Today at the Life 2.0 Summit Corey Bridges and Rafhael Cedeno spoke about the innovative Multiverse project. While we wait for the first screaming success to emerge from the 1.0 version released this past August, here's a list of some of the amazing things you can do if you're thinking of building a world of your own.
- Build On A Planetary Scale - You can make a world "the size of the planet Earth down to 1mm resolution". That's a direct quote. Do give it a try.
- Import 3D - They have conversion tools for 3DS Max, Blender, Maya, and a few others. If you have 3D assets, you're probably covered.
- Easy Marketing - All Multiverse worlds use the same client. When you register your world they'll list it right in the client people already have on their systems.
- Host A Crowd - 1000 people per server. That's per server mind you, not per world. You can add servers ad-hoc as you go along.
- Host Cheap - That 1000 people server will cost maybe US$1000/US$1500. You can buy your commercial-quality game a server from the store down the street.
- Read Shakespeare - Edward Castranova's "Arden: The World Of William Shakespeare" is powered by Multiverse, proving that it's not all about killing skeletons.
- Add Plugins - Plug-in combat, mobs, quests, inventory, trading, and physics. Or don't. Either or.
- Auto-Generate Terrain - Use the Terrain Generator, or import maps from L3DT, PnP, or TerrainCreator tools. Create an entire country's topography in less time than it took you to flatten your land in Second Life.
- Have X-Ray Eyes - Preview the avatars and creatures that will be in your world, rework their skeletons, rework the submeshes, try out different lighting schemes, and try out different animations.
- Make Money - Everything is free, and when you're ready to charge people, go for it. Multiverse just wants a bit from the gross profits.
Maybe I'm being a bit impatient by saying this, but it's been a two months since v1.0 came out. Will somebody please launch a fully-functional game world with this thing?
And...here's the issue, Caleb. That must be hard to do, even for tekkies, or they would have done it.
Why isn't there even a preview beta landing area or SOMETHING for Castronova's Shakespeare thing for example?
It sounds like fussy, tekkie perfectionism and complexity. Is it?
And...while you can only have 70 on a server, and only do so much with terrain etc it's the users -- dummies like me -- who can do this. The Lindens of course provide a layer of management in a proprietary company. That vexes tekkies who want to kick the goads. But it makes the entry more rapid and fun for the rest of us.
I can't even figure out how to get started even making a chicken scratching at a cube in Multiverse, that's the issue.
I've been involved with creating game assets for a while now, and it takes time, and a whole team. Everything has to be designed, built to some pretty wierd technical requirements, and implemented with intense scripting. It doesn't sound like a point and click template sort of thing. Look at the mod communities in games like UT and HalfLife, whole communities spring up to support a team developing a mod for months and months. I want to see stuff too, but this is a lot of work, and will take time.
my 2 cents
drO
I'd love to get cranking in this thing. 80% of my team reports client crashes 90% of the time - that's like, at least 10% worse than SL (/I kid/). Who has time to spend on that?
Ditto the Shakespeare thing - I felt baited, nothing to see yet. :\