P2P test sessions completed

Thanks to all who attended either of the test session times. We’re delighted with the improvements achieved between session 1 & 2.

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Webservice down for 30 minutes of maintenance

Update: Maintenance completed!

The VastPark webservice is about to go down for 30 minutes of maintenance, during this time you may experience intermittent functionality with many of the applications and will be unable to visit parks hosted at vastverse.com.

I’ll update this post when the maintenance is completed

Developer Program expansion

VastPark welcomes five new develpment companies into its Developer Program.

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VastPark P2P Closed Beta

After a number of internal tests working closely with the guys from NICTA we’re now ready to begin accepting registrations for the closed beta of the VastPark P2P networking code.

We plan to run a number of multi-user tests over the next few months, so be quick to register and get in on the action!


Visit the P2P Closed Beta registration page here.

0.94 Preview Releases Online

After a somewhat hectic last few months which has seen some interesting new uses of VastPark, super-optimistic release dates slide past and a trip to a warm Los Angeles with not one, but two announcements, we’ve decided to open up our development snapshots to the public. 

These snapshots are the builds we use internally for development work and contain goodies from the coming 0.94 release. The links are ‘hot’ meaning that the files they link to will be updated regularly and without notice.

Note: Parks created in prior versions of the toolkit will likely require some minor changes to make them work as expected in these snapshot releases. Stay tuned for an article on migration or if you can’t wait that long, come say hello in the forums.

Get your snapshots from http://www.vastpark.com/index.php/dev-snapshots/

LuaInterface also google-coded

Some of you may know that I’ve recently added the role of LuaInterface maintainer to my repertoire and after some minor changes to the codebase, it’s now available over at google code for your viewing pleasure:

http://code.google.com/p/luainterface/

VastPark uses LuaInterface as the bridge for Lua scripting, which is our scripting language of choice. Its proven to be a great option for scripting for many game development houses worldwide and we have to agree, its flexibility and speed are much appreciated

Open source client & server!

We’re announcing today that we’re developing an open source web-based virtual worlds player and that our open source virtual worlds server is now online. The web-based player will combine our current Browser and Viewer software along with exciting not-yet-released features and allow anyone to run and embed immersive virtual worlds inside of their web pages just like videos are being embedded into web pages today.

We are calling this new player the Immersion player. Why?  Because it reads and renders the Immersive media markup language (IMML) that we have developed as an open specification for developers to adopt royalty free.

In the last few hours people have been very curious when we plan on releasing the Immersion player. We’ve scheduled the first release to come out this year as a desktop version with source code and we plan on demonstrating the web-based version in March 2009.

You can read our press announcement here: www.vastpark.com/index.php/press/.

Earlier this year we talked about releasing an open source version of our server code. Just an hour ago we have put the VastServer Core source code up and available for download on GoogleCode: http://code.google.com/p/vastserver-core/.

We’re glad to get this release out the door as this marks a major milestone for the whole platform, which has been significantly remodelled since our initial software release in April. I’m very happy to say that version 0.94 of the VastPark Platform features a truly elegant architecture that hard core developers will appreciate. Now we’re working on preparing the Creator, Browser and Viewer for the v0.94 release. Still lots to do as we’ve got a lot of new features such as the first release of 3D widgets and our powerful new plug-ins system.

Just to be clear: We expect this release will be the last significant release of the Browser and Viewer. You’ll find that the Immersion player is a big step forward.

Publisher Beta 1 Released!

Today marks the first of the v0.94 powered applications surfacing online, with Beta 1 of the Publisher released.

With this update, the Publisher is now closer to being a convenient content management hub, enabling media to be published, previewed, deleted and metadata to be edited.

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!

Congratulations!

We would like to say a big congratulations to Andrew Burrell and Trish Adams for being awarded financing from The Australia Council for the Arts for their MMUVE IT project.

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

Steve: Stabbing update

Just spoke with Steve Eagle. He’s doing well considering how lucky he is to be alive.

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

Steve: Stabbed but safe

Steve Eagle, an investor in VastPark and our VP of Strategy is in hospital recovering after being stabbed.

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.

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Three concepts enter a room

Three concepts enter a room, each with a point to prove…

“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!

Tutorials shaping up

One thing that’s been massively lacking here has been documentation. Today we’re unveiling the first of a series of tutorials to help you use VastPark.

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.

Welcome to the early days of VastPark

Thanks for your interest and excitement! You can now download our preliminary toolset. These tools are free and always will be. We’ll also have pro versions and encourage 3rd party developers to release extensions which they can sell at whatever price they choose.

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)

One small step for Bipbot

...One giant leap for VastPark. Yes, it’s virtually happened… We’ve been pounding keyboards night and day and now we can say VastPark is going multiuser. There’ll be a server that you can grab and run for your own worlds. 2 months and it will be yours… All yours!