Greetings all - working on a space that I want to create a 1player experience. Has anyone successfully used the " https://gather.town/api/createRoom " /CREATEROOM/ api to create and spawn a player into a new space or has anyone seen some 3rd party apps / links that might help pull this off smoothly?
Thank you all!
I can think about a few scenarios which provide sich an experience.
If you use the SetMap API and send a command referring to a room that is not listed in the space, the room will be created.
If the new room name is know, you could set up an automation using e.g. zapier or integromat to change the portal in a initialization room to the recently created room.
After a few minutes this portal will be deactivated again to receive new player requestsâŚ
This is just straight out of my head without any testing of the whole concept, eventhonthe single steps of this scenario had been succesfully tested in different scenarios.
With javascript and the websocket API, i can imagine that this is work even better, if you have the javascript skills :-).
As far as I know, all bricks that are necessary to build this, exist.
Iâm still digging into it a bit. Iâve seen a few solutions using the rest API and Python, but ultimately Iâm still looking for a simplified way to make this work. It feels like an essential piece to making some of the Gather.town experiences when dealing with IP actually feasible. Especially something that is media-rich, open 24hours a day to the public and protective of the participants without as much monitoring.
So what you are looking to do it likely possible (JS call to a lambda script to create the map, then activate a button on a page which has the generated URL from the createRoom call), but it doesnât sound like something that benefits from being on Gather, aside from them creating the movement/interaction infrastructure for you.
If this was 4-6 or more players at once, I could see how hosting it in Gather would be awesome. But single player, not so much.
Iâd be interested to hear opinions otherwise, though.
Well, as far as benefiting Gather, I think something like this could be a pretty cool entry point with various IPs that might be looking for a way to utilize the Gather infrastructure but also make sure that thereâs a controlled environment spawned off their projects.
Thereâs also a passionate interest in storytelling with Gather, weâre already seeing them dip their toe into the water with the Coke-a-Cola factory project and Amazonâs Wheel of Time. Once a new participant has the space up, they can invite whoever they want to help them solve the mystery or experience the story. 
Thatâs what weâre hoping to achieve to bring more people into the Gather metaverse that might otherwise never try it as well as open up a collaborative storytelling environment that doesnât have specific human monitoring woes.
But whatâs youâre talking about Bill sounds intriguing, certainly a different way than I was attempting early. I feel like all the pieces are here, but I havenât see it utilized and would love to figure it out.
Some great discussion here guys, youâre definitely all treading on some topic that seem like interesting starts for possible new use / growth for Gather outside of our classic Virtual Offices and Virtual events.
I did notice though @Shawn that your original conundrum seems to have itâs root problem more in the lack of moderation tooling Gather currently offers, rather than outright needing a feature for space âinstancingâ (Using the MMO-style term here to describe your suggestion).
For example, if there was a way to force everyone in the space to be in ghost mode permanently, would you really need to spin up solo instances of the space for each new user? Iâm getting the feeling that you wonât.
We do have some internal old functionality that works like this though, we used to use it for spinning up demo spaces (Example link). However, I think one can already implement a way better version of this on their own by using API commands such as createRoom as you mentioned - you would just need to host the service yourself.
Let me know if I understood your points correctly and if you have any other comments here. Definitely interested in this topic, and could see us doing something here soon if we can more strictly define what exactly is the problem we are looking for / thing we are trying to enable.
Thanks @Jommi , and youâre absolutely right on our use case here. For some of the properties weâve worked with via Gather ( and on this project Iâd like to test it out with ), one of the big barriers for buy-in is the inability to
So youâve hit the nail on the head. Forcing everyone in a ghost mode would be a good immediate solution for our use case here. Is that something available to other spaces?
You can use the Websocket to force everyone into Ghost mode (though this could get funky depending on how aggressive people try and take themselves OUT of ghost-mode). There is not currently a âset all members to ____â function on the moderation level.
To your point other points:
Forcing a narrative: As someone who has designed escape rooms in Gather, as well as other story based experiences, it is possible to do this, even without the web-socket api. Password doors especially help ârouteâ players through a story, and embedded low-code solutions like Genial.ly can bolster the experience as well.
Moderating players: Yeah, definitely tough, and one I donât think even Gather has a good answer for (not a slight, just stating how tough the job is). The ability to force logins, put passwords on spaces, use guest lists to force naming, etc are really good starts, and if you have a good community, that is all you need. The issue comes when you attempt to take it public. Opening a space to users who are unfettered by social obligation is just asking for people to push the envelope, usually for the worse.
My companyâs solution has always been passwords, and copy/killing a space when it gets too public. But we also focus on conventions, events, and remote work, all of which have predictable use patterns. Ill be interested to hear some more feedback on this, from both sides, as many moderation tools for gaming also have good use in social events.