Release 1.1: Video, Flash, Scalability, and More!
By Rand McKinney (c.rand)
Multiverse Documentation Guru
In case you haven't heard, Multiverse has a new release coming out soon: version 1.1. This release focuses on expanding the programmatic capabilities of the Client and dramatically improving server scalability and performance.
Here is a taste of what you can look forward to:
Client features:
Displaying video, web pages, and Adobe Flash animation: The 1.1 Client will be able to display video movies, both from the asset repository and from a streaming media server; it can also display web pages and Flash animations.
Blended animations: The Client will support blended animations to support combinations of animations that can be played at the same time. For example, a character may be running, holding a gun, looking up, and firing all at the same time. This ability eliminates the need to create separate animations to cover all of these permutations.
UI enhancement: Chat bubbles, quest markers, and floating name text have been revamped for this release, and will use the same interface system used for other UI elements. The chat frame functionality will also be reimplemented in Python scripts.
Material scripting: You will be able to script material files from the Client scripting API.
Deleting characters: The character creation framework will provide the ability to delete characters.
In previous releases, the World Browser had a largely undocumented BetaWorld API associated with the server's MARS modules. The 1.1 release replaces BetaWorld with a Python scripting API that you can modify or completely replace. This will enable you to create your own original gameplay systems with new types of player interaction for quests, inventory, trade, and so on.
This change was fundamental enough it will require some manual migration when you move to the 1.1 release. We replaced references to BetaWorld, Client.Instance, and other internal client objects from all the UI scripts in the Sampleworld Interface/FrameXML directory with calls to ClientAPI interfaces and the new MARS client Python scripts. We've written a comprehensive upgrade guide to help you in this process.
Server features:
In this release, we added vastly improved performance and scalability to the server. Both the messaging system and the distributed object architecture have been reworked. For details, see Tropical: Server Fun (in the Sun), below.
Tools features:
New World Editor features:
You can now open a world file without loading all the object collections in the world; then, you can open the individual object collections separately. This is useful for very large worlds with many objects, and will dramatically reduce World Editor's startup time for such worlds.
You can choose to display objects in the tree view individually to improve performance.
There are lots of new camera controls.
You can create custom keyboard and mouse button mappings.
Additionally, we've made a number of improvements to the other tools. We are working hard to implement some of the more sweeping tools features you have requested (yes, terrain editing is top on the list) and hope to be able to release them soon.
See www.multiverse.net for more on multiverse.