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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Media Info

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!

Contact Info
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:
FAQ
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!

Developer Blog

Alpha Applications are Closed

Hi everyone!  I just wanted to drop a quick note to let you all know that our alpha application has been closed down for new submissions.  We have received over 10,000 applications in under a week!  For you stats fans out there, we averaged one every 45 seconds!  Whew!  Thank you all for the interest and for taking the time to fill out our application.  We'll begin letting in our first round of testers soon and start paving our pathway to beta.  We will be rolling over the alpha applications to our beta testing -- so please do not feel slighted if we are unable to choose you for our initial alpha testing.  In the meantime, please sign up for our metamail to stay on top of all of the latest Metaplace news.

Thank you again for all your interest and great questions.  Keep it coming!

Tami "Cuppycake" Baribeau
Community Manager

Previous Post | 36 Comments | Next Post
Posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 1:03 PM PDT

Reader Comments

AnjelusX said:
And now the waitin' an anticipatin' begins.
on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 3:13 PM PDT:
Cuppycake said:
That's the fun part ;)
on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 12:40 AM PDT:
AnjelusX said:
lol Cuppy I've known either to be particularly fun, unless it's the act of watching others wait and anticipate so I concede it could be fun from that point of view, and huzzah for the above random spam
on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 4:45 AM PDT:
Forgedchaos said:
So when can we expect to find out if we're in the alpha or not
on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 8:09 AM PDT:
Yum said:
Dang i missed the sign up. Oh well :)
on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 9:31 AM PDT:
Luca said:
w00t!!

looking above, it seems you also got your first spam comment. Way to go :D
on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 9:48 AM PDT:
Jason said:
Sigh, there's always one.
on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 9:50 AM PDT:
AnjelusX said:
Actually the first spamming comment was some crazy html coding to all sorts of nonsense, which I found vastly amusing
on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 11:26 AM PDT:
Moriegame said:
Snif:( I also missed the sign up. I'll keep a close watch on Metaplace for future developments. The ideas for my game are ready :P
on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 1:06 AM PDT:
M said:
Is it true that I read there are only going to be 50 places to start with from the 10,000 or so who applied for alpha, tell me it ain't...?
on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 7:20 AM PDT:
Wendelius said:
"Is it true that I read there are only going to be 50 places to start with from the 10,000 or so who applied for alpha, tell me it ain't...?"

Cuppycake replied to that here:http://www.metaplaces.de/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t;=114

"There will be more than 50 slots. ;) We're looking to START at 50, and then ramp up from there -- most likely up to about 500 in alpha before moving on to beta. Hope that helps. =)"

So only to START with.

Wendelius
on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 8:48 AM PDT:
Anna said:
Hi!
I hope to get a meta place but I see that it is "shut down". Could you please let me know when it will be up and running again. I would really, really like to create a meta place. Thanks!

Anna
on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 7:53 PM PDT:
Iaian7 said:
I'm happy to say I got my application for Alpha in on time... but I know friends who'd love to help, and didn't. Will you be accepting new applications for Beta testing? (though with that many applications just for alpha, no one's blaming you if you don't) Keep up the good work, I can't wait to see where it goes from here!
on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 10:29 PM PDT:
GUSTAVO said:
e ai queria saber comofazer seu metaplace
on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 3:39 PM PDT:
tomas en lotte said:
i wil builjd me own game
on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 12:08 PM PDT:
simonlebon111 said:
blablabla
on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 1:44 PM PDT:
Johnnys Stardust said:
I am Japanese men.
I wont to submit.
on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 8:09 PM PDT:
audiophil said:
man this sounds positively insane... Cant wait for it to come out =D
shame i missed the alpha... =/
on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 12:26 PM PDT:
Adele said:
Very interesting! A lot of fun should come out of this.
on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 4:51 PM PDT:
Gabby said:
I can't remember anything I put on when I made my account! Holy crud, is that bad?
on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 at 10:40 AM PDT:
Adam said:
Im glad i made it in time.
Is there a rough time frame we should expect the opening of this?
on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 7:50 AM PDT:
Gabe said:
Gabe likes.

Let more people test it,
please, please *breaks down into tears* please..
on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 12:32 PM PDT:
Tim said:
Hi Metaplace! Not intending to be rude but when are you actualy gonning to release Metaplace? It's just that I'm a naturaly inpatient person, and signed up ages ago. Please e-mail me back :)
on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 1:08 PM PDT:
Jed said:
I think I love you guys. Is that weird?
on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 6:57 PM PDT:
Hunter Schneider said:
When will metaplace be up and running for the public?
on Saturday, October 6th, 2007 at 2:22 AM PDT:
crackruckles said:
Does it work on sub domains and if not does anybody no where to get a free domain from?

Can i modify it later cause im a programer too but i just dont have the time to make a virtual world so is metaplace open source or not?

please email me back with the answer's
many thanks crackruckles.
on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 7:44 AM PDT:
williamperry80 said:
i was reading the san francisco cronical yesterday i had found
an artical in the tecnologie and business section on vertual online
world as wel information on gaia habbo imvu metaplace looking forword to the cute social blogging conection
on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 3:19 PM PDT:
Raam said:
[quote]
Cuppycake said:
That's the fun part ;)
on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 12:40 AM PDT:
[/quote]

Err... depends on how patient people are I suppose? :)
on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 2:01 PM PDT:
Ripper McGee said:
Can't wait to either participate (hopefully) or at least see what others have created!

~Ripper
on Saturday, October 13th, 2007 at 1:28 PM PDT:
Marcus said:
when is Metaplace going to work ?
i can't wait much longer ! =]
on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 6:07 PM PDT:
Oliver said:
Aw! I missed the signup! Best of luck to everyone who tried to get in, make something cool so I can be inspired for when sign ups become public!
on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 3:49 AM PDT:
Jewel said:
we've wanted to join for so long, ever since our prof told us about this place. please contact us when u can give us slots.. :(
on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 7:23 AM PDT:
Kay said:
hey i wanna make my website virtual i have been searching this for a year now.
on Sunday, October 28th, 2007 at 11:14 AM PDT:
Jokern102 said:
Ahh, I can wait!
on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 12:30 PM PDT:
Brittany said:
How do I sign up? it says alpha sign up is closed.....
on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 10:37 PM PST:
sitemap said:
Nice site. Thank you:-)
sitemap
on Monday, December 31st, 2007 at 9:51 AM PST: