Metaplace - Community Spotlight - Danser by Tachevert

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.

tango209 on Bravo on Ponyplace, Cuppy!

May 13th, 2008 at 3:27 PM PDT

6 Replies, 34 Views

Simokon on Larger client size possible?

May 13th, 2008 at 3:08 PM PDT

9 Replies, 144 Views

Simokon on Bravo on Ponyplace, Cuppy!

May 13th, 2008 at 2:46 PM PDT

6 Replies, 34 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. ;)

Community Spotlight - Danser by Tachevert

Hello everyone!

This is the kickoff post for a brand new weekly community spotlight that we’ll be doing every Thursday! Each week we’ll be picking a world created by one of our alpha testers and highlighting it, showing a screenshot or two, and doing a short Q&A session with the creator. We hope you’ll look forward to seeing a peek of the wide diversity of possibilities that our users are already making with Metaplace!

Our first choice is Danser, a social music world created by Tachevert. Here is his Q&A!

Can you tell us a bit about "Danser"?

Danser is an experiment in creating a social music world. Players can just hang out in the world and chat -- but there's also a game to pick up and play musical notes. Everyone in the world "plays" music in synchronization, and so everyone gets choices to make. You can hide in the corner to avoid picking up notes to play, and just chat. You can try to coordinate with your neighbors and pick up pleasant harmonies together -- or you can antagonize them with dissonant countermelodies.

How long has it taken you to build this world so far?

Most of the work in Danser was finished in a couple of weekends. Once I'd pick the game up, I found it hard to put down! Of course, this has gone faster than I expected, because some components (such as text chat) were easily imported from modules created by other Metaplace users!

What has been your favorite part about building this world?

The framework provided by Metaplace has been one of the easiest I've ever tried for getting multiple players interacting in the same shared virtual space! I've been able to skip a lot of the "drudgery" that's usually involved, and get into "playing" in almost no time -- and that's just fun!

Where did you obtain the art for "Danser"?

It may be shocking, given the depth of perspective and stunning realism of the avatars, but this art rolled off my very own Wacom tablet.

Do you have any other worlds or games in mind to build on Metaplace, or are you working on anything else right now?

I have so many ideas that I often don't know where to start tinkering on a given night! :) In my short time in the alpha test to date, I've been able to experiment with a lot. I've been able to use Metaplace as a platform to deliver richly interactive online learning content to an open-source Moodle platform, I've toyed with some interactive video, and I've even been able to pitch in to help create a game lobby that the Areae folks used in a public stress test.

And then there are, of course, the tomatoes... but that's all I'm going to say about that.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I've been gaming since my Commodore Vic-20, got hooked on the bizarre combination of MUDs and Civilization-style world-building games in my youth, and then Star Wars Galaxies kicked off my current main vice of MMORPGs. I went to school for Computer Engineering and ended up doing a bunch of different tasks, from writing AI software in C++ to manufacturing microchips to business and E-Learning web development.

I've been co-running a blog site for a couple of years now at http://www.worldiv.com/blog discussing crazy MMO design ideas, and other stuff in the MMO and videogame world.

Stay tuned for next week's spotlight post!