Multiverse Goes Open Beta
Posted Tuesday, October 31st, 2006, at 11:21 am Eastern by Mark Wallace
For those who haven’t checked it out yet, now’s the time to get into Multiverse, the free virtual-world development platform, which has just gone from closed to open beta. “Register with the Multiverse Developer Program, and you will be able to access the downloads here,” according to a forum post. [Via reBang.] We blogged about Multiverse recently: could it be that an open 3D world development tool (albeit one intended mostly for game-making) will promote widespread adoption of 3D Web usage in whatever form, in a way that Second Life might have trouble doing on its own?
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I don’t see SL having much trouble, actually.
Just to set expectations: this particular Multiverse open beta is geared mostly toward engineers. Non-engineers have built some very cool worlds in private beta, so I don’t want to discourage you, if you’re dying to dive in. But if you aren’t comfortable with command-line interfaces and hand-editing config files, you might want to wait for a more user-friendly beta. Otherwise, come one, come all.
–Corey Bridges
Exec Producer, Multiverse
>But if you aren’t comfortable with command-line interfaces and hand-editing config files, you might want to wait for a more user-friendly beta. Otherwise, come one, come all.
We do a lot of this already in Second Life, even being clueless gits without programming skills — but no doubt your commands and your hand-editing thingies are all different. So…I’ll take a rain check for now but will keep watch.
Walker, it can’t be widespread until it does have a user-friendly beta. And that wouldn’t mean having am SL-like interface circa 2003 or frankly, even circa 2006. We would reall hope the next big thing would get rid of all that tekkie clutter on the screen, make SEARCH a button you can see and use; take developer tools like wonky BUILD out of sight and out of mind, etc.
>>So…I’ll take a rain check for now but will keep watch.
Thank fuck for that. Wtf would you know about developing a product? Being an end user “expert” is the easiest job in the world…blowing wind about menus and usability because you’ve played with tso and sl.
>>Walker, it can’t be widespread until it does have a user-friendly beta.
Did you even bother to read what Cory Bridges said? As per usual..no!
Having played with the closed beta releases for a few months, I can say that this platform has a huge potential and may well promote widespread adoption of the 3D Web.
I set up a server last night without any problems. It was quite exciting to have my own MMO running locally — something that SL can’t offer me right now. I wish the Multiverse team the best of luck and am really excited to see the platform develop.
Very interesting!
Unfortunately, the client is Windoze-only, which is totally useless to me. At least the server is Java, but that does me no good without a client I can run on a real OS.
Hi, Kami–
Regarding the Windows-only client: we will indeed be building the Multiverse client on other platforms, like Mac, Linux, mobile devices, and consoles. Those other clients won’t be available immediately, but since most of the Multiverse crew comes from Netscape (where we had something like 16 different client platforms), hopefully our commitment to cross-platform carries some credibility. Thanks!
–Corey