A new VW called Cloud Party (https://its.cloudpartytime.com/) has been in the talks on SL-related / metaverse fora after their launch for the past few days. It is a new proprietary closed system made by some ex-Linden folks, looks and feels a lot like SL, but focuses only on a WebGL+WebSockets client. We took a quick look and had some talk on IRC on #realxtend-dev about it yesterday, I summarize some observations here:
- much is familiar and there's nothing really new in itself: * general look & feel is like SL (no wonder I guess as same people have been making it?), * authoring by drag&drop of meshes from library to world is much like the old Library thing in Naali 0.x already, and what e.g. the Admino library Tundra add-on (just having a website with thumbnails of meshes that you can browse) featured in their hosting looks like. The basic support for mesh drag&drops is a core / bundled feat in Tundra. * I don't think they've copied anything from us, it's just how normal basic things work also in tools like Unity3D which was the idea they started with (they first wanted to make a new game engine / dev kit, similar to Unity but with WebGL (Unity3D didn't have export alternatives 1 year back), but made it with realtime collaborative editing and then as it was fun decided to make it a hosted SL-style VW biz instead). * Facebook authentication & integration is also similar to Adminotechs * the whole cloud hosting worlds-on-demand idea of course is what also Adminotech (with Tundra) and Kitely (with Opensimulator) are doing too * the way to navigate from a cloud to another is basically identical to what Spinningwire came up with for the Berlin gallery weekend thing (click on a distant gallery in the horizon to visit it), so really there is much familiar :) . Also the TOY lobby has the similar design of mini-island like platforms floating in the sky, just that there they are also connected with bridges so you can also walk from a plat for another. * and as we've seen before, WebGL has performance overhead which I think is part of the reason why also CloudParty does not look like Crysis, or even some fancy game running on the Unity3d plugin or even Ogre .. or indeed the sometimes quite fancy native SL client. I'm sure much could and will be done on the gfx front in CloudParty still though. They wrote the rendering code themselves, and certainly have made it to suite user generated content (like the slviewer renderer is I think, even though there are no prims in CloudParty, it is a bit similar when people use meshes as building blocks) & also lower end HW. It starts up pretty quickly and works nice and well, though. * Javascript API for in-world object scripting, like we have in Tundra too (but more LSL style here, the script is in the scope of a single object and there seems to be string based messaging / events for interactions then. I've been otherwise tasked to investigate an interoperable (cross web & native reX clients) and ease to dev etc. API, so studied this one with that in mind too .. might be fun to test implementing some of the CloudParty JS API in Tundra or WebNaali too (at least much simpler than implementing LSL support which I've studied sometimes a bit too :) .. docs are http://its.cloudpartytime.com/help_scripting.html . Didn't seem like the ultimate general multiuser 3d app API to me, but certainly worth a look and more study, was fun to test it live too (got a little script made). - It is I think a great demonstration of WebGL & WebSockets in action for a fully fledged VW, with all the editing and creation related things etc. working nicely .. UI logic is much like in SL (select object and modify it's properties) but modernized and quite clean and simple. Some here have sometimes I think misunderstood WebGL as being limited to some kind of static scene previews etc., we've have a bit of a hard time sometimes also with customers (who know SL and Tundra etc too) to convince them that WebGL and Flash etc. apps can be interactive and collaborative too (not just like single person scene views) -- after trying out this VW, there should be no misconceptions about that anymore. There are also many nice pre-existing WebGL made 3d creation tools out on the web, 3dtin and tinkercad and such -- those are single user though. I've sometimes estimated that VWs can become bigger and more commonplace now (or already last year :) thanks to the ease of adoption through WebGL -- is sure interesting to see to what extent it happens in CloudParty now. Businesswise it so far repeats the SL model, of there being a single company running the whole world, renting those islands there etc., and the whole technology being closed and proprietary. So nothing new regarding realXtend there, as in we keep on providing an open source, not tied to a single company (competitive market vs. vendor lock-in) and extensible (you can use it to your needs for any apps, not just SL clones) tech. If I understood correctly, one of the guys (Cory) there is now also responsible for Facebook Mobile or so, so I figure we'll see the tight FB integration continue. As featured in the reX 2012-2013 roadmap we made with Jukka and others, we are also continuing on WebGL and other alternative client tech support on two fronts: A) CIE/Chiru continues the old WebNaali effort, which is a manual reimplementation of a Tundra client using pre-existing WebGL rendering engines (originally GLGE, now three.js is considered) and websockets, and B) Jukka has already tested automatically compiling the same gfxapi 3d rendering engine code from C++ to both native apps (also iOS and Android) and to JS and WebGL for browsers (which gives about a 10x perf hit, same as what we see in CloudParty I think, but still it works). This could in the long run give an optimal solution where we can run the same client efficiently in small mobile devices (where webgl isn't yet, and may even never make it - CloudParty is hopeful though) and with the ease of web stuff in laptop&desktop browsers with more power available. I think that covers my main first reactions, let's see how things develop.. there's a lot of talk on the net, one thread somewhere seemed to be about why Linden should buy them out :) (didn't read that one) ~Toni -- http://groups.google.com/group/realxtend http://www.realxtend.org
