It’s been fairly widely reported over the past week that there’s a new kid on the virtual world block. Metaplace has some significant backing and looks promising. Some key snippets from Metaplace’s company, Areae:
“We think there are all kinds of things on the Internet that would be improved if anyone could have a virtual place of their own”
“committed to an open markup standard for our network protocol – anyone can write a client for any platform they want. We decided to use Web standards for everything we could, which is why you can have a game world that is also a website, or use Web data to populate your world. The scripting language (we call it MetaScript, of course) is based on Lua. You get the idea – no ‘not invented here,’ no closed proprietary approaches”
“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”
“We fully intend to be customers of our own product. We’ve already started work on our first big game – a ‘worldy MMORPG’ with what we hope will be a ton of fun game play. What’s more, we figure that some of you who have been looking for a game like that might want to help us build it.”
Metaplace is at alpha testing stage and if you’re keen, you can sign up for that testing.
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