In the meantime, have you visited LambdaMOO?
telnet://lambda.parc.xerox.com:8888
There's a lot you can do in just text, although there's a large 'lag',
primarily because the core DB and most of the commonly used 'parents' =
classes were designed by inexperienced C programmers.
My chief advice for anyone setting up a virtual world is to start off on
the right foot; have someone experienced - say, me - do the basic
architectures, the generic rooms and players and so on. I wrote (for
MOO) some very high-speed expandable basic room generics. You might be
able to adapt the architecture to VRML. I also have an object-oriented
non-procedural causal-chain high-speed expandable RPG architecture, but
I'm not sure you'd need that.
Again, the chief danger is being frozen into some slow hacked-up
nonexpandable procedural system. The LambdaMOO room system and player
classes are bad; LambdaMOO RPG is beyond words. Don't just write a
minimal set of basic classes; do it right the first time and make SURE
it's written by someone who lives and breathes object-oriented.
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/singularity.html
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/algernon.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I know.