The long wait is finally over. After years of planning, volumes of hype, and the input of thousands of beta developers, Multiverse has finally released v1.0 of its platform. The Multiverse Platform is "a comprehensive software solution that gives development teams the technology, tools and assets to create virtual worlds for almost any purpose, including games and business tools." Basically, you can make worlds with it.
For developers one of the big selling points of the Multiverse Platform is the purchase model. You can download the client, server, tools, starter assets, and sample worlds for free, and generate revenue using any model you prefer. Multiverse will collect 10% of your gross revenue.
To get things moving they've begun a "Worlds in Progress" initiative, making four worlds available to try out for free. Complete source code will be available for developers for two of them as well. Below you can see a video demo for the Dark Horizons game to give you a general idea of the graphical quality you can expect.
A wide variety of people have been following the progress of Multiverse closely, including such film industry heavyweights as James Cameron and John Landau who officially serve as advisors. Now that an official version of the software is released, it will be interesting to see what they do with it.
sounds like: "that's gonna hurt" :)
Robbie Kiama, Meta Mart www.MetaverseMart.com
I can't wait!
Great stuff today Caleb!
Do they have real estate?
This is an open platform Prokofy. You run it on your own server. You can create as much land as you want or need.
You could probably sell land in your world, but you've got to wonder what happens to land markets in a universe where anyone can create their own planet.
So, were those music video style "quick cuts" or lag?
...
Seriously, I think the pricing model is the most interesting aspect of this product. 10% of gross is quite inviting compared to licensing fees that game engines normally incur. The fact that non-commercial use is free makes it even more inviting... there is really no risk other than time spent getting up to speed with the system.
However, it is pretty clear that this is a gaming platform, first and foremost. (The social world appears to be a "game" with the game engine disabled.) Nothing wrong with that, but it does make it unlikely to be the platform that will establish the de facto standard for the 3D web. On the other hand, this piece of the quote makes it clear to be that they know how to handle the customization aspect:
"If you need to build fairly low-level server code (e.g. handling physics in a different way) you will be using the server event-handling system. Java is appropriate for this level of code. If you leverage an existing rule system such as MARS (Multiverse Agnostic Rules System, which defines many game rules) then you can write extensions to MARS using either Java or Python."
Having a choice of of which level of abstraction to work at (either low level or high) displays a strong understanding of the dual nature of customization of virtual worlds.
People make real estate value on the back of the beyond. Even when land seemingly can be rolled out endlessly like toilet paper, land can become special to people by their way in which they develop it and build culture and content on it. This is one of the features of humans that socialist game-gods can never breed out of people.
I finally got Multiverse social world downloaded and installed after quite a few tries past various error and bug messages, then when I went to make the character, it kept giving me geek-speak errors about something being "thrown". It has the usual allergy you find in many geeky areas of the Internet toward capital letters or spaces between words. Even allowing for all that, the character just wouldn't save, and I had to give up for now, but it looks quite intriguing and I can't wait to see it.