, and names can be dragged to the FULL ACCESS box. This allows them to build on your island, and they can move / delete anything you have placed on your island. They cannot, however, edit or duplicate objects. Further information on CP’s permissioning system will apparently be announced “Once the marketplace is closer”.

Command Line Options

Something that hasn’t appeared to have been widely covered in blogging about Cloud Party is the availability of command line options. Whether this is because they are a new feature or not, I’ve no idea, but they provide a range of interesting options. Commands can be entered in chat and are preceded by “/”. Entering a single letter after the slash (e.g. “/a”) displays a list of commands starting with that letter. While visiting Claudia222 Jewell I had a play with a few of the commands, including the avatar rescaling, which allows you to instantly alter your avatar’s size (between 1.5 times and 0.5 time the default size).

So rentals are now available within Cloud Party. How popular they prove to be after the initial “curiosity rush” has passed remains to be seen. As others have stated, the platform has a good way to go before it can be considered a serious contender in the VW ring – and I still remain unconvinced on building a platform purely around a land revenue model. I’ll be continuing to watch developments as best I can as they are announced / rolled-out and allowing for the fact there is still – as yet – nothing within Cloud party sufficient enough for me to sign-up with Facebook in any capacity whatsoever.

With thanks to Botgirl Questi.

Note this is a 3-page piece. Please use the page options at the bottom of the article to page through.

There has been a lot of chat recently about Cloud Party, the newest “SL-like” virtual world to come into existence – due in part to the fact that it is backed by SL’s co-founder, Cory Ondrejka, thus giving it something of a high visibility. Like Kitely, Cloud Party is hosted within Amazon’s cloud computing architecture (hence part of the reason for the name of the platform), and – again as with Kitely’s initial beta phase – requires a Facebook account in order for all of the capabilities to be used.

Unlike most traditional grids, however, Cloud Party doesn’t require a dedicated viewer or client – it runs entirely within your preferred web browser (although users of the latest flavours of Internet Explorer may have issues as Cloud Party runs on WebGL, which isn’t natively supported in IE).

Also unlike most grids, cloud island doesn’t feature the usual 256×256  metre (or larger) default land mass; instead, regions are “islands” floating among the clouds (again, hence the name of the service). The precise size of these islands is hard to judge and at this point it time it is unclear if islands can be “joined” in away way to provide larger land masses.

That Cloud Party log-ins are (for the foreseeable future) only fully enabled via Facebook might also be off-putting for some. However, if you’re not a Facebook user, you can still log-in with limited functionality on an anonymous basis and at least get a feel for the app, which is what I did for several hours on Friday June 22nd.

Logging-in to Cloud Party is facilitated via the website.This offers the options of logging-in  via Facebook or anonymously. This also present you with the obligatory “click to accept terms and conditions” pop-up, and options to use either “Gamer” movement controls or “Tablet” control features and a choice of male or female avatar.

A pop-up welcomes you on logging-in for the first time (or if you are logging-in anonymous, for the first time since closing your browser completely), and also opens-up a tutorial on the left of your screen. The tutorial covers a couple of subjects: Getting Started, which covers the basics of moving, camera movement and chatting, changing clothes, etc., while Building introduces you to the basics of building (at least if you sign-on with Facebook; building is disabled with anonymous accounts).

The Getting Started tutorial is fairly straight-forward, and while it may appear to be teaching those familiar with virtual worlds how to suck eggs, it is a handy way of getting people started, and having it open on the initial log-in is something LL should learn to do with the HOW TO option of their Viewer, rather than dumping newbies in-world with a nice (but initially pointless) Destination Guide display.

The interface itself is clean and simple. Top right of the screen you have a button to log-in via Facebook: if you have logged-in anonymously, this will allow you to switch over to your Facebook account (if you are currently logged-in to FB), with a simply log out/log in. If you’re not logged into FB itself when you hit the button, you’ll be logged out of Cloud Party and prompted to either log-in to your FB account.

Next to the FB button is your cellphone.Clicking on this opens up additional options and capabilities. Again, not all of these are available when logged-in anonymously. For example, as an anonymous user, you’re not connected to the Cloud Party asset library, so you have no access to the build tools and while you can open the Outfits option, you won’t have anything to wear. The cell phone is looked at in more detail below.

Bottom left of the app window is the Local Chat tab. Clicking this opens – yes, you’ve guess it – the local chat window, which functions pretty much as you’d expect from using SL, although irritatingly, it doesn’t appear to like the apostrophe, the use of which seems to close the chat window and switches focus back in-world. You can also right-click on people’s names in the chat window and open you Cell Phone to IM them, etc.

Getting Around

Cloud Party offers two options for movement when you log in: “Tablet” and “Game”. The latter works pretty much the same as most game systems, using both “click to move” whereby clicking on the ground moves you to that point or you can use the arrow keys WASD (when not focused in chat). “Tablet” apparently allows Tablet-like screen-touches to move your avatar.

You can also teleport directly to locations or people on the current island or to other islands you can see in the sky by right-clicking on an object / person  / island and selecting TELEPORT HERE from the menu.

There doesn’t appear to be any privacy features available – or at least none in obvious use – as I managed to happily island-hop, jump to people’s homes (where the arrival point had been set in-doors) and so on without any let or hindrance. But again, this is an early beta, so privacy options – assuming I’m not missing them – may be coming in the future.

There’s one other means of getting around worth mentioning here, and that’s via the Navigate option on your Cell Phone. Clicking on the Navigation icon displays your “phone” in landscape orientation, with a range of categorised navigation options.

Use the buttons at the top to display the various categories of destination available to you, and then scroll down / up the displayed lists to find a place of interest – then click the green GO button to teleport. Note that destinations in Navigate may be other Cloud Party islands or individual locations within an island, and that currently there is no means to search for a specific destination.

Right-clicking on avatars, as well as allowing you to teleport to them, also presents you with options to start a private chat with them or view information about them. I’m not sure if these options are functioning as yet or whether I was unable to use them due to being logged-in anonymously.

The avatars in Cloud Party are pretty basic at present, and are somewhat mindful of early Unity 3D avatars. customisation is limited (restricted to skins and outfits, no sliders, etc. for altering shape), and they have a gawky default pose with rather a lot of rubbernecking. Those used to the sophistication on SL and OpenSim are liable to find Cloud Party avies limited – but again, this is only a beta!