Is a standard lurking?
(Visited 10634 times) Game talk
May 302007
More and more of these open networked platforms for shared 3d spaces keep popping up on my radar. Here’s a list of three new ones to add to the likes of OpenCroquet and Ogoglio.
- Muse is an oldie that I had forgotten about, but I’m linking it here for completists’ sake — it’s has been around since 1998. And it looks like the site hasn’t been updated since 2003. But there’s an SDK to download!
- Interreality’s Virtual Object System. Dates from … 1999. Their FAQ states that it’s compatible with Wndows 2000, which means, I guess, that they haven’t updated their site in a while either.
- On the other hand, Uni-Verse seems to be a going concern, and has the backing of some universities.
What else is out there lurking? Outback Online hasn’t announced specifics of what they’re doing yet, but they do have a nice list of what they’re not. 🙂
Edits from readers:
- Warb which seems to have a site over at PocketRealms
- OpenSim
- Open Source Metaverse Project
- M.U.P.P.E.T.S.
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Don’t forget OpenSim.
And the Open Source Metaverse Project.
And the M.U.P.P.E.T.S. project at RIT.
we just ran something on Yoick/Outback and Warb. Mostly the article is about Warb which is pretty cool imho. link here http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2007/05/a_preview_of_wa.html
I’ve been watching VScape for a few years
(@Trevor, they got “Emily” long before you did, though I don’t know if Kerry is using the model).
Uni-Verse seem to have their shit together way better than everyone else. Design a protocol, implement it as libraries then create a client using libraries. Unless I can come along and design my own super-duper client and/or server using my own custom libraries that run the common protocols, there’s no way it’s going to catch on.
Plus they have a flashy website and that makes me take them more seriously because I’m kind of superficial that way. *ahem*
The Interreality Project is still very active, although you are correct in noting that the FAQ (and a number of other parts of the site) haven’t been updated in years. We have taken a long view of trying to get the fundamental technology right, rather than building a flashy product that ultimately doesn’t scale up.
Unfortunately, this has also meant we’ve gone through a couple cycles of throwing everything out and rewriting it from scratch, so the actual end-user 3D client is in a perpetual state of “proof of concept” rather than being something that you can download and start doing development within the platform right away.
The new design under development will change this by ensuring that scripting support is a fundamental feature, which should drastically lower the barriers to entry for developers and users.
What it really comes down to is that crafting software for virtual worlds is hard. It involves a tremendously long list of requirements, and fundamentally every virtual world that’s been created so far has only done so by skipping over various fundamental features — which is why people are dissatisfied with the current software. The “3D Mosaic” (or Netscape) doesn’t exist yet.
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