(A piece of) Metaplace Launches!
Hey there everyone – we’ve got some exciting news.
I know you’re tired of hearing it by now, but Metaplace is a platform for virtual worlds. There are a lot of kinds of virtual worlds – we’ve shown you a puzzle game, a multiplayer arcade game, and a chat world with avatars. Our testers are busily creating more sorts of worlds, ranging from RPGs to experimental collaborative music systems, and we look forward to showcasing some of those for you in the next few weeks.
We’re still many weeks away from letting everyone into the full tools, but the time has come to start releasing some of the individual worlds that we have made and leaving them up permanently as a “sneak preview” so that people can see the breadth of what can be done with the Metaplace platform. So today we’ve released the very first Metaplace world on MySpace: Metachat.
It’s just a simple chat app, with movie playing, soccer balls to kick around, and some other features. It only uses a fraction of what Metaplace can do, but it’s a start. We invite all of you with MySpace profiles to add the app and check it out.
Over the next few weeks, you should expect to see more uses of Metaplace popping up here and there. And of course, we’ll always let you know about them right here. Expect some variety in what goes out there, since we’re intent on showing everyone the breadth of the capabilities of the platform.
This is just the start of our “sneak preview” rolling release plan, of course. We’re excited to start letting more folks touch the full platform – soon we’ll be moving into a broader beta for the tool suite, but there’s still plenty of work to do on that front. You should expect to see larger cohorts getting invited in, so keep an eye on your email. In the meantime, folks are starting to use the Iso Tile tool to make some cool art assets for when they do get in – check out the thread on the forums and join in!
Some fun architectural tidbits, to whet the appetite of those of you not yet in the closed test:
- This is not a MySpace specific app! It’s the standard Metaplace client you may have seen before in our stress tests. The same client you played Uberspace and Wheelwright in. Since Metaplace is client-agnostic, you can serve up really different sorts of worlds via the same standard client. The stuff around the client itself is leveraging OpenSocial to transparently log in MySpace accounts into Metaplace. The web-embeddable client comes with a Javascript container that lets you do stuff like that when you embed it on your own pages (eventually).
- This world was mostly the work of us in-house, but a lot of pieces were actually made by alpha testers! You can have more than one owner of a world, so we often have testers working side by side with Areae employees on projects. Also, this world leverages modules a lot, meaning that many pieces of its functionality are bits and pieces imported from other worlds.
- You’ll notice some examples of web integration, with many of the features using web services to talk to other websites. We’ve talked about this before, but it’s one thing to talk about it and another to see it in action.
- You’ll also notice that this world uses instancing; we automatically create rooms for private chats, and we create duplicate rooms if one gets too full.
- There’s even a teeny tiny bit of physics, with a soccer ball you can kick around.
- The kicker: because so many pieces were off the shelf, this was put together mostly in a week.
I really want to shout out to the alpha testers, who have done an incredible job. We really can’t wait to show you more.
Raph Koster
President
