Caleb Booker

An Early Adopter’s Quick Guide To Web.Alive

As of right now you can’t even buy the development kit for Web.Alive. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t start getting ready to build there!

Firstly, why should you bother?

I took a tour of Mellanium‘s environment again today, and what really struck me was the level of detail visible. I was looking at this highly detailed model of the Titanic with textures so good I could zoom in on the knots in the wood. That’s impressive, but what was even better was that I could glance across the room and see a fully rendered locomotive and old fighter plane.

The interface was obvious. Fixing up my avatar was easy. The voice just worked. Full-screen mode just worked. We could easily hand files to each other, view PowerPoint and fully rendered web pages with Flash support, and snap privacy settings in the room on and off with a click. All of this right in the web browser.

So its a beautiful thing, tested with up to 90 concurrent users and it runs on your mom’s laptop. While things with Avaya’s buyout of Nortel make things a little shaky, this isn’t a platform to be underestimated.

At the beginning I promised information on how to get an early start. Its simple: buy a cheap copy of Unreal Tournament 2004. It comes bundled with UnrealEd, which is all you need to begin building environments right now. Import your static meshes from Maya or 3D Studio Max, and you’re just a step away from publication.

Now we just have to wait for Avaya to release the dev kit. I’ve been lead to believe that good news is on the way, but beyond that we’ll just have to wait and see.