I see from the weekly updates that Cloud Party has gotten mirrors. I am not sure why they did that, but it is pretty neat.
Cloud Party Mirror – Image from Cloud Party Bugle.
There is a setting to control the number of frames that get rendered in the mirror… dynamic planar reflection… the setting is in the materials section of object properties.
The Cloud Party people are having a contest for the best art presented in Cloud Party. It looks pretty interesting.
Cloud Party Art Contest
The email they sent says: Continue reading
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.
New World Notes has a story on building with mesh building blocks in Cloud Party. See: Cloud Party Adds Mesh-Based, Collaborative Building Blocks Which Sound Super Superior to SL’s Prim-Based System. Win the contest and get US$50 of Cloud Party coin.
Originally I thought this was a feature that many have asked for in Second Life. The feature people ask for would allow those not interested in using Blender or 3DS to build with custom mesh in SL. They would be able to edit the individual vertices of an object. But, that is not exactly what they are getting in Cloud Party. The following video shows what is being added.
[youtube nkL0vv3CPnU]
While this does not allow users to tweak individual vertices, it does add an easy way to hook primitive shapes together. In SL we use Third Party Viewers (TPV) that have alignment tools to set cubes next to each other. In the SL Viewer we have to do math or use something like Prim Docker to fit cubes together. But, that process does not remove any of the hidden faces or vertices. My understanding is that in Cloud Party using blocks does omit the hidden parts.
The really neat feature in Cloud Party is that the new Block Tools work with mesh items made in Blender or another 3D modeling programs.
I hear what I’ll call rumors that Cloud Party has stopped growing… I suppose like lots of stats it depends on the details as to what that means. There are people exploring the possibilities of Cloud Party and the developers are continuing to develop…
Maxwell Graf is building Rustica stuff in Cloud Party. Some others are doing some fun things. You can keep up on the goings on at: Cloud Party Bugle. The blog has a nice list of tutorials for Cloud Party.
The frequency of posts there seems to be decreasing. Hard to say at this point.
Cloud Party has a Twitter channel now.
I don’t see lots of news flowing out of Cloud Party. We probably won’t until it moves closer to release, the end of Beta. I think it is early adopters and experimenters that are working with the start up developers.
Vivienne Daguerre has an article up on her blog about Cloud Party starting to rent sky islands. See: Private Islands Available in Cloud Party.
She does a good comparison between Second Life® and Cloud Party®. Pushing the numbers into a different format the land-wise cost per square meter is better. SL=US$0.0046/sq meter – CP=US$ 0.0015 that is about 32.5% of the cost in SL. As you get more land in CP the cost goes down to $ 0.0004/sq meter which is about 1/10th the cost.
Tier is another thing. CP has limits on how much stuff you can put in an island. But, I don’t see a tier costing system just limits. The 100×100 meter islands are about 15% of the size of a Second Life region. One can have 350 objects, 25 of which can be dynamic, and that total up to 300,000 triangles.
It is hard to compare that to Second Life. But, 15% of 15,000 prims is 2,250 prims. Trying to turn that into triangles is reaching. Regions can handle 750,000 but I think that is an average… and it is from my memory which is sometimes unreliable. (See SL Limits) But that gives a limit of 112,500 triangles… but it is possible to create a million polygon avatar in SL… so, the polygon comparison numbers seem rather meaningless.
There are no adjacent islands in CP. Also, CP is incomplete. So, it may be reasonable for the land cost to go up as development continues. But for now it is a pretty good deal… provided you don’t compare it to OpenSim, but that gets complex.
Gwyneth Llewelyn is one of my favorite writer analysis. She has a new article out about Cloud Party and her take on how it will and won’t affect Second Life. Few people really understand Facebook and how social sites do and don’t work. I put Gwyneth in the group that ‘gets it’.
Image by: Gwyneth Llewelyn
Check out her article: Not yet a party but soon?
A few Second Life bloggers are covering Cloud Party, a new 3D virtual world on Facebook. Hamlet at new World Notes has posted an interview with Cloud Party’s CEO, Sam Thompson.
My Home in Cloud Party
The current version of Cloud Party is a beta version. They are 9 months into development, which I think is pretty awesome.