• Metaplace status update!

    Hours Categories Gamemaking
    Comments 2 Comments

    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…


  • Second Skin

    Hours Categories Game talk, Watching

    I’m a day late on this, i think! But Second Skin is premiering in New York, and they want to sell tickets. 🙂

    Today’s the day!  Tickets have just gone on sale for the NYC premiere of our little documentary on virtual worlds, Second Skin.  We would love to have all of you there, and would be honored if you’d join us at our hometown premiere.  If we sell out this theater fast enough, we might get other NYC theaters to notice, and give us a good run- which would create a lot more press, and help us with our theatrical release later this year.

    If you could please BUY TICKETS HERE and forward this message along to *everyone* you know, we might sell out within the day- our humble goal.  Thanks to all of you for making  this movie such an unbelievable success.

    In case you’re new, here’s the skinny on our movie, below.  Also, watch out for us in next week’s issue of Newsweek and Moviemaker Magazine!

    Read More “Second Skin”

  • WordPress 2.6 upgrade

    Hours Categories Misc, Open thread
    Comments 9 Comments

    I am doing an upgrade to WordPress 2.6, don’t be surprised to see the blog broken for a bit.

    Later:

    OK, I think it’s done, and there seem to be no adverse effects. During the few minutes that it was defenseless, 7 spams came in. 🙂

    And my Visual Editor conked out beforehand — the dreaded “visual editor just doesn’t work” bug that apparently plagues many. Sigh. Here’s what fixed it:

    • The upgrade, at least on my machine, put everything up with the wrong permissions. I set the wp_includes folder and all files under to 755.
    • I also deleted the contents of wp-content/uploads/js_cache

    Apparently there are several things that cause this. So here’s some useful threads.

    Oh, and you need to add captions to your existing theme if you want them styled right on the images. I found this, though I then started tweaking it. (See below).

    Even later:

    All my accented characters were broken, and it’s because the wp-config-sample.php file has utf8 for the DB_CHARSET, but my blog is old enough that all its tables were creates many versions ago when the default was latin1_ci_swedish. There’s no easy way to change the DB, so I fixed it by changing the DB_CHARSET in wp-config to just ”.

    OK, now that caption stuff:

    Read More “WordPress 2.6 upgrade”

  • E3 MMO movement

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 7 Comments
    XBox Live avatars
    XBox Live avatars and new dashboard

    From here, it sure like the virtual world-ish convergence that has long been predicted is hitting the consoles in earnest.

    • XBox Live is adding avatars, akin to the Nintendo Miis, but it looks like they’ll have a bit more spatiality and multiplayer interaction to them — and will be the basic interface for XBL from now on. Oh, and remember when I commented that consoles were turning into PCs? They announced the ability to install games to the hard drive as a major advance. Heh.
    • Nintendo’s next Animal Crossing game is also drifting towards online-world land, though still not truly massive in scale.
    • Club Penguin is jumping to the Nintendo DS, and don’t underestimate Disney’s new DGamer service, which is intended to network all the Disney online properties.
    • Sony has a 256-player action game coming, which qualifies as “massive,” certainly, though perhaps not as presistent. They’re also adding more real-world integration, with stuff like movie and TV downloads, weather service, news, etc.

  • Blizzard scores win against WoWGlider

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 24 Comments

    Virtually Blind has the scoop, but in short, Blizzard won on all the major points: the court didn’t go for the copyright argument, saying they were bound by precedent and not a policymaking body; and that making this kind of software looks like tortious interference (meaning, interfering with the contract between Blizzard and users). Further analysis at TerraNova.