Metaplace Stress Test

Want a sneak preview of one space-shooter games made with Metaplace? This one is entitled Uberspace, and you can see it in another stress test of the Metaplace platform to test scalability, bandwidth, and instancing within a multiplayer space.

Stop by their website at http://www.metaplace.com on Saturday, March 8 at 12:00pm (noon) PST to challenge other players in a space shooting game and help them out!

Metaplace Developer Chat

For those wanting to know how did the Metaplace Developer Chat went, you might want to read this two links:

http://smallr.net/metaplace-chat gives you some nice screenshots and talks about the event itself.

http://smallr.net/metaplace-transcript has a chat transcript.

More news about Metaplace... tomorrow

Metaplace [1] is basicly a platform to easily create a Virtual World. The aim is to make it easy for anyone to create a simple Virtual World (like, for instance, create just a virtual room and put it in your MySpace profile), but also an extensible framework that lets you make real complex stuff. Theoreticly - at least - it is flexible enough to make exactly the kind of VW you want, putting the limits just in your imagination. An alpha is running for a while for a few selected people that had to sign an NDA - so we don't really know much about it. In less than a week, 10,000 people applied to that alpha (including me), but only a selected few had access to it. Now, some questions are arising, including:

• When can we expect Metaplace to reach beta phase?
• How soon do Areae expect that a new round of Alpha testers will be let in?
• When will the NDA be lifted allowing the alpha testers to tell us all the good things they know?

These, and more, are going to be answered in a "Developer Chat" tomorrow at 5:00pm PST (9:00am GMT), in... a Metaplace :-) I'll try to be there [2], and you?

[1] - http://mindboosternoori.blogspot.com/search/label/Metaplace
[2] - http://www.metaplace.com/

OpenAvatarID

When I heard about Raph Koster [1] creating Areae I got excited. When I heard him talking about it I got more excited. Then, when I heard him talking about his more deep insights about the future of Virtual Worlds I got... scaried. No way a guy with such a vision would make such, in my point of view, mistakes. But he did: in the middle of awsome texts he would drop here and there something I wasn't liking. So, when I knew that Areae was announcing its product, I was extremely curious and yet afraid that it would come something I would not like. He announced Metaplace, and I got the feeling that, after all, he was doing well - heck - I badly want to try it. It was exactly I was looking for! Since it is in a closed beta stage, I can only but read everything I find about Metaplace, but today I got... disappointed. I'm not going to dig into that issue this time, since this isn't a post about Metaplace (I'll leave that to a later time), but some things he said that was just shocking to me. For instance, Metaverse's default client (the one they provide) communicates using telnet [2]. Hello? Communicating credentials and conversations via telnet from a Flash app (client side, you know?) to your servers? Have you never heard about encryption? Anyway, in the same day I posted about "one avatar to rule them all" [2], where I talked about companies like Linden Lab and IBM that believe that virtual worlds should be capable of accepting visits from other worlds' avatars, if they owners want, I read this interview to Raph Koster where he says that, among other companies, folks at Areae think that virtual worlds shouldn't be capable of accepting visits from other worlds' avatars.

Since there are so many arguments from one side and another, I just want to have a clue (tho' the data retrieved will not have revelance...) of how many people think one way or another...

So there's a poll: do you think that virtual worlds should be capable of accepting visits from other worlds' avatars if they choose so?

Please vote by following this link: http://www.polldaddy.com/p.asp?p=118953.


[1] - http://www.raphkoster.com

[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telnet

[3] - http://mindboosternoori.blogspot.com/2007/10/one-avatar-to-rule-them-all.html

Areae is Metaplace, tomorrow

For those like me that are expectantly waiting for Areae's [1] release, tomorrow might be the day: Metaplace is going to be announced tomorrow [2], and soon we'll be able to know more about the virtual world Raph Koster is talking about for so long...

[1] - http://www.areae.net
[2] - http://www.metaplace.com