With Amazon's Lumberyard Going Open Source, The Time is Now for a Metaverse Framework

I was right about to blog a good reader comment on my post about Matthew Ball's new metaverse framework for succeeding the mobile web, when news dropped about Amazon Lumberyard (previously on NWN here) which enforced its points even further:

Amazon is contributing its Lumberyard game engine to open source, and it will be known as the Open 3D Engine.

The Linux Foundation will oversee the project and form the Open 3D Foundation to accelerate collaboration with game developers to enhance the triple-A game engine. This shift could bode well for future projects like an open metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, such as in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One.

More on O3DE here. Reader "Kyz" writes about how platforms like these press the need for Matthew's big picture perspective:

I think what he's reaching for is metaverse "framework". And on that I agree, the metaverse needs to be built upon capacity, protocols and lots and lots of interop. Smart to leave out cryptocurrency and ironic that cryptocurrency is hindering the 3D end of things because it's making graphics cards more expensive and harder to get because of miners.

I like people seem to be evolving past the metaverse as a space in a way. I got caught up in the concept early on. Worked with some folks in a company called Chaco Communications and they had built a client called Pueblo, which was basically an HTML/VRML browser that could talk over TCP connections.

We married that with a MUD (MUCK if you want to be precise) called NeonMUCK. So at that point we had servers that anyone could set up and turn into a virtual 3D world with little effort. Now VRML was crude, but we had something that later projects like Second Life didn't have, which was the ability for anyone to create and run their own server with common protocols. This is what we considered the Metaverse. No walled gardens, here. Just the potential for lots of gardens.

But anyway, hoping new graphics innovations and systems like Pixar/Nvidia Universal Scene Description [Watch above - WJA] will help open this puppy up to become a real metaverse.

I can't even Google up a reference to NeonMUCK, but that's not a surprise, as the VRML era of the mid 90s is pre-Google. Which shows you just how long all this has been matriculating. 

Comments

[Deadhand]

Hey!

Are you aware of the Vircadia project? The core team (as well as a number of contributors) are attempting to continue the work left off from High Fidelity.

https://vircadia.com/

We'd love it if you'd join us in the discord server or join us at one of the Vircadia events!

https://discord.gg/q4B9XbCJ

[Kyz]

Wow, only just heard about this from the Adobe/Substance Discord (Adobe is one of the contributing companies to the Open 3D Engine) and ran over here to see if you carried the news.

Pretty awesome, hoping this picks up some steam. I could see this being used to create connected worlds. Glad Amazon decided to make it open source.

No worries about NeonMUCK, ancient history. I know one dev forked it into ProtoMUCK, when the main developers bailed on it. Although I see ProtoMUCK hasn't had a source update in 5 years or so on Github, no surprise there either, but it's still got reference to NeonMUCK in the copyright doc.

But back to this century ... I don't think a metaverse can be done with anything but an open source server. Anything managed by a singular entity ends up in with too restrictive licensing or in the dustbin when the company tires of it. So this is just the ticket.

[Do My Classes Now]

We all are distorting our world we have to save and work for that to.