Thursday, May 25, 2017

Playing with SpacialOS

I've been wanting to explore some other Virtual Worldy environments outside of Second Life and OpenSIM a bit, and recently went through a quick look at Spacial OS, using their tutorial which can be found here.  Spacial OS kind of feels more like a basic game engine/server than a real virtual world environment.  You don't really develop in world or anything, but it is something that can be used to develop and deploy a multiplayer online environment.

I didn't get too detailed into developing anything, though it uses Unity, which is a pretty common platform these days.  I did run through and deploy a world that I could connect to, and somewhat more fun, I used a remote computer for the server and my laptop for the client.  I had to adapt the tutorial a bit, during the authorization phase by copying and pasting the URLs around and entering the IP of the server instead of "local host" but it worked out easily enough.  I deployed the server end on a Windows 7 VPS I have on Cloud At Cost.  


During the set up, you connect the server to the console at improbable.io.  Once it's up and running, you can use this dashboard to view and interact with the backend of the game world, in this case, the demo Lumberjacks and Wizards game.


The demo game itself is pretty basic, and definitely a demo, you control a little wizard, you can set fire to things with one button and put out fires using rain with the other button.  There are also some lumberjacks gathering wood and building little houses.  You pretty much just walk around setting trees, lumberjacks, buildings, and even yourself on fire.  


It's kind of neat watching the back end of the world, you can do some interaction here as well, like deleting things removes them in real time.

Ultimately, I decided to wander off to the edge of the map, when i reached it, my little wizard just disappeared, forever.  Kind of disappointing, but it was a neat little demo.  It would take more time and skill than I have to go much farther with this platform however.