This week in Twinity included a successful major release. If you haven’t taken visited lately, now is a great time to come back and see how much has changed. Here are the highlights:
Expanded Profile. We’ve added more information to the in-world Profile so you can tell others more about yourself and learn much more about the people you meet. You’ll now be able to see to what Groups they belong, and browse the Places they own or rent.
Groups. We’ve offered Groups on Twinity.com for quite awhile, but they’ve now been brought into the virtual world itself. Browse and join Groups in the new Community Directory, advertise your affiliations by setting an ‘Active’ Group and displaying a title above your avatar name, and expand your Group by inviting others to join.
Events. This is another feature that’s moved from the website into the virtual world. The Community Directory lists all Events happening today, tomorrow, and this week. To make it even better, we’ve finally added member-created Events; go to Twinity.com to schedule your Twinity Event!
One-Click. The most common interactions in Twinity are not just One-Click away. Moving your pointer over a chair will let you sit with just a click, moving over another Member opens their Profile with a click. Radios, Teleports, and more have been improved with One-Click actions.
Chat is Back. Members have been asking to have their chat history back, and the new version delivers. We’ve also rearranged the Chat and Friends functions to better manage your conversations.
COLLADA. Custom object upload has been a ‘quiet’ feature for some time, but it’s clear that many of you have discovered this powerful functionality. This release improves COLLADA support as we move closer to ‘official’ feature status.
Texture Size. A new slider lets you turn down the size of textures to allow speedier performance on older PCs.
Stability and Performance. More and more improvements designed to optimize the Twinity experience.
We had some troubles with out-dated search-index caches, which caused the release to take longer than expected, but by now everything seems to working smoothly and so far the new release seems to be reducing our crash — though it’s a bit early to say for sure.
Much bigger changes still lie ahead of us. We’re currently rewriting and replacing many parts of the Twinity software to further increase stability, performance and download speed. Right now this effort is about 60 percent done, but the early results are impressive and we hope to be able to make it available to you by early May. Between now and then we will continue to release several smaller updates. In the coming weeks look for better maps, navigation, and the debut of a brand-new female avatar.