Metaplace - Metaplace Community Spotlight

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.

Diehvel on Alpha Closed?

July 24th, 2008 at 8:54 AM PDT

3 Replies, 28 Views

DarknessFalls on Alpha Closed?

July 24th, 2008 at 8:49 AM PDT

3 Replies, 28 Views

Diehvel on HELLO RED NAMES

July 24th, 2008 at 8:42 AM PDT

12 Replies, 127 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. ;)

Metaplace Community Spotlight - MPCards by Scopique

This week's community spotlight is switching it up a little bit, and highlighting something different other than a world. One of our testers, Scopique, has made a really neat XBox Live Gamercard-like signature image that dynamically displays the badges that users have earned within Metaplace. We liked them so much, that we're using them too! This is a unique spotlight because it displays the work also of another alpha tester, DrOffset, who provided the background art for the badges. Enjoy our interview with Scopique.

1) Can you tell us a bit about the badges you have made for Metaplace users?

The badges are dynamically created from the web service feeds provided for every MetaPlace Alpha user and include information such as worlds that were created by the user, the MetaPlace badges they've earned, and the avatar icon that the user has chosen for their MetaPlace account.

I had been thinking about what I wanted to use for my MetaPlace forum signature at the time, and thought it would be cool to have a signature that was dynamically created from my MetaPlace profile. The first format that came to mind was that of the Xbox Live GamerCards which provide a lot of information in graphical format that one can "use anywhere".

2) How long did it take you to make these?

It took only about two days for the first iteration, which is the index card style. Once that format was set and introduced, I created another, thinner version which is better suited to use as a forum signature. I already had code which interfaced with the web services, and some code which could layer different images, so it didn't take long to put the two together.

3) What has been your favorite part about working with Metaplace so far?

The people have been fantastic; everyone -- both the Areae staff and the community members -- are always willing to help one another. It's been great to see what the community has been doing with the tools, and a lot of that information is being posted for all to learn from and use.

Sometimes people can be really protective of their knowledge, but the Alpha testing has really benefited from all of the people who are willing to share their hard work with others.

4) Where did you obtain the art for the badges?

The user avatars, world and badge icons are on the MetaPlace servers and are available through a few of the many Web Service feeds provided by MetaPlace. The badges simply load the images from the web as specified by the web service feed.

5) Did you work alone or collaborate with others?

I worked alone in coding up the pages used to collect the images and generate the badge image, and Dr. Offset provided the background images and layout for the badges.

6) If not finished, what else do you have planned for the badges?

I'm still looking into adding mouse-over functionality to display the world names when you hover over the world images. I'd also like to create some other versions for use as forum avatars. Any other suggested uses are always welcome!

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

My main project is MetaPunk, a cyberpunk themed MMO that's getting a lot of positive feedback so far. We're only in the planning stages right now over at MetaPunk.net, but we've got a a few of the prototype systems in development right now.

We've got a lot of ideas that we're excited to develop for MetaPunk, and I think that because MetaPlace is powerful enough to allow us to build something that's feature-rich without us going into debt to third party sources, we can take a lot of chances that more mainstream MMOs simply aren't able to do. Whether or not the public likes it is another matter :D

8) Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

My name is Chris Smith, 34, and I'm a professional web developer living in New Hampshire with my wife Isabelle and our 7 year old daughter. I've been a gamer for over 20 years now, and have always wanted to create games, but haven't had the head for graphics programming. I'm looking forward to using MetaPlace to build MetaPunk, and to see all of the fantastic things people will do with it.

Thanks for the interview!

Thank you Scopique for the interview!