Well, the NFT crowd finally did something that works, at least at beta level.
matterverse.com
There's a download for Windows. This is UE5, with all the good stuff turned on. So you need a serious gamer PC.
https://play.matterverse.com/latest.zip (Over 4GB. I tried this under Wine, since my big machine is Linux, and it failed because Wine 7.0 doesn't support a feature it wants. which is about normal for UE5 right now.) Someone with a gamer-class Windows 10 machine can try this. I haven't been able to run it yet.
They have a “cloud gaming” option, for which you pay Paperspace about US$0.50/hour.
There's a whole NFT thing attached, but it's optional. Unlike almost everybody else in the NFT space, first they are bringing up the 3D world online, and then, in Q1 2023, the NFT stuff turns on. Which means they won't be in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
It looks like reasonably good Unreal Engine 5 content. Which is way ahead of everybody else in the NFT space. There's a content editor, mostly for placing existing items. Looks OK.
Not yet clear how multi-user this is. I get the feeling this is a bunch of game devs who decided to build a metaverse. They answer if you talk to them on Discord.
One approach to multi-user is to run everything server side, where you have lots of inter-server bandwidth, and just ship video out to the clients. That's what Bored Ape Yacht Club's Otherside is doing. They're browser-based, but the browser is just streaming video from Improbable's M2 system. So they can get thousands of players on screen at one time. Their content looks crappy, though.
