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"We're in constant touch with them," he said. "We have private forums, IRC channels that our engineers basically live on. And there are constant e-mails and phone calls between our engineers and our customers."
As for the teams Multiverse chose for its initial beta testers, Bridges said they were almost exclusively full teams replete with engineers, modelers, designers and producers.
That's "so they would be able to be as self-sufficient as possible," he said.
Bridges also said Multiverse has created a wiki where its customers can collaborate on ideas for how to build virtual worlds with its tools.
"People can bring their own skill sets to (the wiki) to explain how to do something with the Multiverse platform," Bridges said. "You end up with this critical mass of shared brain-power out there."
According to Ron Meiners, who handles developer relations for Multiverse, working with teams of developers from South Africa, Thailand, Israel, Qatar and many other countries has been eye-opening.
"People from all over the world are involved with Multiverse," Meiners said. "It creates just a really amazing vision of a worldwide nexus of independent game and world development."
One American developer on hand at the conference here was Tim Holt, a senior faculty research assistant in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University.
Holt is using Multiverse's platform to create what he called "a massive forest visualization environment."
Essentially, he said, the idea behind the project is to incorporate real-time forestry data involving tree species, size of trees, the number of trees and more. And then the data is fed into the Multiverse tool to create a real-time 3D-look at the Oregon forests.
It's "a collaborative space for forest planners and forestry researchers," Holt said. "You're making a policy decision about something, about a region, and the best thing you could do would be to have everybody fly there...But that's not realistic...So we see this MMO-style game that becomes this collaborative thought space, and we can see the forest and discuss it."
And Holt said he was attracted to Multiverse because it allowed his team to create such a project on the smallest of budgets, something he said wasn't possible with other tools.
In any case, to Sellers, Multiverse's platform provides the kind of dynamic that will surely result in some stellar projects, even as many developers' work goes nowhere. But it's worth it, he said, because of the successes that will come.
"You're going to see a lot of lackluster projects, and that's true" since many teams are going to be little more than two guys in a college dorm room. "But one of those two guys in a dorm room is going to be (the next) Yahoo."
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Austin
and BTW, at least one isn't even a game, the forestry one is just a 3-d representation of the forrests of Oregon
you don't need to reinvent the wheel to sell cars, bicycles, trucks, or wheelbarrows
and BTW, at least one isn't even a game, the forestry one is just a 3-d representation of the forrests of Oregon
you don't need to reinvent the wheel to sell cars, bicycles, trucks, or wheelbarrows
and BTW, at least one isn't even a game, the forestry one is just a 3-d representation of the forrests of Oregon
you don't need to reinvent the wheel to sell cars, bicycles, trucks, or wheelbarrows