I figured with our public unveiling approaching, that it was about time I let the jME community in on a bit of what we’re working on here at the Brooklyn eXperimental Media Center.
Betaville is an open-source multiplayer environment for visualization of participants’ own built environment, designed to promote the development of general 3D visualization and design skills, and a new approach and open resource for participatory urban planning, design, and public art in context and for the long term.
Along with ourselves here in Brooklyn we’re working in association with the Media2Culture Institute of the Hochschule Bremen. The Betaville framework makes use of Java, MySQL, PHP, GIS datasets, as well as the Android platform, while the desktop client application proudly rocks jME2 and FengGUI.
I’ll be trying to post some content here as interesting screenshots and tidbits come along, but will also be inviting everyone to try out the first public release in the end of October 
This looks great! I look forward to seeing more progress on this!
Can you create inside the engine itself?
Thanks!
For the first public version its based on an import pipeline, but we’re working on other methods of design. The learning curve is often too high for someone to jump into Blender while Sketchup can be equally confusing to some, so we’re working on lowering the bar of entry
Looks sweet, are you still working on this?
Absolutely! Still going and you can totally try it out 
Check out http://betaville.net for an installer
Nice! how does one log in to try it out?
When you run the webstart app there’s a button to register an account, let us know what you think!
I was able to login and register
Is a nice looking simulated environment However when I tried to make a jME headquarters I couldn’t quite figure out the process to complete it, including a screen shot:
Was nice to see the environment!
It looks like some of the prompt windows are caught behind the upload dialog, but I’d say you’re on the right track! If you move the big window, you should be able to click past the ok/move on dialog.
There’s a tutorial here: http://betaville.net/wiki/doku.php?id=howto:create_a_proposal
Disclaimer: The process of loading models is a bit hairy. We’re accepting OBJ and Collada, but be careful with the scaling (1 meter = 1 unit). It’s been an interesting ride trying to accept different formats from different modeling applications and keeping them all in scale 
We really appreciate you trying this out!
Oh Cool! I didn’t realize we could place our own unique models I’ll see if I can try this again over the weekend.
I really like the idea I had some problems starting the game but that’s probably because I’m running Linux with an ATI card = no good combination. I got it started eventually but when i imported a .dae model i exported from blender it crashed so i grabbed a random model from the internet and placed it
Awesome! Where’s your proposal at, I’d love to have a look!
Also, would you mind posting your blender model & any textures? Its really helpful to see any models that cause issues
I just made a box and extruded a roof in 30 seconds and exported as collada 1.3.1 which crashed it. There were an option to export as 1.4 too but that didn’t seem to work. I guess its the version that is wrong.
I’ll screenshot where is it as soon as I manage to start the game again 
As I said i just took a random model i found on the internet, haven’t made it myself.
Thanks, I’ll be sure to check it out! We’re mostly using Maya in-house so its great to have a knowledge of issues with other DCC tools.
This is the house i placed: http://i.imgur.com/a6khE.png
I had to click the yellow arrow and select Show before it appeared but i guess you’re aware of that. There were many yellow arrows around the map that i could click to see houses.
I suggest you add a chat and an online-list.
Ah ok, I see it… There actually is a chat/commenting system if you select the object and right-click…
http://i.imgur.com/6s8yJ.png
A who’s online list is something interesting we haven’t previously thought of though… Do you think it would aid in collaboration if you were able to see people you knew online?
Here is the model i took: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=a1c17b44c131d115587031f7fc8eccb7
I was unable to import from blender as i said.
Commenting isn’t really a chat system. Programming an online-list and a simple chat system would be a good thing. An online-list alone isnt very useful but with a global chatroom it would be
I went through the steps of placing a exported basic UV mapped building near location: GPS 40.704877786534524 UTM -73.983950612446228.
I went through each step, but the model seems invisible.
The Object was exported from blender as .obj
I didn’t see the model i imported at first, turns out it was under the ground and after moving it up a little i saw it. Perhaps thats your problem…
WASD said:Commenting isn't really a chat system. Programming an online-list and a simple chat system would be a good thing. An online-list alone isnt very useful but with a global chatroom it would be :)
Ah something live.. This is definitely a possibility in the future as we're going to be introducing in-world modeling as well.
lwsquad said:
I went through the steps of placing a exported basic UV mapped building near location: GPS 40.704877786534524 UTM -73.983950612446228.
That's actually GPS or UTM so you know. We should make that interface clearer!
What @WASD said is right though, if you exported the object at (0, 0, 0) it could in fact be sitting under the terrain