Metaplace - Web Services

Metaplace! That's what!

Build a virtual apartment and put it on your website. Work with friends to make a huge MMORPG. Share your puzzle game with friends. We have a vision: to let you build anything, and play everything, from anywhere. Eventually, anyway. We have to finish first.

robh on ESRB Rating?

August 28th, 2008 at 3:38 PM PDT

5 Replies, 89 Views

Delvie on August Update

August 28th, 2008 at 1:51 PM PDT

1 Replies, 26 Views

Monkey Rogue on my game ideas- vertical shooter

August 28th, 2008 at 12:27 PM PDT

1 Replies, 9 Views

Feel like writing about Metaplace.com on your own site? Maybe you're a journalist? Here you'll find all sorts of materials that might make that easier: fact sheets, screenshots, logos and other artwork, and all the other handy stuff that goes in a Media Kit. Go nuts -- you've got blanket permission to use any of this stuff!

www.areae.net

Areae, Inc.

11770 Bernardo Plaza Court
Suite 101

San Diego, CA 92128

USA

Phone: 858-451-2700 Fax: 858-451-2722

For press enquiries, please email: metaplace@consortpartners.com

What is Metaplace?

Our motto is: build anything, play everything, from anywhere. Until now, virtual worlds have all worked like the closed online services from before the internet took off. They had custom clients talking to custom servers, and users couldn't do much of anything to change their experience. We're out to change all of that.

Metaplace is a next-generation virtual worlds platform designed to work the way the Web does. Instead of giant custom clients and huge downloads, Metaplace lets you play the same game on any platform that reads our open client standard. We supply a suite of tools so you can make worlds, and we host servers for you so that anyone can connect and play. And the client could be anywhere on the Web.

We hope there will be millions of worlds made with Metaplace. It could get hard to find stuff if we're right, so the portal lets you easily search, rate, review, and tag worlds and games of all sorts. You also get a user profile so you can find each other.

Can I make my own world?

That's sort of the whole point. You should be able to stage up a massively multiplayer world with basic chat and a map you can build on in less than five minutes. It's that easy. Inherit a stylesheet -- puzzle game, or shooter, or chat world -- and off you go! Building maps and places is as easy as pasting in links from the Web, and dragging and dropping the pictures into your world.

What's more, you can link your world to someone else's world. Put a doorway in your virtual apartment that leads to Pirate Vs Ninja-land! Stick your world in a widget on your Facebook or MySpace profile. Mail it to a friend and they can log in with one click.

What sorts of worlds can I make?

You can make pretty much any sort of game or world you want. You can decide whether it's massively multiplayer or not (it's MMO out of the box, but you can set it to a lower size if you want). You can decide whether to have physics or not, you can change the keymappings and the interface, the sort of stuff there is in the world, the maps... basically, it's all up to you. Game logic is written in MetaScript, which is based on Lua. So it's easy to make whatever kind of game or world that you want.

Metaplace will support everything from 2d overhead grids through first-person 3d. However, right now we only have clients that do 2d of various sorts, including grid view, 2d isometric, 2.5d heightfields, and so on. We expect to keep working on the 3d client support.

How does it interact with the web?

We speak Web fluently. Every world is a web server, and every object has a URL. You can script an object so that it feeds RSS, XML, or HTML to a browser. This lets you do things like high score tables, objects that email you, player profile pages right on the player -- whatever you want. Every object can also browse the Web: a chat bot can chatter headlines from an RSS feed, a newspaper with real headlines can sit on your virtual desk, game data could come from real world data... you get the idea. No more walled garden.

Who makes it?

Metaplace is made by Areae, Inc. We're a team of veterans of the game and Web industries who thought that the current way of doing things was kinda slow and didn't give users like you enough control. Check out the company website to learn more about us!

Also, feel free to sign up for . Our newsletter will keep you in the loop. ;)

Web Services

We have often stated that Metaplace “speaks web fluently.” In today’s blog post, we will elaborate a bit more on what we mean by this.

To begin, every Metaplace world process is also a web server. It can issue both outgoing web requests of arbitrary type, and handle incoming web requests as well.

This means that any Metaplace world is capable of creating a web request from script, and then issuing that request to an arbitrary outside web service. The game server provides useful API methods to easily parse the responses from these web service, including REST-like XML parsing and RSS. You can also pull entire web pages and regex parse (string match) the response manually for more granular control if you wish. Examples of this include issuing queries to outside SQL databases from an object in-game, pulling external real-time stock quotes into your world, getting the latest RSS news from CNN and feeding it to a town crier NPC chat bot, slurping real-time sports scores into your in-game sports bar, pulling YouTube videos into a wall in your apartment, etc. This also means that objects and scripts in your world can transmit outgoing data such as badges, in-game events, or game scores to an external database or web service. This allows for a nearly limitless extension of game functionality out across the internet.

Additionally, because every Metaplace world is also an embedded web server, external services can make requests of the game process through a simple CGI-like interface. This means that an external webpage could call into the server process and access real-time data on individual objects currently in the world. It is also possible to issue events through the game simulation using this interface, meaning that you could spawn a monster in-game when someone clicks on a webpage link, for example.

Because this functionality is customizable and defined by the world owner through script, world builders are free to define this behavior themselves in any arbitrary format to suit their particular needs. This also allows a world builder to externally expose only the data and functionality that they explicitly choose to. World builders are free to use all or none of this functionality on a case-by-case basis, depending on their world’s desired functionality, and user skill level.

Furthermore, because script functionality is inherently modular, complex web service implementations can be packaged into module format and published across the service. This would allow even beginner world builders to import such functionality into their worlds with just a few clicks of the mouse. A town-crier NPC that pulls its chat dialogue from an external news RSS feed, for example, can be packaged as one simple module that any world builder could use in their world, without any knowledge of web programming required.

Dorian Ouer

Server/Client Engineer

As a reminder, we are having our Developer Chat this week. You probably want to update your Flash player to the latest version. Please check back here on Thursday, January 31 at 5:00pm Pacific Standard Time to participate! We look forward to chatting with everyone.