(20 March 2008) VastPark, a highly interactive virtual worlds platform, held its first multiuser "stress test" for its closed beta community today.
During the test, the VastPark team announced a new product: VastServer. VastServer is a software tool that can run one or more highly interactive virtual worlds. Similar to a web server, VastServer serves up IMML, an XML based Virtual Web equivalent to HTML. It acts as the message rely between all the users on the site so they can interact with each other and see what others are doing online in real time.
It can be installed on any 32-bit/64bit Windows computer (XP/Vista/Server 2003/Server 2008) with .NET Framework 3.0. "Because VastServer is so light-weight and easy to run, we're lowering the barrier to people popping up a virtual environment that they can share briefly as a meeting room or a game environment and then stop it. It makes virtual worlds into utilities, much like Skype conversations. Of course they can run them persistently but a lot of what we, as users, do is form ad hoc events and it's terrific if we can run rich events online whenever we want very easily," said Craig Presti, Lead Developer at VastPark.
Also during the test, participants got their first opportunity to explore a first person shooter game under construction using the platform. "You guys have a great product at hand" said one enthusiastic participant.
"We see a big future in communities working together to build meta-games with the platform. That is: Lots of little game maps that join together into one massive growing game. Community gaming is going to prove very compelling and we want to make it rewarding for everyone involved," said Bruce Joy, CEO of VastPark.
Feedback, from our users, about what was seen at the event was unanimous, ranging from: "[This] Rocks!!!!!!" and "cool" to "Excellent product" The next step for the platform is a public beta of its software tools. It was announced that this beta begins April 10.