Virtual World News 

It has been well over a month since our last blog post, time for an update about what is currently taking place on the grid. What exactly is happening in this new virtual world you might ask yourself? The answer is a lot, so much activity goes on in world, so much movement went on in the past few weeks as we initiated the placement of the world’s virtual landscape it looks like a typhoon went through. Even our residents (the early alpha testers) were surprised to see all their homes and 3D objects floating around in the air when they logged on. This thoroughly approach was indeed needed to form the landscape. The first stage went smoothly and all the rough work has been completed. One could say the tornado calmed down and the constructions made by the people of Dreamworld are slowly coming down to earth again as they get settled with their belongings on the fantastic looking new landscape.

The unspoiled desert you see pictured above preludes the coming of a new virtual world which will be part of the Metaverse. With the initial work on the landscape completed we now have time to focus on several other urgent issues we are currently facing on the grid. This also reminds ourselves and the residents that we are still in the very early stages of alpha testing. However we must admit that we are satisfied with the procedural process Dreamworld is making.

Before this major work could be started we had to expand the grid with more land mass. The expansion of the landscape is something that took place in january. Before this enlargement of the virtual land mass Dreamworld consisted out of a testing area with a surface of 589824 m² (square metres). At that point we had kept the world to a minimal in land mass for testing purposes. The larger the world the bigger the amount that each update and fix requires. Further delay of the world’s expansion was out of question as more and more people are coming to take a look in world and have the urge to test and explore which is a good thing. In order to satisfy the demand and need for more terrain the grid has been expanded with a massive land mass 3.932.160 m² which is almost 4 million square metres of virtual land. This brings the total land surface area of the virtual world to 4.5 million square metres. We believe that this will be sufficient in a first stage to meet the direct needs of the residents to get acquainted with the world and see what it is all about. Important to note is that this huge land area is not intended to offer directly for sale to residents. The purpose of the landscape is to serve as some sort of virtual park, a place to meet, interact with other avatars, objects and discover what the virtual world has to offer. We will go further into this once the landscape has been completed and place an official announcement regarding this when the landscape is complete. As you see with projects of this size we have to work in different phases until the desired result has been reached. When you will check the map you can now overview the new continuous area of land which forms Dreamworld today. The picture below will go into history on how Dreamworld started and what it looked like during its first half year online.

Our main concern is inventory at the moment but we have good news on this. Thanks to the efforts of our alpha testers who keep reporting what works well for them and what doesn’t we have been able to improve inventory performance in a drastic way. We received many complaints from people regarding the lack of working inventory. Everything in world seemed to be working well, teleports are smooth, so is region border crossing, logins happen fast, textures rez fast and the grid is running stable. But inventory that is something else we noticed. The main reason for this is that inventory in Dreamworld works in a very complex way and forms quite a challenge for the programmers. During each update improvements are made, but in world inventory was failing and kept failing. Until recent rezzing an object was a huge challenge and would fail in plenty of cases. Transferring an object from avatar to avatar also didn’t work properly. One could say that inventory certainly didn’t perform as it should but investigating the issue and the feedback we received from our residents helped to determine the cause of the lack of performance for inventory. We have made several changes and now we can say that inventory performance has increased in a drastic way. We received many positive remarks yesterday regarding this subject when we went in world so we are going to keep working to make inventory accurate and stable as we know this is important. Now we do know and understand on what to work in order to increase performance which is splendid. The first tests we performed so far on the grid indicate a 95% performance boost in rezzing objects and reliability of inventory. The storage of objects also works much smoother so we are very pleased with this as it will allow people to build and enjoy Dreamworld in a better way. We also want to thank the alpha testers for their continuous reporting on the matter.

Another point of importance to mention is that we have commenced to work on several ways to make it more easy for our new virtual colonists who arrive in world to start out. When new people come to Dreamworld they arrive as Ruth, a little lady with brown hair. Of course it’s possible to change and alter your avatar appearance but we noticed that for many this isn’t so obvious so we commenced to make efforts in creating starting packages for both the male and female avatars on the grid. This goes from skins, clothing, hair and objects to make it more easy for people to feel comfortable with their virtual body. A nice example is this release of the first male avatar since our male residents were asking to improve their looks. We will continue to work on the development of starter packages for people in world. There are also several residents who are creating all kinds of items for new people or so called freebies so we wish to thank them for their input.

We welcome you to come and take a look in world and see for yourself what people are doing and experience what Dreamworld is like. Each day we strive to create a world that goes further and advances to become a stable and robust 3D platform for avatars to sojourn in.

Count Dreamworld