Well, the New Year celebrations have come and gone and I have my usual sore head after only 2 glasses of pink Champagne. I am a total light weight… to recover I spent part of the day re-exploring Kitely which I joined in May last year. So this post is a bit of an update as to how Kitely has fared since then and to give you some idea of how much it is different (better/worse) than SL. I’ve no idea how kitely will do over the next year, I hope it does well as I still think it has a lot of potential, but Opensim offerings come and go and what SL has shown (against the odds) is that it has/had staying power.
This is going to be a series of blogs on Kitely just outlining my experiences and observations so far as well as offering up some tips. I like the sense of having a giant 16 sim blank canvas to work with and the creative possibilities in my mind are really starting to form.
Subscribe For Free Kitely Skins…Read On…
Being quite a vain sort of person (and I don’t see that as a bad thing…if only more people were a little bit vain) my initial concerns were to sort out (what can only be described as) my hideous avatar appearance, including ‘dayglo’ coloured skin, horrendous hair and terrible clothes. I did manage to do this but only after resorting to creating my own skins and importing my own clothes into Kitely.
The new Kitely Marketplace is helping to bring in more merchants from SL and elsewhere but it will take time for the quality to be available and mesh clothing of any choice doesn’t quite exist, yet. So the clothes you see in the ‘after’ pictures are templates I’ll be using for various photo shots, so don’t be surprised if you see the same outfit more than once…although things are slowly improving.
You can see (laugh at) the evolution from Newbie to Nearly Normal in the following pics although I am still having problems with my imported boots and decent hair…so Meli Imako if you are reading this please get back to me!
This was one of the first photos I took on my new free sim in May. As you will see Kitely Moco is wearing a fetching Mini Mouse outfit (the best I could find at the time) and matching headband. The skin was ok’ish, with the emphasis being on the ‘ish’
Seven months later and having failed to find a skin of the right quality I made my own. I’m pleased with the results so far and even the outfit suddenly looks better. Although my Kitely avatar has the exact same facial measurements as SL Moco she has quite a different look. I’m always amazed at the difference a skin can make but can see that the sliders here produce a slightly different output so some tweaking maybe needed.
And here is the latest result complete with hat, which I am wearing simply to partly mask the clunky flexi prim hair. If anyone has discovered a place to get gorgeous mesh or prim hair let me know as my creative skills do not and probably will never extend to rigging wearables otherwise I would have made my own!! The barren landscape is my new home, devoid of trees or life at the moment but that is soon to change!
So, as my way of helping ex pat Second Lifers make themselves at home in Kitely, over the next few weeks I will be creating a series of high quality skins in all shades from the coolest milk to the warmest mahogany and if you are a subscriber to this blog and are a Kitely ‘resident’ you can pick up one of my Kitely skins absolutely free to get you started! More details on this in a later blog when the skins are released.
Free Sims…Build Your Own Perfect Homestead!
Another important thing to note is that Kitely offers everyone a whole sim of your own absolutely free, totally gratis and this is 100k worth of prims…FREE! This is great to use as your home base (imagine what type of homestead you could create and oh…the privacy) or as somewhere to build and test out mesh creations without any cost. I’m just at the very start of setting up my in world store although I think it is going to take some time, well I do have 100k prims to fill and mesh is particularly well suited to this metaverse. Mesh objects only count for the number of objects they are composed from not their Land Impact. So a highly detailed mesh creation that is only made of 2 objects will just register in kitely as 2 prims, making more space for even more stuff. I’ll add more building tips in a later blog once I learn more.
There is a lot of mesh in-world and some really gorgeous installations, where people have made the most of their 16 sim allowances. Again I’ll be blogging about some lovely worlds I’ve found in one of my next posts.
Shopping Tips
At the moment there is not a great deal of choice although it is a lot better than it was and some very skilled artists are starting to sign up. There are about 60+ shopping worlds of various sizes i.e. of one sim or more and additional ones are coming on stream all the time. There are a couple of things to bear in mind:
- Kitely is an on-demand service which means that if no one is on a particular world it will take a few seconds to fire up and teleport you across. This is one of the reasons they can keep costs low. Generally in my experience I’ve not found this to be a problem, with the teleport effect feeling seamless and usually no longer than teleporting in SL. So please bear this in mind when travelling around
- Most shopping worlds (sims) are free to visit. Kitely operates on the basis that some worlds are free and some you will have to pay to visit (it all depends on the type of account you have) and over time I suspect that all shopping areas will be free as I know I won’t be paying to visit somewhere just to buy some shoes. I also think that the paid areas will eventually be for dancing, concerts, private members clubs and other…ahem…entertainment services – Update – see Ilan Tochner’s clarification on this in the comments below
- There are some good freebie centres but it is not quite the freebie fest SL once was, check on the Kitely.com main page for freebie places, plus most locations do offer one or two freebie items which may come in useful
You can pay in KCs or via paypal in dollars so it’s a bit clearer to know how much you are paying for something
Have fun if you do visit, become a subscriber to get your free skin and let me have any tips/experiences!!
moco homes emporium 
Hiya Moco-)) Dot just mentioned this here http://www.kitely.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1113&p=8326#p8326 so I came over to read and found a couple of things to help about.
Firstly, and forgive me if I missed the mention, but some people allow all visitors to their worlds, and such as mine is, one of the free Kitely worlds, I pay for the time of visitors [excepting for the new premium account holders now who are free to roam]. I use my free region/world to showcase content I have accumulated in the Meta, and only import my OARs to it, something in which Kitely is the ONLY commercial grid to do.
Anyone can feel free to visit http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world/Minethere-Always/Mineys , however, I have set it to Adult since Kitely allows under 13 players and I decided to err on the side of caution.
Also, here is an example of one inworld shop I forgot to mention to you when we IM’ed…good quality too, I think.
http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world/Isis-Ophelia/IDdesigns
Have fun creating for fun, rather than worrying about tiers and prims, anymore-))
Hey Minethere, thanks for your comments as always and all comments and any clarification are welcome!
It’s a good tip about setting it to Adult and I think it just takes a while to fully understand the fixed price worlds and metered worlds if you’re used to something different. My big frustration at the moment is the lack of centralised info for builders and it would make a big difference if it were all in one place, for example;
1) physic collisions seem to be set up slightly differently in Kitely and spending hours working out what the differences are and the workarounds would put off a lot of creators
2) what’s the maximum number of linked objects permissible in a build? All basic stuff but would be great to find in one place.
I’ve really enjoyed my recent Kitely explorations and found Tao Lia which was really beautiful…I’ll blog about that in the next few days.
Hey,
There are some awesome regions/worlds in Kitely to explore, here is one of my favorites:
http://www.kitely.com/search?q=karima+hoisan
I am not up on physics but here is a link to the OS version now in Kitely which should be helpful and serve as a jumping off place to find out more:
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/0.7.6_Release
However, as can be noted there, the current ODE physics will, sometime this year, likely, be replaced with Bullet physics, a new and cool one being working on, in part, by a few folx from Intel, and being tested extensively now in several grids in the Meta.
OS allows much more linking of objects, as well as distance between links, as well as smaller and larger prim sizes.
I forget the specifics, and the Kitely forums are a good place to ask tech stuff:
http://www.kitely.com/forums/index.php
But prims are .001 to 256m
When Kitely enables hypergating it will grow by leaps and bounds…have fun!!
That’s really useful I will take a look! Thanks again
-)))
Hi Moco,
It’s important to note that as of January 1, 2014 people never get charged KC for the time they spend in other people’s worlds. The only people who need to pay something for the world are the people who own the world. They can do so by selecting one of our fixed-price options or using a pay-per-use option.
For details see: http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world-news/2014/01/01/new-fixed-price-options-starting-at-14-95-month/
Ok, thanks for the heads up….I knew I was getting confused somewhere….is it this clear on the website do you think?
The big Learn More link on the homepage links to this page: http://www.kitely.com/services
The second line on that page states “Most of the information in this page explains how to host worlds. If you only want to visit existing worlds then simply create a new account and start visiting worlds immediately. Visiting other people’s worlds is free.”
I hope it’s clear enough 🙂
I think what is confusing some people is having heard outdated info about how they can get charged for the time they spend in other people’s worlds. People who haven’t heard that before come in expecting to be able to visit other people’s worlds for free (like they can in SL) and that is exactly what they can now do in Kitely as well 🙂