SketchWorlds offers the first professional and reasonably priced realXtend world hosting plans, which is a major business milestone for the realXtend platform. Maxping poses some tough questions to the founder Jules Vos to find out the details.
New platforms, ideas and especially businesses are developing
around a number of rapidly developing open source platforms for
virtual worlds. The realXtend platform has been gradually picking
up steam. Today (15th Of July, 2009) SketchWorlds
has launched, which aims to not only provide simple hosting of
realXtend-based virtual worlds, but also to fix problems and
provide a number of new features which are not included with the
platform. I sat down to have a chat with founder Jules Vos, also
founder of Visibuild and Second Life estate Crystal
Islands, about his newly launching service.
Jani Pirkola: What triggered you to create
SketchWorlds?
Jules Vos: One of the things I really like
about realXtend is the combination of the quality of its features
and its availability. Almost anyone can run it on their home
computer, VPS or server and have a virtual world running with a
powerful graphics and scripting engine. However, there is more to
creating a stable, cost-efficient and optimized environment. This
is the layer of quality that SketchWorlds provides.
Jani: Where does the name SketchWorlds come
from?
Jules: RealXtend makes building 3d worlds
incredibly easy, also by using 3d content exported from Google
Sketchup. Although Sketchup does not have anything to do with it, I
think that in the same way SketchUp makes creating 3d models very
accessible, SketchWorlds makes creating 3d worlds possible.
Jani: You said that SketchWorlds provides "a layer of
quality" on top of the realXtend platform. Is that just a marketing
line?
Jules: One of our top priorities is maintaining
an environment that is as stable as possible. For example, should a
World crash anyhow, it will be up and running again within 20
seconds automatically. We have also added a number of features. One
of the first additions is the included web service (in part
provided by realXtend). Of course World owners can choose whether
they want their World to be private or public, but for public ones
we provide a registration form so visitors can connect. Next to
that, in the short term we're mainly focusing on solving realXtend
bottlenecks. 3d model uploads of more than 1mb often fail within
the client, so the web service also includes a form that allows you
to upload 3d models. Although there is no technical limit, we can
comfortably go up to 6 mb. We also offer a new and improved client.
We also back up all data on a daily basis and store this both
locally and on Amazon S3 to ensure maximum data safety.
Jani: The new SketchWorlds client sounds impressive. How
it differs from the existing realXtend viewer? Can it be used for
Second Life and Opensim as well?
Jules: It is mainly still the realXtend client,
so it is still possible to use it to connect with Second Life and
Opensim. Key differences are improvements to the settings. The most
immediately obvious being an environment fix. RealXtend had two
long stretches in the day cycle where the terrain would be pitch
black, giving a very unrealistic effect. This is reduced to a few
seconds, next to making the day more bright and graphically
pleasing. Other than that, a few settings regarding the graphics
have been changed and a few minor tweaks that should make life
easier have been applied. The menus have been also been updated to
include less things that don't work. The client can be downloaded
here.
Jani: Do you aim to create a grid or community
World?
Jules: While that is certainly an option, our
first aim is to provide stable virtual worlds to people. These
aren't part of a big grid with a theme or rules, it's entirely your
World where you make the rules. To make a 2d web comparison, grids
mostly resemble something like GeoCities which is a specifically
themed and clustered type of webhosting. On the other end you have
completely blank rentable webspace, which resembles a VPS on which
you install the World yourself. SketchWorlds is in the middle,
offering quality 3d worlds, however not self-managed. Of course it
would be terrific if someone else wanted to create a grid community
using our World hosting services.
What we are working on now is to enable hypergrid teleporting as
soon as possible. For Worlds that are open to the public, this
gives them an opportunity to attract visitors as the hypergrid map
will allow SketchWorlds users to explore from one World to the
next. The goal of SketchWorlds, and of virtual worlds in general,
is to facilitate the creation by developers and exploration by
visitors of interesting content.
For now, we do have a demo and sandbox world up and running.
Here we have a number of "exhibits" that show you what the
realXtend is really capable of, and not even to its full extent
yet. I think a lot of people underestimate how powerful the
realXtend platform is in terms of user experience and graphics.
Jani: Who are the customers of
SketchWorlds?
Jules: In the broadest sense, it is aimed at
anyone who wants their own stable and professionally managed
virtual world. However more specifically, we are approaching a few
different markets. Primarily we think that many following virtual
worlds will appreciate this initiative, but the plan is also to
reach out to other communities. 3d visualisers could benefit
tremendously from using a platform such as realXtend, but most of
them would never go through the trouble of installing realXtend on
their own servers and looking after it every day. The realXtend
platform should also have great applications for prototyping and
idea sharing, as well as games and other interactive content such
as simulations. A very broad market exists for virtual worlds, and
we are only at the beginning of exploring which stand to gain the
most from their use.
Conclusion
Having followed the realxtend project from the start, I think the
emergence of professional hosting is both expected and, at this
early phase, quite exciting. It indicates that the technology does
have business potential.
Maxping team gave a test drive for SketchWorlds and gives
thumbs-up recommendation for the service. Good luck and may the
ping be with SketchWorlds!
We recommend that you discuss this article on Think, but if you really want to you can leave a comment right here as well: