Technical Developments

Our engineering team has had a busy couple of weeks, so we’d like to give you all a quick look into some of the more technical progress that’s being made on the Decentraland project.

The team is hard at work putting together the Developer SDK. Just this past week, they’ve added support for Node.js server-side scenes, which is one of the first milestones on the path toward enabling developers to build multiplayer scenes in Decentraland. They have also been focusing on optimizing the efficiency of peer-to-peer interactions in VR mode and have been improving different input methods, like VR controllers, mice, keyboards, and mobile devices. Considerable progress has also been made in broadening our compatibility with A-Frame by adding additional A-Frame entities.

We have also been addressing some of the smaller, yet significant, details like improving the realism of Decentraland’s sky, sun, and even fog! Our engineers have also added the ability to present a first-person view of your verified crypto-collectibles. These small details like atmosphere and lighting all add up to create an a more immersive experience.

Shifting focus to developments in the Marketplace: we have begun adding a functional “wallet page” where you will be able to view all of your digital assets in one place, along with a new activity page where you should be able to track all of the transactions you’ve conducted in Decentraland. These are just a couple examples of a series of advancements in the user interface and experience of the secondary tools we plan to provide alongside the main Decentraland client. We’ve also deployed a marketplace contract on Ropsten and are conducting audits and tests of that functionality.

We have also re-deployed Decentraland’s LAND contract after integrating some very useful community feedback on the ERC 721/821 standard. Finally, the team is working on adding the ability to manage changes in IPNS (the naming system for IPFS, the decentralized content distribution network supporting Decentraland) without having to re-deploy entire smart contracts.

The team is continually hunting down bugs to fix and processes to optimize.

Etheremon Integration

Last week we introduced an exciting integration with the crypto-collectible game, Etheremon. Their team is going to be piloting our developer SDK while building out the Etheremon integration for Decentraland. We plan for this to be the first of many crypto-collectible game and dApp integrations, and are excited to start putting tools into the hands of other developers interested in creating content for Decentraland.

Designing Genesis City: Korean and Chinese Translations!

Last week, our Product Lead wrote a discussion of the philosophical and technical decisions behind Genesis City’s roads. He examined some of the interesting usability and design considerations we faced when laying out the virtual road system, so if you are interested in learning more about transportation, content discovery, and LAND value then check out the post here.

We have also made a Korean translation and Chinese translation available for this post.