More on WebFlock

 Posted by (Visited 4980 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Jul 212008
 

For those curious about the tech behind the Electric Sheep’s WebFlock platform, here’s a glimpse from a comment posted on Clickable Culture:

…the avatars are typically created in Maya or Max but they are rendered into sprites. That doesn’t prevent avatars from being individually personalized, but we haven’t finished that capability yet in our feature set.

You can still have a very 3D feel with our rendering engine (less toylike than isometric in my opinion), but you don’t have full camera control. Personally, I think that is a feature you DON’T want right now (unless you are doing enterprise simulation/training or mirrorworld stuff) — if you’ve ever watched people try to learn the camera controls in your typical full-3D virtual world, it is sheer pain.

The environments are also created in Maya or Max and then exported to Collada.

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WebFlock

 Posted by (Visited 9621 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Jul 172008
 

WebFlock screenshot

The Electric Sheep Company has launched WebFlock, which is an “under 100k/year” Flash-based solution for building white-label virtual worlds. ESC will do the hosting and presumably the work of making the world; their first customer is the TV show The L-Word.

Many of the articles and commentary are comparing it to Lively, but the comparison seems wrong to me — Lively is aimed at end users making small spaces, whereas this seems more like it’s up against SmartFoxServer and ElectroServer as a white-label solution. It will fill a nice niche there, given the radically different style of the visuals — the other two seems to lean towards kids’ worlds.

I would expect to see more adult IP (TV shows, movies, businesses) using this sort of platform for their virtual world presence, rather than embedding their presence inside of a single world.