Dear Twinizens,
Just minutes ago, we deployed a small update to Twinity. When you restart the client, the patch will run automatically. This update resolves the following issues:
– Minor issues with the Minimap
– Some connections issues related to our new game server
– Occasional appearance of a blue screen when arriving in Berlin
– Incorrect dates for place creation for some locations
– Minor issues related to chat initiated animations
Thanks,
Craig
Today the University of Heilbronn, Germany hosts a virtual conference as a closing event to their series of lectures about e-business and online marketing. The topic will be Potential Use of 3D Visualization for Medium-Sized Businesses. You are invited to visit this event free of charge and discuss with the speakers and other experts about the future of virtual business.
Day: Wednesday, 10 June 2009
Time: 19:00 CET
Location: HS Heilbronn in Twinity
Current release is one of the most important in the past months.
Our female avatar has been completely revised (new symmetry, new animations, and adjusted garment). We hope you like the result! An interesting technical detail is the fact that all of our pieces of clothing have been done using our new Collada export pipeline. We are just documenting this exporting process and creating exemplary files so that every premium member who has modeling skills will be able to create and upload clothing of their own. In addition we added many new attachment slots and morph targets, so the avatar can be customized even more individually.
For all the non-modelers among us there is a nice new feature in the current release that enables the alteration of textures and colors from existing pieces of clothing. Soon we will provide the relevant templates on Twinity.com.
The most important change in today’s release however pertains our new resource manager. We have reworked the file format, caching system, decoding and multithreading to speed up the loading time of city and apartments. The leap of performance is very noticeable especially in the city areas. The stability of the client has improved with this change, too. Further new features are a message broadcast system, enhanced support of Collada import, improvements on the minimap, and chairs without the distracting seat icons.
We are up to many things to further increase the performance, especially the performance in areas with many avatars and the user interface along with the loading speed of locations with numerous objects.
sered has some initial reviews of the new female avatar in Twinity. You can read more about it on his blog.
Generally speaking I like what they’ve done to the Twinity women; the results are pleasing. My wife has an avatar in Twinity, and we modeled her to look like a real woman, not like a virtual barbie as often encountered in Second Life.
You may have noticed that Twinity’s female avatars were ready for a makeover. So as of today, please welcome Twinity’s new female avatars!
Your new female avatar is visible when you log in to Twinity. We have remodeled her entire body, giving her a more oval face, a more elegant neck and shoulders, and much more female body proportions. Her animations have also been tweaked to give her a slinkier walk, as well as more feminine moods and facial expressions.
All your current avatar settings still apply. However your new avatar will still look different, because of her new head and body shape. You will probably need to adjust your body and face settings to get the perfect look, but these kind of problems should be easy to remedy. In some cases we recommend repeating PhotoFit to get a more genuine facial appearance.
We have also improved Twinity’s female avatar creation tools, letting you set your female avatar’s waist and hip size, and give her a more accurate age. Your previous outfits have been given an optimized fit and hairstyles have been remodeled. And for the very first time, additional jewelry options are available, such as rings, bracelets, and necklaces. For those of you looking to update your wardrobe, there are also many new summer clothes to choose from.
We hope you enjoy the new female avatar and look forward to your feedback! Take part in our mini survey below and tell us what you think about the new female avatars, or if you have more to say, drop an email to support@twinity.com or write a comment to this entry.
[poll=22]We’re sure everyone is interested in what today’s release bring so here is a brief summary:
– New female avatar (More information on this follows shortly)
– Minor fixes to improve the importing of objects
– Improvements in the speed of loading cities and apartments
– Feature to allow members to add textures to certain existing clothing
– Broadcasting feature for administrative notifications
– Default location at login screen set to last selection
– Opening of mini-map as default after login
Thanks,
Craig
Dear Twinizens,
Just a quick note to let you know that we will be updating Twinity today from 10:45 until 16:45 (CET) . This will be a major release and as such it requires an extended downtime. Unfortunately, during this time it will not be possible to login to the client. We will post shortly on the features and bug fixes related to this release.
Thanks,
Craig
We’re currently recruiting for software R&D and business development in Singapore. We’re especially interested in hearing from candidates for the business development jobs as soon as possible as we’re trying to set up some interviews still this week. Read More
Now that Angels & Demons is winding down in Twinity, we’d like to hear your thought about the experience. Please vote in the poll below and let us know your thoughts in the comments section.
[poll=20]The guys from Sympra did a lecture in Twinity. Read their feedback here (in German) :
http://blog.sympra.de/2009/05/26/sympra-goes-3d/
Thanks for this report!
