This presentation had John Grden and Trevor Burton introducing their latest project – a Java/Flash based online MMO called Paperworld. The entire project will be released open source in April, but for now the demos shown gave a good idea of what we can expect in the coming months…
Paperworld consists of two parts – an extended Red5 framework on the server side streaming multiplayer data, and a custom Papervision3d framework on the client side rendering the 3d view. Presently there are many utilities and modules tools being developed and pooled for use by other developers and designers, to aid things like avatar creation, loading and movement management.
The Paperworld framework relies on precalc’d 3d transformations on the server that are pushed to the client – partly for speed reasons and partly to maintain coherence in multiplayer movement. The Flash client smooths server proxy positions and the current local position of your avatar to give a motion that is a little more robust to fluctuations in latency. To get round the problem of larger 3d environments choking on download bandwidth, the Paperworld server does not use sharedobjects, but has relevant set selection – a technique which checks how far away an object is from each player, taking into account direction of movement, to intelligently load content
Currently a website exists for people to register their interest in the project, so if you would like to be kept informed of updates and releases of the Paperworld framework, goto http://www.paperworld3d.com and sign up!