It begins with some general predictions on what will happen in the virtual worlds market over the next 12 months and then gives an intro to what we’re releasing soon with VastPark version 0.94. All 3D footage is inworld footage from VastPark demos. Enjoy.

New Features
- Preview content before publishing
- Preview existing content from the index
- Edit existing Item metadata
- Delete existing Items
- Preliminary publisher group support

Visit the download page for the installer and let us know what you think!

Update 21st June, 3.30pm Entering into another maintenance window now...

Update: Everything is back up and running, there will be another maintenance window occurring at a similar time on Monday.

The VastPark Webservice will be temporarily offline for an upgrade later today from 3pm GMT+10 for around 30 minutes. During this time the Creator, Publisher and Browser might behave slightly erratically. VastServer and the Viewer will not be disrupted.

Apologies for any inconvenience, this is one of the few remaining hurdles before we can get the next release out the door

This is The The Australia Council for the Arts second virtual worlds arts initiative and Andrew and Trish’s project explores brainwave activity and body movement. 

More info on the MMUVE IT project

If he hadn’t been only about 3 blocks from a hospital he would have most likely died from loss of blood. Also the hospital had a helicopter available to take him to emergency surgery at a top hosipital in Canada where they were able to stabilize him. He lost his spleen and half his pancreas. The knife passed through nearly every organ in his chest apart from his right lung, his heart and his intestines.

He is now able to take in liquids and he no longer needs oxygen tubes and fluid drainage from his lungs. So he’s recovering well. Thankfully he was very fit and healthy when this happened.

You can read about Steve’s stabbing

Two of the group of alcohol-fuelled idiots are now up on charges; One for attempted murder. Read more about the stabbing.

Steve is lucky to be alive as we’ve heard the blade that stabbed him was long enough to go right through him.

News is sketchy right now but we’ve heard he’s undergone considerable surgery and may have lost his pancreas. Fortunately he’s fit and we know he will recover quickly.

We’ve all been shocked at such a senseless attack on Steve. If you’ve met Steve, you’ll know he is one of the most generous guys you’ll ever meet and has a positive attitude in every situation. Here’s Steve talking at the Metaverse Roadmap Summit/Metaverse U conference in February at Stanford University. If you are wanting to send good wishes to Steve feel free to contact him via comments here and through his Facebook.

Get well, Steve! We love ya, mate.

“I allow developers to extend VastPark in any manner they want!” exclaims the Plugin, freshly built and bursting with potential. The Widget, hearing this is unimpressed and replies “that may be so my friend, but I can reference you and your brethren to create a self-contained package full of life!” Not wanting to be left out, the Park waits quietly as the Plugin and Widget turn to stare with disdain. “Well...I’ve been around for longer than you both, can reference each of you and am the container most users will use to create their virtual experiences!”

If you’ve managed to cringe your way through the above, you may have noticed a few new members of the VastPark family, Plugins and Widgets. Both of these elements are part of the IMML specification, but haven’t been implemented...until now.

Coming with the next release of the platform in July, Widgets and Plugins will both be present as part of a major rewrite of the entire codebase to improve stability, modularity, performance and memory consumption.

Some of the goodies coming in the next release:
- Major improvement to the Publisher allowing for updating, deleting and previewing existing metadata and content
- Support for publishing Widgets and Plugins
- VastPark Scripting API v1
- Fixed support for streaming sounds
- Across the board performance and memory usage improvements

Editors note: Is your comedic genius better than ours? Leave your attempt at “3 concepts enter a room” in the comments!

We've decided to break the tutorials into 3 categories:

• Getting Started
• Virtual Worlds Made Easy Tutorials
• Advanced Tutorials

Here's the one we're releasing today. By the way, all our tutorials in these series are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

So when is the next Stress Test? It looks like Stress Test #3 will happen around the end of May. (Nope, we didn’t release a software update during May/June due to the significant overhaul required to take VastPark to the “next level” - so the stress test#3 won’t happen until after the next software release is out and stable - Ed.)

If you have a client needing to use VastPark, feel free to contact us for a confidential discussion.

Some stats from the test:

• Approx 20 concurrent users were online at any one time


• Browser was flaky


• Server solid as a rock, 0 crashes and CPU usage was negligible.


• In the 9hrs 25mins since the server was restarted for the test, there were:
  
  
  
  • 167 hits to vp://vastverse.com/stress-test2/
  
  
  • 14 hits to showroom
  
  
  
  

• The new webservice didn’t break and there weren’t any reports of login errors that we’re aware of. A login error would’ve given the users a login failed dialog box or a scene without content. Anyone who experiences this please contact us.

Right now, we’re flat out fixing bugs, making improvements, demos and documentation. Any help that you as the community can provide to one another is appreciated by everyone. We’ll have a public forum online before our Stress Test#2 on the 22nd April.

We’re really looking forward to working with you now and as things progress.

cheers,

Bruce Joy, CEO (April 10th, 2008)