vSide beta 6 released

vSide has just released Beta 6!

vSide is a Massively Multiplayer Online World for teens, centered on partying with your friends.
It's based on TGE 1.3.5, although with some fairly significant modifications here and there.


new user-facing stuff:

Apartments
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* LGA Tower - a new, larger apartment.
Users in vSide own their own apartment, customizing the surfaces, choosing YouTube videos, placing furniture, etc, etc, and with Beta 6, there's a new apartment to own. LGATower is a much larger apartment than others, allowing users to build wild environments.

* Multiple layouts per apartment
Your apartment can now have three different layouts instead of just one

* Door Codes
You can restrict access to your apartment by setting a DoorCode. Throw private parties!

* Tons more surface materials and furniture for apartments, including customizable picture frames of your friends.


Games
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* Sumo! There's now a Sumo Wrestling Hall, where you wear a sumo suit and enter sumo combat!

* The Grind - a virtual arcade game you can place in your apartment. It's got the gameplay of a classic puzzle game, but the screen is a projected hologram so your friends can spectate.

* Other casual, open-ended gameplay enablers.

Shopping & Clothes
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* Two new clothing shops and fashion lines: Modz-Podz and Kawaii, and additional gothic clothing and furnishings will be released each week.


First User Experience
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* Not so exciting for existing users perhaps, but important for vSide as a product.
We've streamlined our first user experience by letting you design your avatar's initial look on the web, and making the introductory "Gateway" world even more streamlined and fun.


Under The Hood
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* Naturally the usual bugfixes and general improvements.

* We reduced the size of our installer by about 70MB by baking in only tiny versions of our textures, and dynamically downloading the full-size versions as needed.

* A technique to capture high-quality images of players complete with transparency allowed us to automatically generate the hundreds of images needed to "design" your avatar on the website, such as these:



some screenies:
the new kawaii store with it's t-shirt-flinging octopus!


kids getting crazy in the sumo ring!


playing The Grind in a dark alleyway..


the materials and surfaces browser