2018.9 Update / Release Notes

[Adam Frisby]

Hey everyone,

I figured I'd slightly cross-post from our blog (original post here) with what's in our 2018.9 update. You can get this one by ticking 'Creator Preview Release' on our installer, or going to preview.sine.space/download (for Mac/Linux users)

I won't post the full list of release notes (see the original post linked above), but I will highlight a few interesting tidbits (esp with the 2018.10 viewers about to be posted with a bunch more interesting stuff)

Runtime Inspector
We hinted at this a while ago, but it basically gives you a lot of the power of the Unity Editor directly within our 'Room Editor' - allowing you to manipulate objects at a fairly fine grained level; exposing the majority of the properties of an object, and letting you edit them without needing to go into Unity.

Model Uploads
This is currently locked to a select group of test users on our preview grid, but allows you to upload 3D models (and associated textures) in a ton of formats (FBX, Blend, DAE, OBJ, 3DS, GLTF, LWO, STL, and a lot more) directly from within the client without having to switch to Unity (although more sophisticated edits, producing products for sale, etc still requires this step and will do so for the foreseeable future). [ETA: This is tied to our new certification program, also on our blog.]

Lots of Avatar Quality Updates
We've done a lot of work on the underlying skin textures and rendering of our avatars, added more sliders and improved the default weighting.

The New Gigaregions Feature...
I'm keeping this a secret until I can do a dedicated blog post on it, but it's quite cool - the name is a good hint though...

 

[Trilo]

FYI, while there wasn't any fanfare or any kind of release notes, SineSpace released a new version of the client app recently. Version 2018 10b17 is available now on the download page. A minor pet peeve of mine is that the version naming is all kinds of inconsistent, and may be confusing to newcomers - I'm hopeful that they'll figure out something a little more user/consumer friendly as the beta progresses and things get ready for the masses. Regardless of what the version number is, the current (and most stable) release will be found on that downloads page I linked to, and any preview or experimental builds would generally be posted on the #betas channel of the SineSpace discord or some other place that testers and content creators can find easily.

Overall it's a pretty solid update, though unfortunately there are a couple significant bugs that popped up shortly after release. A hotfix to address just those issues has been promised, but has yet to be delivered (I'm hoping it'll happen sometime this week). Perhaps once the hotfix gets out we'll get a proper set of release notes, as the last live client release before that was early July and it's quite a laundry list of stuff in there.

 

[Trilo]

Circling back to post an update on the client app. The Sine Wave team had a few more behind-the-scenes technical issues to sort out (they're in the process of setting up an automated build system, which will help us makers and users get updates to test more regularly without it taking someone on staff all day to fool with it).

Today we got the Mac & Windows versions of the 2018 10b31 client, which contains the hotfixes (no new features, just some bugfixes). They can be found on this page. I'm told that once they finish some internal tests to verify that everything is doing what it's supposed to, they'll make it the live client for everyone.

It's been great for me - fixed an issue that was preventing me from being able to use the Room Editor in one of my regions, that makes me super happy.

 

[Trilo]

Sorry for the gap in replies, it's been a super busy few weeks for BlakOpal and I. RL nonsense and fun, along with an array of stuff in SineSpace....

Anyhow, SineSpace did manage to release a client update on 11b22. There weren't any significant changes over the 10b31 release, mainly they added support for both doing in-world promotions and sales (they did it just in time for a Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale on gold currency that has since ended), as well as a revamp of the lowest tier subscriber plan.

Previously, everybody got a 128MB region with 10 user concurrency for free. That's the equivalent of an SL homestead, if not more when you consider that SineSpace regions are not limited by geography... only filesize. Keep it under 128MB, and you could do 20km x 20km (that's what, 6,400 SL regions?) like I did with a big empty desert build.... They nuked the $5/month deal and replaced it with a $10/month deal.

On the surface it's a big increase... but it's gone big on bang for the buck. For $10 a month, you go from 128MB region size to 512MB region size (that's huge, 4x larger to be exact). You also go to concurrency of 25 users in the region at a time. True, if you want a busy hub or megaclub you'll want more users than that, and they definitely have those plans... but in my opinion that's more than enough for both average users and budding virtual entrepeneurs. In the "but wait, there's more" department, they now give anyone signing up for either that plan or ANY of the bigger subscription plans a weekly stipend of 150 gold per week. So if you boil a month down to 4 weeks, you get $6US via in-world currency plus that 4x increase in region size for your money. Whether you're building your own region or grabbing and using one of the templates from the SineSpace shop, that's a good-sized region.

In full disclosure, I don't work for SineSpace. And they don't pay me to be excited about or talk up the platform. However, as a maker and merchant, I do hope you come check the place out, and if you like it and want to stay a while, buy some of the stuff from BlakOpal Designs or Trilo Byte Designs - it helps my partner and I pay our bills.