Development History

The concept and name for Multiverse dates back to the early 1990's where it was a MUD people could play via dialing in to a BBS system. That incarnation was fairly complete and included combat and eliza like AI for NPCs. Multiverse3D goes back to 1998 when it began as a C++ app built from scratch with a custom graphics engine, network layer, and physics engine. The custom 3d object modeler app is shown to the right. Eventually, it moved to using Crystal Space as the graphics engine and ODE as the physics engine. The codebase grew to 110kloc and the team was about 12 people at it's biggest.

In 2005, we hit some road blocks and took a break to write Siegium. Siegium made a lot more use of Python than MV3D had, and it also used Twisted for network gameplay. Both of those concepts worked out very well, and in mid 2006, the Python version of MV3D started development. Version 0.1 was released in September 2006 and featured a server and client with basic graphics.

• Version 0.2 came in October 2006 and added terrain and physics amongst other things.
• Version 0.3 was released in March 2008.
• Version 0.32 was released in July 2008 and was the first open source release.
• Version 0.34 was released in February 2009. It features many client user interface improvements and world editing tools.
• Version 0.40 was released in January 2010 and concentrated on high availability.
• Version 0.41 is the current development version and will bring a new persistence engine along with the ability to export and import parts of of the world.

Check out the old MV3D news page on the wayback machine for some very early history.

MV3D has been primarily developed by MikeHandverger.