As posted about in the post on August 26th, Ozimals hired a project manager who we got the chance to meet today and talk to along with Malk and Candy. Today marked the first of what will become weekly community meetings which as of now, will be held every Monday at 12-noon and 6pm SLT.
The purpose of these meetings is to give the community and Ozimals staff the chance to talk, hear about upcoming changes, talk about issues important to the community and maybe even learn things about the bunnies with the introduction of the “Ozimals Oracle”. This weekly installment will be a sort of “how to” with details about how the bunnies work, tips and more in relation to a specific topic (ie Bunny Range). For now, we’ll stick to the topics of today…
This first meeting was quite busy and included a wide range of topics. I’ll do my best to condense them for those who are unable to attend either meeting. Like the meeting, this will be the first of many posts to cover said meetings here at JFO and I will do my best to cover as many of the meetings as I possibly can.
Meet Joel Savard!
Joel is the new Project Manager with an extensive history in professional project management in a number of industries. You can learn more about Joel on his website at http://joelfoner.com/about which includes his resume.
Joel has been on Ozimals staff for a matter of a few days now and has started working with the bunnies although unlike so many of us, he doesn’t have a collection going. 
I’m sure he’ll become as addicted as the rest of us and that will soon change.
Joel’s main objectives are…
- Add to the Software Development Team – people who are accustomed to professional development in larger scaled systems
- Grow and Deliver reliable products with better testing
- Deliver the need of less patches with less problems with a longer release time in between
- Make code more reliable
- For us: Less hassle, less fooling around with software and technical things and more time to enjoy our bunnies.
Ozimals Oracle – Bunny Range
After our sort of introduction time with Joel, the meeting switched gears and we discussed this week’s Ozimals Oracle Topic – Bunny Range. It’s a pretty basic topic – one that we cover here at JFO on the Bunny Range Page but it’s a good topic for those in the community who needed clarification or maybe didn’t understand range settings at all.
Ozimals has introduced a new FREE “set up target” that you can get at the main Ozimals store (shown at left). It’s basically a set of prims with a nice target on them showing the bunny’s home position, hopping range and breeding range based on the default range settings of 5 meters. Very handy tool! Hopefully those of you who are having “food imbalance” issues will pick up this tool and use it as it will help you understand why you are having an imbalance and will fix the problem for you.
I’m not going to really get into the actual topic of bunny range settings since again, we’ve got a page for that. But I will be modifying the page to include some more information – hopefully make it easier to understand.
As always, people got out of control at the meeting and couldn’t just stay on topic. This always happens and I have to say – it’s incredibly frustrating for the people who need the information of the main topic. It probably doesn’t help that Joel asked for us to shout out some topics we can discuss at later meetings as people tend to bring them up and want to discuss them right now.
Social Bun
We’ve been waiting for Social Bun for quite a while now. Like Bunnyburry, it’s always on top of the list of questions. Today, Malk and Joel touched base with us to help us understand the delays.
Social Bun is meant to be a Community based website that will include “social things” like a friends list, associates list for more business-type connections with different privacy settings, IMs and private message capabilities, event calendars and such. But more than that, Social Bun provides ways to sell bunnies by setting them for sale, providing the SLurl to see the bunny in world and even look up bunnies that match the criteria you’re looking for.
The delay is that Social Bun also planned to include certain types of data that has since been determined to be something that can be potentially exploited – thus loosing focus on the big picture… Fun! So Ozimals has had to take a step back and evaluate the uses of Social Bun which is taking them some time. While Social Bun may be leaning towards being mostly a social networking site for bunny enthusiasts, the pedigree system is still the core of the project and will still be the only way to verify that a bunny has the correct genetics.
Bunnyburry
We touched briefly on Bunnyburry. Like Social Bun, it has it’s very own team of developers working on it. And, like Social Bun, we’ve been waiting for it’s completion for a while now. And again, like Social Bun, a few snags were caught that are delaying its official full release.
Right now, Ozimals is looking into the idea of doing away with the Tier system and allowing the community to make 1 purchase per week from any tier. This will make it so we can purchase from any of the current tiers no matter how many coins we may have. So instead of falling into Tier 3, you can still purchase from Tier 1 if you wanted. This isn’t official… they’re currently testing this idea.
But Malk was kind enough to log onto his alt Aeron Constantine and give us a look at the hutches purchasable through the Bunnyburry system once it’s complete!
I took it upon myself to edit the first image as it contained pricing on the box that is likely subject to change. Here’s Aeron showing off the box with the pictures of the hutches (at left). There are 4 colors and when buying the hutch, you get 1 of the 4 colors at random.
There are 2 sizes of hutches. One is a little smaller than the other and more of a collective display while the other is bigger and allows for the bunnies to actually hop inside (it’s also a little higher in prim.. 7 prim vs. 4).
That about wrapped up the important notes to the meeting. There is still another meeting today at 6pm SLT for you to catch. I recommend it.. it was quite informative and it’s always fun to get together with the Ozimals staff!
Sorry for the lousy pictures. Again, still have a broken computer and am borrowing my husband’s.
