For those wondering what’s up with Metaplace, we have a July Update up on the company blog that should serve to catch you up. We’re really really busy these days, gearing up for going beta.

We’ve seen some absolutely amazing work being created within Metaplace. We’ve had educational learning software, the start of basic RPG’s, an RTS, a beginning shooter game, arcade games, word games. We’ve seen people make procedurally generated maps, the start of standalone clients, and then all the games we’ve shown in our Community Spotlight posts. We’re consistently entertained by the creativity that is shown, and we are excited to see what you all can make.

The post also has a short term roadmap, and lots more…

Another day, another little tool release over at the Metaplace site. This one is a little helper that assists in making transition textures between different terrain tiles. Sure, some engines do blending for you, but some don’t. And some effects really require handmade transitions. Well, the Transition Tile Maker lets you make your own blend masks and share them, or use the premade ones for making transitions. We figure there’s art tasks for UGC that are kind of tedious, so why not help the process along?

You can grab it for Windows or for Intel Mac…

I just realized I never posted about this over here, only on the main Metaplace site. A while back I did a little tool for Metaplace users to help them make isometric walls. Nothing too fancy, and there’s higher-end tools out there for this sort of purpose, but this does do some nice stuff like help you make sloping walls, do whole batches of textures and generate hundreds of walls quickly, etc.

So here it is — free, and no guarantees.

• IsoTileMaker 0.6 for Windows
• IsoTileMaker 0.6 for Intel Mac

If you want to check out some of the stuff that users have made with it, there’s a  little gallery thread over on the MP website. And the latest version is generally linked here.

You can get it here.

This actually connects to the same chat world as the one on MySpace, and the one on our forums. So it’s all one big happy cross-SNS virtual worldlet in Flash.

We also got a bunch of forums interested in trying to integrate a Metaplace world on their forums… it’ll be one based on Metachat to start with, though it can of course change later. It’ll be their own world, though.

Last time I mentioned this little app on here, people challenged the question of whether it was actually a world or not. Well, it supports hundreds to thousands, there’s physics, a sense of place and space, you can kick a soccer ball, interact in real time… the background could scroll, and you could have avatars instead of profile pics. So… close enough, to my mind.

BTW, we’re going to start spotlighting community members and their worlds. The first spotlight is up now — Tachevert (of WorldIV) and his world “Danser,” which is one of my favorite MP projects so far.

And it’s RIGHT NOW.

(it’s over now)

I know, two Metaplace posts in a row…

Anyway, we are Looking for Community Beta Partners, people who have forums and want to try out adding a Metaplace world to them. This is just an early trial, so we’ll only pick a few to start. So if you’re interested, drop us a line at the link.

If you’re interested, please send me an email at jason@metaplace.com.  Please include the following information:

• Name, url and brief description of the community

• Estimated number of unique monthly visitors/members

• Type and version of forum software that you’re running

• Ability / willingness to do some simple php integration

If you tried out Metachat on MySpace, you may notice that now it embeds a personal world — as in your own chat room — on your profile. If people stop by, you’ll see them as past visitors, they can leave messages in the chat history, and of course, if you both happen to be there at the same time, you can chat live… and of course, it links to the main Metachat world as well.

Wow, it’s been a crazy couple of weeks.:)

We’ve said all along that Metaplace is a platform for making all sorts of virtual worlds. I know a lot of you are waiting for games written in it – specifically an RPG, probably. But well, games are hard, and they take time. And we didn’t see any reason to wait! So we decided that it was time to start releasing some of the worlds that have been made with Metaplace, and today we launched the first one – a simple chat room.

This is part of the OpenSocial launch on MySpace, so it’ll be interesting and exciting to be in the first wave of apps… as of right now, we seem to be the #1 app. Of course, it just launched a few minutes ago. I fully expect to get overtaken any second now by Flixster…

There’s a more detailed post on this over at the Metaplace website, including some implementation tidbits.

If you have a MySpace profile, you can hit the apps page to add it, or visit Metachat directly.

Here we go, stress test number three! Stuff is starting to accelerate quite a lot here as we gear up for releases. So we’re doing another stress test. This one is for an overhead 2d space shooter that you may have seen screenshots of before. This intent this time is to stress test with some physics and a really bandwidth-intensive game. We’ve also worked some on optimizations and on browser compatibility since last time, so we’ll see how that does. We really hope we manage to break stuff this time!

You don’t need to be an alpha tester to play. Just visit the main Metaplace page at noon Pacific time tomorrow, and there will be a link to the game.

Edit: in case it wasn’t clear — this was a “sneak preview” sort of thing; we are not live to the public, it was just for a few hours.

Well, we didn’t make a big deal about it, but Metaplace has now officially been played by actual players, and not alpha testers. Today we did a dev chat using Metaplace itself as the platform for the IRC-like text chat, and in the middle of it we also showed off a little bit of a more graphical space with avatars. It was a chance to both talk to folks and also to shove a high number of people at the server and client, including guest logins, to try to stress things a bit.

It all went spectacularly well, too. We expected things to blow up, but nothing did. Extremely low CPU usage, even with over 80 simple avatars walking around and chatting in one relatively small space (small enough that there was no real network culling going on). That’s a decent achievement for any virtual world system. Bandwidth was a bit high, but we know things to work on there that are easy big gains. Seems like fairly few weird browser issues — which is easily the biggest bugaboo with doing something so Web-based. I have seen that a few folks failed to get in at all, and we’ll try to track down why…

We’ll be posting the official chat log with our next blog post, probably. But in the meantime, a few of the VW-centric news sites were in:

• Massively has a full liveblog
• Virtual Worlds News has a list of top 5 takeaways

Our friends over at the Electric Sheep were also on hand. And of course, there’s blogs by bunches of folks who attended, like TBowl, Feeding Change, Oh No, Aliens!, Cooking XP, and Dr. Offset’s. Edit: Dr. Offset’s has a little bit more, and there’s Emergent Future’s take here.

A couple of those have pics of the (brief) graphical demo. Everyone’s only one avatar… we’ll have to save character customization for another day.