In this edition:
• Corey's Column
• Alpha Developer Tools--released into public testing!
• Multiverse White Paper--available!
• Developers wiki--launched!
• Tech Corner: About Collada

Corey's Column

As you can see, we have some big news this month. We've put our first set of tools into public alpha-testing, we've released our first white paper that gives a high-level overview of Multiverse technology, and we've made available our developer documentation at our developer wiki. (By the way, many of you have written outstanding posts in the forums. Feel free to take your best posts and and add them to the wiki.)

We're releasing this information and technology early in the development process, so a lot of it is rough and incomplete. However, we strongly believe that it's better to let you get your hands on it now, so you can provide feedback that drives development in the direction that you want.

Soon we'll announce contests for asset-creation, world-creation, and more. We're looking forward to giving you a stage for showing off what you can do.

Even more interesting, in a few months, we'll release our client and server into public testing as well, so not only will you be able to build a world--you'll be able to inhabit it.

Thanks for all your patience--things are about to get really interesting.

--Corey

Corey Bridges
Executive Producer, Multiverse

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Alpha Developer Tools Avaliable

We have just released our version 1.2 of three of our developer tool set: the Model Viewer, Terrain Generator, and World Editor. The tools are still early in the development cycle, but we wanted to get them into your hands, to give you a chance to work with them and so that your feedback can guide subsequent revisions and improvements. You can find the release notes for tools and discuss the tools as much as you like, in the new tools discussion area of the forum. We'll be there, too. However, the ONLY way to guarantee that Multiverse gets your feedback or bug report is to let us know through the official feedback form.

One other point: this is just the first set of tools. We'll be releasing other tools in the months ahead, in addition to adding more features to these tools.

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Overview of the Multiverse Platform

We've just released the Multiverse Technology White Paper, discussing the Multiverse vision, platform, and opportunity. This first white paper provides a high-level overview of how our technology works. Future white papers will provide technical drilldowns. You can find this presentation of our new approach for MMOG creation here: Multiverse Platform Whitepaper (pdf)

"Multiverse provides two general ways to distribute load among multiple servers: based on game world geography, and by distributing plug-in services. Geographical load-balancing enables servers to offload processing for objects based on their distribution in the virtual world. As a particular area becomes crowded with objects, mobs, and player-characters, it can be partitioned and distributed among multiple physical servers to provide scalability and consistent performance. Similarly, each plug-in service can be distributed across multiple physical servers as needed. For instance, if a mob AI is found to consume significant resources and becomes a bottleneck, the mob AI service can be easily distributed to additional servers."

from the Multiverse Technology White Paper

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Developer Wiki Launched

In line with our philosophy of getting you more information sooner rather than later, we've launched our developer wiki. At the wiki, you'll find documentation not only on our publicly available tools, but also on our client and server, even though they're still in private testing. We're constantly updating the wiki--take a look at its "Recent changes" link, and you'll see that we sometimes make dozens of additions per day. And for those of you who are using our tools or the rest of the platform, we invite and encourage you to write wiki articles to share your knowledge and experience with the rest of the developer community.

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Tech Corner: About COLLADA

I'm Robin McCollum, principal client engineer. For this month's Tech Corner I'd like to provide an overview of COLLADA and how it relates to Multiverse. COLLADA is an open standard for digital assets. Multiverse uses the COLLADA interchange format as part of the asset pipeline to get models from the various 3D modeling tools (e.g. 3ds Max or Maya) into the Multiverse format. One of the core problems faced by a game engine is getting the model information out of the DCC (Digital Content Creation) tools. A common approach here is to build a custom plugin for each tool that exports the data. Since supporting a plugin for these tools is complex, game engine developers generally have to choose one or two platforms to support. COLLADA aims to solve this problem by providing a common format, and convincing the 3D model tool vendors to build and support plugins for their tools.

So far, 3ds Max and Maya both have contracted third party developers to build and support plugins, and XSI has included the plugin with their product. Originally, the COLLADA standard was designed by Sony as their official format for the PlayStation 3 and PSP. Later, this was adopted by the Khronos group as an industry standard. Another product that attempts to provide interchange between modeling tools is Okino's PolyTrans. PolyTrans is a commercial product that attempts to provide good conversion of model data, skinning information, texture coordinates, and animations between the various DCC tools. To do this, Okino has its own intermediate format. They also provide plugins for some of the DCC tools (including 3ds Max, Maya, and XSI) that can export and import files with their format.

Kaydara's FilmBox format is also used in a similar role to COLLADA by many companies. Since several of the DCC tools can import and export files in this format, it is often used as an intermediate format. Kaydara was acquired by Alias which was subsequently acquired by Autodesk. The primary advantage of COLLADA over FilmBox is that COLLADA is an open standard, rather than a proprietary format. Many of these interchange formats have some glitches when something that is easily handled by one tool is not easily handled by others. Unfortunately COLLADA is no exception to this, and still has many shortcomings. This is one reason why it is important to use the ModelViewer during the development of art assets to ensure that they will look right in the game engine.

Recently, two substantial new features have been added to COLLADA. The first is the COLLADA Physics extension, which allows artists to set up collision and deformation properties in the tools, and then export it in a format that can be used by other tools or game engines. The second significant feature is the COLLADA FX extension. This is designed to allow the export of the complex next generation materials, including shaders, from the tools into a common format. We are evaluating these features for possible integration with the Multiverse platform.

The current alpha versions of the Multiverse tools do not have a finished solution to exporting material properties and shaders from the various DCC tools, and these scripts must be manually created for now. (More information is at the wiki.) As the vendors add support for the COLLADA FX format, we hope to provide a good material solution that takes advantage of this standard.

Links:
Collada Public Forum

Collada 1.4 Spec (PDF)

COLLADA plugins for 3ds Max and Maya

COLLADA Blender plugin

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"Well, narrative words, as they're hard for a computer to parse, are hard for a computer to tokenize-- they are not meaningful in game terms. So, can a player who has been trained by the game to tokenize everything, ever do anything but ignore a story as it unfolds, as a superficial distraction?"

Palamedes, Multiverse Developers Forum