Difference between revisions of "Regions"

Revision as of 12:12, 14 June 2016

Create and upload a region

Link Space and Unity

Link Space and Unity

• Grab an API key from https://curator.sine.space/ and link it to your Unity project.
• Download and import the Space Editor Pack prefab into your Unity project.

Basic Scene Set Up

Basic Scene Set Up

• Assemble your scene content
• Remove the main camera
• Add a landing zone

Region - Virtual Good Settings

Region - Virtual Good Settings

• Add Scene Settings Component
• Fill in Virtual goods information

Region - Export Settings

Region - Export Settings

• Choose whether your region is downloaded as one file or streamed progressively to your guests.
• Set your region's loading page
• Reserve your region's unique URL

Region - Platform Settings

Region - Platform Settings

Supported platforms

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.

Settings

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.

Submission Process

Submission process

REPORT

Info

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

[[File:]]

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.

[[File:]]

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;

[[File:]]

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;

[[File:]]

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.

Region Management

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.

[[File:]] IMAGE PENDING

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.

[[File:]]

REGION ACCESS

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

[[File:]]

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;

[[File:]] IMAGE PENDING

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.

[[File:]]

MULTIPLE REGION MANAGEMENT

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

[[File:]]

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;

[[File:]]