Sign of the Kite

By and For the Kitely Community

Sign of the Kite is a website by and for residents
of the Kitely community of virtual worlds.

SOTK Newsletter 17th June 2016

By

Welcome to the fifteenth Sign of the Kite (SOTK) newsletter. Remember SOTK is the shortform newsletter that keeps you up to speed with all things Kitely and OpenSim. It is written BY residents FOR residents and is neither sponsored nor endorsed by Kitely. 
 
This is the last newsletter for a while as Graham’s editorial quill of information has broken and his inkwell of inspiration has dried up. If you would like to see it return at some upspecified date, leave a moderately adulatory message on the Kitely Forums (if you want to be snarky, don’t bother). 
In the meantime the SOTK focus will shift to the website and History Month. Thanks for reading and see you inworld!

Kitely developments

The chatlog from Sunday’s meetup has been posted on the forums. From that you will see that Ilan and Oren are attempting to integrate the calendar into the new login page (which isn’t exactly short of content as things stand).

Community developments

The focus on the forums latterly has been on thoughts for redesign of the Welcome Center. 
Serene noticed that the Kitely Community Group now has in excess of 500 members and Graham reckons chat is much more lively of late.

Builder’s Guild

Ozwell gave a very useful update on what the Builder’s Guild intends doing. The list of activities and resources was buttressed by additional suggestions made by Selby and Serene.
When Ozwell asked whether builders were using shadows (many weren’t), Louis-Francis recommended setting Shadows to None (not the same as unchecked) and keeping Ambient Occlusion set to On. Useful tip!

Freda’s Place Events

Graham says: Freda’s events are a great opportunity to meet some of the most active contributors to Kitely, not least Freda herself! NB some of the content is rated “Ooo-err, missus”.
Mondays

FAIRY TALE HOUR

2pm Grid Time
@ Frostbite Thane
In June, we’ll be reading (and hearing) Tales from the Brothers’ Grimm. These really can be quite grim indeed, so please come expecting more depth than one finds in Disney versions of these stories. Have voice enabled so that you can hear the tales. All welcome.  
Tuesdays

TUESDAY COMMUNITY CHAT

2pm Grid Time
@ Frostbite Thane
You never know what we’ll talk about, but it’s always fun and a great way to get to know your neighbors. No need to enable voice; we chat in text. Adults Only, Please. (Not because we cuss like sailors or do so naked. We don’t. But the conversation is sometimes deep and better for adults.) 

FICTION ON THE FLY (writing workshop)

5PM Grid Time
@ Babble Arts Center
We’ll gather weekly and then explore literature and writing together. Each week we will write (very) short fiction based on fun and inspiring prompts. Each week, Freda will explain the guidelines and we’ll have fun writing and sharing. Please have voice enabled so that you can hear that explanation. Adults only because I have no intention of censoring what anyone is inspired to write or share.**
**Participants will have the opportunity to have their writings included in the first edition of OS Babble Zine.  
Wednesdays

ERMENGARDE THE EXPANSIVE AND THE RHINOLOPE REBELLION 

(All Wednesdays except the 15th)
5PM  Grid Time
@ Frostbite Thane
Come hear the author spin her tale in live voice.
I hope you’ll come to enjoy a bit of magic at Freda’s Fairytale cottage. The teleporters wear daisies. Click one and choose “fairytale” from the menu.  Have voice enabled so that you can hear the tales. Adults, please.  
Thursdays

ALMOST FRIDAY HAPPY DANCE

June 23, 1 PM Grid Time, Fury (@ Frostbite Thane); 
June 30, 1 PM Grid Time, Fabulous Fifties (@ Ihnen’s Inlet)
No need for voice enabled but please make sure you can hear the music. All welcome.  
Each week’s dance music has a theme. You don’t have to dress for the theme, but it would be fun if you want to. There will be party favors and games and lots of conversation.  

QUICKY POEMS 

(starting June 16)
5PM  Grid Time
@ Babble Arts Center
Fun and fast poetry creation session. Using various prompts and guidelines, those gathered will create new poems each week. I promise, this really IS fun! Please have voice enabled so that you can hear each week’s poem plan. Adults Only because I have no intention of censoring what anyone is inspired to write or share.**
**Participants will have the opportunity to have their writings included in the first edition of OS Babble Zine.  
FRIDAY

PROMPTLY EROTIC

June 24, 6 PM Grid Time
@ Babble Arts Center
Join us for this Adults Only writing session. Using a variety of visual, verbal and sound cues, we’ll spend an hour playing word and writing games and creating very short erotic fiction or poetry. BAC is generally a Moderate region, but it will be set to Adult for this event. Please have voice enabled so that you can hear and participate. 
AUDITIONS FOR MOTHERS’ DAYS BY STEPHANIE MESLER
@ Babble Arts Center
This is your chance to be part of Babble Box Theater’s very first production. MOTHERS’ DAYS is a full-length comedy I wrote about 25 years ago. It was first produced in Columbus, OH, at The Third Avenue Performance Space and has made it onto stages a handful of times since. At the Babble Box, this fall, we’ll be performing selected scenes from that play, the ones that can be best adapted for virtual performance. (Each scene stands on it’s own as a short one-act.) I have set up a few times for open auditions. We seek three female actors and one male actor for the play. Those open audition times are as follows:  
Fri., June 17 at 6PM Grid Time
Sun., June 19 at 11AM Grid Time
Please contact Freda Frostbite if you would like to audition but cannot make any of those times. We can surely arrange something.  

Playing games

Serene reports: 
Giz Ihnen recently found a nice collection of scripts. “It’s in french. It has OS/SL scripts for all sorts of games. have only tried the maze generator so far and it worked perfect…”
Follow the scripting topic on the Kitely Forums for scripting help and tips and links.   https://www.kitely.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=759(

New Worlds

As mentioned last time, Karima Hoisan has a new world and it’s now officially open! (It gets Freda’s no-pix, must-visit rating)

RezMela

Ramesh has been exploring the use of Space Navigator for machinima and live demos of flood simulations made using RezMela. Nice use of PiP as well.

Singularity

If you were wondering what happened to the Singularity viewer, a new CEF-enabled version (i.e. modern MOAP) has been released for Windows and 64-bit Linux. Mac is still an issue apparently.

Discussions getting heated? Stay cool with these tips!

Warmer weather prompted Graham to consider ways to mitigate overheating in his laptop during the Community Meetup even when operating at low draw distances. While all kinds of fancy cooling plates can be purchased, the notoriously mean Graham decided to look at alternatives.
  • Firstly, he could shift to Lumiya on his Android tablet. Note that is is much easier to navigate if you set landmarks first. Radegast would be another possibility for the laptop working primarily as a chat application.
  • Firestorm provides a Text mode on the login screen. While teleports and chat would work, Graham again couldn’t work out how an avatar could effect a sit without seeing the seat (you need to restart the viewer for the change to happen).
  • Firestorm: apparently most viewers have a command line setting that can reduce the work being done by the GPU, viz –cooperative 50. Who knew?
  • Hardware solution: Coral passed on a tip from a friend, namely to place the glowing laptop on a cookie tray to assist cooling. Mmm, cookies… AND low-cost!

Did you know?

The forum thread for the SOTK newsletter has received over 2900 views during the past two weeks. It’s likely that many came via search engines, which means that more people may be discovering the possibilities of OpenSim and Kitely. So this explainer is directed to them:

FYI: OpenSim (also known as OpenSimulator) is open–source  software for the creation of virtual worlds that can be run on your PC  or hosted remotely as with the Kitely.com commercial grid. Worlds in  Kitely and beyond are optionally networked via the Hypergrid. They are  accessed via dedicated browsers such as Firestorm. Content can be  created inworld or imported as mesh models.  It can be scripted in LSL which is substantially compatible with the  language used in Second Life (TM). Objects can display web content and  access external web servers via LSL scripts. Subject to permissions  being set, content may be exchanged with other avatars and can be sold  either inworld or, for example, on the web-based Kitely Market which  delivers inworld to more than 100 non-Kitely grids. 

On the Market: Sweet Distractions

Tocy Sweet is getting seriously historical with this new (and rather elegant) dress available in 9 colours from her shop Sweet Distractions on the Market.

All aboard for History Month this August!

Age of Steam: The Moorish Arch hid the steam-driven winding engines that hauled the trains on the final gradients leading to the Liverpool stations in 1830. Don’t forget the cables, Graham!
Another reminder: August’s History Month is currently divided into four weeks as follows:
Week 1:  Greco/Roman
Week 2:  Medieval 500–1500
Week 3:  1600–1700’s
Week 4:  1800’s to 1914
Graham still thinks that this is general guidance rather than “tablets of stone”.
While there is still much to do Graham is teasing one of his contributions (currently called Age of Steam) which he hopes to release eventually as a free educational OAR. The view shown is inspired by Thomas Talbot Bury’s sketch. Watch the forum for availability and teaser opening times.
As mentioned already, the focus for news on History Month is going to shift to the SOTK website alongside the forums. Please join us there!
Bury sketch on Wikimedia: http://bit.ly/1UZUWEM

Education Beat

TODAY: With the proviso that Graham has no idea what the GLF is (and suspects there may be several), it has a meeting today on the  hypergrid-enabled conference centre of the US military Air University.  Good speakers so further details if you’re interested:
Nice article on ScienceNode about the research and educational applications of VR and why the metaverse is necessary.
  

TiddlyWiki for a MOAP-based HUD: Part 3 (the last)

Last time Graham pondered the use of TiddlyWiki for displaying dynamic HUD-based text during world exploration. This week he tries to implement teleports via the HUD…
Teleport destinations are selected from the blue menu and displayed at the foot of the HUD (shows TP: Easel1 in this case). Clicking this shows the world map with the destination highlighted ready for teleporting.
From last time:
  • Currently the scripted HUD can help visitors by serving as a guide, appropriate TiddlyWiki-based web pages being displayed according to whichever point of interest (poi) is nearest.
  • The HUD has two faces, one for MOAP (i.e. the wiki), the other for standard touch (mediating teleports). It is generated by rezzing a basic cube, adding the script, saving it and then taking the HUD back into inventory. If all went well you should have seen the cube change shape  and also display MOAP (media will need to be enabled) when you attach it as a HUD.
  • The challenge posed last time was to use this HUD to display information from the wiki relating to a particular area/poi of the world. To do this we make use of TiddlyWiki permalinks where each tiddler (pseudo-page/text chunk) in the wiki can be addressed via its own URL qualified with the tiddler name (in our case equating to a poi).
This time we look at use of the HUD to support teleporting between poi’s based on the address already stored in the notecard. First, however, we need a pause/play mechanism that allows us to browse the wiki without having the mechanism continually reset so that it returns us to the current (or default) poi page. Clearly we could use a Play/Pause button on the lower, non-MOAP surface. However, a simpler approach is to use avatar movement, i.e. the screen is not updated automatically unless the avatar has moved a significant distance since the previous update. 
Moving to the main topic, teleporting, there are various ways to offer teleports. The simplest is to offer a map teleport based on the coordinates we already have in our notecard. Thus clicking on the lower part of the HUD pops up a dialog presenting up to 12 locations. While it would be nice to teleport in a single step from the dialog, the osTeleportAgent function is only supported on your own land (for security reasons). While there are a variety of other options, llMapDestination is arguably the simplest if not very immersive. The function pops up the global map with the destination highlighted ready for teleport. On the “upside” it does mean that the user becomes familiar with the overall layout of the world/region. 
The llMapDestination function must be activated by a touch event, i.e. selecting an option from the dialog is insufficient. Teleporting therefore involves touching the left side of the panel HUD to display the menu dialog with the selection being shown on the HUD on the righthandside using OSSL to draw the text. Clicking this displays the map with the named destination highlighted. Clicking the map Teleport button takes you to the destination.
Issues? To be honest the script needs more work, not least because the focus on the HUD seems to be lost quite frequently so that it does not function as a touch target. This may be due to the fact that there is a timer running more-or-less continuously in the background; clicking on the avatar seems to fix this issue but is sub-optimal. Currently the system is also limited to 12 locations all in one world though that could be fixed relatively easily. 
Graham intends using the HUD alongside his “Age of Steam” world so you will have the opportunity to test it and IM him for further updates if interested.

VR tech update

This week in VR has been dominated by news from the big E3 conference and exhibition at which upcoming games are teased with tech taking a back seat for a change. It seems as though the Xbox One will evolve a new console for VR (and presumably AR) under its Project Scorpio. There was no specific reference to the Oculus Rift as some had expected so perhaps it will be hardware agnostic. Sony, of course, is due to release its PSVR later this year to complete the lineup from the major early players although it seems likely that Nintendo will also have a new VR-enabled platform next year. Sony’s nextgen platform will also support VR and is called Neo. 
The open hardware platform OSVR continues to be upgraded with a new headset screen specification. As ever, the GPU is a hidden cost for many. They also announced a $5M developer fund whereby approved developers are guaranteed some payback provided their content is released DRM-free via the OSVR. 
Meanwhile ILMxLAB has a Star Wars concept video done in Magic Leap mixed reality. Hope you’ve saved up for one of those as well.
While you’re waiting for an HMD-enabled OpenSim (and some Rift and OpenVR support may be on the way in the fullness of time for those of pronounced intestinal fortitude), Ilan drew attention to Virtual Desktop as a Windows app for using ordinary programs in an HMD-mediated VR space (Rift and Vive). Graham imagines Dot is asking “Why?” and wonders whether she will be using the HMD option in Obduction (from the makers of Myst). [Dot says: No, she won’t; but there might be some echoes of places in Kitely already. One of the Easter-egg sponsors has a home-from-home on Intersections.]

Production team

Production team: Dot Matrix, Serene Jewell, Graham Mills_2, Shandon Loring
This week’s editor: Graham Mills_2
Thanks to forum and community meetup participants for suggestions

Stay in touch

Stay in touch with Kitely events and announcements.

On the Web

Kitely Calendar: http://ow.ly/W2sDL
Kitely Market newest listings: https://www.kitely.com/market?sort=date
Some freebies listed on signofthekite.com http://signofthekite.com/category/freebies/

On the Hypergrid

HYPEvents Event listings: http://hypevents.net/