Still frame of the hero scene at dusk: a lamp-lined causeway between reflecting pools leads to a large blue-and-white A-shaped portal, with colonnades, a half-built pavilion and hills behind it.

Ascendance Open Worlds / Engineering

Ascendance3D Open 3D, still moving forward.

Open tools. Preserved worlds. New worlds.

Ascendance3D develops and preserves open virtual-world technology across VRML97, X3D, browser runtimes, development tools, and restored digital worlds.

Explore the projects

What is in this scene

The Ascendance Archive is an original Ascendance3D world written in X3D (hero.x3d). The camera follows a lamp-lined causeway between reflecting pools and passes through the A-shaped portal into the Archive Court: two colonnades and a half-ring of standing stones marked with amber lines. It then crosses to an engineering terrace with a pavilion under construction and three copies of one small rotunda: as wireframe, as flat surface, and as a lit finished form. It leaves through a gateway, crosses a bridge over a river gorge toward far silhouettes, and ends high above the whole site. Three exhibits are real objects from the Cybertown Mall, built by BassMekanik and adapted for this scene: the Chronos Orrery in the court, the Signal Storm Globe on the terrace, and the Buswagon Van Beach Edition parked beside the causeway. The same file loads in X_ITE or X3DOM.

The web built worlds before it built apps. Some of them can still be entered.

In the 1990s people built three-dimensional places in plain text and put them online. VRML97 became an international standard in 1997 (ISO/IEC 14772-1). Its successor, X3D (ISO/IEC 19775), is still maintained.

The files survived. The browser plug-ins that drew them did not. Ascendance3D works on both sides of that gap: tools and runtimes that let old files open again, and new worlds built on the same open standards.

This page is an example. The scene above is an X3D file drawn by an open-source runtime in your browser, with no plug-in.

Projects

WRL Forge

Desktop tool for editing, previewing, inspecting, and packaging VRML97 .wrl content.

Public beta · GPL-3.0-or-later · Linux and Windows x64
Open Worlds Archive

Recovered and restored Cybertown worlds, with creator attribution, provenance research, and modern browser access.

154 worlds open in the browser · 150 credited
Cyber Town Next-Gen

A restoration and modernization effort centered on the Cybertown virtual-world platform, its surviving worlds, systems, history, and community.

Foundation phase · community-led · noncommercial
Runtime Lab

X_ITE and X3DOM run side by side on the same scenes, starting with the one at the top of this page.

Started · this page is the first test
FreeWRL

Contributing to FreeWRL modernization: packaging, compatibility, and related engineering.

Contribution · FreeWRL is an independent project

WRL Forge

Open a VRML97 world — plain or gzip-compressed — and work on it with the standard beside you.

Edit in a code editor with an outline and live syntax diagnostics.
Preview unsaved edits in an embedded X_ITE renderer.
Scan a multi-file world for missing, unsafe, or case-mismatched assets.
Package a world as a portable ZIP for review and hand-off.

No automatic upload to Cybertown. No telemetry. X_ITE is its only renderer.

Download WRL Forge at wrlforge.com

marker.wrlVRML97 · UTF-8

#VRML V2.0 utf8
# A coordinate marker, written by hand.
DEF Marker Transform {
  translation 0 0.5 0
  children [
    Shape {
      appearance Appearance {
        material Material {
          diffuseColor  0.23 0.48 1.0
          emissiveColor 0.08 0.30 0.36
        }
      }
      geometry Cone { bottomRadius 0.12 height 0.3 }
    }
  ]
}

A small original VRML97 file: the kind WRL Forge opens, checks, and previews.

Open Worlds ArchiveAscendance Open Worlds

Preserve the work. Preserve the name behind the work.

The Open Worlds Archive holds Cybertown worlds recovered from backups and scrapes, repaired so they open in a modern browser, and credited to the people who built them.

Credits come from the official Cybertown map pages, the builder directory in Cybertown’s own navigation file, and credits written into the world files. Where the record is silent, the archive says so.

Worlds that open: 154
With a named builder: 150
Builder still unknown: 4

Easter Island
Builder David Maloney (Avatara)
Church
Builder Phillip Sand Hansel II (MrPhillip)
Athens
Builder Phillip Sand Hansel II (MrPhillip)
Pyramids of Giza
Builder David Maloney (Avatara)
Space Station 6
Builder Phillip Sand Hansel II (MrPhillip)
Old Marketplace
Builder Stan Ogden

Browse all 154 worlds

Runtime LabAscendance3D

Same open standard. Different runtimes.

X_ITE and X3DOM both draw X3D in an ordinary browser with WebGL. They take different routes. The hero loads one of them, never both.

X_ITE and X3DOM as used on this page
Property	X_ITE	X3DOM
Version on this page	4.7.0	1.8.3
Licence	GPL-3.0	MIT or GPL-3.0
How the scene attaches	A complete X3D browser in JavaScript; loads `hero.x3d` by URL	Maps the X3D scene into the page’s own DOM through an `<x3d>` element
Classic VRML97 `.wrl`	Yes — the archive viewer uses it	No — X3D XML only
Hero scene, this visit	Not loaded	Not loaded

Cyber Town Next-Gen

An independent, community-led, noncommercial effort to preserve, restore, and continue Cybertown — the 3D virtual city whose citizens built homes, clubs, and galleries inside it — and the unfinished Cybertown NG vision.

Preserve first. Restore what already exists. Then build the future that was promised.

Cyber Town Next-Gen, project principle

cybertownng.com

Independent project

FreeWRL

FreeWRL is an independent open-source VRML and X3D browser. It is not an Ascendance3D project.

Ascendance3D contributes modernization, packaging, compatibility, and related engineering work to it. Details will be published here when that work is released.