Entropia Universe: Earn real money with an MMORPG
Some time during Summer 2007 while reading up on the CryEngine 2, the technology behind the first person shooter Crysis, I came across an article that mentioned a company that was licensing the engine for their upcoming virtual world. So I was curious to see what happened to that project and while searching I came across another company using the CryEngine 2.
Entropia Universe is an MMORPG created by the Swedish software company MindArk. The difference between this MMO is that it's essentially free to play. There's no subscription fee. Perhaps influenced by virtual worlds such as Second Life, Entropia Universe sports its own virtual currency that can be exchanged for real world funds at a fixed exchange rate. In other words, virtual items the player gains during battles with NPCs through trades with other players or other interactions have a real cash value.
In terms of game play Entropia Universe has a feel similar to Star Wars Galaxies when it was first released (that is, before it underwent the combat upgrade and new game enhancements).
While it's tempting to spend real dollars in order to fund your character, it is possible (albeit a much slower start) to work your way up by following the newbie guides put together by veteran members.
When it comes to visuals, it's not necessarily the most spectacular game, and certainly not a shining example of how to put the CryEngine to best use, but considering how new the game is, it's entirely possible (and desirable) that the developer will improve the models, textures and, most importantly, the currently rather ridiculous character animations.
While MindArk's (historically proven) business model is to earn revenue from player activies, it's certainly possible for savvy players to have fun playing an MMORPG while generating an income.
As with any endeavor, there's no free money to be had. It'll take dedication, research, and a certain amount of luck. Being an early adopter is a risk, but can be potentially more rewarding.
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MetaverseData beta starts
The key problem with developing for Second Life thus far has always been the less than sufficient APIs that Linden Lab offers.
When it comes to communicating with objects in-world, you have the choice of the reliably broken XML-RPC, polling from in-world via llHTTPRequest(), or sending bite-sized data snippets by email. To make it easier, faster, and more flexible, MetaverseData introduces the Message Exchange Service that makes this task painless.
Interacting with avatars (say, sending message, or delivering a product) can be just as much of a hassle. Everything is dependent on their UUID also known as their "key". If you don't have it, you can't do it. Again, Linden Lab currently does not offer a useful way of acquiring the UUID, making transparent web applications that much harder. MetaverseData offers Avatar Services that let you look up avatar related information easily via REST calls.
Getting a list of region data used to be fairly straight forward task; everything was embedded in the JavaScript file that was part of the MapAPI which was used by SLURL.com. With Linden Lab switching to Google Maps and custom map tiles all that went away. [I believe this is an effort to conceal the size of the grid.]
Finally, uploading textures into Second Life has only been possible using the Second Life client. The Texture Service allows you to send an image in pretty much any format, converts it to JPEG2000, uploads the image into Second Life, and returns the UUID which you can use in your Second Life scripts to interact with the image in-world.
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Discovering Second Life
I took the plunge. I had heard about Second Life before — mostly on Slashdot. I spent a few minutes browsing Google Video and came across one of the Google TechTalks titled Glimpse Inside a Metaverse: The Virtual World of Second Life.
Essentially it was Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka from Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, giving a talk on the technology that powers the world of Second Life.
So far I've played Star Wars Galaxies (which in my opinon was mutilated by the SOE) and dabbled with Planetside (after the downfall of the Tribes series), but otherwise anything MMO (WoW, etc) has not interested me as a "Gamer", and so far I hadn't much thought about looking at it from a developer point of view.
And that's pretty much where the presentation caught my attention. Particularly the objective to switch to a Mono powered platform.
So I've signed up (my Second Life name is Mark Barrett) and ran around aimlessly to find out what's up.
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