Metaplace is gone. Along with the site, thousands of user-created worlds representing untold amounts of time and creativity have collapsed into canned screenshots and video clips. Call it business imperative, another walled-garden tragedy, whatever, in the end (that would be NOW) it makes no difference. Things existed before and now they don’t.
For my own SlideMountain world (a work that I’m most proud of) I decided that the proper send off would be via a blaze of scripted destruction. Performance art, in a 2.5D metaverse.
After a maddening series of lag and connectivity issues, I kicked off the process today around 8pm or so.
The harbingers of doom arrived early
It seemed only fitting that I use the Multim0d script sequencer that I released a few months ago (and I have to say it worked pretty well :-)). The various effects plugins were written in an insane rush, between holiday obligations, etc, and could only be tested up to a point. Oddly it was not easy to guess exactly how long it would take to erode things from fully-running world down to bare tiles. Turned out to take almost an hour.
Yeah, you really “had to be there, XD”, but here’s how it went: First random clusters of objects were suffused with a blue-ish glow and then slowly pulled across the world into cluster of 4 moai surrounding a sparking lava core. Once there they were slowly deleted. Gradually, the clusters increased in size and the sliding speed was increased until all world objects had been destroyed. Then the moai vanished.
For the last stage the terrain began to “melt” in a multistage fading and leveling process, randomly distributed across the world grid. This was the one part which worried me a bit and sure enough the “erosion” process code caused a stack bust when tackling the 100×100 grid and a crowd of onlookers. I quickly flipped to a fall-back that spiralled through quadrants and everything completed nicely.
And that was that, weeks of work nuked in less than an hour.
It was a sad but strangely satisfying end to something I’d worked hard to complete and which was a source of amusement for many people. But to me at least, better than letting things evaporate at the flick of a switch in a server room.
And to all the avs who popped in to watch the “Meta Meta Immolation” let me just say thank you for your attention, camaraderie and support. Indeed, Best Wishes to all the MP community!
Metaplace is dead: the metaverse is just getting started. Onward.
