This news is a little late, so I do apologize to Adam Frisby and his team at Sine Wave Entertainment (the makers of the metaverse platform Sinespace and it corporate cousin, Breakroom). I had decided to take most of December 2021 as a vacation from this blog, in order to refresh myself to meet the new year head on!
At an Office Hours presentation in Sinespace in early December, Adam (wearing his now-signature bunny rabbit avatar!) gave his Annual Keynote, in which he talked about how 2021 went, and what’s coming up for 2022. Here are some highlights from his speech:
- Sine Wave were originally planning a promotional push for Sinespace last February, but the ongoing pandemic threw a monkey-wrench into those plans, and work shifted to Breakroom. Companies can now go to breakroom.net, buy it off the shelf, and customize it with little-to-no involvement from the team; this means that the Sine Wave team isn’t getting as tied up dealing with Breakroom customer issues as much as they have in the past.
- Did a lot of work on compliance and auditing their back-end processes;
- Did a lot of crossover stuff between Breakroom and Sinespace, including well-attended talks by Philip Rosedale and Matthew Ball;
- Made a huge effort in Quality Assurance, fixing bugs and implementing feature requests in Sinespace (e.g. adding the ability to control your avatar turning speed);
- The design and UX team is working on user interface improvements (including the Room Editor);
- Usability improvements (e.g. click-to-walk now steers around obstacles; fixes to inverse kinematics for feet and hips on avatars for smoother movement);
- Developer improvements (e.g. new LUA functions);
- New network stack is coming out very soon (designed to have hundreds and even thousands of avatars in one location at once); Adam mentioned recent load tests with 650+ avatars; the new network stack works better on WiFi and cellular connections;
- Vehicle improvements: a smoother experience, due in a couple of weeks!
- New terrain system;
- New parcel system (e.g. allows you to partition a region in three dimensions entirely within the client—drag and drop zones, set rent, etc.);
- Unity 2020 support to come out in a couple of weeks;
- Adam gave a demo of a new mobile-centric user interface for touch-screen devices such as monitors and tablets. Beta mobile viewers are available via the Discord server today if people want to test them out.
- Coming up for 2022 (in roughly chronological order): the new network stack; Unity 2020 upgrade; improvements to virtual reality support; a new asset format; visual scripting tools; the new Room Editor; improvements to the base avatar (e.g. body shapes; they’re trying to find a good character artist).
- When does Sinespace finally leave beta? Adam can’t give a firm answer, but he says “next year”.
If you want to watch the entire presentation, it has been posted to YouTube in a 38-minute video (the Q&A portion afterward was unfortunately not recorded):
This blogpost is sponsored by Sinespace, and was written in my role as an embedded reporter for this virtual world (more details here).