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- Metaparticle Tool and Animation Strip EditorSeptember 29 2008
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We are excited to release two more standalone tools for everyone to play with! The Metaparticle Tool is a little program that allows you to create your own particle effects for your world. It's a great way to make simple effects for a Metaplace world ahead of time.
Metaparticle Tools For Windows - ZIP file.
The Metaparticle Tool is a way to make animating special effects. It saves out individual frames of animation as PNGs so that you can then recombine them using the Metaplace AnimStrip Editor or an image editing program.
It's a moderately complicated tool with a lot of power, but it's also pretty fun to use, so don't be intimidated! There are full help documents including a tutorial available in the Help menu within the tool. The resulting images require an Animation Strip Builder to put them into an anim strip that can be used within Metaplace, so here is a link to another tool we've made:
Metaplace Animation Strip Builder - Windows ZIP
Please let us know in our forums if you need any help or would like to share your creations!
- Community Spotlight - Virek Online by FredrikssonSeptember 23 2008
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It's been awhile since we've done a community spotlight, but here's a great one I have to share with everyone! This time the world is Virek Online, the beginnings of a folk music RPG!
Can you tell us a bit about Virek Online?
"Virek" is an old word from the north of Sweden, meaning "far-travelled". The game is a light action rpg with a silly little story about the Land of the Minstral Kings which is taken over by an evil wizard. On another level it's a fun way for my music duo "Pettersson & Fredriksson" to share stuff with friends and fans. So you'll hear our music in-game, and you'll find cd-covers and bandpics hanging on the walls and so on. Even the sound effects will be produced by our instruments! So welcome to the first nordic-folkmusic-RPG ever made!
How long has it taken you to make?
I...don't know. Been spending a lot of time here, that's for sure. Of course, much of that time has been spent learning the tools and such. And meeping.
What has been your favorite part about working with Metaplace so far?
I thi
- Where did the Metaplace idea come from?September 4 2008
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In response to a question asked in our public forums:
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I came from the world of muds. That means I got my start in virtual worlds in the days when anyone could download a codebase, and assuming they had a server they could get going and dive into running a world of their own.
That went away with the big MMORPGs. But when we did UO: The Second Age, there had already been a movement among players towards having "grey shard" server emulators. Some of the tools users had made to hack the UO datafiles were actually better than the tools we had in-house.
So I informally floated an idea for the expansion that didn't go anywhere. Why not release the game server as a binary, release documentation for our scripting language (which was fantastic for the time), release our tools client, and let people make their own worlds?
We could then add red moongates as a housing object you could place in the main UO shards -- red moongates in Ultima lore were the moongates that traveled from world to world.
The red moongates would reconnect you to the player-run server, and would do a one-way copy of your player data - so you could move your character from the official servers outwards, but never bring back stuff from player servers.
As I recall, part of the reason that my informal proposal (I never pitched it formally) didn't go anywhere was that old bugaboo, leg
- Metaplace August UpdateAugust 27 2008
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Hello everyone!
It is time again for our monthly update! Things have been extremely busy here at the Metaplace office, both in development and with our relocation. We have hired on some fantastic staff over the past few months and unfortunately outgrew our old office and had to move to a bigger space. We are settled in now in a colorful office in the same building and are back to business. Here's a snapshot of our new place:
On the development front, here is an update on what we've been working on:
New Toolset
Our new Flex toolset has made a lot of progress. We've had a ton of feedback so far that it is much easier to use, loads faster, responds quicker, and allows users of all skill levels to create their own starter world. Some of the tools that are available are:
- Creating your own objects with art from your hard drive or from the Web
- Tile painting with a brush that can be configured to change the width, height and density
- Wall creation. For those who have playe
- Tile Transition Maker v.0.5 released!August 4 2008
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Hello all,
A few weeks ago we released our Tile Transition Maker tool to everyone. Here is the latest release, version 0.5!
The big new feature is seamless texture generation Many textures that you find or make will not line up perfectly on the edges. This leads to "seams" when you use them as terrain tiles. But this tool can help fix that, and makes it easy to use photo source for your tiles.
Select texture one or texture two by clicking in the respective window. The preview will change to show you what that texture looks like when tiled to itself. You'll see the seams pretty clearly there.
On the Edit menu, choose "Make seamless (Radial)" or "Make Seamless (Linear)". You can also use CTRL-R and CTRL-L (Command on Macs). This will change the texture so that it tiles perfectly to itself. These two commands do much the same thing, but have slighly different results. Depending on the texture, you may want one or the other -- try them both. If neither is to your liking, you can use "Restore Original" (CTRL or CMD-E) to get back the original.
After you have decided on a seamless version, you can proceed with your transition generation as usual.
Here is the latest version: