New Photo Tour

I know I’ve been really quiet for quite some time now.  I’ve been working on a couple ‘top secret’ projects and I didn’t have much that I could offer my readers.

But now I do have a couple things to offer.  One is a new and improved photo tour which should be less time consuming.  Those of you who have done the photo tour in the past know how slow it is.

The old photo tour was arranged in what I call a hub configuration, where a central location had a door for each photo op.  Going from one photo op to the next required two teleports: one to go back to the hub, and another to go to the next photo op.

Here’s a link to the new photo tour for Facebook users and another one for MySpace. These links will take you to the first of 25 rooms. Just keep going left-to-right. MySpace users may also leave comments for their daily coin run. Please no gifts though, because I am already flooded with stuff.

Update: Here are links for the end of the photo tour: Facebook and MySpace.  This is useful if you get disconnected halfway through, because you can start at the end and work backwards.

The new photo tour is in a chain configuration, where each photo op has a teleport door to take you to the next photo op directly.  Like so:

This is much faster.

The reason I didn’t set up a chain configuration before is that it requires every photo op to be very reliable, because a single error can ruin the entire setup.  If the photo ops are not under my control, then it’s hard to guarantee that they won’t break the chain, and if they do break the chain, it’s hard to fix.

I felt that the hub configuration was good enough, but even that got to be a problem because some of the photo op owners would change their setup to have multiple doors, which turned into a maze-like web of photo ops, which led people to get lost.  I think it’s good if more people decide to offer photo tours, but I don’t want mine to confuse visitors in a maze of doors.  That’s part of the reason I decided to set up the chain configuration photo tour.

So what else have I been up to?  What’s in the works?

I am putting together a website, which is almost ready, that will allow people to make their own custom whiteboards.  I’ve got a video posted, and I hope to have the website ready in a couple days.

After that is up and running, I am contemplating a url service which will provide links for those popup things that are normally posted to your Facebook wall.  Like factory mystery gifts, puppies, red/green/blue keys, Hollywood stars, and all that junk.  The problem with posting a raw URL (on Facebook or anywhere else) is that after a few people have clicked on it, it no longer works.  But a little web app can keep track of how many people have clicked on a link, and discard the URL once it has been consumed.

Then, after I’m done with that, I think I’ll re-do the maxing program.  I’m sorry to everyone who is wanting an update to the maxing program sooner rather than later.  As you can see, I’ve got a lot on my plate right now.  I am hoping in a week or two!

Links to Specific Rooms

Today someone was asking me, how do you make a link to a specific room, like the ones in the photo tour post?

First, go to YoVille.com and go to the profile of the owner of the room.  (This might be difficult if it is not your room or one of your buddies’ rooms, and in that case I can’t help you.)

Click the Homes tab, choose which house has the room, and click on the room to bring up a larger view:

Once the large view of that room is showing, at the bottom you should see a button to visit this room:

When you click this button, you will be taken to a URL on YoVille.com that will take you directly to this room in the game:

Now, if you want to create links for Facebook or MySpace, you need to take special note of the room identifier, which is the part after “d=” but not including “&poe=200”.  So in this example it would be h23017951.

For Facebook, the url would be

http://apps.facebook.com/yoville/index.php?autologin=1&d=XXXXXXXX

And for MySpace, the url is

http://profile.myspace.com/Modules/Applications/Pages/Canvas.aspx?appId=111238&appParams={%22zy_path%22%3A%22index.php%3Fautologin%3D1%26d%3dXXXXXXXX%22}

Where you would replace the red X’s with the room ID.

Enjoy!

The Photo Tour

The photo tour is a way to get coins and points with photos.  A high-scoring photo (score of 1000 or higher) will give 20 points and between 15 and 20 coins.

Unfortunately, you can only get one free film at each place.  Even different rooms in the same house, or different houses owned by the same avatars will only give one free film per day.  So to get lots of coins and points, you have to visit homes owned by different avatars.  This is where the photo tour comes in.

Each teleport door leads to a photo op owned by a different avatar.  I don’t have many avatars, so I enlisted my friends to help create the photo ops.

Since each one is owned by someone different, you can go from one photo op to the next to the next, getting one free film at each one.  So you don’t out of film after only five photos.

Unfortunately this can’t go on forever because there is a daily limit of 25 free film you can get this way.  But still, that’s a decent number of coins and especially points (if you’re not already level 50).

Here are links for Facebook and MySpace.  Enjoy!

Room Decorating Game

There is a lot I want to say about maxing, trading, and whiteboard art, but first I want to talk about the new room decoration game.

Update Feb 4th: They seem to have caught on and fixed the gift loophole.  Darn! (But I’m leaving this article as is, even though it doesn’t work anymore.)

Specifically, what I think most people are interested in: it’s possible to get all rooms completed without spending money

Here’s the basic idea of how the game works:

You get up to 550 points for arbitrary, pretty much BS reasons

I say BS reasons because in a brand new room you can, for example, get the “plantastic” bonus for placing three herbs in the room, but in another room that has already reached 550 points, those very same three herbs will not get you any bonus at all.  Is it a coincidence that all rooms stop getting easy points at 550?  Trying to chase the specific bonuses like “plantastic” or “ruggy” is a waste of time and energy.

So how do you get past 550 points?

You get points whenever you place a “new” item in a room

You may have noticed some items in your inventory are marked as “new”.  Beyond 550 points, it seems that only items marked as “new” contribute to room score when they are placed, and the number of points they contribute is directly related to the value of the item.  More expensive items add more points.

Placing an item in a room removes its new status, which means you can’t simply move the items to another to a second room to add points to the second room also.  Only the first room gets the points, and after that it’s not new anymore.

Does that mean that you have to spend money to get decorating points?  Not quite, because:

Items are “new” when you buy them from the store, or when you receive them as gifts

Buying new items from the stores is certainly one way to get room points, albeit a costly one.  But they also made it so that items received as gifts are always considered new.  This is true even if they were not new before they were given.  In other words, giving an item as a gift restores its status as new!

Incidentally, transferring an item via trade does not restore its new status.

This means that by giving items back and forth between two players, you can get the room decorating points over and over again from a single item.  It works best with more expensive items, since it requires fewer placements to complete a room.

Here are some random items I tested, and their point value:
2400 points:  Shark Attack
4415 points:  Interactive Sandbox
1732 points:  Whiteboard
1222 points:  Floating Mine
3800 points:  Spotlight Mic
600 points:  Yellow Pool Shark

It requires a total of 15,000 points for a room to be 100% complete.

More on the decorating game later…