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.

Stress Test #2 Results

Thanks to all who came to the test yesterday. We had 20 of you running around inside concurrently but more outside unable to get in. We’re working on getting more of you in next time.

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.

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)

Stress Test #2

We listened, so our second stress test is at a European friendly time!

This time we're reworking Shed42 into multiple chat-zones and we've got plans on adding a bit of interactivity and individuality.

This will be the first test of our new MetaWSS index. What does the MetaWSS index do? Find out more at the test. Also, during the test we will be making a public announcement concerning some exciting ways you will be able to interact with the index.

The test runs at 8.00-8.30am PDT, Tuesday, 22nd April.

The chart below shows local times:

San Francisco Tues 22nd April 8.00-8.30am

Austin Tues 22nd April 10.00-10.30am

New York Tues 22nd April 11.00-11.30am

London Tues 22nd April 4.00-4.00pm

Cologne Tues 22nd April 5.00-5.30pm

Mumbai Tues 22nd April 8.00-8.30pm

Singapore Tues 22nd April 11.00-11.30pm

Melbourne Wed 23rd April 1.00-1.30am

We be monitoring the Shoutbox from about 30 minutes before the test right through until the test is finished.

The park link will be availble from both the forum and the shoutbox during the event.

Thanks for joining us, see you soon!

Virtual Worlds 2008

We will have a booth (our first ever!) at Virtual Worlds in New York. Bruce Joy, our CEO, is speaking on a panel about user generated virtual worlds. Come and visit us for a demonstration of VastPark in the flesh.

Hope to see you there!

Stress Test #1

Thanks everyone that came along to help, we enjoyed meeting you all and appreciate the support. Next time we will have the downloads online IN TIME!

Summary:

• People visited up to 3 simple test worlds. One of them was Dark.park an FPS test game map.
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• We made some announcements including the public beta release of our software would occur very soon: In mid April. This will be followed by a significant community tools release in Q3 which should really confirm VastPark’s place as a leading virtual worlds platform.
• We announced the VastServer project will be released along with other tools in our public beta release in mid April. We also announced that VastServer would be released under an open source license.
• We also announced we are working with our P2P networking engine partner, NICTA, to commercialise their technology that was going to be released as part of a project called Outback Online. This technology will enable VastPark worlds to support tens of thousands if not millions of users simultaneously: an extrodinary achievement.

For those of you that were asking for stats, here goes…

• According to our measurements, each client was receiving about 7-10kb/s (tiny!) from the VastServer with 30 users online simultaneously running around 30 updates per second on position data and custom messages for chat.
• The server CPU didn’t go above 5%.
• 200 hits at vastverse.com/stress-test1/ in a 30 minute period with a max of 30 concurrent users (we reckon it could have done 100 in FPS mode but we’re keen to get more online simultaneously next time so we can see what it takes to actually slow it down).
• The pre-test park - /dark_park/ had 150+ hits within 30 minutes with 22 concurrent users max.
• 100+ hits on /dark/, the official fps test environment, with 27 concurrent users max

All environments were running on the same server simultaneously.

We had over 540 messages in our Shoutbox! - and loads more in world, also… check out some of the screenshots.

VastPark now has a facebook group as well, VastPark: Grow your own, we wanted to enable easy interaction and communication, so if you are a facebook user come along and join, most of our team are there as well members of the community.

Thank you all again, we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did!

Our next test is likely to be April 18. The timing will be set to Europe. We hope many of our testers from the US and other parts of the world can also attend. We’re looking to develop more interactivity in this next test.

Creativity above consumerism

Somehow it seems more nourishing when we create things ourselves whether we share it with others or enjoy it alone without fanfare or external validation. This seems to be true of cooking, writing and pretty much any creative endeavor. Ultimately creativity is what nurtures us and enriches our culture; as a counterpoint, consumerism offers instant gratification, but lacks nourishment.

There is that wonderful proverb*: "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime."

This quote has been a truism for 3rd world aid activities, but we can apply the same philosophy to consumers seeking to co-create their entertainment and online social experiences. Let people be storytellers, creators, publishers of entertainment and managers of online communities and they will have nourishment "for a lifetime".

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GDC 2008 Post-mortem

GDC 2008 has just finished. I enjoyed it all immensely. The Worlds In Motion Summit sessions were generally packed out. Judging by the event, virtual worlds have arrived in the heartland of the games industry. But what does this mean and is the games industry ready for the changes in mindset?

Raph Koster made two terrific presentations. The second one was a post-mortem on Metaplace to date. I was very pleased that VastPark stacked up very well against Metaplace. Feature for feature we're both terrifically similar and fundamentally compatible. We've both favored LUA, REST, XML (where it counts) and a web-like framework. Although there's obviously much work yet to do on productization and solving playability issues in more physics intensive worlds, Raph and his team have created a very consumer friendly product that is lightweight and lends itself to becoming a standard interactive web stack. On the other hand, it wasn't clear that they had elegantly solved the complex problems of automated distributed content delivery and copyright when enabling users to remix high quality 3D assets into their virtual worlds. The issues of distributed content delivery and copyright are critical to enabling professionals to release their libraries of content into the system so the content can be used and monetised. That's a big part of what we've sought to solve with VastPark (and particularly with our MetaWSS specification). We think that solving these content issues have much wider application across media syndication and delivery because it works for new media formats but it also works for any digital file, no matter what the format.

It seemed obvious to many in the crowd that if we are to use game technology to grow a web, we need to get rid of proprietary system stacks. IMHO, the fact that game technology has generally been proprietary has significantly hindered the growth of the ecosystem built on game technology.

What I took away from the post-mortem was that everyone on this "game tech as a web" crusade are headed away from the traditional games industry's mindset towards an open standards thinking mindset. An irony is that if the games industry doesn't do it, others will.

Until now the game industry has had a game-centric ecosystem, but now a whole host of new industries want to reach in and help themselves to the communication, presentation and real time feedback possibilities inherently available in game technology. Many people feel that game tech can be used for other things: training, teaching, group communication, real time workplaces, general entertainment and casual immersive experiences. Get ready to game more.

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!

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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An entrepreneur-friendly EULA?

Warning: Graphic imagery, mixed metaphors and mad linkz

Most people think themselves reasonably intelligent and a humanitarian at heart until they read documents written by lawyers and wish that they had the power to stain the pavements of the world with the blood of obtuse, stuffed-shirt lawyers. Of course, I'm not somebody who thinks like that but I do have sympathy for their viewpoint.

Baron, a user from our community, had some questions in the closed beta forums about our current licenses in terms of what they allowed an entrepreneur to do with our platform. Confusion? It cannot be! Personally, I think legal documents ought to be so clear and simple that savvy folk can read them and grok the concept. Baron is definitely a member of the "savvy folk" so I went and did some reading of my own documents. Yikes, a legal quagmire! What's the lawyer's address and where is my .38 Special? Damn, I don't reside in the US *yet* and Australia has normal developed-world gun controls so I don't have access to a gun and thus both my lawyer and I are statistically safer. Watch out legal eagles, I'm heading stateside in February. Anyway...

Reading our current terms of service, etc, they seemed out of touch with what VastPark is aiming to become: a virtual worlds platform that enables any community or individual to create, publish, share and even profit from their own virtual worlds (without needing years of 3D experience or programming skillz).

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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.

“Virtual Worlds Industry Forecast”

I was lucky enough to be included in the Virtual Worlds Management Industry Forecast 2008 (Download the Report). The report gives valuable insight into 45 different industry CEOs and experts in the virtual world field. Thanks to Chris Sherman and Joey Seiler for conceiving and compiling the report.

The report revealed some of the things I was thinking about in this last month while I haven't been blogging, so I've decided to reprint those excepts here.

The other news is our implending Beta 2 release of our Creator tool and some news about the markup language that now drives it.

Anyway, on with the show. Here were the questions we were given and my answers are below each one:

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