Metaplace Debuts to the Public

Raph Koster and the Metaplace crew took their world-building platform out for a spin tonight, showing off the world in a public developer's chat to anyone who cared to drop by. The environment was simple, just an embedded chat menu, but Koster said to expect more demos in the soon future. And, while it's relatively simple, the chat app worked great. After updating my Flash plug-in to the latest version, the environment loaded immediately in Firefox and continued smoothly. I noticed a solid crew of just about 100 chatters throughout most of the session. More impressively, Metaplace demoed a full 2.5D space with characters and all, seamlessly loading it from the chat client into the graphical space. A lot of the information was a re-hash of old news bits and then some more detailed looks at the guts of Metaplace, but hit the jump for a rundown of the important  facts.   

1. When's it coming: We reported earlier in January that Metaplace would be open to new players in February and then to a broader beta audience in April Apparently when Koster said that, though, he meant that sessions like this would kick it off. So while Metaplace was a day ahead of schedule, I was hoping to actually be browsing through Alpha-created worlds tomorrow.

-"The date for beta is dependent on how the testing goes, the goal was to have users logging into a multiplayer world in February. Today is only Jan 31st, so we beat that by a day, except in Europe. Still in alpha, and moving through the stages based on tester feedback. The goal is spring for broader public testing. If testers say no, not yet, well, then, not yet!"

2. How hard is it: The chat system looked fairly simple, but it turns out that it took the Metaplace group just a little while to put it together. Now anyone can use it, though.
-"What you see here is relatively complex actually. We'll be getting a demo of some of the features later in the chat. But the basics of this chat world with the user list, input bar, and chat room list was about 6 hours of work or so (not bad!). Of course, Metaplace exported this chat as a module, which means that any world can use this code, and many do. So now all worlds can have a chat system in them if they want, or they can still make their own."

3. Where can it go: Well, the goal has always been to take the worlds any place on the Web, and it looks like at least the most popular applications are already set.
-"This Flash client will eventually be embeddable anywhere. Metaplace will supply a handy Javascript container that will include the Flash client. Have tested it on Wordpress and on Facebook already."

4. How much will it cost: There's a free version to develop, and the worlds can then set prices for users or just give them free access, but it's not clear yet what the free developer version will have, how much special features will cost, and how Metaplace is actually going to balance out the costs.

5. Who's using it: Metaplace is already in use by "one graduate class at a major university " for coursework, and the developers expect games as well as social and serious applications to be developed. For the  coming months and  the release, though, they expect the ratio to change.
-"Alpha: mostly all builders. Beta: half and half. Release: mostly players. Metaplace fully expects that in release, most people will just be players. Maybe people who just set up something really simple, without doing any coding or art, based on a stylesheet."

Look for the full chat log to be posted by Metaplace soon.

Update: I was looking for other reactions, and it turns out Massively liveblogged the whole shebang.