"Create, explore and trade in the first-ever virtual world owned by its users." With this welcoming phrase Decentraland invite us to dive into one of the first blockchain-backed platform that enhances an alternate reality to express our ideas and projects into the world.
​
Launched in February 2020, Decentraland has seen its potential grow as a place to display and showcase cryptoart. Nowadays you can find NFTs placed all over the Land, some of them inside buildings specifically made to gather them, others in parks and open areas and even some of them can be found flying around.

The most important thing to do at first is to create a list of your desired NFTs to be in place. Decentraland doesn't have a hard limit regarding NFT placing or video streaming as they count in the Entity limitation.
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If you don't know your limitations, you can find a lovely spredsheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BTm0C20PqdQDAN7vOQ6FpnkVncPecJt-EwTSNHzrsmg/edit#gid=0

This is the list of assets we are going to display in:

For our example we will use a splendid land of 1x1. Here we will build our environment and decide where to place our finest cryptoart pieces. For this small piece of metaverse the platform allows us to have a maximum of 10.000 triangles, 200 entities, 30 bodies, 20 materials and 10 textures in our exported project zip folder.

To have a better understanding of limitations, we have to take into account that every "entity" (called in Unity gameObject) that has it's own independent Transformation node (Position, Rotation and Scale) is considered an Entity. Even if it doesn't have a 3D mesh (Body) attached to it.

This means that every NFT, video stream or model will count at least as one entity each.
​
So for now we know that our NFTs will "size" 4 Entities within the limitations and we know that although they are all animated, only one is a video source and it will be the one to do a video stream. The other three artworks are in GIF format, supported by the Picture Frame by Decentraland.

There is one simple rule in Decentraland to do a display of NFT picture frame and it's that: if it is in OpenSea, it can be shown. This is due to the API used to extract the blockchain data to display the artwork that requires the Entity to include a NFTShape stating the Smart Contract Address and the Token ID of the artwork. This flexible set up allows you to incorpore to your land NFT assets from SuperRare, Rarible, KnownOrigin, Whale, MakersPlace and many more!

For all the artworks that remain apart of the current admitted formats (Image file formats), we have to do a video stream of them but we must know that even video streams have limitations.

The formats currently supported by the Decentraland API are .mp4 , .mov , .ogg , .webm.

Note: The inclusion of the .ogg format makes possible to only stream audio indeed :)
​
To extract the video source of an artwork it's just as simple to catch the static video source some platforms give you by right clicking on the artwork

Source link: https://storage.opensea.io/files/28b5a343586b597f755148a85d8edd23.mp4
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With this source our artwork can be streamed.

For this test we have developed a small environment scenario where we place a "dummy" game object that will indicate the complete transform data we need, position of the video stream, its rotation and its very own scale. We have named this personal beacon "COG VideoDisplay (1)", this code name will make it easier to find it in the game.ts code the export processes for us.

As you may have noticed among the code, rotations are not set in Euler angles. Instead unity runs angles in Quaternions to avoid the gimbal to happen. If you want to input Euler angles remember to put .eulerAngles after rotation to indicate that your values are being written differently.

More about Euler vs Quaternions
​https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6002516/quaternions-vs-euler-angles

As the official Decentraland documentation follows, the code to do a stream goes by stating the following lines:

This chunk of code would create a video in the position 8,1,8 located in the land with a size of 1 meters square.
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To adapt it we extract the code needed to our scene, specifically we need the part where a plane is spawned in the world position.

This is the vanilla code, stating that "entity77588n" is called "COG VideoDisplay (1)". This is the Entity we need to work on to make it stream a video on it. For it we add the following lines:

Instead of spawning a new entity, we have decided to set a material on the current one and tell it to have an specific material (that contains the VideoTexture) and describe the behaviour it has to have when the player interacts with it.

After setting our code we can deploy it locally and see if Decentraland runs our chunk of code, luckily for us this works and so the video can be seen in motion alongside the other NFTs.
​
The main counterpart to stream a video it's the fact that it is not an NFT in essence, somewhat we could say that breaks the spirit of the blockchain but it's the only way possible to do this at the moment.

Another point against it's use is the memory usage and the overload that may cause to play raw videos or stream to much data into Decentraland. Because it is a platform that it is already streaming a lot of information, overloading it with additional videos and images can be problematic if you look to have a smooth experience.

You can also set different properties to the stream that by default are not enabled. Or you may want to start the video in a specific position or stream it slower. This is the complete list of things you can add to you custom stream code:
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• videoTextureName.Play()

Simple performer to play the stream, useful to trigger a video by custom events

• videoTextureName.Pause()

Pause the video

• videoTextureName.Reset()

Takes the stream to the start point

• videoTextureName.Loop

(true or false), set a boolean to indicate if your stream continously loops or stops at the end of the video stream

• videoTextureName.PlaybackRate

The speed of streaming your video has, 1 is the default speed.

• videoTextureName.Volume

The audio volume of the video, 1 by default.

• videoTextureName.Seek

Allows you to change the starting point of the video once it's played or reset. -1 by default.

Streaming a video source in Decentraland is, among other things to develop to your land, simpler than it can be thought at first glance. But be careful when placing multiple streaming videos without stop as they can overload your scene (and your neighbouring lands too!)

"Create, explore and trade in the first-ever virtual world owned by its users." With this welcoming sentence Decentraland invite us to dive into one of the first blockchain-backed platforms that enhances an alternate reality to express our ideas and projects into the world.
​
Launched in February 2020, Decentraland has seen its potential grow exponentially as different blockchain-related companies and projects have placed a headquarter or contact point to connect bridges with their audience among the metaverse.

Ahh, yes here we are at the start point of this journey. When it comes to develop buildings with a specific goal we must ask first what is going to be used for and the initial division of their space and how much space do we have. Two words: What and Where.

What does this building gathers?
​
Nugget's News had a clear vision on how its content had to be divided and placed:

• 1st floor: General information about the company, news and social links.
• 2nd floor: Learning about cryptocurrencies with supporting videos, images and out-links.
• 3rd floor: An event area to host different kinds of event.

Where is this building at?
​
Having our general info distribution by floors, we had at our disposal a 2x2 LAND state at Decentraland, these meant:

The project came in to modernize a previous building designed for the same purpose, but the client wanted a more unique approach rather than a realistic building one.

When it comes to unleashing imagination. You don't have to care for concrete covers, pipes or electrical equipment. There is not such thing as supporting pillars or weight constrains and everything you make it has a purely esthetical reason.
​
Basically:

Following the need to modernize its appeal, for this project we played with the idea of having a hangout area, learning place and screening place in a building that had a sobriety but elegant design. We chose modernist architecture as a main reference and mixed it with the idea of a giant logo surrounding the building. 

After the references have been set, it's key to start developing a mock-up or quick model that draws the volume boundaries of the building and mixes properly what we want (#00) and how we want it (#01) based on the purpose of the building and the references chosen. 

This give us a proper shot to iterate on and we can start trying it out in-engine to match sizes. Also it gives us a scope on how many objects do we have to craft and anticipate some possible constrains based on our goals.
​
From this blockout we extracted specific references for chairs, counters and every visual needed. It was time to get into shapes.

As every shape gets developed individually or along the other props in the same floor, the project starts to approach a critical state, where composition has to be remade or tweaked to have a beautiful interior and exterior design.

As every shape gets developed individually or along the other props in the same floor, the project starts to approach a critical state, where composition has to be remade or tweaked to have a beautiful interior and exterior design.

After different iterations and redesigns we get to the final design. All running in engine.

After we have all shapes made and initial composition set, it is time for us to go to the next step, design materials and apply them.

As we said before, the Nugget's News building look comes from a Modernist architecture with some art-touch made by us. This means that the building has to be mainly using "modernist-like" materials such as concrete, clean wood, painted steel, brushed grey iron and a little bit of marble.

But we cannot forget this is a corporate building, so we have to mix those ideas with matching colours from the colour palette of the Nugget's News website. This is basically a palette of 5 blues and a coral variant made for contrast with the rest of the components.
​
Both main ideas mixed together result in the following material (excl. Albedo dyes)

​Of course, creating materials is not a one shot job, we have to iterate and local-deploy constantly to reach the result we want and at the same time play with all the constrains, this means that we have to cleverly reuse all the materials along the building and minimize those that can only be in one place or are too specific. Apply different materials in different polygons set in the same mesh and etcetera. 

An example on material design evolution is the wall (and floor) of this room and how it evolves until it gets nailed.

​Regarding Animations, this is something I was kind of thrilled to see done, the idea with the Nugget's News immense logo being animated and morphing during the whole experience. We found pretty interesting that the shape of the logo has an almost continue tileable curvature, so we could play with it and invert the curvature as an animation, making the logo continuously loop non-stop by just morphing.

A concept made to understand how the logo should deform, it exploits the fact that it already has a "natural" curvature and inverts it seamlessly.

​Technically it is something difficult to get right as the rig has to be correctly executed to drag properly the vertex by animation with the simplest model complexity possible. But once we have it right and complete the animation, we can have our hands on the next step, color and UV mapping.

UV mapping this was something we came as the NN shape came along, as the logo itself is made out of triangles this benefits us and we can make the whole texture with a two gradients: one for blue to light gradient triangles and other for blue to dark gradient triangles.

Once the composition and all the visual aspects of the scene are ready to evaluation and have been checked in-engine, it is time to get our hands on designing information areas. We now basically are creating a good user experience by deep thinking and assess how the design will be experienced and ensure the best experience. This means to place everything in a way that is not tedious for the player.
​

A welcoming area, with out-links that take the user to other places related with the company, like Twitter or Web.

Multiple panels that can be a calendar of events, a motif of the company or just general info about its activity.

In the second floor is placed a second welcoming counter as the floor content is related but with a different mission, if we want the player to feel welcomed and understand what's going on this is the best way. Also there is again another link board so this connection is always close to the experience of the user.

Different panels with different boards to explain specific materials and contents about the company are placed along the second floor in independent cubicles. 

Each cubicle has its own "Learn more" so the player goes directly to the expanded content related to what it's being told.

A mid-floor between Floor 2 and 3 was set to amplify the use space and maintain everything airy.

During the whole displacement along the levels, you can see where are you heading.

A general view of the conference area, spacious and set to gather big meetings with announcements or "Ted talks".

And a viewpoint on the same stage.

Once everything is in place and with the correct information set, there is nothing more to do but to upload our content to the metaverse and let the people experience it.
​
This project has given us a fantastic opportunity to create a headquarter that had no relation with our daily work, as we are involved indirectly with cryptocurrencies but we focus in 3D developments and experiences. I do really hope to get my hands again on such different things as building the worlds others imagine.

To apply only one type of static to an object is as easy as clicking on the dropdown arrow next to Static and mark all your desired values.
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Static can make a huge difference in how performance behaves in Unity, is a 101 in optimizing your work and getting it running into potatoes. The whole Static well used is the secret for smooth fps.

In the Game view we can find a little tab called "Stats" there we can see how many batches are being processed by frame in the current FOV of the Camera set in scene. Without Lightbakes, Occlusion Culling, Batching Static and others this could easily rise as every feature needs a single calculation by object.

This means (among others): calculate mesh visualization, apply material (1 batch per shader pass), lighting (if realtime 1 batch per object), realtime effects like particles, skybox... So you can get that Static-ing your objects is crucial, specially the one that tells the engine to don't modify anything from its render/transform: Static Batching.

Before we get our hands on Static Batching, we will unravel the different types and do a brief explanation and usage:
​

• Static value:
  • Contribute to GI: Consider the GameObject when computing Lighting Data.
  • Occluder Static: Turn this GameObject an Static Occluder.
  • Occludee Static: Turn this GameObect an Static Occludee.
  • Batching Static: Consider this GameObject to merge its mesh/meshes with other GameObjects set to Batching Static.
  • Navigation Static: Consider this object when computing Navigation Data.
  • Off Mesh Link Generation: Attempt to generate an Off-Mesh Link. (Navigation Data)
  • Reflection Probe: Consider this object when rendering Reflection Probes.

You can find information about creating a good Occlusion Culling system in VRChat here:

The Static Batching tells the Engine to combine similar meshes in order to reduce its calling count. But what is similar for Unity?

Unity will combine all meshes that have the Static Batching checked and have the same materials, in order words, Unity engine combines by material.

This reduces notably the amount of times its calling to render a mesh without killing its independence as an object. Combines the mesh but still considers all the GameObjects and their respectively components (Transform, Physics...) but they won't move. So Animated objects are off the table as they are Dynamic Objects and should be performance improved using other ways.

As an example, here in the Avatar Garden we find that we have repeated along all the environment a set of assets that vary in Transform values but remain the same in all the others (Material settings), all these objects are marked as Static so Unity only renders:
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• Once all the "orange mesh" GameObjects.
• Once all the "light-green mesh" GameObjects.

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... and so on with every Material match between all the Static Batched GameObjects.

The result of Static Batching led Unity to combine all the meshes that used the same Water material or combining all the meshes that used the ground material.

If you animate a GameObject by its transforms and has the Static Batching checked it won't move on runtime. Meanwhile if you have an Animation based on shader values it will get animated. This means that Shader modification on runtime is still possible for Static Batched meshes.

The river in the Avatar Garden is an animation of the values of the Material Shader. The engine is told to interpolate two values in an amount of time and it does it through the Shader, this allow us to make this type of effects and at the same time maintain low the draw calling rate.
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Also notice that the shadow doesn't get displaced during the animation, this is due to the UV space they are using. Standard shader uses the UV0 for input texture maps like Albedo, Metallic, Smoothness etc and so all the values modified during runtime only affect the UV0 channel of the model. On the other hand lightmaps make use of the UV1 and they are not modified during runtime.

For more information on how we created the river in the Avatar Garden, check our article about it!

To reduce this impact, Unity goes for Dynamic batching or Static batching as we stated previously, good practices to reduce draw calls include:
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• Combine different objects that are going to share the same Material.
• Pack different and independent objects in one bigger Atlas Texture.

This is an example of Atlas packing, all the objects from the exterior are using the same texture maps and so they will be draw called once.
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The Avatar Garden uses tileable textures and so it reduces too the number of materials. For color depth and variation we used Lightbaked lighting.

The static value is a must in the improvement of performance during runtime in Unity. Well executed can heavily impact on all machines and can let people with low-end machines running high-end experiences.

You are more than welcome to drop any question or your try-out and results!
Join us: https://discord.gg/UDf9cPy
​
Additional sources:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/GameObjects.html
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/StaticObjects.html
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/DrawCallBatching.html

In Polygonal Mind we've been heavily involved in Decentraland development and community for the past 2 years, and thanks to it we've been in many meetings answering questions about this Metaverse.
​

This article is a recap of all the most common questions we've been getting about the platform explained for a non technical person.

Decentraland is a virtual world divided into squares of land of the same size. You can buy and trade this land and also build on top of it. All the content in the world is generated by the owners of the land, making it a huge collaborative space.

The project has been under development for longer than most would like to admit, and it is evolving on a very slow pace to my taste. This slow motion is probably because 2 years ago, most of the progress of the platform was not poured directly into developing it, but more into the financial aspect of it.

• MANA released very early, and was listed on most well known exchanges as a tradeable coin.
• LAND sale was also done way before we could see anything in the world.

This was very criticized and tagged by many as a "money grabbing project" the progress the team was showing to the public was very focused on financial, while at the same time, various promises were broken on the technical side.
​

• The project changed the engine a couple of times, meaning that anything built needed to be re-done most of the times.
• VR was removed from the priority list.

Many in the community felt very disappointed at the time, especially for the VR aspect. Decentraland as a concept drove many different people in investing for a very long term project without a clear route.

But what many of us wasn't able to see at the time, was that having a very strong coin and assets before the actual platform would enable the growth of a development ecosystem from the ground up.
Seen with perspective, it was a risky move, but the right one. I don't really know if this was made on purpose or accidentally.

During this time, there has been many initiatives to attract talent to the project.
​Game Jams, Funds, and contests, providing MANA and LAND.

In the future, these initiatives, especially the game funds, will be managed by the Decentraland DAO. That will unlock funds to bootstrap projects pitched directly to the community.

These type of events has motivated professional teams to invest their time into developing for the platform. This has been a great advantage against other platforms that haven't invested that much into attracting developers. It is highly important to allow monetization of your work as soon as possible if you want to retain creatives for the long run.
​
Most of the times these payments were done in MANA, which has been increasing its price during last year, helping even more those teams who hold it as a financial asset to fund their ideas.
​
Taking all of this into consideration, we can expect his internal ecosystem to grow slowly into a B2B market for the short term, that will evolve eventually on a play to earn economy.

You'll need a computer and a browser.

Although this statement might hold some truth, there are various things to consider on the graphical style of Decentraland.

The most important one is resource optimization, it is a web project that loads your 3D interactive land and everyone around you on real time, from your browser, and on top of that, is USER generated content, that can or cannot be prepared to run smoothly.

Think about browsing a website, I'm sure you have experienced a bad website that takes forever to load because it has high resolution images. This is the same thing, but multiplied. So when you open a site, you open at the same time all the sites around it, some of them will work just fine, but others will work badly.

Unfortunately, there isn't much we can do about this, for now.
​
And if we think even more into the future, probably everything will be rendered on a cloud computer and streamed to your device, like Google Stadia does. I'm not very optimistic about this technology since it will need that most of the world uses a very high speed internet connection. But only time will tell.
​
The second thing to consider on the graphic aspect is the style, and this is purely a personal taste opinion. This debate has been going for years on the videogame industry, hyper-realistic graphics against stylized content. There is no real answer to this. Stop.
​
There are many things that Decentraland is lacking visually, we can all agree on that, but I expect the team to deliver them in the future.

Unfortunately you can't, yet.

A very frequent question, right now, you need a license to mint wearables, and it is given by the DCL team. There is a reason behind, making wearables requires 3D modelling, texturing and rigging skills. Not everyone has them.

We're in the early stages of the platform, and I guess the team is doing closed experiments with experienced teams and individuals to learn the best way to open the market later on.
​
In the future we can expect:

• To have in-game tools to create basic wearables, like t-shirts.
• More licenses issued by the community through the DAO.

This is one of the points that have brought many different debates and heated arguments to the community. It was promised in the Whitepaper, but discarded a few years back.

Developing a platform is not an easy task, and a VR platform is even harder, so removing it from their roadmap was not a crazy idea at all, it has helped focus on bringing DCL to more devices than a VR focused project could potentially do at the moment.
​
It has been stated by the Decentraland team that VR is not a forgotten thing, just postponed. So eventually we'll be able to experience Decentraland with our favorite headset. When? Not anytime soon pal, probably in 2022.

There are various reasons behind this, the most obvious is scarcity. There is a limited amount of them and in order to make more, the community has to vote for it.

Building on it isn't easy either, you need some expertise to create something worth visiting.

We can't deny that the market has gone wild and has been pumping prices for a while, leading to what we have today.
​
But at the same time it has shaped the vision of the project into a more B2B approach rather than the B2C we all had in mind. For a business, buying and investing into Decentraland is way more reasonable than a regular person.

Many old fashioned businesses are starting to consider their own Metaverse presence and this question pops very often on their head.

The Metaverse is and will be infinite, endless layers and worlds that we can access anywhere from many different devices. You'll be lost and very easily as we get deeper on the internet.

Decentraland will act as an attention beacon for users, pretty much like any social media platform does these days. So you might want to build your own personal space outside these Metaverse platforms, but you'll need to invest a lot of efforts to attract users there and retain them.

And I'm not just talking about advertising, you'll need to develop interaction on your own, servers to hold visitors, avatar systems, interactivity, etc. Not saying that is impossible, but it will take way more time and funding than having your parcel in Decentraland.
​
I would say that having a small presence on Decentraland (or any other platform) and linking it to your personal space will be the most logical option in the future, just like you have your Facebook page and your own website.

This is just a highlight of the many different questions we get everyday, my goal this time has been to explain how Decentraland has been evolving in the last few years from an insider look.

​But there are lots of different questions that I haven't included here, so stay tuned for more Decentraland insider looks.
​
As a final reminder, Decentraland is a collaborative layer of the Metaverse, just like Facebook is part of the internet. If everything keeps evolving steadily it might become the business cluster of the future.


See you around the Metaverse!

So you are new to all this Metaverse economy and you are having trouble understanding what's going on. You want to start investing some time and maybe even money on it, but you are not sure where to start... Well, you are in luck, this post is for you!

In the last two years, we've been involved in many Metaverse projects,
​building and generating value across different platforms.

In this article we'll dig into Blockchain Metaverse projects, the ones we know and what you should consider before starting your journey. There are many different Metaverse projects out there, but today we'll compare the best known in the space on different points, so you can have enough information before digging further on them.

Before starting you must understand the Metaverse as a concept.
NONE of these projects alone are the Metaverse, even if they say so on their marketing efforts.
​They are LAYERS of the Metaverse, and all of them combined are the Metaverse.
In easy terms to understand, Facebook is not the internet, but a part of it. Same applies here.

The oldest one in the space.
​
It is a single Metaverse layer divided evenly into a grid. Every single coordinate is called LAND.
All the LAND is the same size and has the same limitations. Users can combine their colliding LAND into Estates. Users can create districts to coordinate themselves and this one function as separated entities/companies. There is a limited supply of LAND and there is no way to create more unless the community proposes it through the Decentraland DAO.
​
The world was open on 20/02/2020

Minecraft-like inspired project.
​
It is a single Metaverse layer divided unevenly in different plots and islands.
There is a main island called Origin City that has a limited supply of parcels.
Their team is always generating new islands and parcels as a way to fund the project.
Every plot has a different size and limitations.
​
The world was open on July/2018

High end devices focused project.

It is a single Metaverse layer divided unevenly in different plots along an already generated map with some islands too. Every plot has different size and limitations. The team is releasing new land once in a while.

The world was open on 20/02/2020

The project also has a new proposal for owning whole Metaverse layers, called Somnium Worlds.
​But there is little information about this yet.

Evolution of a previously very successful non-blockchain project into a new paradigm.
Also with Voxel art.
​
It is a single Metaverse layer divided evenly into a grid. All the land is the same size and is pretty big, users can combine their plots into estates to generate bigger places. There is a limited supply of land there is still a big part of it not released to the market.
​
The world is still in private beta, aiming to launch in Q1 2021

When we talk about Metaverse layers we're talking about content being deployed on the same "world" meaning that in theory you could be able to "walk" from one point to another without any loading screen, so when you join the place, you can see your parcel and everything built around it even if this content is built by another person.
​
This is the case of Decentraland, CryptoVoxels and Somnium Space,
they all got a seamlessly walking experience.
​
As opposed to the other projects, Sandbox encapsulates their land experiences into separated scenes and when you walk from one parcel to another, there will be a loading screen.

Desktop Website: ​https://decentraland.org/

Desktop, Mobile Website and VR: https://www.cryptovoxels.com/
Same experience in any device.

Full version: Desktop Client and High end device VR headset.
Reduced version: Desktop Web and Quest.
​https://somniumspace.com/
​
The reduced version is encapsulated in different instances, meaning that you can only visit 1 plot at a time. Web based visitors cannot see client visitors and vice versa. Avatars are also limited to the web version.

Desktop Client.
Not released yet.
https://www.sandbox.game/en/

The project started with Esteban Ordano and Ari Merlich, both very experienced folks on blockchain and high end technology and did a very successful job creating and pushing the idea. Now the project is managed by the Decentraland Foundation, a new entity that is focused on listening to the community needs. Most of the team is in Argentina.

By the one and only Ben Nolan. This solo entrepreneur from New Zealand started off the project from scratch and now has a team helping him to generate his vision. They are very active listeners on their Discord and Twitter.

Funded by the serial entrepreneur Artur Sychov, the project started with a very successful indiegogo campaign back in the day. Based in the beautiful city of Prague, right in the heart of Europe.

From afar all these projects look very, very similar, but they are actually not, they all have different communities with various mindsets.

This project has made a huge effort into building collaborations and partnerships with top blockchain and crypto projects around the world, there are many virtual headquarters built in there already and more to come in the following months.
​
Events and networking is what is driving Decentraland adoption.
​You can keep up to date with their events on the website.
​
The platform has also a lot of cryptoart galleries and a few games to enjoy.
​But be aware that most of the place is still empty.

If you want to get inspired quickly, you MUST visit CryptoVoxels.
​In 2020, CryptoArtists from all around the world have taken over this platform generating mind blowing content. The world is filled with art galleries and the community is super active. This project has the best boarding experience on Crypto-Metaverse so far.
​
There are many art and business related events in the world, but there isn't a centralized way to find them, you must follow each micro community individually.

The main selling point of the project is its beautiful image rendering.
If you own a high end VR device, Somnium is for you.
​
The community is small but cozy, very active and welcoming on their Discord.
​They also got an event page to keep track of all the events.
Art galleries and private land is the content you'll find there.

The project is unreleased yet. But I can give you a glimpse of what you'll find.
​Games, games and more games.
​
Their team is making a great effort to build a game platform along with many creators. With their background on the industry and how they communicate, I expect SandBox will become a great gaming platform. They are using Arkane Network, which makes on boarding for blockchain newbies very easy.

Alright. So you want to have something built in your new virtual domains, these are the things you need to take into account.

This platform has 2 ways of building.

The Builder: This online tool allows users to place and allocate 3D models in the parcel and then deploy. What you can do with it is very limited.

The SDK: Tool developed for professional teams to generate interactive content in the game. Probably very complex for starters, but very good if you want to have something very unique on your parcel. We've made different games and experiences with it. Developing with DCL SDK is still a very niche thing and takes A LOT of time, so be prepared to hire a professional team.

The easiest and most friendliest of them all, just join CV and start placing things in your land while playing. You can find many artists willing to take building commissions and they'll create amazing stuff by pushing limitations to the next level. The great downside right now is that you can't create any complex behavior on CV, so no games.

There is a Somnium Builder that works very well, it is very similar to the Sims building creator tool and it allows you to make your own place out of already generated assets. There is a Unity SDK in the works for Somnium, but no release date yet.

This project has developed 2 different tools for content creators:

VoxEdit: that allows to create game items and characters.
​
Game Maker: This tool will take the assets generated on VoxEdit and place them in world, also adding interaction and complex behavior for them. No code required.
​
Since the platform is not released, it is still hard to find people to develop in your SandBox Land.

All the platforms, released or not, got some economy going on, based on different stuff.

They have their erc20 token called Decentraland MANA ($MANA)
​Probably the strongest coin of all the platforms and listed on the most well known exchanges.

1 MANA ≃ $0.116

Their LAND economy is also pretty hot, the lowest prized LAND on OpenSea right now costs
​8,000 MANA ≃ $924.3
​
This project also has wearables made by their team and community,
​you can also buy and sell names on Decentraland.

They don't have any coin anymore.
​
It has a very small wearable economy, but unfortunately generating new tokens it's been closed down due Ethereum gas fees many times, making it very difficult to generate a stable revenue for creators.
​
Cheapest parcel on Opensea: 1 ETH ≃ $1,236.61

They have an erc20 token called Somnium Space CUBEs ($CUBE)

1 CUBE ≃ $0.3

But their team has made claims that they want it to become a stable coin.
Cheapest parcel on Opensea: 0.68 ETH ≃ $839.5

The project has also created their own virtual reality avatar market, only usable on Somnium client version. They also have released a world token. But they haven't released much info on this yet.

They have an erc20 token called SAND ($SAND)

1 SAND ≃ $ 0.05

Cheapest parcel on OpenSea: 0.1 ETH ≃ $122.7
​
Any item created and uploaded to SandBox will be automatically an NFT, so expect a huge boom of NFT trading from this project once is released.

The following statements are made in Jan of 2021 and are based on how all these platforms have evolved along 2019-2020. This might shift as their communities become bigger and evolve.

Networking platform. Hopefully a decentralized virtual Silicon Valley of the future. Many big blockchain companies and influencers are setting their virtual business Head Quarters in there using districts as a catalyst. Unless LAND prices go down, the investment needed to buy a plot and then to develop content for it, is really high. This kind of budget makes sense for a B2B environment.

Micro house-blogging platform. Pretty much like your 3D house blog. The team sets the prices based on FIAT in order to attract more BUILDERS. Many companies and influencers have a plot in CV too, but most of the plots are built by artist showcasing their art. It is amazing to see all the islands getting built these days.

Virtual Beverly Hills neighbour for early blockchain enthusiasts and celebrities. Somnium parcel prices have skyrocketed in the last year. The community is small BUT very active and very well connected. The world looks like a green field, that can remind you of The Sims.

Blockchain based Minecraft competitor. Is very difficult to imagine how this project will evolve without seen it released yet. But based on the previous SandBox game and the team background, we can already see this project being the only one fully focused on game development.

All these projects got Discord communities and Twitter accounts to follow their progress.
You can learn more about them by following us too!

I just wanted to give some insight thoughts on these projects, since these are the most
​"HOT Blockchain Metaverse" projects in early 2021.
​
All these platforms compete and work together at the same time.
If one of them fails hard, it will affect negatively to the others,
since they are all tied together with Ethereum.
​
As I stated in the beggining, NONE of them are the Metaverse,
they are just layers, collaborative worlds filled with used generated content.
Ultimately the users owning and building the platforms will be the ones
in charge of its success or failure, same goes for their tied coins.

I haven't included any NON-blockchain projects on the list, but to give you some real facts with perspective about how EARLY we are in the space.... VRChat has today more daily active users than all of the platforms mentioned COMBINED.

True ownership will be granted by blockchain, but only if the majority of users
understand the value of NFTs and prefer it to centralized systems.

We could keep comparing all the projects in the space in the future on different subjects,
​feel free to leave us ideas on our interoperable Discord community!

Using the Decentraland SDK to place entities "manually" in the typescript code may be a slow and tedious process, especially if you have to put a lot of them and you have to look one by one if they are in the right place.

That's why you have tools to help you build a scene, like the Decentraland builder or the Unity to DCL export plugin. However there are a limited set of things you can do with them.

In this guide we'll see how to make custom modifications to the Unity plugin for DCL to expand the number of things you can export to code from the Unity scene editor.
​
Before starting with this guide you should have a minimun knowledge of the Decentraland SDK, the basics of how to export a scene from unity to DCL and some programing basics (we'll use typescript and C#).

Before start writing code in your game.ts file, be aware that the Unity export plugin will ovewrite the entire game.ts file and your code will be lost, because of this we need to work in a separate file.
​
Create a new file src/imports/components/NFT.ts with the following code:

And another one src/imports/index.ts with:

Now we have our code ready for when our modified plugin exports the game.ts

Create a empty script in Unity and open it in visual studio (or your favorite code editor).

You only need to store here the NFT address info for this guide, but fell free to add anything you need for your project.

Now we have the data stored in our entity, the only step left is to modify the plugin to translate this data to our project in typescript.

Modifing the plugin may seem like an overwhelming task, but keep in mind we only need to add our little pieces of code in it and expand its functionalities, simple if you know where to do it.
​
Open SceneTraverser.cs in the Decentraland plugin folder: Assets/Decentraland/SceneTraverser.cs
​
Find the public static ResourceRecorder TraverseAllScene function and add the following code after the comment //====== Start Traversing ======

This will import our NFTdata class at the start of game.ts
​

Next find the public static void RecursivelyTraverseTransform function and after exportStr.AppendFormat(NewEntityWithName, entityName, tra.name); add this code:

Last step, find the place where the export strings are declared and add the SetNFT string at the end.

This code will check if the exported entity has an nft_script and will add the NFT data component to the entity in our game.ts file.

With all done your scene is ready to be exported to a typescript project and your resulting game.ts should look like this:

You can access from anywhere in the project to an array of entities with your custom components, this can be usefull to control where and how some components or behaviours start.

You don't need to make complex new components if you don't have to, for example you can export from unity only the info to put an entity in an array and apply to them a custom behaviour.

Before start making your componets, take a look at the decentraland sdk and the decentraland utils library, they may have what you are looking for.

ECS API Reference:

decentraland-ecs-utils:

If you have understood the steps done in this guide, you are ready now to make your own components for decentraland and place them using the Unity editor, this will be very usefull to fill your scenes with gameplay and interaction. I hope it makes your development process for decentraland easier.