Planet Postmoderna Blog

It has been decided that we will abandon building our demo in Vastpark and move to Multiverse. The change does not have anything to do with Vastpark. I have been very happy with their support of our project. In fact the Bruce Joy and the Vastpark Team has been downright awesome! It merely turned out that because of personal and technical and other circumstances, I needed to make the change. I still think that Vastpark has a lot of promise going forward as a platform and encourage any Virtual World Builders out there to take a serious look. We still may use their tool in the future for other offshoots of this project as Postmoderna takes shape.

For now, Multiverse seems better suited for our current goals. I understand there will be quite a learning curve (yet again) with learning this platform. From what I see though I am very excited about the possibilities.

I speant a good portion of the week last week and the week before working on the storyboard screens for the Base Camp POI Scene in Vastpark. They were designed to guide visitors through the story of this zone.

I placed the screens, starting at the spawn location and set up a path (guided by bluish – purple arrows) that would direct visitors through a series. They would finally end up at Base Camp. From that point they would be free to explore the zone.

Now after I did that and completed every screen and even caught my errors (with the help of a friend of mine from the Multiverse Project, Force of Arms), I got some really good feedback from Bruce Joy, President of Vastpark. Bruce’s suggestion?, If I redesign the screens to be web components, I could keep the quantity of screens down and make the content more enjoyable—let alone more readable.

I am actually experimenting with that right now. Vastpark also helped me with a dock-object that can pull our PayPal form into the scene. I need to implement that soon so it can be used to make contributions to our project.

The key to making that work though is to get the LLC set up first so we can start taking those contributions.

Now in addition to all of this, I purchased a product from The Game Creators. It is an older program from Alien Code but it still works pretty well. It is a TreeMajik/Plant Life combo. The package creates low-poly trees and plants that can be exported into Direct X format. What is nice about this is it makes it easier to generate some quick flora. The package was optimized mostly for DarkBasic but as DirectX the models can be used anywhere.

At first I was having some trouble with the plants since the export wasn’t working well but Lee from TGC helped me get with the designer to update the files and get some help. Turns out that some Direct X files have extra brackets in them that keep them from being read well. Problem solved I think.