Dan Hope of High Fidelity has blogged this week : Stack Manager Makes Local Servers Easy to Setup. The post is aimed in the main at those who have been in High Fidelity Alpha and have attempted to setup a local server before. However the post is also worth a glance from those who may want to know where High Fidelity is heading.
Stack Manager is the name of the application that allows people to setup a local server in High Fidelity, this amounts to running a server on a local machine. The application has been through a lot of changes, and in the past people found it a bit cumbersome. However the latest version makes setting up a local server a breeze, as High Fidelity engineer Stephen Birada explains in the blog post :
Basically, in less than two minutes — from download to installation to running the Stack Manager — you will have a local server, and you can start to build with it.
Basically that’s it, you download the application, run the setup and then start the server and you have a High Fidelity world running on your local machine. At the moment you need be an alpha tester to download and try Stack Manager I believe. However in the future anyone will be able to use Stack Manager, as the blog post explains :
After creating a new world, the next step is to invite people to visit, and Stack Manager is designed to streamline that process. Create a temporary place name — even without a High Fidelity account — and connect friends without making any firewall/NAT changes to your router or computer. If you like the domain, buy a place name in our directory to preserve it.
Place names seem to be similar to domain names. As High Fidelity is in Alpha and there’s not that much public information about this side of matters it would be unfair for me to say too much, especially as there’s a good chance things may change or I’ll say something that gives the wrong impression.
However I can say that downloading Stack Manager, running the setup and getting a local server up and running is an extremely simple process.
The High Fidelity team are making some nice and steady process but they are also taking a sensible approach with the Alpha period and not releasing too much information, which is understandable as things change a lot in the Alpha stage.
High Fidelity has a big Open Source ethic so people will be able to fiddle around with the software to their hearts content once it’s more widely available.
High Fidelity is likely to make a lot more noise this year and hopefully a lot more people will get to see the product. Hopefully Emily from High Fidelity will also do more singing, the word on the virtual street is that songs from Frozen may be on the horizon, but you didn’t hear that from me!