WebbliWorld Public Beta is Go!

Today was pretty momentous for me to be honest.

We finally, finally, FINALLY launched the true public beta of the kids virtual world I have been working on since December 2008.

Called WebbliWorld it’s aimed at young kids (5 years+) and offers a hybrid Flash / HTML multi-user world. You can run around the Flash world, chatting, playing and customsing your space. While checking out the new site content through HTML links. It works in a similar manner to Whirled really.

You can access the beta at http://beta.webbliworld.com

Feel free to register and play. You will need to have your account manually approved before you can “buddy” with other people in-world, but the moderation team are working flat-out this weekend to ensure there isn’t much delay.

While it may look a little “sparse” at the moment, there are some really cool things coming on-line shortly (yes, including games!)

The Technology

It’s built on ElectroServer 4.0.7b, which the ElectroServer team supported excellently. There were quite a few issues with http connections that they worked diligently to resolve for us, so hopefully other ES users will benefit from those fixes too. We’re running on a pretty meaty server that should be able to cope with thousands of connections.

We had a soft launch of the site today, promoting it just on a few dedicated forums that Aardman run (Shaun the Sheep and Wallace & Gromit) and we’ve seen a flurry of users registering, walking around and chatting. This is the first MMO world I’ve built, so there was something quite magical about seeing a room full of users all charging about, that knowing that they weren’t fellow office staff 🙂

Development has been a truly mammoth task for me. I did all the AS3 code, platform design, server plugins, all of the AMFPHP gateway work, web site php/html/css/javascript, MySQL structure, stored procedures, debugging tools, logging tools, numerous utilities and admin systems… the list goes on and on! Now you can see why I’ve been so utterly frazzled and haven’t released a new game in the past 4 months 🙂 Thankfully a few weeks ago we hired a really good AS3 developer to help with the project, and his input has been invaluable. You can see a lot of his handiwork in-world, and in the exciting new features we’ll release soon.

Feel free to register and have a play. There are lots of hidden things in there. Click around, as lots of objects do stuff you may not expect. At the very least please edit your pod 🙂 Wake the pod up by clicking it, then click the “Edit” icon on your toolbar to start placing items. Feel free to post screen shots of your pod designs here!

Oh and if you see “WebbliMunro” charging around the world – that’s me.

Posted on July 10th 2009 at 6:33 pm by Rich.
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