Metaplace - Transition Tile Maker

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.

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August 28th, 2008 at 3:38 PM PDT

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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. ;)

Transition Tile Maker

This week, we're glad to release another standalone tool to help you build assets for your future Metaplace worlds! Here is the Tile Transition Maker.

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The Tile Transition Tool helps you make transition tiles between two different terrain textures. While a client engine might support procedural blending between two different terrain textures, there are effects you can only achieve by providing a set of transition tiles. This tool makes it a snap to generate the full set of transitions you might want.

How To Use It

Adding textures

You select which slot to drag a texture into by clicking on it. The selected slot will be highlighted red.

You can import a texture into a slot by either dragging one in from the desktop or by choosing Open... from the File menu. The new texture will be put in the selected slot, replacing whichever texture is there.

You'll get a preview of what that texture looks like across a 5x5 grid in the preview window, so you can use this to check that it tiles well.

Note that tile transitions will not support transparency in textures, so if you drag in a texture with transparency, it's going to get a black background in the generated transition tiles.

Deleting textures

You can delete a texture from a slot by choosing Delete Texture from the Edit menu, or hitting the Delete key.

Masks

A pulldown in between the two texture slots provides a set of default "masks." These are premade patterns that set up the ways in which the two tiles will blend. You can see a preview of the way the mask looks right under the pulldown.

You can also cycle through the available masks by just clicking on the previews.

Generating Transitions

Click the Generate Transitions button, or hit the space bar, or choose Generate Transitions from the menu. The twelve transition tiles will appear in the transition slots, and a composite preview will appear next to them displaying what the transitions and tiles would look like in actual use.

Once you have generated transition tiles, the Save Transitions button will be grayed out.

Saving

Hit CTRL-S, press the Save Transitions button, or select Save As... from the menu. Type in a filename and select a directory. Twelve textures will be saved in PNG format at 64x64 pixel files.

There is a pulldown next to the save button that lets you change the size of the saved tiles to other values instead.

The resultant filenames will automatically have numbers appended to the filename you chose.

Using Your Own Masks

This is an advanced feature.

You can add masks to the tool by clicking the Add Mask button. You will br prompted to select first a corner texture and second a straight edge texture.

Once you add a texture pair, they will be added to the pulldown menu.

We suggest you keep these textures in the folder where you keep the tool.

If you select a mask that you added, the Delete Mask button will become available.

Custom mask entries are saved in a file called transitions.ini in the folder where you keep the tool. You can edit this file by hand, if you want. The entries consist of a name for the mask pair, and the two filenames.

Masks will be automatically resized internally to be 256x256, so for pixel-perfect purposes, you probably want to start with them at that size.

A mask image should be a PNG with transparency; we suggest that you make the opaque color something easily visible against both a black background and against a transparency checkerboard grid in your preferred graphics package (we picked red, but it could easily be any color you wish).

In your graphics program, create a new file, 256x256. Make sure you create it with transparency as the background. Then You can create the opaque portion in a new layer. Your corner mask should have 3/4 of the image covered, but it doesn't really matter which 3/4. Same goes for the straight edge.

The inverse corner texture will be generated procedurally by inverting the corner texture, so make sure your corner textures are symmetrical!

Make sure the masks tile to each other as well. The preview image when you generate will be helpful in this regard.