Cloud Party Announces…

Cloud Party has a blog. Today they are announcing they will be blogging weekly to let users know what is happening in the CP world, at least from the technical side of the programmers. They will be talking about fixes and additions made over the past week.

This announcement says they are starting a membership drive type of thing. They will be focusing on getting new users. I suspect we will see lots of banner ads floating around the net. It will be interesting to see how that goes.

This week they added a ‘people’ search.

See the article here: Weekly Update 04.16.2013.

5 thoughts on “Cloud Party Announces…

  1. There is one thing that I’ll never find appealing about Cloud Party: the fact that they have shaped the world as floating islands. One of the strong points of SL is that a good part of it has a geographical continuity. It’s a world which can be really explored and entire paradigms can be shaped on it. In short, it’s a (virtual) world.

    • I agree. That is a problem for me too.

      The layout certainly avoids the region crossing problems of SL. But, SL is getting better.

      • “The layout certainly avoids the region crossing problems of SL.”

        Definitely, but purposelessly coupled with Second Life’s concept of finite space, Cloud Party has an even bigger problem. Instead of the Cloud Party devs having to figure out how to make it fast for a person riding a vehicle t o transition from one 256 meter, $295 dollar chunk of space to another, they have a problem of once someone travels 500 meters in one direction they can’t go any further at all.

        Both are very crappy problems, but at least with Second Life and it’s whole land resell deal its an understandable problem. There’s a reason. For Cloud Party though there’s zero reason not to solve the problem in the way 99.9% of 3D products like games do, which is to allow and have as much X, Y and Z space as triangles are budgeted for until that very real limit is hit, not some arbitrary limit.

    • It is called “Cloud” Party and the default build of new islands are floating islands, but unlike Second Life, we aren’t stuck with default terrain and sky. In a few clicks it’s easy to delete the default island and clear the default sky and be left with a void of stark white to create any kind of a 3D space.

      For builds in Second Life with object skies, object water and object terrains; or builds intended to have no sky, water or terrain at all, Cloud Party is a superior choice for those because these ideas are baked in and Second Life build strategies like sinking land beneath sim water, or building thousands of meters high to avoid sim water and land altogether, or relying on rezzed objects to create a better sky and terrain aren’t necessary.

      For builds in Second Life dependent upon connecting one sim to another for roads, stretches of seamless terrain and every other build idea that requires joined borders, Second Life is superior, but only as long as Cloud Party for whatever reason tries to compete with Second Life in selling finite X, Y and Z space. Or “land” as both companies think of it.

      I don’t foresee any kind of a land resell market in Cloud Party. It doesn’t seem at all like an objective of the devs, so I’m not exactly sure why they’ve decided to make 3D space finite. There’s a lot less of a point in having better scripting, mesh creation tools and etc. when they’ve purposefully adopted the cons of having finite space without any of the pros,.

      The pros are what Indigo described; when forcing the concept of same connectable terrain, same connectable sky, same connectable water of the same size for the not always same chunk of money, we get the collaborative virtual world that we have with Second Life.

      Even though Second Life is only 20% mainland and much of mainland is entirely fractured in theme and build, there’s still chunks of it and many private island continents where customers have come together to grow a virtual world as they envision it.

      By Cloud Party having varying sized, unconnectable regions with no forced content like Second Life’s water, terrain and skies, it already doesn’t have those constants necessary to ensure it be seen as a contiguous, land-based virtual world in theme. That’s not entirely true though. It’s possible to connect regions in Cloud Party by teleporting someone from one region to the next. One could create a door that teleports from a tavern interior region to a village exterior, and for 99% of people something like this doesn’t break immersion in games like Skyrim, but for SLers that want to seamlessly look across region boundaries and cross them without an intermediary loading screen, this isn’t connectable enough.

      If Cloud Party can’t have the pros of Second Life’s design decisions regarding regions, it should drop the cons and achieve some of those pros at the same time. Like, if they dropped the arbitrary limitation on X Y and Z space, but kept the same tiers of triangle and script limits obviously, it’d be possible for say, Relay for Life organizers to build a course as giant as the one in Second Life. It’d be possible to create fantasy landscapes more spacious than what Fantasy Faire has. Possibilities and creativity would exceed the limitations of finite X, Y and Z space is one feature Second Life can’t offer. It wouldn’t fix the “problem” of no seamless connected spaces and how that contributes to the vibe of a virtual world, but it’d incredibly enhance the immersion of personal spaces if things like space stations were separated by kilometers instead of meters. It’d create a new kind of virtual world rather than one different from Second Life only in a short list of pros and cons.

  2. This year a part of Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference is also in Cloud Party.

    Check the blog news:
    http://blog.cloudparty.com/2013/07/23/vwbpe-this-week/

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