GMUVE stands for Graphical Multi User Virtual Environment. It is a completely different approach to 3D interactive applications. GMUVE is an engine/framework for writing massively multi-user 3D applications. It is being written as Open Source software in Python and Java. As an application developer you may be wondering what kind of 3D appliactions is GMUVE useful for. We have compiled a list that we have thought up:

• Massively Multiplayer Online Games
• 3D Chat Applications
• Combat Simulators
• 3D Graphics and AI Research
• Education and Training

There are probably many other uses we haven't even dreamed up yet.

There are a number of ways in which we are taking a different approach to the problems involved in these systems. For example we are working on an architecture where a GMUVE application can be run in a single user, client-server, peer-to-peer or hybird mode. Our datastore that stores state for a GMUVE application is itself object-oriented. A GMUVE application can be created in real-time while it is running.

We have decided to devlop GMUVE in Python and Java. There are currently two version in development. The intention is to make them compatible. The Python version is currently the actively developed version, however the Java version is not far behind it.

We decided on these languages for a number of reasons. First we wanted portable code that could be run on many different types of systems. Second we wanted a language with a robust easy to use API that had available all the features we needed so we would not have to waste time writing a lot of supporting code. We wanted a language with very strong object-oriented capabilities. We decided that with much of the graphics processing now being done on the GPU the fact that Python and Java may not be as fast as C or C++ would have little impact on the speed of our application. Also with JOGL getting a JSR and being moved toward being an official part of java low-level access to OpenGL on Java is a reality.