Creating a Solar System with Element Heirarchy

We've been hassling the programming department for ages about getting element hierarchy happening in VastPark. You can imagine my surprise when I was told that it was up and running.

Basically what it allows user to do is to nest an element inside another, making it a child of that parent element. This means that when the parent moves the child moves with it. That's useful for all kinds of things. We can now enable avatars to "carry" things. We can finally have text showing the name of each object on top of their heads for easier identification. But I've been thinking about building a galaxy. I was told this is an experimental feature right now and is still a week away from being solid, but after a quick test, I found it solid enough and I got to work creating a Solar System.

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VastPark apps crashing on startup?

We’ve been seeing a few crashlogs recently that seem to imply that either the VastPark installer has neglected to update your system to the correct version of .Net Framework (3.5 SP1 for Browser, Creator and Publisher) or that the install hasn’t quite gone as successfully as it could have.

If you find you’re seeing the friendly VastPark error box on startup of the apps mentioned above, give the following a go:

• If you recall seeing the .Net Framework install and update and haven’t restarted your computer, give it a restart. It’s possible some parts of the framework were in use during installation so a restart may help
• Didn’t see the .Net Framework box appear, or suspicious it didn’t do what it was supposed to do? Try a manual install.

If you’ve been a victim of the startup app crash, please let us know if any of the above fix the issue. If you recall what happened during installation that would be helpful also

Park Files, Old to New…

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The Vastness of Vastpark - Halloween 2008 Video Fun

In the spirit of Haloween Gary over at Just Virtual has put together this awesome machinima, with a complementing eerie sound track. You can see his original blog post here

Keep up the good work Gary. We look forward to seeing more machinima like this in the future.

Immersion Player demo - Ted’s adventure

We are busy developing our new Immersion Player and we created a preview demo of how an end user could quickly create their OWN WORLD (private or public) out of premade favorite elements that they'd previously found or had received from their community. We reused a lot of the content we already had to test out the theory. Thus Ted went on an adventure. See the images below and click on them to see large full screen captures. No touchups etc, of course - all real time. If you have an existing community and your own IP, we'd love to hear from you so we can talk together about how you can deliver your content to your community via the web!

You can also check these images out at here at Flickr.

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)

Shoot’n: A Creator’s Guide

There I was, sitting in a deck chair enjoying the sights, the serenity and a slab of Carlton's finest blonde with my mates, watching the world go by as water from Tidal River soaked through the bottom of my chair. It may have been the beer serenity that led me to think that I could pull off an on rail shooter in VastPark with lots of guns, death and destruction. Although I was enjoying my week off camping at Wilson's Promontory evidently I was looking forward to going back to work.

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