Anyone know much about Cloud Party?

[ozRocker]

This is a virtual world that runs on webGL.  I don't think they used any webGL frameworks like ThreeJS or BabylonJS.  I know these guys launched in 2011 and were acquired (and shutdown) by Yahoo in 2014.   The company was Sam Thompson (ex-Cryptic and Pandemic), Jimb Esser (ex-Cryptic), Conor Dickinson (ex-Facebook and Cryptic) and Jered Windsheimer (of Cryptic).  It looks pretty cutting-edge for its time.  Does anyone know much about this project?  Did they end up doing any cool webGL related work with Yahoo?

 

 

[GameMonetize]

I have no idea

[ozRocker]

I did a bit of research and found some people that used it.  The avatars are customisable but they could only have 25 in the scene at one time.  There's also another webGL virtual world in the works called Cosmos3D.  They were using VWF (virtual world framework) which is open-source and has ThreeJS builtin.  They also struggled to get many avatars in the scene at one time.  As a result, they had to ditch VWF and ThreeJS (not sure if they are using BabylonJS now or made their own framework).   I think the recurring problem is that with customisable avatars you cannot use cloning and my understanding is cloning is a great benefit because it uses the same vertices in memory.  So if you have many different avatars with 65,535 polygons (the Second Life limit) you can really chew up your memory having those on screen at once.  This would kill a mobile browser for sure.

So now I'm wondering, how could someone get the maximum number of avatars in a scene at the same time?  What would the best optimisation techniques be?