LogInThe team behind Sinespace gave a talk on their tool that is basically an all-in-one virtual world platform for building multi-user worlds, and everything within them.
The team behind Sinespace gave a talk on their Unity tool that is basically an all-in-one virtual world platform for building multi-user worlds, and everything within them.
We’re a bit of a mix, we’ve got people who have come from film & finance, games and the virtual worlds industry itself. Currently, we’re about twenty people strong; but we’ve been working on this for a while.
Originally, we built this tech for our own use in-house, we built social virtual environments for corporates – you want one, we build it & make it happen. But, along the way, we realized that the tools we’d built were actually useful for a lot more than our own needs. We’ve always been big proponents of user-generated content, and wanted to use these tools to make something that developers would love – a virtual world, something built collectively by user-developers – but with real power under the hood; the capacity to use modern game engine features; so in 2015, we decided to make that happen – we spent about 18 months cleaning the tools up, writing documentation and doing a first tentative launch. We’re about two years in now, and we’ve added more features than you can shake a stick at – making the tools even more powerful than before, and we’ve become asset store partners with Unity – making them easily available (mostly) free for all Unity developers.
Sinespace
Sinespace is hard to sum up – it’s a platform certainly, letting you build, upload & develop content into shared environments; meaning you can take a side project you’ve already built, and easily share and expand it with others. It’s also a dedicated platform in its own right – it’s quite possible to build fully featured games on the platform (and our white label stuff is aimed at these kinds of users). Finally, it’s a huge collection of ready-made tools designed to work together – from vehicles to inventory to everything else; you can use them in your projects easily.
From our perspective, the most important thing shifts from user to user – some users want tools to help them make clothing more easily, so we provide things like automatic rigging & weighting tools out of the box. Some users want to be able to shift users onto multiple devices, so we provide tools for auto-optimizing content for end-user hardware. As trite as it is to say – the most important feature is everything; that is to say, the ability to take something in a totally different direction by adding a few more components, or a bit of scripting – the freedom to create chaotically is a huge asset to us.
How to get started?
The easiest way is to just grab Sinespace off the Unity Asset Store, we also suggest checking out our YouTube and Wiki pages as a good place to read up on documentation (also, join our Discord – it’s really useful for both us and new developers!) – from there you’ve got a quick start panel that gives you some starter projects, like uploading a new region for yourself.
As for pricing, it varies. The tools themselves are free – we even throw in a bit of hosting free as well. If you sell content to other users (we’ve got a built-in marketplace), then after transaction costs, it’s a flat 70/30 split. If you want to host large and expansive projects – then we do have additional fees, they’re on our website, but not beyond the capacity of personal or indie developers (we also have enterprise plans with premium support and such for bigger customers).
Ideal customers from 80.lv readers would be people who are interested in building, uploading and showing off your side projects – you can take them from still images to a fully fleshed out 3D environment you can share with people easily, and it’s only a few more steps to start adding layers of interactivity — I originally built these tools for myself to do just that; and that’s what I’d love to see developers do! (and again, reach out if that sounds like you – we’d love to help onboard you!)