Hooray for 2009

As the 2009 working year begins for me on Monday, I’ve been reflecting on our development aims in the first 3 months of 2009.

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What being an official VastPark Developer gets you?

In our first newsletter to our developers we sent out yesterday we said what being an official VastPark Developer gets you. Well we felt we hadn't expressed things very clearly so this post attempts to be clearer.

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P2P Closed Beta Test Results

Thanks to all who came to either session of the VastPark and Badumna beta test. We had 12 of you running around concurrently with users from around the globe (Australia, Canada, Japan, UK and USA). While things didn't go too smoothly in the first session the guys over at NICTA quickly identified the responsible component in Badumna resulting in a much smoother experience in the second session.

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P2P test sessions completed

Thanks to all who attended either of the test session times. We’re delighted with the improvements achieved between session 1 & 2.

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Vastpark P2P Instructions

Ok the first VastPark P2P Closed beta test is just a few hours away and you have downloaded and installed the Vastpark Imp software. So now what?

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VastPark P2P Closed Beta Test

UPDATE: If you have installed the software and looking for instructions check out this.

The first Vastpark P2P closed beta test is here!
We're running this test at 2 times. The first time is designed to suit European and Asian users. The second time will suit US and Asian users attending. We hope you can join us for either one of the test times.

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Webservice down for 30 minutes of maintenance

Update: Maintenance completed!

The VastPark webservice is about to go down for 30 minutes of maintenance, during this time you may experience intermittent functionality with many of the applications and will be unable to visit parks hosted at vastverse.com.

I’ll update this post when the maintenance is completed

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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Melbourne event

Bruce spoke at the Australasian Virtual Worlds Workshop 2008, Nov 28-29.

Metaverse Journal posted an article that covers Bruce’s talk at the AVWW:
AZWW Doggie Bag

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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Developer Program expansion

VastPark welcomes five new develpment companies into its Developer Program.

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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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