Metaplace Preview

While Metaplace is still running under a NDA, I’ve been given some freedom to talk a bit about the upcoming online game development/virtual world/social networking technology. If you aren’t aware of what Metaplace is, then let me clarify first. Metaplace is the brainchild of famed Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies developer, Raph Koster. It seeks to provide a way for anyone to create their own virtual world. Basically, it is a simple way for people to create their own online social spaces and games. It is designed so you can create anything from a simple chat room, to an expansive MMORPG. The platform is designed to be run in a web browser and currently runs under Flash, employing 2D graphics. However, anyone is free to code up their own clients (in fact, I believe someone has a Java client in the works), even ones that could theoretically support 3D graphics.

Metaplace is currently in beta testing at this point, and while it may not be completed yet, it certainly has come a long way. I’ve been involved in testing for a number of months now and I have seen the platform evolve tremendously in just that amount of time. The User Interface has been better unified and tied together, and the Metaplace Team is still working on improving the users experience in that regard. Building worlds is a snap. Everything from finding new objects and tile-sets to pop down to better create your own world is all very simple to do. So, creating your own little online chat environment is a complete snap – and you can even make it look pretty nice too, considering some of the worlds I’ve seen.

But that’s a chat, not an actual game. If you want to develop a game, how does that go? Well, it is a bit harder than building a simple chat environment, as you can imagine, but the Metaplace team has done a lot to make the process easier. Metaplace itself uses the LUA scripting language – a popular language that is used among various areas in gaming, such as World of WarCraft interface mods. This language should be pretty simple to pick up for most people. Yet, what if you’re like me, and you aren’t really much of a coder and just don’t have the time to pick up a coding language like that? Well, people can package up their game systems and pop them onto the cross-world marketplace for other builders to use. That means that, even if you can’t code yourself, you can make use of entire game systems coded up by other residents of Metaplace.

While it certainly has a ways to go yet, given how Metaplace is going, I expect pretty great things out of it, to be entirely honest. I look forward to seeing what the developers do with the platform – and where the players take it.

Also, with this new-found freedom, I hope to give a few more updates involving Metaplace in the future. I’d like to pop up some tutorials, and also use the platform as an excellent talking point for future talks on online communities – there’s a lot of potential there, after all.