Experimenting with Multiverse Part 1
One thing I’d like to start doing here is sharing my experiences with the masses- to not only share news from external sources, but to also share with you my own “news” in the form of discoveries, technology evaluations, and explorations of virtual worlds and interactive media.
So with that said, I spent some time over the last few days exploring Multiverse; a development platform
for creating virtual worlds. First impressions are lasting ones, like the scent of a woman- pleasant or unpleasant, and my first measuring stick is how the environment looks. I know that’s a shallow one, but hey, it’s how I’ve always been- what’s pleasing to the eye can certainly be intriguing at the least. I downloaded the Multiverse World Browser and Registered for an account. My first interest was to see the Time Square Demo World. If they can get that right, there’s certainly potential for the platform yet. After the installer ran, and the patches were applied, I proceeded to login. The first thing I noticed was the Axiom.dll updates, which means the graphics rendering is done with the C# flavor of OGRE. Not a bad choice- it’s one of the leading graphics rendering engines in open source, and the scene management is fairly straightforward.
Once I logged in, I was quite impressed. The default avatar held a slight resemblance to the avatars in Entropia Universe, which isn’t a bad thing, and the overall environment was sleek and trendy:
The UI was quite basic, but what do you expect from a demo world. As I’ve seen in screen shots the UI can be updated. After walking around the virtual streets of Time Square (listening to the Fresh Prince), I decided to load up the Fantasy World demo. This test for me is to see if I could see myself playing a game based on this platform. Once the world loaded up, I created my avatar/character. Again, not to many choices but not surprised. I dropped in the world and immediately saw a few scripted wolves running around. Again the environment although not as advanced as say, Crysis, it could do the job for a basic virtual world solution. One thing I missed was the shadowing. I didn’t see where that was implemented, but maybe that’s in the works. It has the potential to aesthetically a step up from Second Life and/or Active Worlds, but maybe a slight step down from CryEngine-based Entropia. Intrigued enough by what I saw, I went ahead and downloaded the server, and developer tools. Check out my next post on Multiverse as I take a deeper dive.
Great post. The Multiverse Platform supports many advanced lighting effects, including shadows, high dynamic range lighting, and an assortment of shaders and particle effects. It’s up to the developer to decide what features they want to enable in-world. Be sure to check out Dark Horizons…it demonstrates much of this.
Thanks for pointing those items out to me. I was certainly looking for them as you can tell. Knowing this, I will be sure to mention you in the next post and highlight those features as I explore them. Great info!