Openly-Social VastPark
As was recently announced to quite some fanfare, Google’s OpenSocial looks to be an interesting development…except it seems that they forgot one slightly important thing! The domain name, www.opensocial.com, happens to be owned by none other than VastPark.
Here’s an excerpt from a recent update to the VastPark front page explaining our involvement:
“Two years ago we formulated a vision for the future of social networks. It was a vision of distributed and connected communities where users could share and build relationships across multiple sites and social networks. We did not believe that any one social network would remain siloed.”
The art of making a user click
After allowing a sizable portion of users in to have a taste of VastPark, it was interesting to analyse the first batch of “in the wild” crashlogs that were submitted (thanks again to everyone for hitting the submit button!).
In all, it was pleasing to see that so few crashes were making their way to my inbox, but the ones that did may have revealed the greatest marketing secret of all time, the word monster. The single most consistent error that made up 85% of the logs over 2 days was due to a dodgily published model lurking in the web service, going by that name!
The lesson in this for the team at VastPark is to make sure that enticingly named content in the system will not crash the application when a user clicks on it and for everyone else; if you want someone to click on something, the word monster is a good option 
The new VastPark.com goes live
The new VastPark website is now live!
As well as providing a lot more information on VastPark than has previously been available, it brings with it the first members of the invite list gaining access to the software. This also means that I can begin writing up scripting examples again 
The first ‘Worlds Collide’ mini-review
The guys over at Metaversed have had a look over a preview build of the upcoming VastPark Creator release, check it out what they had to say at:
http://metaversed.com/25-sep-2007/sneak-peek-vastpark-creator-readies-beta
VastPark ‘Worlds Collide’ Preview
With recent announcement of the VastPark ‘Worlds Collide’ beta, and the actual release getting nearer by the day, I figure its time for a few thousand words about VastPark.
Here they are:
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VastPark.com relaunched…sort of
Yesterday the new VastPark website went live with a brand new front page, but not a lot else for the time being
The old site is still accessible via a link from the new front page, so a bit of the VastPark history remains available.
Stay tuned for the rest of the site upgrade as well as the new VastPark release, codename “Worlds Collide” sometime during the next month.
Rebuilding the platform
Over the past few months things have been fairly quiet in terms of new releases and general info appearing on the Official VastPark website. But I can tell you this has been for good reason.
Behind closed doors at VastPark central we have been working quite hard on a totally brand spanking new rewrite of…everything!
Some of the more notable changes:
- WPF! One of the biggest changes to Windows application development in recent time and we’ve jumped on board. Expect to see some nice looking UI’s
- There are now 3 core applications; Creator, Browser and …? Find out soon!
- More flexible and re-usable scripting design
Of course, to top this all off there is a new website which should come online in the next few days.
VastPark 0.83.5 released
A minor update of VastPark was released yesterday that brings improvements to the scripting and fixes some minor bugs in the creator, official changelog:
- Fixed some crashes in the Creator when adding scripting to an entity for the first time
- Fixed duplication of entity bug where scripts were not duplicated correctly
- Added DateTime support in the scripting
- Added HighResClock support in the scripting
- Fixed a potential render crash in the Creator when changing between static and dynamic entities
- Fixed some issues with the SetForce scripting functionality
- Fixed an inconsistency in the Creator related to loading a site with entities that have DoubleSided = true
Get the download over at www.vastpark.com/downloads.php
VastPark in the Press
A few little news articles have started to appear online mentioning VastPark, here’s a list of a few that I know of:
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The Age – ScreenPlay
A blog run by The Age dedicated to interactive entertainment news
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The Age – It’s the Web Take 2.0
Small mention towards the end of the article on page 5
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Internode Game News – Grow your own 3D
Small article that was dugg but didnt make it to the front page
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SLOZ – Australia’s Second Life News Source
Short article speculating on VastPark being a takeover target for Linden Lab
VastPark Release 0.83…released!
Update 20/04/2007: Another build, 0.83.1 is now online that adds some minor new features and fixes some annoying bugs from the 0.83 release.
The “best release thus far” of VastPark has been released online at the official VastPark download page. A number of improvements appear in this version, most notably in the scripting department.
New plugin and script functionality:
InputGrabber
wiki link
Allows input to be mapped from the keyboard when activated and a script attached to that mapping. One great example of this is in the recently released Rumpus Room by ashepherd and The Pianist by yours truly
PreloadSound
wiki link
Allows sounds to be preloaded from a web resource and referenced within a site. Used extensively in the Rumpus Room site and The Pianist
New Scripting object:
Scene object
wiki link
The heart of all VastPark operations. Contains functionality to Show, Hide, FadeIn, FadeOut the site, store and retrieve cookies for the site, GenerateBox, GenerateSphere, GenerateCylinder, GenerateCone entities for addition to the scene as required, as well as a host of other properties such as the User and UI objects.
Useful code:
Scene.Show()
e = Scene.GenerateBox(vDim, vPos) e.Visible = false Scene.Add(e)
Scene.User.Position = Vector(10,10,10) Scene.User.Rotation = Vector(90,0,0)
Deprecated Functionality:
GenerateBoxEntity()
GenerateSphereEntity()
GenerateConeEntity()
GenerateCylinderEntity()
ShowSite()
HideSite()
See the VastPark Wiki for full details on the new scripting changes and the VastPark Download page to get the new release.
