Web Avatar Ready for Developers

Just in time for GDC Europe 2011: the Open Virtual World client is now "Ready for Developers" who want to build their apps on the Web Avatar platform.

The Open Virtual World client is

• a Web Avatar platform.
• a Concurrent Casual Gaming platform
• a platform where you can build your casual game

The Open Virtual World client has

• an avatar on every web page
• a WebKit based rendering engine
• modules and APIs
• everything a client app needs: protocols, logging, configuration
• open source

"Ready for Developers" means:

• it is working
• it can be used by developers
• it is not ready for end users
• it needs customization and packaging
• it needs gaming extensions and a game server if you want your users to do gaming
• it needs an item shop and inventory if you want to sell virtual goods
• it needs integration with your user profiles if you want to make the Web Avatar as a feature for existing games
• it is not a product yet
• but: it is a working platform for you to make a product
• and: it is free and open source

The Open Virtual World project will soon publish a complete client which users can download. Until then, developers get early access to the platform.

Need help? mail to openvirtualworld@gmail.com

Three Musketeers

Chrome support arrived.

We now have extensions for all 3 major browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer. See the image where I am on this blog page with my avatar and 3 different browsers at the same time.

If my avatar moves in one browser, then it moves in all browsers. If I chat in one browser, I chat in all at the same time. The client logs in to the chat room only once. But the avatar is shown on all browsers.

This is very different from weblin where you could only be on a page with on browser. Other browsers of the same page/domain had no avatars at all.

Initially I wanted to defer Chrome support until after the release. But it is much better to have Chrome support, because I Chrome is my main browser. The client needs lots of day to day testing. Now it is being tested all the time while I am doing my normal web browsing.

By the way: a weblin just private chatted to me, but there is no private chat yet. I just saw it in the logfile, but I could not reply. Do we need private chat early?