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!

VPWS down for maintenance later today

Update 21st June, 4.30pm All done! Users with Publisher accounts will find the Publisher is temporarily broken, a fix is on the way shortly.

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

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!

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!

Creator tool Beta 2 Release

Hooray, we've done it. Beta 2 of our Creator tool is out the door. If you're a member of the beta community, jump in and download it.

It's taken longer than I expected but the journey to this latest release has been a unique one. Much of the effort went into entirely changing our file format. Beta 2 features a brand new markup language that we've been working on for some time: IMML. IMML stands for Interactive Media Markup Language.

Why would we go through the pain of such a radical change?

We wanted to adopt a high level "HTML-like" language that's easy read and write. We also wanted it to be fundamentally file format agnostic and to suit our twin ambitions of "Code once, run anywhere" and aiming towards something that can support all kinds of virtual worlds and a wide range of real time interactive purposes. Since 1999 when I first developed the dream of the VastPark platform, I've never found any markup language that would help us achieve our ambitions, so we've been developing it ourselves. IMML files are in XML with a schema (so auto-complete works). IMML supports a range of unique features includes describing connections between independent virtual environments: for instance one world within another and geometric connections between worlds. I'm excited about IMML so I'm sure I'll write more about its development in the future.

Beta 2 of the Creator tool also features support for multiple lights, spawn controls, everything can have its own timeline for controlling time-based events and much more. So a lot of the work we've done is fundamental to improving what you can achieve with VastPark. No we have some tidying up work to do as we complete some of the features we've been wanting to add. We're hoping that this will be easier now that we've defined so much of the IMML language.

Through January to March there will be a few bug fixes and some improvements in the user interface and functionality. The next major tools release will be our 1st beta of the Asset Publisher. The Asset Publisher will allow you to publish your own content into the VastPark platform. You can choose how your content is shared: is it only available within your worlds or can others use it as well. We're putting the structure in place so that you can sell your content if you wish to. Expect a date for release in Q1 2008.