Early this morning I rushed out the news that Forterra had released the OLIVE SDK. Had I waited just two or three hours, however, I would have been able to include this amazing bit of background on the company and their interwoven history with There, courtesy of the games visionary Raph Koster.
Years ago there was a company called There that produced a virtual world without peer. It was heralded as a landmark achievement, but ended up having to close because of customer service problems. They needed restructuring, so in order to continue on There was split into two entities: Makena would run There.com as a consumer product and Forterra would specialize in the technical aspects.
Under the new model, both flourished. Makena worked with MTV to produce Virtual Laguna Beach and The Hills, while Forterra focused on military training applications and expanding the technology in novel ways.
If you've logged into There recently you'll notice the results right away. It loads smoothly, the frame rate is always high, and despite the low-polygon count on the avatars the world graphics are really fantastic. Raph mentioned two other features of the OLIVE platform not mentioned in the press release: a spherical world, and neural net AI. For more details on the OLIVE platform click here.
As with all things net-related, specialization really seems to be key, doesn't it? Trying to do everything at once creates a bit of a glitchy mess, but doing one thing extremely well and inviting other specialists to fill in the blanks creates a finished product.