Cloud Party CEO Sam Thompson: Socialverse appAvatar Shape-Tweaking Sliders, Island Search, More Camera Control Coming Soon

Cloud Party CEO Sam Thompson stopped by New World Notes to comment on Iris Ophelia’s post on “3 Things Cloud Party Needs to Attract Virtual Fashionistas” and confirmed that yes, those three things she’s looking for — avatar shape-tweaking sliders, island search, more camera control — are coming soon to the web-based, user-generated, Cory Ondrejka-backed virtual world. That, and more:

“We are very much on the same page,” wrote Thompson, “all three of these features were already on our todo list in some form or another. In fact, we pushed a very basic island name search function (in the navigation app) just moments ago.”

More detail from Thompson, who also talked addressed the skepticism some have with Cloud Party, after the break:

“The self-portrait mode on the camera phone is definitely coming soon. In the meantime you can zoom out by scrolling back, and then use left-click to rotate around your character. Not nearly good enough (no panning or composition control), but a start.

“Adding sliders for avatar adjustment is a bit more complicated, but something we’ve built these avatars to handle, and something we have a lot of experience with from working at Cryptic Studios. We also have more initial clothing choices coming, but figure that getting a marketplace up and running will be a quicker solution to the problem of not having enough clothes selection.

“Also, I understand being skeptical about us as we are a new company on the block and no one knows who we are, but please believe me that we are here to stay and absolutely listening to our users. We have not taken some massive VC Tiktok for crypto round or hired a bunch of marketing people: we’re 4 programmers and an artist in an old office with an ant problem. This is our first company, and we’re all game developers that wanted to try something new. I’m pretty excited about where Cloud Party could be in a few more months, and I hope you will help us build it into something lasting and great.”

Moral of the story: Iris Ophelia gets results. Or alternately: Cloud Party developers are dynamic and responsive to what Cloud Party needs to succeed.

For what it’s worth, having played a couple Cryptic MMOs pretty extensively, I would trust former Cryptic folks more than most to put together some good slider options.

I think both Champions and Star Trek Online had an issue where faces could look a little “samey” without using extremes, and the faces in Champions were just not all that attractive to begin with, but I’m hoping those will both be examples of lessons learned that will inform the sliders that Cloud Party will eventually have. If these devs were 100% unknown entities in that regard I’d be a lot more worried.

what makes you think all 800 million Facebook accounts are real people? Facebook itself admits 50 million of their accounts are fake names, and the true number is likely higher.

Some of those are “innocent fakes”, like creating a separate account for facebook games, so you don’t spam friends and family with game messages. Then there are people who care about their privacy or stalking, and lastly the “commercial fakes”, accounts created just for the purpose of linking to websites or business to make money.

In my material life a friend visited me this evening. I casually mentioned CP as ‘an interesting thing’ and gave her a demo on my desk top system.

I then wandered off to make coffee. When I returned they had taken out their laptop, gone to their FB account, flipped over to CP, and were half way through the integrated tutorials while wandering around the beginner zone.

By the way, if you are an artist in SL and you have been making exhibits by creating mesh objects and importing them into SL, you can at present import those objects into Cloud Party for FREE!. (see caveats 1, 2 & 3)

If you are familiar with the building tools of Unity3d, then you will have no conceptual problems with the CP building tools. If not, you’re primary learning point will be that putting textures on objects is a two step process. Object surfaces have materials placed on them. Materials themselves include a texture as one of their properties.

If you need scripts written, there are eager souls wandering around that place who are experimenting with interactive scripting. The language syntax is different from LSL, however once you get used to the expressive style, you’ll see that the functionality is similar.

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caveat 1: If in SL you’ve been accepting free exhibition space from various corporate or institutional landowners, or have been competing in creative contests for prizes, you might want to check the fine print on your terms of sponsorship. In RL people who accept such largess often discover that they have signed away their creator rights.

caveat 2: Land, known as zones in CP, is not free. However there are numerous sandboxes, known as public zones, within which you can experiment. Just move away from the now over crowded Beginner Zone.

caveat 3: At present you can get a small free plot once you complete the building tutorial. Since CP has started selling land just yesterday, you might consider jumping into CP, completing the brief lessons, and claiming a free plot while the offer still stands.