We reported in June that Microsoft was expanding Virtual Earth with Dassault Systems' 3D modeling. DS' 3Dvia initiative and ShapeIt technology will be relying on Allegorithmic's texturing tools to provide a more photo-realistic user-generated content alternative to Google Earth's SketchUp. We spoke with Allegorithmic President Sebastien Deguy about his quickly growing company's inclusion in the Virtual Earth project. "Microsoft didn't have a way to do content, and Google Earth didn't have textures," he said. "Virtual Earth wanted high resolution textures, but they did a study that showed that when you jump from an 8 megabyte to a 12 megabyte package for download, you lose 20% of your users. And that's exponential." Deguy's major claims for Allegorithmic is that the free software, MaPZone, lets authors create bitmap textures 1-2x faster, while the pro software creates ProFX textures that are 500-1000x smaller.
The textures work in a way similar to Flash, explained Deguy. The description of the model and texture is hosted by the server, but the processing work is done by the client, leading to significantly faster downloads and rezzing without losing quality. That's true for both traditional games, in which Deguy says at least 70% of all textures can be replaced by ProFX, and virtual worlds.
Unfortunately, he didn't have any of the Virtual Earth libraries handy to show off, but he says they'll be as rich as the textures created for more traditional single player games and MMORPGs.If that's true, Virtual Earth could have a strong leg up on Google Earth.
More excitingly, Deguy says that Allegorithmic has discussed integrating with several other undisclosed platforms, including some major developers. Any ProFX texture uploaded to Virtual Earth, he said, would be portable to take into any other world running on the platform.
Considering Microsoft has always been a company to push for the success of its own standards, individual deals by Allegorithmic take on a fair amount of weight.
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