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Koster's Areae Unveils Metaplace
Some nine months ago veteran MMOG designer Raph Koster announced his new game company, called Areae ... but not what they were making. To go along with the TechCrunch40 Conference, the company has finally taken the wraps off of their project: Metaplace. Essentially, Metaplace is going to be a virtual world toolkit. The whole thing is built on open standards, and attempt to 'bring virtual worlds to the web', instead of keeping them boxed away in a separate little garden. As the site puts it: "We knew it was all coming together when one of our team made a game in a day and a half. And then stuck that game on a private MySpace profile. You can inherit someone else's world (if they let you) and use it as a starting point. You can slurp whole directories of art and use them as building blocks. Cut and paste a movement system or a health bar from one world to another. Use an RSS feed for your NPCs. We made puzzle games, RPGs, action games... and set up doorways from one to the other." Virtual World News and GigaOM have writeups of the presentation at the TechCrunch Conference, while Areae's Community Manager Tami Baribeau writes in a post why gamers should care. Over at his site Areae President Raph Koster just breaths a sigh of relief.
Bah, answering myself... It will support physics and currently only has 2D clients. They're working on the 3D client. Sounds like it's more pre-alpha than alpha.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
It's simply not accessible enough. The web browser is very easy to get and use, but the VRML browser has always been a pain to even find, let alone use. Control schemes and movement typically suck, and the 3D worlds have always been very low-definition by necessity.
Second Life is the best VR browser out there, and even it is just barely above average as far as controls and movement go.
The other problem is that 3D doesn't really add much to most interactions. It's neat to think of having a 3D TV and all that, but will you -really- get much more out of the experience over regular TV? It's the same with VR on the web. A full VR world restricts movement rather than enhancing it, and inserting little 3D images into pages doesn't show anything that inserting a GIF can't.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
It's neat to think of having a 3D TV and all that, but will you -really- get much more out of the experience over regular TV?
Skirts.
In full 3-D.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.