a new virtual world for teens - The Lounge

Hey All -

just thought i'd drop a line letting you know the project i've been working with since about october.

"the lounge" - http://pcdmusiclounge.com

it's a 3D Virtual World for teens where the basic idea is to hang out and dance and chat. it's free to users, with in-world advertising and tie-ins to the top-40 music industry.  it's based on a fairly heavily modified version of the Torque game engine by Garage Games, and as far as i know is the most "massive" use of their engine to date.  We released a public beta about three weeks ago, and since then have maintained an average of forty to sixty simultaneous users; i think our maximum has been 110 or so.  It's a central server model using UDP for most things and TCP for some things.  The Torque engine is cross-platform, but so far we're concentrating on PC. (Altho the Mac and Linux versions compile and actually run a little bit!)

All in all i've been impressed with the Torque engine. It's definitely old tech, and takes a lot of wrapping-the-brain-around, but basically it's able to handle 100+ users without too much trouble.

best,
Orion