Developer tools join Player at 0.95

Publisher

• The often asked for, long promised FTP support! We now have the ability to create groups that are backed by your own FTP storage (Amazon S3 support is still available) and the Publisher will allow you to publish directly there. Contact us if you'd like to setup a group using your own FTP account.
• Support for uploading replacement assets much quicker via the Browse button in the asset tab
• Advanced tab to hand-edit the metaforik xml
• Support for Background element

Creator

• Copy and paste (select an element or series of elements in the scene, hold Ctrl and drag out new copies)
• Improved loading speed when loading multiple of the same item (still some substantial perf improvements on the way here)
• Fixed undo functionality to support undo/redo when adding or removing elements
• Shifted camera UI helper model to better convey the position of the actual camera view. The end of the lens is now the point where the view is displayed from
• Added UI support for creating non-texture based backgrounds
• Fixed spotlight bugs
• Fixed change camera type at design-time bugs
• Lots of misc. bug fixes

1st Release: The Player goes online

Read More...

Videos from our 2nd inworld event

We've run our first 2 inworld virtual conferences recently:

Read More...

Let’s get Metaforik

Metaphors (conceptual "Items") are at the core of our platform agnostic content syndication specification.

Read More...

3ds Max Plugins Updated

I've just updated the 3ds Max plugins so that they support versions 2008 and 2009.
You can download them from the downloads page under the publisher.
http://www.vastpark.com/downloads/#publisher

Open-source = Peace of mind

The big announcement we made in September is that our Server and our new player (Available in the Downloads under its codename Imp) will be open source.

Read More...

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.

Read More...

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

Developer Program expansion

VastPark welcomes five new develpment companies into its Developer Program.

Read More...

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.

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

Open source client & server!

We’re announcing today that we’re developing an open source web-based virtual worlds player and that our open source virtual worlds server is now online. The web-based player will combine our current Browser and Viewer software along with exciting not-yet-released features and allow anyone to run and embed immersive virtual worlds inside of their web pages just like videos are being embedded into web pages today.

We are calling this new player the Immersion player. Why?  Because it reads and renders the Immersive media markup language (IMML) that we have developed as an open specification for developers to adopt royalty free.

In the last few hours people have been very curious when we plan on releasing the Immersion player. We’ve scheduled the first release to come out this year as a desktop version with source code and we plan on demonstrating the web-based version in March 2009.

You can read our press announcement here: www.vastpark.com/index.php/press/.

Earlier this year we talked about releasing an open source version of our server code. Just an hour ago we have put the VastServer Core source code up and available for download on GoogleCode: http://code.google.com/p/vastserver-core/.

We’re glad to get this release out the door as this marks a major milestone for the whole platform, which has been significantly remodelled since our initial software release in April. I’m very happy to say that version 0.94 of the VastPark Platform features a truly elegant architecture that hard core developers will appreciate. Now we’re working on preparing the Creator, Browser and Viewer for the v0.94 release. Still lots to do as we’ve got a lot of new features such as the first release of 3D widgets and our powerful new plug-ins system.

Just to be clear: We expect this release will be the last significant release of the Browser and Viewer. You’ll find that the Immersion player is a big step forward.

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!

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