Trevor F. Smith: Exterior:

So, Areae finally announced Metaplace, their web based virtual world construction service. Based on the conversation I had with John and Raph a few months ago I think they have the whole "game world as canvas" domain sewn up. I'll be a user as soon as they ship, though they haven't released a target date to the public.

Some things to keep in mind:

Metaplace is a service with an open API, formats, and protocols, but the announcement doesn't mention open source. So, if we like their style we can build our own clients or servers which talk the Metaplace talk, but that's not the same thing as being able to boot the latest, professionally developed Metaplace server on a local machine (or EC2 cluster). (UPDATE: some noise about open clients here) Also, there was no mention of what standards process they're using for new protocols, APIs, languages, and data formats, so it could be anything from "here's some docs" to W3C committee.

Metaplace is "like the web", but also not like the web. They've used Lua (which is an awesome language) for the game logic instead of choosing one of the many web scripting languages. They could have chosen one of the Ps (PHP, Perl, Python) or Ruby or Javascript, but they went with a language which is common in game development. There are definitely reasons that Lua rocks, but it shows that they're willing to choose game dev style instead of web dev style for core pieces of functionality.

Metaplace is for game worlds, which means that it has hard agreements about the server as Ground Truth so that cheats don't immediately kill all fun. This isn't black magic but it has engineering constraints about how loose you can be with simulation and traffic delays. Near real-time protocols must be used for world events, so you're talking about a non-HTTP protocol which comes with the usual firewall and NAT problems. Areae know what they're doing so they'll do a good job, but some company networks just won't pass anything but HTTP without IT department approval.

Metaplace is a game platform with game aesthetics, which means that some corporate cultures will frown on its use. I don't think Areae's selling into that market, but there are lots of people out there looking for a commercial grade web space platform which they can use for commercial applications. Metaplace isn't it (for now).

All of this is not to say that I'm not a huge fan of the folks at Areae and what they're doing with Metaplace. I expect that they'll dominate the domain they've chosen and they'll definitely receive my monthly subscription fees in exchange for what I know will be a very fun service. As the team at Transmutable grows and we gather momentum it's a relief to know that people as talented as Areae have the web game domain covered so that we can focus on goal oriented applications which merge the values of the web and 3D spaces.

More on that (and a new company site) in the coming week.

UPDATE: Though they've embraced markup, Metaplace has invented an entirely new language and format for world definition:

The core of Metaplace is something we call MetaMarkup. It’s a markup language designed to serve as a game equivalent to HTML. We use this as the network protocol for servers talking to clients. It looks like this:
[UI_IMAGE]|0|-1|my picture|0|0|100|100|0

As you can see, this isn’t XML or other markup standards; that’s just because XML was too big, and other standards weren’t really suited to what we were trying to accomplish.

Whenever I hear people say that XML is too big, I get cold chills. They could have used XML for all human facing work and compiled it down to a compressed format for transfer and rendering. Instead they've thrown away all of the web toolchains which handle XML, and manage to scale quite well, thank you very much.

Later in the post:

Well, look at it this way: MetaMarkup is HTML. Clients are like browsers. The server is like Apache. The scripting is like CGI. The modules and stylesheets are like CSS and stylesheets. And Metaplace.com is like the Google/Yahoo/YouTube that sits on top of it all.

Somehow they've missed that the interesting part is not to be like those things, but to actually be the web. I'm also concerned that the screencasts of their app seem to all take place in a page consuming flash app instead of using HTML for all 2D widgets and Flash only for scene rendering, but I hope that was just for demos.

Subtitle:	A public record of my projects and related works.
Keywords:	Bit Henge Favorites Fingernail Clippings Ogoglio Transmutable
Streams:	trevor.smith.name twitter reader linkmonger flickr
Search:

Trevor F. Smith: Exterior

links for 2007-09-22

links for 2007-09-20

links for 2007-09-19

Metaplace

links for 2007-09-01