Difference between revisions of "Regions"

Revision as of 10:24, 14 June 2016

Create and upload a region

Step 1 – Link Unity to your Space account

Log in with your Space account at https://curator.sine.space/

Go to Settings / API keys.

Generate and API key and copy it.

Go to your Unity project and in the top bar menu select Space / Upload Settings.

This will open a field in the Inspector (usually on the right in Unity)

Paste your API here and click check to verify.

This links your Unity project to your account; everything you upload from the project will now go to the same account; that can be multiple scenes and other virtual goods.

Step 2 – Scene requirements

You can upload a scene in Unity as a region in Space.

First you need to undertake two steps in the scene itself.

REMOVE MAIN CAMERA

When you create a new scene in Unity it will by default have a light and a camera. You need to delete the camera (by selecting it in the Hierarchy window and clicking delete).

LANDING ZONE

You need to define where users arrive when they log in to your region; and what direction they are facing. To do this, once your scene is set up, from the top menu in Unity select Game Object / Create Other / Landmark

This will place a new landmark item in your scene. In the Inspector window, set the type to Landing Zone and tick Spawn Point.

The in scene object is a yellow edged transparent plane which you can position anywhere in your scene. The yellow arrow points in the direction your visitors will face when they arrive.

Be careful to position the landing zone slightly above the terrain; if a tall avatar's feet arrive below the terrain they may fall through.

Step 3 – Scene settings

Now you need to fill in a form, with the information relating to your scene.

In the top menu in Unity go to Space / Scene Settings.

This will add a Virtual Goods component to your scene. You will see a set of fields in the Inspector.

You can return to this component any time via Space / Scene Settings.

In the Inspector set the Content Type to Region.

PRIMARY DESCRIPTION

Add the name, description and brand identity of your region as you want it to appear in the explore and discovery panels of the Space platform.

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LOCALISATION

You can add slots for as many different languages as you want to.

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IMAGES AND ICONS

If you are uploading items that will be sold as virtual goods to other Space users, add the store icons and imagery here and set the prices for Gold and Silver credits.

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If you are uploading a region or item that is not for sale, tick the not for sale box. You do not need to add any images or icons if the item is not for sale.

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DUAL CURRENCIES

You can set each item to gold only, silver only or any combination of the two. As a guiding principal we would recommend making most of your inventory gold only but offering a few items for silver as well, perhaps 10% of total inventory, to help promote your goods to a wider audience and to give the platform a richer pool of content for new users to explore before they buy gold.

Gold

Gold credits can only be purchased for real money by spending users and can be converted back to real money by Sine Wave virtual goods partners.

Gold credits trade at 10 / 1 fixed ratio with USD$

Silver

Silver credits are free promotional credits given to users as rewards for participating in the community.

Silver credits cannot be converted to real money but can be used by creators to promote their content to new platform users who have not yet purchased gold.

CONTENT MATURITY

Choose an appropriate content maturity level;

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CREATOR INFORMATION

The creator information should show the details of the legal entity holding the account; whether that is an individual or a company.

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EXPORT SETTINGS

Mode

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Single scene

Single scene delivers the entire region to the user as a single file which downloads before their avatar spawns. For regions with download sizes up to 100 mb, Single scene is likely to be an acceptable download time for your visitors.

Multi bundle

Multi bundle is a form of dynamic loading control. It splits your scene into smaller components that are streamed to the visitor progressively.

The multi bundle algorithm examine every root object in your scene and compares each with every other root object. It then bundles objects where there is more than 40 kbytes of overlap in shared data between them.

You group into root objects has a big factor on how we create bundles; for instance grouping all vegetation or grouping one particular building where users will arrive.

Too many bundles will cause stuttering for the user while they are progressively loading. A reasonable target is 20 – 30 bundles.

Additive scenes

Additive scenes is a Unity utility that allows you to organise a single region into multiple scenes. You can manually split content, creating a root scene containing occlusion, lightmap and navigation data, with additional scenes loading mesh and other content progressively. You will need Unity 5 multi scene tools to manually set this up.

For more information, see;

http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/MultiSceneEditing.html

Required download

When you are using Multi bundle mode you need to select one item in your scene, usually the terrain, and add a component to it called Manual Loading Control or Dynamic Loading Control. Then tick Required Download. This will ensure that the item is sent to the user before their avatar spawns. Without this there is a risk users will arrive and drop through space before your scene loads above their heads.

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Suggested memory

If your guest's device has less memory than this, they will be given a performance warning when entering the region.

WORLD MAP

The world map allows users to search and browse regions. The Preview Image you supply will be used as a background to preview your region in the World Map. It will also be used as the background while the region itself is loading.

Preview image

The image you provide should be a .jpeg file. A 2:1 aspect ratio is recommended. Because the image is stretched to fit different screens it will distort slightly for some users.

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Loading logo

The Loading Logo Image appears on top of the Preview Image and is not stretched, allowing you to present your brand logo or a region specific title without distortion.

The image you supply should be a .png file with 512x256 dimensions. When you import the .png file, ensure the Alpha is Transparency box is ticked;

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REGION URL

You can assign a unique sub domain for each of your regions, which you can share with guests who can walk directly into your space from their browser.

In the editor you can reserve your region name.

Once the region is published you can then teleport directly to the staging server version (Creator) or the live public server version (Live).

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PLATFORM SETTINGS

The platform settings allow you to fine tune your region for each platform you want to publish to.

Space currently supports;

Standalone - Desktop application, PC or Mac Mobile / tablet - Android or iOS WebGL - Chrome, Explorer, Firefox and Edge Console - Sine Wave Entertainment is an accredited developer for Xbox and Playstation. The company is planning to release on these platforms later in 2016 after building a user interface for game controllers.

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The default settings are designed to work for most regions.

Scene adjustment

Remove lightmaps / light probes / reflection probes

Removing lightmaps and probes can significantly reduce download speed but will also impact on the runtime performance.

More information;

Lightmaps Light probes Reflection probes

Static bake meshes / colliders

Ticking these boxes will prebake data before export. This improves loading performance but the region download will be bigger.

More information;

Static bake meshes Static bake colliders

Strip occlusion / navigation data

Occlusion data holds information about what areas are visible from other areas; it allows the viewer to make intelligent decisions about optimising a scene, however it can add several mb of size to both runtime memory use; and download size. Keeping it improves performance but can result in higher memory use in big scenes.

Navigation data is used for showing waypoints, and moving NPCs around in a scene; it uses a little bit of extra memory, and can be stripped out if you are under severe memory pressure.

Texture size reduction

Max texture resolution

All textures will be reduced to a maximum of the defined size for each build.

Texture reduction levels

Reduces textures all by a multiple of the original, in line with Max texture reduction above.

So; if your scene contains large textures at 1024x1024 and you set the max texture reduction to 512 those large textures will be reduced by a factor of 4.

If you then set Texture reduction levels to 1, smaller textures in your scene will also be reduced by a factor of 4; so a 512x512 texture, which otherwise would have been unchanged by the Max texture reduction, would also be reduced by 4, to 256x256.

If you set the Texture reduction level to 2 it will multiply the Max texture reduction scale by 2; so in the case above reducing the smaller 512x512 texture by a factor of 8, to 64x64.

Normal reduction levels

This will apply a further multiplicative reduction on normal maps on top of the reduction already applied by the Texture reduction level above.

Texture compression

Allow crunch / Crunch level

Allows JPEG compression to be added to all textures in addition to DXT compression. This will degrade the quality of your images as the compression is lossy; but significantly reduces download filesize. It does not improve runtime memory size except during loading. Crunch level runs from 0 (very lossy) to 100 (lossless).

Compress textures

This applies a further quality reduction, comparable to the quality slider in Photoshop when saving a jpeg file.

True color As 16

Interprets images stored as 'True Color' to 16-bit colors. This applies compression to the colors, without introducing the blurriness / artefacts that DXT compression can introduce; at the expense of being slightly larger. With this ticked, any image with 'True Color' compression, will be packed at 16 instead of 32-bit on this platform.

Audio settings

Force audio to mono

Converts stereo files to mono for that platform.

Audio bitrate

This is a percentage field. So whatever the bitrate of your original files, you can reduce by X% for each of the different platforms you publish to. For instance a set of 128 bitrate original files, left at 100% in the Standalone build can be reduced to 64 in Mobile and WebGL builds by setting this field to 50.

Step 4 - Submission process

REPORT

Info

This shows how many objects, root objects and colliders your scene has. It will flag potential performance issues.

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Script list

Space currently has a white list of approximately 120 scripts you can deploy in your regions. The script list shows all the scripts in your project, flagging the ones not currently white listed, which will be stripped out when submitted.

You can submit scripts to your account manager for inclusion in the white list. When the platform's SDK is released (scheduled for September 2016) the white list will be maintained in parallel.

Apply compression settings

Click this button to apply the Platform Settings (above) to the assets in your scene.

Once the automated compression has run you can manually adjust individual files before publishing. You might, for instance, apply 512 as a maximum image size for the WebGL version of your region but then revert one or more specific important textures back to a higher resolution.

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Sort into layers

Click this button to automatically assign every asset in the scene to one of four draw distance layers, according to their size; larger objects are set to be visible at greater distances.

The draw distance for each user is determined by the quality settings they select inworld;

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Default = 20 to 75m Important = 80 to 320m VImportant = 240m to 900m NotImport = Max 30m (60m in Beautiful/Ultra) NotImportLandmark = Max 60m (120m in Beautiful/Ultra)

If you do not apply Sort into layers button everything will be left in default layer.

After applying you can manually review and modify;

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Automatic submission

Once your scene is ready to submit, click Automatic submission. This will create a zip file containing the region and will send it to the Space servers.

Here the assets will be unpacked and compiled for each of the different platforms you have specified. You will receive three automated emails; confirming the content has been received, has started processing and has been released for you to log in and review.

Step 5 - Region management

STAGING AND LIVE SERVERS

When you upload a region it will deploy first on the Space staging servers; staging.sine.space

Regardless of your subscription level, you can upload as many regions as you want to the staging server.

Once on the staging server your region will have an obscenity and security review by a member of the Space team. This review is to ensure the maturity ratings are appropriate and that nothing in the scene could crash the servers or severely impair performance for other users.

If you have a Level 5 subscription you can bypass this manual review and push directly to the live servers yourself.

Your subscription level determines the number of regions you can release concurrently on the live server.

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REGION INFO PANEL

When you are logged in to any region you can click the minimap in the top right corner to open the Region info panel for that region.

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REGION ACCESS

If you are the region owner you can then modify the access permissions;

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You can set the region to be public, limited to your friends or limited to specific individuals who you approve.

APPROVE USERS FOR REGION ACCESS

Any user can request access to one of your private regions;

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You can approve or reject their application.

MEMBERS

In the members panel you can see who currently has access to the region and you can modify their permissions on an individual basis.

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MULTIPLE REGION MANAGEMENT

Your subscription level sets the number of concurrent regions you can deploy on the live servers.

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You can upload as many regions as you want to, and then enable or disable each region to set which ones are live at any time;

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