Build, Test, Open Launch…
Since our last Syntax error, our dev team has been hard at working getting our MVP ready to use for the Avatar System + Inventory Service that we spoke about in last month’s report. We’re now polishing up the final bits of code in-engine. Deploying our smart contracts on-chain. And diving into developer documentation and testing so that we can open up these new features to our community in the coming month!
Inventory System Use Cases
As with most new products, most people really understand the full potential when they get to see demos and use cases in action. Our team has put together a few examples showing off just some of the more common use cases we expect the Inventory Service to solve for. When we think about Utility around items that exist in people’s wallets today, the most common assets many of us are seeing for game worlds are 3D Avatars, Props, Items, Fashion & Clothing, and we’re even starting to see Music NFTs emerge. The Inventory Service we’ll be providing to creators, allows users to read-write dynamic meta-data to these items.
In the demo below, we walk you through how we’re using our Inventory Service to categorize and display items from a user’s wallet, in game. An Atelier showing only items of type clothing, to dress your avatar. A gaming console to equip items and weapons. An NPC to trade wares with, and even a jukebox to filter out any music nfts a user may own, load them in a game world and play them.
To us, this is just the start! We can picture this dynamic meta data being used by creators for much more complex and innovative use cases. Being able to keep track of narrative moments a player takes. Or tracking when an item had been used to win an epic battle! To data that a piece of digital clothing was worn at a virtual burning man event, so in the future that piece of clothing should reflect the awesome wear & tear, or dirt & sparkles accumulated from that game world! Being able to store and build upon the metadata of an asset and keep that stored on-chain, and be used across different metaverse worlds opens up a whole new world of progressive stories tied to our avatars and game objects we as users own. We’re excited to see how users and creators will think of using this feature!
Cross Chain Compatibility
A challenge we’ve had and many internal debates over as well… is which chain or chains should we support with our new Avatar and Inventory Service? Many major collections are on Ethereum, but let's be honest, the gas prices there are kinda steep! If we support Polygon as our chain of choice, great for new creators! But what about those who already have deployed collections on Ethereum? The team spent a good chunk of the last month looking at cross-chain compatibility. Doing some research into using technologies such as Chainlink.
We started experimenting with a new way of keeping track of ownership of assets between different chains using Chainlink, so instead of having to bridge an asset from one network to another, we can execute a Chainlink request, allowing us to set who is the current owner of a given asset and store it on our extended metadata contract of a cheaper network. The big limitation for this is that when ownership of asset X is updated on its original network, a manual update of the ownership should be done on our side, we proposed ‘open sourcing’ the updateOwnership method, but at this moment in time we don’t want to make the UX more complex, so instead we will deploy one contract per network. This approach still makes sense for keeping track of collection owners in a more decentralized way. So only collection owners can update the extended metadata of their NFTs.
The reality is that doing work across multiple different chains is a bit of a mess right now. And most likely infrastructure will change in the coming years, so that chain technologies play a bit nicer together. More updates coming regarding this in the future!
Calling All Creators!
With all that being said above, we’re now in the last stretch to get the Emergence SDK ready for an Open Beta! For the past 6 months we’ve been in a Closed Beta with a number of Developer Partners, who’s feedback greatly impacted some of the new features we’ve been working that are mentioned above. But later in July we will be opening up the Emergence SDK to the community.
In the coming weeks we’ll be producing a number of Developer Tutorials. Extensive Testing. And updating all of our Developer Docs. More news to come but we’re eager to get more eyes on what the team has been up to.
Conference Recap
A few weeks ago was NFT.NYC where both Ryan Gill, Founder and Aleissia Laidacker, Head of Technology and Product, attended and spoke on a few panels! It was great to meet many of you in person! From our partners, investors and some of our Open Meta community! One of the takeaways that both Aleissia and Ryan spoke to, is that the state of the market has really made people refocus back to the Builders. People are moving away from some of the hype machine marketing launches and looking towards the developers and makers who are building out the tools and infrastructure for the future of Web3 and the Open Metaverse. Some of the topics brought up at many of the panels we attended, and spoke on, were about Interoperability, Openness and Standards. It was great to see what so many companies are pushing towards together in this space. And it helped to validate that a lot of the work we all are doing as a community, is on the right track!
Both Ryan and Aleissia will be speaking at the Metaverse Summit in Paris next week! Be sure to reach out to meet up if you’ll be attending as well.
Roadmap
With our Open Beta launch coming up, and all the great feedback we’ve gotten from the community, the team have been working on putting together our Public Roadmap to be able to communicate what we’ll be working on moving forward. Here’s a glance! With much more info to come over the summer.
What’s Next?
Open Beta Launch in a Month’s time
There was an exciting announcement from one of our partners Feature.io during NFT.NYC about their launch of the first metaverse-enabled streaming device. We’ll be sharing more news in the coming months about our partnership with them and how you can get involved!
We’re also actively looking for more Developers to join our team! So if you are excited about Web 3 and Experienced in Unity, then reach out to the team michelle@crucible.network
‘Till next time…
Aleissia Laidacker & Ryan Gill