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 element, so that when the parent moves the child moves with it. After a quick overview I got to work creating a Solar System.

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Melbourne event

I’m speaking at the Australasian Virtual Worlds Workshop 2008, Nov 28-29.

Developer documentation

We are now opening up our introduction to developing on the VastPark platform. It is targeted at experienced developers wishing to get a quick start on using and developing on the VastPark platform. The documents contain information on the nuts and bolts of VastPark including MetaWSS, IMML, scripting and plug-ins. Feedback appreciated!

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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.

My recent travels and thoughts on IMML’s value for interoperability

Recent virtual world conferences in London and trips to both Korea and Finland have been great as we talk to more people about how our open markup language IMML can help platforms like VastPark, RealXtend, OpenSim and others interoperate.

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Changing the VastPark cache settings

Wishing you could control the cache settings for your VastPark applications? Never fear, there’s a way to do it.

Items are currently set to expire in 5hrs. To change this, go to Windows Start > Run

and type in %localappdata%\VastPark\Browser\config\

Hit enter, then edit settings.xml in notepad.

Change:

<ItemCacheExpiry>FiveHours</ItemCacheExpiry>

To:

<ItemCacheExpiry>Never</ItemCacheExpiry>

...to make it never expire. Perfect if you want to demonstrate things offline.

Or:

<ItemCacheExpiry>Always</ItemCacheExpiry>

...to make it always expire (useful if you want to ensure you get the latest content).

Hope that helps a few of you.

LA in November

I will present VastPark’s Immersion player demo at the LA XMediaLab in November. The event is run in conjunction with the AFI.

After that I’m off to Sydney and Melbourne to spend some time with my baby daughter and to work with the VastPark team who are hard at work developing a very early version of the Immersion player for release this year.

Cheers, Bruce Joy

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.

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.

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

I can see your Seoul

I will be speaking at XMediaLab in Seoul and then at both major London events in October.

If you have a project or proposal to discuss and want to meet in Seoul or London, let my team know so we can look to arrange a time. I’m looking forward to the events! If you haven’t heard of XMedialab, then you ought to do yourself a favour and attend one. It’s different from most conflabs because you really get the opportunity to get to know people and develop worthwhile relationships.

Added a GoogleGroup to VastServer Core

Last week we uploaded our open source server code to GoogleCode: code.google.com/p/vastserver-core. Today we got around to adding a GoogleGroup that developers can join to discuss issues with VastServer Core: groups.google.com/group/vastserver-core.