Raph’s Website » Metacrasher: bridging virtual worlds





By N2H

blog · games · writing · music · art · shop · about Raph · contact

Metacrasher: bridging virtual worlds

July 5th, 2007 (Visited 2521 times) Tags:

Metacrasher.com is the site for a new company that seems to be trying to create bridging software so that tools and the like will work across multiple different virtual world platforms. The website seems a bit broken in places, and there isn’t much info, but I was highly amused to see that they apparently support Areae’s texture-mapping format.

Jokes aside, the idea is interesting — essentially, creating a directory of places in worlds, and presumably wrapping software so that you can “see into” various different worlds. They have tests going with Ogoglio apparently.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

9 Responses to “Metacrasher: bridging virtual worlds”

Jump to reader comments » | Leave a reply »

Trackbacks & Pingbacks

Virtual Worlds News: Interview: Metacrasher Talks Future Plans wrote on July 6th, 2007 at 9:58 am:

[...] I know Raph Koster, among others, were surprised to hear you were working with the Areae [...]

reBang weblog » Blog Archive » Metacrasher Project Debuts {*Update*} wrote on July 10th, 2007 at 5:07 pm:

[...] {Update: Here’s some additional information posted in comments on Raph Koster’s blog (Link): [...]

Reader Comments

Heiner Wolf said on July 5th, 2007 at 3:39 pm:
What is “Areae’s texture-mapping format”?
Raph said on July 5th, 2007 at 4:04 pm:

Well, it would be the theoretical texture mapping format we use in our unannounced, unreleased product that Metacrashed doesn’t know anything about.
Trevor F. Smith said on July 5th, 2007 at 6:44 pm:
Metacrasher does actually have a few Ogoglio spaces on our servers, so that’s real enough. I don’t know what the texture mapping bit is all about.
Chris Harpan (Dracis) said on July 5th, 2007 at 11:32 pm:
I’m not sure if it’s just me, but does their site seem a little thrown together? I suppose they are just starting out, but I guess i believe in a good first impression.
Sean Bulger said on July 6th, 2007 at 3:21 am:
Well, regardless of the state this is in… I do agree that it is a very interesting idea. If it actually happens (by them or someone else), I would definitely be interested in seeing the results.
metacrasher2 said on July 6th, 2007 at 9:10 am:
hello all,
dropping by all the blogs and forums to first off thank the admins for linking to the site, second off answer questions and lastly say that our forums have been delivered for activation and will be up later today. i will put the link in another post once it’s up.

actually we mentioned areae because it is a virtual world that will be rolling out at some point. we have never said that we know anything about how areae is going to texture map their avatars. so for the record: this is not information metacrasher claims to know or claims to have any insight into.

you might ask: well why do you mention it on your site?
the answer is: we mentioned a number of virtual world projects on our site as our goal is to try and bridge them. we are showing an example of what would be possible

avatars and most all 3d characters usually have textures. second life has 3 to be exact. for the textures to be placed on an object UV mapping is required. now what if i want to take the texture that i worked really hard on in second life to a different avatar that has different uv texture mapping i would require a tool to do that. a tool to do that does not require proprietary info. of course the user or the world designer in this case Raph would have to tell us”this is how my avatars display textures using this type of mapping” and then we would put it into the system.

most 3d artists can do this, if they have the mesh for the avatar and the texture and even better the uv mapping info. we are simply making it a process that is automated. we show an example of what this tool looks like and mention the different worlds out of respect and the fact that they exist.

of course we don’t know outback onlines format yet or aerae’s. someone would have to submit it. but the fact remains that if an av has user made textures, it’s format can be mapped onto different meshes if done correctly. that’s what the tool is for.
Trevor F. Smith said on July 13th, 2007 at 3:24 pm:
Just to clarify, I’m not part of the metacrasher project and Transmutable is no longer hosting spaces for them.

Recent Trackbacks

Twitter @raphkoster

@cuppy It could be worse -- could be called Wang Chung. in reply to cuppy 12 hrs ago
@cuppy I see piles of people with active LinkedIn status update streams... someone must be using it that way! in reply to cuppy 4 days ago
Connected LinkedIn to Twitter. Let's see if it's annoying or not. :) 4 days ago
More updates...