Decentraland Project Updates — February 5thNews and updates from the Decentraland project
Visiting the Bay AreaWe’ve recently returned from a very exciting trip to San Francisco where we met with several leaders in VR and crypto. Most notably, we gave a talk at a Google-hosted crypto meetup, and we’ve joined with the 0x Project and IDEO’s CoLab in supporting ERC821 as the standard for non-fungible tokens. There is a growing demand for distinguishable digital assets, so it is increasingly important for the NFT community to come together in support of standards. We also had the opportunity to meet with the HTC Vive content division to discuss our plans for the Decentraland project and the potential to collaborate with their developer network on content creation.
Hello, South Korea!Our latest stop after San Francisco is South Korea, where we have been meeting with various exchanges, media partners, crypto-collectible based game developers, and major game studios.
On February 6, Decentraland founders Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano will be speaking at the Hashed Lounge crypto meetup alongside the Research Manager of Hashed, Kim Kyung Jin, and the Aelf co-founder, Zhuling Chen. The meetup’s agenda ranges from stable coins to multi-chain processing, to token-based gaming.
We are excited to share our latest updates with the meetup and look forward to talking about our vision for Decentraland and the future of token-based gaming.
Proposal for Decentraland ScriptingScripting will bring Decentraland to life. It goes without saying that valuable, memorable experiences within VR must be both immersive and interactive. We understand that we can only provide meaningful experiences to Decentraland’s visitors if we first provide a positive experience to our developer community. To that end, we would like to propose this standard for a Decentraland scripting engine. At a very high level, we recognize three requirements for a scripting engine and SDK: power, usability, and security.
A powerful engine must be fast. This rules out most interpreted languages. The Decentraland SDK must give developers complete control over elements contained within a scene, and it must receive events generated within that scene. Ideally, a powerful system will also give developers the ability to define GUI elements.
Making the engine usable means that it must run on any web browser. We don’t want to limit the platforms used to access Decentraland. Our SDK should provide a robust sandbox environment, and it should make it easy for developers to debug their code. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so our SDK should reuse as much existing technology as possible. This will help to ensure that it is accessible to a wide range of developers with varying levels of experience.
Last, and definitely not least, we need our scripting engine to be secure. It should allow developers to create applications within Decentraland that can collect, store, and use private keys when facilitating micropayments. Our scripting engine should also provide a mechanism to safely interact with other peers and applications across Decentraland.
After working through these criteria and examining potential solutions, we settled on TypeScript as our top choice for a scripting language. TypeScript compiles right to JavaScript, it is easily debuggable, and it allows developers to do more with less code. As an added bonus, its typings also serve as embedded documentation for the SDK.
For a deeper dive into our thought process and to join the conversation, check out the proposal on GitHub.
Decentraland at the Rare Digital Art FestivalWhile creating standards for the development of NFTs has been a big focus, let’s take a step back and look at what the community has been doing with these new digital assets! The Rare Digital Art Festival is a vibrant new forum where leaders in collectible digital art are doing just that.
Kieran Farr, a founding advisor at Decentraland, recently represented us at the first gathering of the Rare Digital Art Festival on January 13th in NYC, along with the creators of Rare Pepe Wallet, CryptoKitties, and CryptoPunks to name just a few of the participants who spent the day exploring the intersection of art and blockchain technology.
https://blog.decentraland.org/decentraland-project-updates-february-5th-c951d1dedebd