Raph Koster recently interviewed with 1up.com talking a bit more in depth about metaplace and the development process.
1UP: If I make a module, can I turn around and sell that to you folks to have that be part of the library you sell back to players?
Koster: So if you make a popular module, let’s say it’s a guild system, but it could be as small as like a health bar, then you can put it on the marketplace,online casinoколи под наем you can mark it as open source of closed source. You can choose to put a fee on it or not. You can choose not to share it at all if you want. If it’s up on the market for a fee, we’ll take a small cut from the transaction. We’ll probably have some stylesheets and modules of our own up there, but we’ll probably give away most of the stuff that we do. We have this motto: “We only make content to be stolen.”
Chris “m3mnoch” Chapman, Senior software engineer at Areae posted earlier today a few points of clarification on what metaplace is and can be.
…seems like people either get that “everyone can make their own world” or people get that “it’s like second life where you can make your own content.” people are missing the point that it’s both — it’s a network of user-made worlds.
1) metaplace is a portal — it’s a network of inter-connected worlds. kinda like youtube for mmo game worlds instead of videos.
2) metaplace has mmog platform dev tools. most traditional games get developed on an internal set of dev tools. we’re not doing things any differently for building our internal games. we’re basically just opening up our internal tools for everyone to build on and not just our own artists.
3) a world is a game or virtual world made by a developer (whether us, some other professional, hobbyists or just the curious).
4) each game has distinct rules, logic, key-mappings, etc. completely seperate from the others. yes, there will be porn (duh! it’s the internet!), but that porn won’t be in your “men-in-tights” mmorpg if you don’t allow it. if your game rules don’t allow users to upload their own content, you don’t have to worry about flying penises. rigid, kid-safe content or wild-west user-uploaded chaos — you don’t necessarily have both in the same world. you don’t have to worry about goatses in bobby’s little world if bobby doesn’t want it and he doesn’t allow users to upload content.
5) every game or world has a massively multiplayer structure built in — right out of the box.
6) second life, world of warcraft, eve, runescape, club penguin, gaia, kingdom of loathing and bobby’s little world could all be built on our platform. and they could all cross-link to each other.
7) the game clients do not have to be in a web browser. we just think that one will be the most widely used as it’s the most accessible. in fact, we’re hoping that the community ports the client to as many platforms as humanly possible. mmogs on os/2 warp anyone?
so, no metaplace is not like second life. however, second life is just one of the many kinds of worlds you could build on our platform and connect to the network.
I’m excited to be able to welcome everyone to myMetaplace.com, we strive to be the premiere community for the future creators and dreamers of Areae Inc.’s newly announced Metaplace.
Our focus is not just on the potential game design opportunities that Metaplace has to offer but the other social applications as well. We invite developers of all types to come discuss and brainstorm with us as we explore what could be the next step in digital entertainment.
Please visit our forums and get to know one another, we look forward to sharing this experience with everyone!
Welcome to myMetaplace.com, your home in a new virtual frontier!
Tami “Cuppycake” Baribeu, CM for Areae and the newly announced Metaplace gives a little more insight on what exactly Metaplace is.
“…First of all, Metaplace is a platform that allows you to build any sort of world or game that you wish. Our tools will enable users of all skill levels to create games that can be played anywhere on the web that reads our open client standard – which includes cell phones, blogs, Facebook widgets, Myspace, etc. We host the servers for you and provide forums so you can interact with your players. You can start your own game from scratch, or you can import a stylesheet (shooter, RPG) to give yourself a base to work off of. It’s all pretty simple – even *I* have made something — and I don’t know anything about programming!
Secondly, Metaplace.com itself will be a virtual worlds portal that allows you to discover and play new games and worlds. Rate your favorite games, earn badges, connect with other gamers and hop from one world to another with ease. We expect all sorts of unique games and worlds – everything from your standard RPGs, to Tetris clones, to Amazon bookstores, and university lecture halls…”
View the rest and check out Tami Baribeu’s “Cuppytalk” blog here.
Areae Inc. announced its flagship product Metaplace at TechCrunch40 today, with the announcement they released their website which includes a brief FAQ and a developer blog.
“…Right at the outset, when we launched the original Areae, Inc. website, we told everyone that we were out to reinvent virtual worlds, and to make them work more like the Web does. We also told everyone that the cartoon on the website was our business plan. It’s been amazing to watch the speculation out there about what exactly we meant, but now you know: we meant it completely literally. Metaplace works how the web does, just about top to bottom.
Our goals are sort of idealistic. We think there are all kinds of things on the Internet that would be improved if anyone could have a virtual place of their own. Right now, there aren’t enough good games, for example, and they all seem to be about elves in tights or soldiers in battle armor. Metaplace allows more diversity. Right now, there are lots of people who want to use virtual worlds for research, or education, or business, but it’s just too darn hard to get one going. Now you can create a world in just a few minutes and start tailoring it to your needs. Basically, we wanted to democratize the process of making online spaces of all sorts.
As part of that, we also committed to an open markup standard for our network protocol - anyone can write a client for any platform they want. We decided to use Web standards for everything we could, which is why you can have a game world that is also a website, or use Web data to populate your world. The scripting language (we call it MetaScript, of course) is based on Lua. You get the idea - no “not invented here,” no closed proprietary approaches.
We knew it was all coming together when one of our team made a game in a day and a half. And then stuck that game on a private MySpace profile. You can inherit someone else’s world (if they let you) and use it as a starting point. You can slurp whole directories of art and use them as building blocks. Cut and paste a movement system or a health bar from one world to another. Use an RSS feed for your NPCs. We made puzzle games, RPGs, action games… and set up doorways from one to the other. Basically, coming to work in the morning is a lot of fun…”
Check out the rest of the post and the entire Metaplace site here.
Raph Koster recently interviewed with 1up.com talking a bit more in depth about metaplace and the development process.