Hi Twinizens,

We’ll have a major update of Twinity today and expect a downtime of at least 3 hours starting at 10:30 CET. Expect some cool new features to come. We’ll post the release notes here in the blog. Stay tuned.

Your Twinity Team

Twinizens,

Probably a lot of you have noticed that some things on www.twinity.com aren’t working properly at the moment. We ran into a few unexpected problems when we upgraded Rails. We’ve been working hard on fixing all the issues, and most should be done by end of week.

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.

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Last week we were fully focused on improving our crash rate, a new engine core version is currently in testing that will fix a number of crashes. We still do not understand the reason for all of the crashes and freezes, but we look at every single crash-dump you send us to get to the bottom of the problems.

Next week we plan a big release which will include the new engine core plus a number of new features around groups, events, member profile, chat and simplified interaction with objects in world. We’ll work hard to deliver a smooth release and will spend this week mostly on testing and bug-fixing.

In the next weeks we will finish an exiting new tool, that will allow you to build any floor-plan you like in Twinity. We would like to do a little closed beta test with it, before releasing it to everyone. If you like to help us test and improve the tool, please send a mail to support@twinity.com.

Spring is finally with us, and with the changing seasons come great changes in Twinity. There are more fun new features coming up in the next few weeks than the Easter bunny could carry in a single basket … unless we’re talking about some kind of super-strong, mutant rabbit, of course. Or maybe even a robot rabbit.

Before offering glowing descriptions of features that haven’t quite arrived, it seems appropriate to address the ups and downs of the current Twinity. And by up and down, I mean the ongoing struggle against the dreaded Crash Rate.

The crash rate is a simple measure of how many Twinity Members are having poor experiences using the Twinity software. A couple of weeks ago, we identified a major cause of crashes in the chat system, and by turning off some chat features quickly saw the crash rate cut in half. We then fixed these problems and turned the chat features back on … only to find that a bit of old code had slipped back in and pushed the crash rate right back up again. Chat is once again off, and the crash rate is back down. With our next release, we expect to end this up and down once and for all and have pushed all of our technical resources into lowering the crash rate permanently.

But onto the new! Regular Twinity visitors have already noticed any number of small improvement throughout Twinity — the most visible, probably, being the ability to teleport directly to many of the most famous places in the virtual city of Berlin. We’ll continue to enhance the tourist attractions.

Last week also saw the release of a completely rebuilt voice chat system. We know the new system is much more reliable than the old version, but we’ll likely need to make additional adjustments to maximize the quality of voice chat in Twinity. If you have never used voice chat, or haven’t used it awhile, please give it a try and let us know what you think. Your feedback will help get this feature right.

Looking forward, in the next few weeks you’ll start seeing some of the features Twinity Members have most requested; specifically, Member Groups in Twinity (and not just on the website) and an in-world Events Calendar. We think these will be great new tools to inspire our already amazing community, and we can’t wait to see how you’ll use them. You’ll also get a whole new look for the Chat and Friends window and expanded information in Member Profile. We’ve also reworked some of the ways in which Members interact with the virtual world to make it easier and more intuitive.

What’s coming after that? It’s too soon say too much, but expect to see many more ways in which you can bring your creativity into Twintiy!

The release last week brought some nice new features and improvements which are listed: here. Unfortunately, it also came with some instabilities like patch-problems, client-freezes, connectivity issues and problems with place access management. We hope to have fixed most of these with the hot-fix patch today.

Next week we plan to release a new version of our rendering engine. It will improve the support for Collada model uploads and add the ability to have dynamic billboards in the city. Also our new female avatar is getting close to completion. All clothes and animations had to be adapted. Currently we are working on new haircuts. The avatar will have better body proportions and its animation skeleton will produce more natural movements.

One feature we have been working on in the past weeks is voice-chat. We would be very interested to hear how voice-chat works for you. Best send us a message via in-world feedback or comment to this blog-post. Thank you.

We are currently preparing the next release, which will bring some nice improvements like simplified private chat, additional outdoor spawn-points for better city navigation, improved voice chat reliability and better handling of large friend-lists. We target next Tuesday as release date.

Meanwhile we follow our new strategy to push out improvements and bug-fixes in-between releases. To avoid client freezes we temporarily disabled the chat window. It will be back with the next release. Another related problem was fixed with a patch today: Sorting the chat bubbles in 3D was sometimes causing freezes. Also we had to take back an experimental feature to compress texture size on low-end hardware, because it does not work correctly and needs more investigation. Now everyone will see the full texture resolution again.

Finally a request to content creators: We are currently beta-testing the Collada model upload functionality (models can be found on Google warehouse or exported from 3d-modeling tools). If you have problems uploading a specific model, please send it to support and we will investigate the problem and try to fix it.

Twinity is still in beta and we thus still need to improve many things. We got comments from members who want to learn more about what is going on behind the scenes. That’s why we are happy to introduce a new section in our newsletter with updates about the Twinity development progress.

I will post the same text here on the blog, to give you an opportunity to comment on the development news.

You might have noticed recently an increase in the number of patches. This comes from our new strategy to release bug-fixes and features as frequently as possible. To keep the disturbance to the community to a minimum, we try our best to update Twinity only within two fixed release windows per week: Tuesday and Thursday between 11 and 12am CET.

Last week the patches included fixes for a crash on Athon processors, fix for a freeze during teleport and faster city loading. Also, Twinity remembers your last position in the city now. The next patch will fix an error with flat-mates, should fix a bad freeze during chatting, and will improve the performance on machines with small video memory.

Also you might have noticed a couple of short server outages last week. We updated our MMO server two weeks ago and had some nasty issues with outdated configuration files. Since mid-last week no further server-crashes occurred, so we think we have caught the problem.

For the next weeks our main focus will be stability. We fight hard to reduce crashes, freezes and server drops. This requires some low-level changes on the thread-synchronization layer and our resource management. These improvements take time and some cool features (such as vehicles) unfortunately have to be put on hold, until we are happy with the stability.

Other things we are working on are better media playback, more reliable voice-chat, better performance with long friend lists, and a more beautiful female avatar. More about this in the next newsletter.