Apply VW conference video

Here’s the 4minute video presentation which ran at the Apply Virtual Worlds conference run recently in London…

It begins with some general predictions on what will happen in the virtual worlds market over the next 12 months and then gives an intro to what we’re releasing soon with VastPark version 0.94. All 3D footage is inworld footage from VastPark demos. Enjoy.

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

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.

Read More...

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.
.
• 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".

Read More...

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.