Metaplace’s public debut
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. 😉
It was a ton of fun. Unmoderated and remarkably smooth with a ton of questions answered and some great demonstrations at that. A chat, a graphical space, the ability to pull information from the web, embedded youtube videos – what’s not to love? 😉
Congratulations on the success of this! That indeed is a great accomplishment for any virtual world, and I’m quite looking forward to seeing Metaplace in action.
Congrats on your launch! 🙂
Sweet, keep it up!
That chat was a lot of fun. It was really nice of you guys to hang out afterwards too. 🙂
When is the next one? I missed it.
Good for you, using Metaplace for the chat.
I’m always a little embarrassed when folk have to admit that their massively multi-player platform isn’t suited to having very many people interact with one another.
Heh. kudos.
So I saw a screenshot where someone was like “Now all I need is a halberd”, and that got me thinking.
Would it be wrong to import UO’s art files into a metaplace world? Would it even work?
Well, to be honest, I’d feel more excited about this if I weren’t left out of it. Because…that’s how it feels when you are told something is “open to the public”…but not really, just a sneak preview.
Also, I hope you won’t bring IRC culture with your IRC-like chat.
80 avatars are what you can get comfortably on the Second Life private island servers — even 100. At a four-corner sim set-up, that’s 400 people. And that’s ok. I really don’t think there has to be this hysterical chasing of numbers. You don’t need a football field. You need a reasonably sized class auditorium, at most. Otherwise people can’t really talk meaningfully anyway.