After a short skype chat with Tao yesterday, he invited me to a platform called SmallWorlds. (no - it has nothing to do with the social network “A Small World“)

It’s one of these 2.5D worlds, which are really not a new big deal and there are quite a lot of them on the market right now. More or less all of them are flash based and more or less all work and look the same way.

But I must admit that I really start to like this small 2.5D worlds and that I see quite a few useful usage scenarios for them, if I would have a nice open source, free to use and modify building set for it. (don’t tell me about metaplace now )

Compared to getting the server side of Second Life open source, something like this couldn’t be such a big deal and would be very nice to play around with, wouldn’t it? I want something easy XML based. So that I  just need to edit a few XML files to describe rooms, avatars and whatever and then … tatataaaa … your own 2.5D world. Data Portability and Co. of course included right from the start.

A small standard to develop objects for this open source and free available 2.5D world - what basically would be an easy to use template for your graphic program of choice - would also be helpful