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Difference between revisions of "Regions"

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Create and upload a region
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==Step 1 – Link Unity to your Space account==
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[[File:Howtocreateashopbanner.jpg]]
  
https://curator.sine.space/
 
  
Go to your Curator account (above) and find settings / API keys.
 
  
Generate and API key and copy it.
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There are different ways to build regions in space.  
  
[[File:Api_key.jpg|options|https://curator.sine.space/]]
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You can build region assets in other software packages and import into Unity.
  
Go to your Unity project and in the top bar menu select Space / Upload Settings.
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You can use Unity's mesh shapes and terrain tools, and you can grab third party assets from the Unity Asset Store.
  
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All of the pages linked here all refer to the Scene Export Settings/Scene Save Settings component:
  
This will open a field in the Inspector (usually on the right in Unity)
 
  
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[[File:Scenesavesettings.jpg]]
  
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.
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If you want to upload a region quickly, click on 'File>New Sinespace Scene' in Unity to instantly create a quick-start region.
  
  
==Step 2 – Scene requirements==
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==Assemble your scene==
  
You can upload a scene in Unity as a region in Space.
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You can upload any scene you create in Unity as a region in Space.
  
First you need to undertake two steps in the scene itself.
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Once your scene is assembled you have two housekeeping tasks;
  
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).
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==Remove Main Camera==
  
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When you create a new scene in Unity it will by default have a light and a camera.
  
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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
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[[File:Camera.jpg]]
  
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.
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==Add Landing Zone==
  
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.
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You need to define where users arrive when they log in to your region; and what direction they are facing.
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To do this, once your scene is set up, from the top menu in Unity select Game Object / Create Other / Landmark.
  
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OR;
  
==Step 3 – Scene settings==
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If your Scene Heirarchy menu does not include Create other / Landmark, then;
  
Now you need to fill in a form, with the information relating to your scene.
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Create empty object, then in the Inspector, add "Landmark behaviour" component.
  
In the top menu in Unity go to Space / Scene Settings.
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This will place a new landmark item in your scene. In the Inspector window, set the type to Landing Zone and tick Spawn Point.
  
This will add a Virtual Goods component to your scene. You will see a set of fields in the Inspector.
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The in scene object is a yellow edged transparent plane which you can position anywhere in your scene.  
  
You can return to this component any time via Space / Scene Settings.
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The yellow arrow points in the direction your visitors will face when they arrive.
  
In the Inspector set the Content Type to Region.
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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.
 
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PRIMARY DESCRIPTION
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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
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You can add slots for as many different languages as you want to.
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IMAGES AND ICONS
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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
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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.
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Gold
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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.
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Gold credits trade at 10 / 1 fixed ratio with USD$
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Silver
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Silver credits are free promotional credits given to users as rewards for participating in the community.
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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.
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CONTENT MATURITY
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Choose an appropriate content maturity level;
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CREATOR INFORMATION
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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
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Mode
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Single scene
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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.
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Multi bundle
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Multi bundle is a form of dynamic loading control. It splits your scene into smaller components that are streamed to the visitor progressively.
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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.
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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.
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Too many bundles will cause stuttering for the user while they are progressively loading. A reasonable target is 20 – 30 bundles.
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Additive scenes
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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.
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For more information, see;
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http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/MultiSceneEditing.html
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Required download
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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
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If your guest's device has less memory than this, they will be given a performance warning when entering the region.
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WORLD MAP
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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.
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Preview image
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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In the editor you can reserve your region name.
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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
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The platform settings allow you to fine tune your region for each platform you want to publish to.
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Space currently supports;
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Standalone  - Desktop application, PC or Mac
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Mobile / tablet - Android or iOS
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WebGL - Chrome, Explorer, Firefox and Edge
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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.
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Scene adjustment
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Remove lightmaps / light probes / reflection probes
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Removing lightmaps and probes can significantly reduce download speed but will also impact on the runtime performance.
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More information;
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Lightmaps
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Light probes
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Reflection probes
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Static bake meshes /  colliders
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Ticking these boxes will prebake data before export. This improves loading performance but the region download will be bigger.
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More information;
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Static bake meshes
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Static bake colliders
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Strip occlusion / navigation data
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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.
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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.
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Texture size reduction
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Max texture resolution
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All textures will be reduced to a maximum of the defined size for each build.
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Texture reduction levels
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Reduces textures all by a multiple of the original, in line with Max texture reduction above.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Normal reduction levels
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This will apply a further multiplicative reduction on normal maps on top of the reduction already applied by the Texture reduction level above.
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Texture compression
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Allow crunch / Crunch level
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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).
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Compress textures
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This applies a further quality reduction, comparable to the quality slider in Photoshop when saving a jpeg file.
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True color As 16
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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.
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Audio settings
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Force audio to mono
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Converts stereo files to mono for that platform.
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Audio bitrate
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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.
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==4. Submission process==
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REPORT
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Info
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This shows how many objects, root objects and colliders your scene has. It will flag potential performance issues.
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Script list
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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.
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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.
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Apply compression settings
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Click this button to apply the Platform Settings (above) to the assets in your scene.
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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
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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.
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The draw distance for each user is determined by the quality settings they select inworld;
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Default = 20 to 75m
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Important = 80 to 320m
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VImportant = 240m to 900m
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NotImport = Max 30m (60m in Beautiful/Ultra)
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NotImportLandmark = Max 60m (120m in Beautiful/Ultra)
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If you do not apply Sort into layers button everything will be left in default layer.
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After applying you can manually review and modify;
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Automatic submission
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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.
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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.
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5. Region management
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STAGING AND LIVE SERVERS
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When you upload a region it will deploy first on the Space staging servers; staging.sine.space
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Regardless of your subscription level, you can upload as many regions as you want to the staging server.
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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.
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If you have a Level 5 subscription you can bypass this manual review and push directly to the live servers yourself.
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Your subscription level determines the number of regions you can release concurrently on the live server.
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IMAGE PENDING
 
  
REGION INFO PANEL
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[[File:Landmark.jpg]]
  
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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==Adding a New Scene to your Region==
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<b>This does not apply if you are using Multi-Scene Mode & Multi-Scene Editing.</b><br>
  
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You can have more then one scene in your region.<br>
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1 - Create a new scene in your current Sine.Spaces project.<br>
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2 - Double click the new scene in your Assets to load it into the Hierarchy.<br>
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2 - Design your scene. Be sure to save it.<br>
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3 - When ready to upload to the server click on 'Space' Scene Settings.<br>
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4 - Fill out the needed information, map pictures, and click Automatic Submission.<br>
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To teleport between one scene to another see [[https://wiki.sine.space/index.php?title=Components/TeleportWorld Teleport World]]
  
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==Create a Home Region/Template==
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If you want to make your region as a home type, which could be edited by the users themselves, you need to attach a component which is called "Room Floor" to one of the item in the scene, usually the terrain or the object used as a field. With at least one room floor component, the region will show "Edit Room" button when you in it. You can add several Room Floor components to different objects, each floor can be shared to another user, gives him/her the authority to edit.<br>
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In your inventory, you will also find an item with same name of the region. This is a home template. You can use it in "Edit Room" -> "Design" function, to change the whole set of a region. Of course you could set a price for it when upload, so other user can buy it in the shop. <br>
  
REGION ACCESS
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Please see our [[Room_Floor_System|Room Floor]] page for more information on the Room Floor component.
  
If you are the region owner you can then modify the access permissions;
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<b>Please pay attention that ALL the room edit info, like where you put some furniture is recorded in this "Room Floor" script. When you update your region, try not to remove this component in whatever situation. If you remove an old one then attach a new one to another object, the region update will cause all the users who are using your region template to find their region has gotten reset. If you must do that, try to let users of your template know this and be prepared for the overhaul updates.</b>
  
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If you want to add a day/night cycle to your home region/template, please do see our [[Day/night_cycles|Day/Night Cycle]] page for more information.
  
You can set the region to be public, limited to your friends or limited to specific individuals who you approve.
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==Region Tutorials==
  
APPROVE USERS FOR REGION ACCESS
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After placing your landmark, go to 'Sinespace' at the top of Unity, and choose 'Scene Settings'.
  
Any user can request access to one of your private regions;
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Follow these instructions on how to set the scene/upload settings: [[Regions/Upload Settings|Upload Settings]] or watch this video tutorial: [[Videos/Scene_Settings|Scene Settings]]
  
IMAGE PENDING
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*For export settings, follow these instructions: [[Regions/Export Settings|Export Settings]] or watch this video tutorial: [[Videos/Export_Settings|Export Settings]]
  
You can approve or reject their application.
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*For platform settings, follow these instructions: [[Regions/Platform Settings|Platform Settings]] or watch this video tutorial: [[Videos/Platform_Settings|Platform Settings]]
  
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*For how to submit your region, follow these instructions: [[Regions/Submission|Submitting Region]] or watch this video tutorial: [[Videos/Region_Submission|Region Submission]]
  
MEMBERS
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* For region management, see this page: [[Regions/Management|Region Management]]
  
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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For more advanced settings, you can see our post zones page [[Regions/Post|here]] and also our lighting an interior page [[Lighting_an_Interior|here]].
  
MULTIPLE REGION MANAGEMENT
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You can also see how Navigation Bake works [[Navigation_bake|here]], and we also have information on Occlusion Bake/Culling [[Occlusion_bake|here]].
  
Your subscription level sets the number of concurrent regions you can deploy on the live servers.
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There are also some handy lighting tips [[Regions/Lighting|here]].
  
  
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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{{Creation Navbox}}

Latest revision as of 09:43, 20 March 2019

Howtocreateashopbanner.jpg


There are different ways to build regions in space.

You can build region assets in other software packages and import into Unity.

You can use Unity's mesh shapes and terrain tools, and you can grab third party assets from the Unity Asset Store.

All of the pages linked here all refer to the Scene Export Settings/Scene Save Settings component:


Scenesavesettings.jpg


If you want to upload a region quickly, click on 'File>New Sinespace Scene' in Unity to instantly create a quick-start region.


Assemble your scene

You can upload any scene you create in Unity as a region in Space.

Once your scene is assembled you have two housekeeping tasks;


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).


Camera.jpg


Add 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.

OR;

If your Scene Heirarchy menu does not include Create other / Landmark, then;

Create empty object, then in the Inspector, add "Landmark behaviour" component.

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.


Landmark.jpg

Adding a New Scene to your Region

This does not apply if you are using Multi-Scene Mode & Multi-Scene Editing.

You can have more then one scene in your region.
1 - Create a new scene in your current Sine.Spaces project.
2 - Double click the new scene in your Assets to load it into the Hierarchy.
2 - Design your scene. Be sure to save it.
3 - When ready to upload to the server click on 'Space' Scene Settings.
4 - Fill out the needed information, map pictures, and click Automatic Submission.
To teleport between one scene to another see [Teleport World]

Create a Home Region/Template

If you want to make your region as a home type, which could be edited by the users themselves, you need to attach a component which is called "Room Floor" to one of the item in the scene, usually the terrain or the object used as a field. With at least one room floor component, the region will show "Edit Room" button when you in it. You can add several Room Floor components to different objects, each floor can be shared to another user, gives him/her the authority to edit.
In your inventory, you will also find an item with same name of the region. This is a home template. You can use it in "Edit Room" -> "Design" function, to change the whole set of a region. Of course you could set a price for it when upload, so other user can buy it in the shop.

Please see our Room Floor page for more information on the Room Floor component.

Please pay attention that ALL the room edit info, like where you put some furniture is recorded in this "Room Floor" script. When you update your region, try not to remove this component in whatever situation. If you remove an old one then attach a new one to another object, the region update will cause all the users who are using your region template to find their region has gotten reset. If you must do that, try to let users of your template know this and be prepared for the overhaul updates.

If you want to add a day/night cycle to your home region/template, please do see our Day/Night Cycle page for more information.

Region Tutorials

After placing your landmark, go to 'Sinespace' at the top of Unity, and choose 'Scene Settings'.

Follow these instructions on how to set the scene/upload settings: Upload Settings or watch this video tutorial: Scene Settings


For more advanced settings, you can see our post zones page here and also our lighting an interior page here.

You can also see how Navigation Bake works here, and we also have information on Occlusion Bake/Culling here.

There are also some handy lighting tips here.