Areae Debuts Metaplace, Virtual Worlds for Everyone

Areae  debuted its new product, Metaplace, this afternoon at the TechCrunch40 Conference. We reported earlier that the CrunchBase entry for Areae declared that "Metaplace-created virtual worlds will be robust with users being able to play games, socialize, create content and conduct commerce" all embedded in any browser or profile users may want with the Metaplace network tying them all together. The newly live Metaplace.com describes (after 30 minutes of clicking refresh) the product as "a next-generation virtual worlds platform designed to work the way the Web does. Instead of giant custom clients and huge downloads, Metaplace lets you play the same game on any platform that reads our open client standard."

It sounds pretty neat, like a very lightweight, Web-integrated version of Multiverse, a virtual world hit by the widget ray. And just as Multiverse released demos of worlds built on the platform, the Areae team is working on some projects of its own.  Apparently one of the staff has already built a world--in a day and a half--and embedded it in a private Myspace profile. Hopefully that'll go public soon as an example for users to toy with. But the entire team is working on building their own  "worldy MMORPG" that "some of you who have been looking for a game like that might want to help [them] build."

The entire project is on open standards--"no 'not invented here,' no closed proprietary approaches," the site explains, making it supposedly easier to integrate with the rest of the Web world. There's a sign-up for the Alpha group, though no word on when that will be available. While the entire site talks about being open to all users, the Alpha sign-up at least is fairly interested in programming, art, and game design experience.

Here's a condensed list of features from the site:

• Can I build my own world? That's sort of the whole point. You should be able to stage up a massively multiplayer world with basic chat and a map you can build on in less than five minutes. It's that easy. Inherit a stylesheet -- puzzle game, or shooter, or chat world -- and off you go! Building maps and places is as easy as pasting in links from the Web, and dragging and dropping the pictures into your world.
• What sorts of worlds can I make? Game logic is written in MetaScript, which is based on Lua.  So it's easy to make whatever kind of game or world that you want. Metaplace will support everything from 2d overhead grids through first-person 3d. However, right now we only have clients that do 2d of various sorts, including grid view, 2d isometric, 2.5d heightfields, and so on. We expect to keep working on the 3d client support.
• How does it interact with the Web? We speak Web fluently. Every world is a web server, and every object has a URL. You can script an object so that it feeds RSS, XML, or HTML to a browser. This lets you do things like high score tables, objects that email you, player profile pages right on the player -- whatever you want. Every object can also browse the Web: a chat bot can chatter headlines from an RSS feed, a newspaper with real headlines can sit on your virtual desk, game data could come from real world data... you get the idea. No more walled garden.

Check back here in the future, we'll be keeping an eye on Metaplace developments.