Yet another coming soon update, and we thought we'd take a moment to explain why we're still not done yet.  We had originally decided (2 years ago) to release a client with somewhat limited functionality - small 3d space per user, with portals to visit other user spaces, and a few small public spaces also bridged with portals.  While we approached this (and walked around in it), we realized that such limited usability was, well, boring.  More importantly, anyone with some 3d and network programming skills could do the same, and many have.  Further, once they are released, people talk about how limited and boring they are, and those connotations get stuck to that world.

The VScape team used to develop AAA games, and has built networked systems that scale to millions of nodes.  We decided that we should take advantage of our one opportunity to 'go public' with an application that would make it very clear that we have achieved something that will change the way people look at 3d networked systems.  At the same time, we realize this could easily mean we spend forever hacking on our code, and we recognize that there comes a time "when you need to shoot the engineers and release a product."

We have a milestone list that describes a reasonable first release which we expect to start releasing beta keys for the first quarter of next year.  To give an idea of how much work has gone into it to date, we are at about 90% of our milestone list, and (according to sloc) have now spent about 20 man years writing about 82k lines of code. We're focusing on Win32, but the code is ready to port to other desktop OSs (Mac, Linux), platforms (PS3, XBox 360, Wii), and some mobile platforms (Android, iPhone). The game tools are going to provide a new platform and new paradigm for creation of games and interactive objects.  And the open development models for code and content are going to change the way content is developed and published.

As always, we'll release it when its ready and no sooner, but we think you're going to appreciate what we've built...