developers

The virtual world of Kaneva made headlines when it launched, but there hasn't been much news since. At first access was restricted to those who managed to hit a certain quota of friends in a MySpace-like web application, which drove away the first wave of curious surfers. This was followed by the discovery that there isn't much you can do yet in Kaneva and that the client crashed even more frequently than Second Life's. Recently they've had to overhaul their entire system, which meant that the in-world currency isn't even transferable between avatars anymore. This is being further developed, but nobody is sure exactly how.

If you have managed to get through all of this and still want to script some objects in the world of Kaneva, you would have to sign up as an "elite developer". Today, the elite developers received an exciting announcement:

Are you ready for the new Kaneva Game Platform Licensing? We have received a lot of requests for a license for the masses and we have answered the call. You will soon be able to license the Kaneva Game Platform with source for around one hundred bucks (yes i said $100.00 USD). Keep checking back for more details we are working hard to clean up the latest release and deliver a new version this quarter!

The Kaneva Game Platform consists of a client, world-building tools, the server-side code and artificial-intelligence; everything you need to create your very own virtual world or MMORPG. The jury is still out on how good this package is, but at US$ 100 how bad could it possibly be?

Though in it's earliest stages of development, a new app from Ordinal Malaprop, one of Second Life's more interesting dvelopers, promises to help Twitter users visualize their friends timelines, and incoming presence indicators known as "tweets" in 3D. I was privileged to spend a little time with Ordinal yesterday evening talking about the new tool, it's possible usefulness and the limitations of the Linden Scripting Language.

As you can see from above, at present the system is fairly basic. A proof of concept, if that. The potential is there though I think. If limitations in the LSL code that powers the generation, placement and deletion of the colored tweets you see can be overcome, it could prove to be a really fun way to visualize incoming data from friends' timelines on Twitter.

The biggest problem right now seems to be the limitations on memory. If you have a lot of friends, your SIM may get tweeted to death! As I left, Ordinal was thinking her way through that,and also about to ad some kind of conectors to the tweets radiating from "bomb" to make the whole visualization clearer.

Whether a truly useful tool emerges from this remains to be seen, but it sure was a fun app to see, and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.