Key Features of HuzuVirtual

HuzuVirtual has a number of key features to help organisations and companies create branded virtual worlds using their existing digital media.

Branded virtual worlds

HuzuVirtual is a virtual world platform for brands to create their own virtual worlds and online environments. We make it easy for media owners create their own unique world at a fraction of the cost of building one from scratch.

Advanced social gaming platform

HuzuVirtual is a truly flexible, customisable and scalable platform with functionality that includes the creation of different virtual environments, rooms or 'levels' to the world; avatar creation; a virtual or real goods shop; fully moderated chat functionality; custom-branded avatars; and special events such as online meetings, concerts, and VIP areas.

Makes use of existing brands and digital media

Online communities, social networks, virtual worlds and social games are changing the way in which people all over the world communicate, participate, collaborate and play. HuzuVirtual allows you to harness the appeal of your existing brands in ways that tap into these changes in online behaviour.

Integrates with leading social networks

HuzuVirtual integrates with all leading social networks allowing you to embed your unique game wherever your community of customers is found. We make it easy for you to get your brand populated across the parts of the web people use, and to engage them with entertaining, direct content that makes full use of your digital media and established brands.

Flash Client SDK

HuzuVirtual offers an Action Script 3.0 Flash SDK which helps with the creation and maintenance of virtual world environments.

The SDK offers the following:

• Application framework

  HuzuVirtual uses a modular application framework. This helps you structure your application in modules, making it more maintainable and flexible. It also leverages the effort to handle the loading and unloading of the different modules.

• Isometric engine

  A stable and efficient isometric engine. Our isometric engine is not based on a grid system, it relies on a mesh definition of the area. This means that the layout of your environment is not dictated by the granularity of the grid giving the designer more freedom. The engine includes an efficient path-finding algorithm designed to make the avatar movements smooth and non-robotic. It also supports different isometry angles.

• HuzuRelay libraries

  HuzuRelay libraries for managing the communication with HuzuRelay message server.

• Smart-assets framework

  This is a very powerful tool which you can use to easily add new entertaining content in your virtual world environments. It provides the ability to define custom behaviours for specific assets in an environment such as initiating quests, quizzes and mini games.

• Avatar assembler

  A component to easily layer assets for representing an avatar. It will take care of rendering the avatar walking cycles and layering decorative assets in the correct order based on the direction of movement.

• Assets manager

  Your virtual world will be highly dependant on the graphical experience that it offers to users. This means many assets are going to be used to create that experience. The HuzuVirtual platform offers you a clean and easy way to manage all of those assets, so you don't need to care about loading and unloading them; everything is managed internally.

• Mesh Mash Editor

  An advance environment editor to speed up production. With the editor you can define solids, un-walkable areas, place smart-assets and hotspots, as well as preview and test the environment.

• Audio framework

  If you want a full experience in a virtual world you cannot leave out sound effects and background music. They can make a big difference for the user experience. This is why the HuzuVirtual SDK provides a simple but yet powerful audio framework you can use to make the user experience more immersive.

• RESTful API wrappers

  Included in the SDK you will find a set of wrappers that facilitate the communication between the client application and the HuzuVirtual web services. They come out of the box ready to use, with a very simple interface and many examples you can consult.

• Documentation

  Each class in the SDK is extensively documented and you will have access to our online wiki where you can find even more examples and explanations regarding our platform.

• Localisation

  Being able to open your virtual world to different markets usually involves being able to localise it appropriately. The HuzuVirtual platform offers a simple yet powerful set of services to leverage the effort of maintaining different languages for your virtual world.

• 3rd Party content integration

  Including external content like mini games or surveys is straight forward. The HuzuVirtual Flash SDK offers a set of different APIs to ease the communication between the virtual world and the 3rd party content.

• Your code

  On top of the HuzuVirtual Flash SDK you will be required to build your own application-specific features. That will include Avatar Builder, Shop Interface or any other user-interface feature creating the look-and-feel of your application.

RESTful API

The HuzuVirtual RESTful API gives you the ability to leverage our platform using our APIs.

You can access the following features:

• Asset management

  Your virtual world will be composed of a variety of assets, from environment assets to assets that your avatar can wear as well as those you can place in your personal room. The HuzuVirtual platform offers a set of web services that makes the management of these assets hassle-free.

  It also offers the ability to associate arbitrary data to each asset giving you the freedom to personalise them as needed by your users.

• Shopping

  As a user of a Virtual World you want to be able to enhance your avatar or your personal environment with new clothes or furniture. The HuzuVirtual platform provides the ability to purchase assets through simple API calls, retrieve what a user has bought so far, define different shops, update asset prices, etc.

• Bank

  The bank is a set of web services to help users keep track of how much virtual currency they possess, and the ability to manipulate the currency.

• Subscriptions

  Support for subscription packages. This can also be used by third party applications (see HuzuSocial) to retrieve and post information about user subscriptions.

• Quests

  Keeping your users entertained is one of the best ways to keep the user number high in the virtual world. The HuzuVirtual Quest Services gives you an out of the box framework to structure quests for your virtual world. You can define how many steps constitute your quests, a description for each of stages, and it will track the user progress.

• Rewards

  Users love to be rewarded when they finish or accomplish something. These services are built to create new rewards which can then be used for almost everything in your virtual world. You can decide to reward users with virtual currency or wearable assets and you can also define a rewards cap based on time.

• Achievements

  A series of web services to define and reward new achievements based on user actions or accomplishments inside but also outside of the virtual world (see HuzuSocial).

• Buddies

  To enhance the social part of a virtual world application the HuzuVirtual platform offers a series of web services to handle friendships between users. It supports both mutual friendships as well as one way friendship.

• Leader Boards

  Competition between users is usually a healthy tool to push them to play more and more in your virtual world, that is why the HuzuVirtual Platfrom offers a set of web services to maintain leader boards relative to in world games but also third party games.

• Statistics

  This is a vital feature to help you analyse how your virtual world is doing. The HuzuVirtual platform offers an endless list of web services to extract data regarding user activities, user behaviours and virtual world economics that will help you when you are tuning features to maximise the user experience.

• Logging

  This set of web services gives you an overview about problems that occur with the Flash Client so that you can then take actions to address them.

Content Management System

The HuzuVirtual Platform offers a set of APIs to manage all the content used in the virtual world. That includes environment assets, avatar assets, quests, rewards etc. You'll be also provided with an environment editor to facilitate the creation and modification of virtual environments.

Cloud-Based Hosting

HuzuTech can provide an end-to-end hosting solution for clients. Our solution has been designed to exploit the latest technologies and techniques to provide maximum advantage to companies and organisations.

Our cloud-based hosting can offer a number of advantages over other methods such as in-house hosting or third party services. Foremost among these is that the same people who have developed your custom virtual world are providing the hosting service. We are familiar with every aspect of our platform, and are best placed to manage and maintain it over time.

Our hosting solutions have the following features.

• Storage space and Scalability

  HuzuTech's cloud-based hosting service allows for the expansion of storage over time. Regardless of how many users are attracted to the site we can automatically scale to accommodate increasing numbers of users.

• Computing power and bandwidth

  HuzuTech's hosting solution can easily cope with sudden spikes in demand, such as those seen after an intensive media campaign. Both the computing power needed to smoothly run many instances of games, and the bandwidth required to access it can increase on demand.

• Support

  Our hosting comes with extensive support for both clients and their customers, the end users. It has been designed to allow clients to quickly reach HuzuTech staff when they need to, and ensure they are in full control of customer support using our built in tools

.

• Software updates and ongoing maintenance

  We maintain every aspect of our cloud system. This means clients can avoid the overhead of maintaining servers and other IT equipment.

• Security

  Everything we provide includes strong security as standard. All our interfaces require secure logins, ensuring customer details are always safe.

• Partners/Suppliers

  We work with technology from two of industry's biggest players: Microsoft and Amazon. We employ a hybrid approach that exploits the strengths of each and allows us to take advantage of features on both platforms, resulting in a scalable hosting architecture that is easier to manage.

Support and Documentation

HuzuVirtual has extensive support and documentation to help all developers take full advantage of its many features.

This includes online documentation -- covering every aspect of its implementation and development -- as well as introductory material to help those new to the system get quickly up to speed. In addition we are always on hand to help.

Online documentation

Our online documentation contains information on every aspect of HuzuVirtual. As well as outlining the basics of the system it includes the fine detail needed to make the most of it, and includes extensive coverage of the APIs.

Developers are able to very quickly make sense of everything and find the detail they need to develop quickly and efficiently and make immediate use of their existing skills.

API documentation

HuzuVirtual makes extensive use of APIs, ensuring developers can spend less time on the detail and focus on game development. We have documented everything developers need to make full use of of the system.

Contacts

Our team are always available to guide you. We have contact details for the key members of staff and, since these are the people who built HuzuVirtual, are on hand with extensive expertise in every area of development.