New World Notes

Watch: MetaGravity Creating Minecraft Server With Up to 100,000 Concurrent Players -- Up to 5,000 in a 100 Square Meter Area!

Here's the latest demo video of the Quark engine from MetaGravity, which employs "causal partitioning" (more on that below) to enable single shard virtual worlds with massive concurrency. They're showing off that technology later this year with their own Minecraft server, which they say will be able to handle up 100,000 concurrent players. (You can sign up here to request early access.) 

Matthew Chuen, Head of Ecosystem at MetaGravity, says they're also able to handle high local concurrency, i.e. the number of avatars in your immediate vicinity:

"We have successfully handled 5,000 players within a 100-square-meter area with excellent performance," he says. "This is possible because our Causal Partitioning technology is fundamentally more efficient than traditional servers, avoiding the exponential lag that typically makes such high-density scenarios impossible."

Without diving too deeply into the technical details, here's how MetaGravity describes Casual Partitioning:

 

Watch: Quark Multiplayer Promises Massively Scaled Virtual Worlds

Quark Multiplayer is a new networking engine showing off the ability to deploy worlds/experiences with thousands (and thousands) of concurrent users in the same space. Coming soon to an SDK for Unity and Unreal, you can apply for Early Access here.

It's a project from new-ish UK start-up MetaGravity, I'm not too familiar with the team, but I like what they're trying to accomplish. And the site has more technical background on what they're building:

Bluesky Second Life User Starter Pack With Many Hundreds of SLers

If you're on Bluesky and want to connect with other SL/virtual world fans, Caspian Morningstar created this whole huge, two part starter pack. (You can also request to add your own account to the pack.)

Morningstar's packs are up to about 300 members so far, though I'd estimate there's at least 3000 SL-related accounts on Bluesky. (That's roughly the number who follow the official Bluesky Second Life account.)

Meet Melba: Earth-Sized, Uncharted AI-Generated Virtual World from PLAYERUNKNOWN You Can Explore Right Now

Brendan "PLAYERUNKNOWN" Greene wasn't satisfied with lead developing PUBG where you fight other players in a small landscape, so he put together a team to create an entire virtual world engine dubbed "Melba" you can check out right now:

Preface: Undiscovered World is an immersive tech demo showcasing Melba, PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions' groundbreaking technology generating Earth-scale world. In this project still in development, see the power of machine learning creating a planet in real-time, generated directly on your GPU.

More info and download link here. The ultimate goal with Melba, as you may have guessed, is an entire earth-sized open world MMO experience:

I'm Seeing a Strong Shift to Bluesky by SLers --- Including Cajsa, Who Just Closed Her Huge Twitter/X Account

New World Notes columnist Cajsa Lilliehook just locked up her fairly large X/Twitter account (with nearly 20,000 followers) and opened up shop in Bluesky here.

I wasn't surprised when she told me this last night (for reasons I'll explain below), but it's actually part of a larger trend:

In the last couple weeks, my mostly dormant Bluesky account suddenly exploded with hundreds of new followers, most of them SL/virtual world-themed. (OK, maybe "exploded" is a bit hyperbolic, but certainly a fierce fucking puff of activity.) And there's more:

Philip Rosedale just joined Bluesky.

The official Second Life account too.

Plus here's a large Bluesky thread of SLers to announce yourself and meet others there! 

Also other metaverse platforms including Rec Room and VRChat are active on Bluesky.

This is part of an even larger trend, as Bluesky recently hit 20 million active users, in great part in an exile move from Twitter/X in the wake of the US election. That was the thing which pushed Cajsa herself over the blue edge:

Watch: Developer Turns Blender Into a Multiplayer World

Programmer Damjan Minovski created a seriously impressive add-on for Blender which turns the 3D modeling software into a multiplayer experience. (Watch above.) It's part of his Omnistep project, which gives Blender game engine/virtual world qualities. And if you're wondering if multiple users can create in Blender running Omnistep, Damjan replies that's possible in the future:

"This is only a proof of concept showing a small userscript," he told me on X/Twitter. "In the future maybe, but that probably would be a different product."

If you want try the demo, I've embedded the link below, but like with everything, downloader beware:

 

Watch: Equimake Adds 3D Annotation Feature for Presentations, Demos, and Other Interactive Scenes

Here's a cool update from NWN partner Equimake, the free indie platform for live, multi-user collaborative 3D building on the web: 3D Annotations, which enable creators to add clickable text descriptions throughout their scene, which when clicked, centers the user's camera angle on the annotation.

To see what I mean, watch the tutorial video above from Alex, Equimake's founder and lead developer. (Also check out 1:55 for a look at how Equimake scenes work on mobile and tablets.)

For educators and other creators, 3D annotations will make it easier to turn an Equimake scene into an interactive demo/presentation, or even tell a story with individual scenes annotated within the same scene:  

Here's a Whole Huge Library of Virtual World / XR Tech Case Studies for Real World Projects

Via Julian Reyes of the Virtual Worlds Museum, this site here has a whole huge library of virtual world/XR tech being used in many various real world use cases. Most are decidedly on the dry/corporate marketing side, but that's very much the point: This is tech usually associated with gaming applied to an enterprise context.

For instance, the video above shows how 3D graphics / digital twin tech is used to improve the car-buying experience:

Equimake Update: Free, Real-Time 3D Group Creation On Web Platform Adds User Presence "Avatars" & 900 Free-to-Use Unreal Assets

There's a pretty big new update to Equimake, the free-to-use platform for collaborative real-time 3D creation on the web (and a proud partner to New World Notes): It now comes with 900 free Unreal-based 3D assets to use in your scene-building, and there's a User Presence "avatar" indicator, to make collaborative interaction easier within the 3D world.

The assets are from the Unreal Engine Marketplace, part of the "Permanent Free Collection" which includes a license for use outside of Unreal (I.E., in Equimake), and run the gamut from basic everyday objects to full immersive 3D scenes like a hipster cafe and outdoor park. (At right.) And new assets will be added to the platform library roughly every 1-2 weeks.

The User Presence indicator looks a bit like Google Docs when multiple people are working on the same document, except in 3D. Look:

Welcome Equimake: New Platform for Free, Real-Time Collaborative 3D Creation on Web, Now a New World Notes Partner!

Equimake is a seriously cool, free-to-use platform for collaborative real-time 3D creation on the web partly inspired by my book; starting next month, I'm proud to announce Equimake is a sponsoring media partner to New World Notes!

Created by Canadian developer Alexander Yevsyeyev, you can not only share, create, and script interactive 3D scenes with others, but Alex is rapidly adding features which enable more integration of content -- for  instance, you can embed images from Imgur or Flick into an Equimake scene. (Watch above.) And yes, Alex tells me he's hoping to add integration with Primfeed and other social media platforms.

"My passion is helping people and see them grow," as he puts it. He recently led a team of artists, programmers, and QA on a large project, and this experience helped shape what he hopes to do with this self-funded project.

"Equimake is aimed to help learners get better grip on technology, and try to tinker with 3D art and code and see what they like or dislike about it. For advanced users, I also plan to make Equimake fun and engaging where they can either teach others, share knowledge, or simply deploy their amazing art and code."

More details and project roadmap below. You can also ask Alex about Equimake features or updates in Comments or on Equimake's Discord.