What is Metaplace? From the official site:

“Build a virtual apartment and put it on your website. Work with friends to make a huge MMORPG. Share your puzzle game with friends. We have a vision: to let you build anything, and play everything, from anywhere. Eventually, anyway. We have to finish first.”

Another description on their site states:

“So – does it work like the Web? Well, look at it this way: MetaMarkup is HTML. Clients are like browsers. The server is like Apache. The scripting is like CGI. The modules and stylesheets are like CSS and stylesheets. And Metaplace.com is like the Google/Yahoo/YouTube that sits on top of it all.”

Still vague in its description, here is other interesting information from Metaplace’s site:

• The core of Metaplace is MetaMarkup; a markup language designed to serve as a game equivalent to HTML. MetaMarkup parses very fast and can be translated back and forth to XML.

• Since MetaMarkup is an open standard, anyone can write a client for it. It is possible for somebody to make a text-only client, for example.

• Servers will be concerned with little more than 3d space, pathfinding, terrain, collision, physics, and webservices.

• There will be a “Create World Wizard” that will use stylesheets and modules to help people get started.

• MetaScript is an event-driven environment with four main components: templates, commands, triggers, and scripts.

• Templates are meta-data that define types of game objects

• Commands define entry points into the system from users and NPCs

• Triggers define events that occur within the system

• Scripts define handlers for commands and triggers

• The scripting environment uses the programming language Lua.

Still vague in nature, Metaplace sounds very interesting. They promise that using the platform will be free and that only users who have made very popular worlds will incur any hosting costs. Speaking of costs, they also promise to deliver users tools to monetize their creation!

Metaplace