One of the bottlenecks in virtual world research is the fact that we academics don't have any virtual worlds of our own. The reason for this is simply cost: it's just too expensive to create one to anything approaching professional quality (unless you go with a textual world, in which case it's cheap but you don't get players).
There are free development tools around, but they always seem to be missing some crucial component. NeL gives you a skeleton, for free, but wants half a million Euros for a something you could actually use. Kaneva's game engine is more complete, but you can't use it for free-to-play worlds of any scale (ie. more than 30 players - and they want to host it on their own network). RealmForge is very good except for its network features, although it is rapidly improving in that area. RealmCrafter is only $55, so it's practically free, but its graphics engine is dated and it's still something of a work-in-progress. BYOND is 100% free, and is excellent - if you don't mind having a 2D world rather than a 3D one. I was a little suspicious, then, when at the AGC I heard of Multiverse, launching today. It's a complete, end-to-end platform solution that is free for non-commercial use. "We only make money when you make money, and if you never charge a cent, you never have to pay us anything". Nevertheless, having looked into it, it does indeed seem to be the genuine article. It was set up by a bunch of ex-Netscape developers, and they took their give-it-away philosophy with them. The business model appears to be to build up an installed base of Multiverse browsers through free games, thereby making the platform attractive to commercial developers (who will have to pay to use it). Never mind the world of commerce, though - this is great for academics! We get a free, commercial-quality engine, plus SDK, documentation, sample game, art assets - everything except our own content. Because there's a common client, it looks as if even home users could set up small virtual worlds on their own, in the same way they currently set up web pages. If that happens, virtual worlds will really take off. There has to be a catch, right?
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