Create
Getting an object into the Mall
Everything on this page is current policy, and every block says which source it came from. Uploading happens inside Cybertown Revival — this page cannot accept a file.
Drop schedule
Tuesday 9 AM CTR time · Friday 5 PM CTR time. Schedule changes are announced in advance.
My Uploads
My Uploads is reached from the sidebar inside Cybertown Revival.
- A button on the Mall sidebar labelled MY UPLOADS opens the creator page in a new window, showing your pending and approved objects.
- MY CATALOG returns you to that page and shows every object you have uploaded that has not been rejected — original name, price, quantity, limit, upload date, and how many sold.
- PENDING shows uploads waiting to be checked by Mall staff.
- STOCKED shows uploads currently placed in a store, which store, and how many have sold.
- RESTOCK shows objects not currently in the Mall that can be restocked — unlimited items, or limited items with unsold quantities. You can add up to 100 at a time if unlimited, or up to the limit if limited.
Before you upload
Six things go into the form at https://cybertownrevival.com/#/mall/upload.
These are the rules for each of them.
- Object name
- Maximum 20 characters. It may not contain any of these characters: [ ] { } ( ) " * < > -
- Price
- The price in CC, up to four digits. It must match the price on your thumbnail and in the object's WorldInfo.
- Quantity
- How many to stock, up to four digits. A maximum of 500 in one upload. It must match the quantity on your thumbnail and in the object's WorldInfo.
- Object file
- A VRML97 .wrl file, under 80 KB. A file saved as an avatar is not accepted.
- Texture
- Optional. One .jpg, .jpeg, .gif or .png file, under 80 KB. One texture per object. It must sit in the same folder as the .wrl and be referenced by name alone — never linked to another site.
- Thumbnail
- A 450 × 450 pixel .jpg or .jpeg file, under 80 KB. It must show the object name, the creator name, the price, the limit (or “unlimited”), and the date uploaded.
Scale and placement
Size
- The maximum size of an object is 10 x 10 x 10 meters.
- The scale of the objects should be about 25% larger than real life to appear correctly inside of Cybertown.
Object position
- The bottom of the object must be touching the floor at -1.75 on the Y axis. This includes objects that are designed to be on the ceiling or hung on walls.
- Objects must be centered on the X axis. Center is 0.
- Objects must not extend farther than +1 meter on the Z axis.
The Mall Item Checker stands your object in a room at true scale beside a 1.75 m Cybertown avatar, so you can see the answer rather than work it out.
WorldInfo
- All objects must have world info.
- World info must contain the name of the object, the creator, the price, the quantity, and the date it was uploaded.
In full
- Your item's title — The name you have chosen for your creation.
- Your CT nick — If you upload under more than one name, put the name that will be uploading the item here. Use your full and complete CT name.
- Month / year of upload — The current real-life month and year.
- Limited (1/?) or unlimited — If limited, put the limit size here; it should match the number listed on the thumbnail. Otherwise put UNLIMITED.
Paste this into your object
WorldInfo {
title "Object Name"
info [
"Made By: yournick"
"Uploaded: Month, Date, Year"
"Limited To: 1/?? or unlimited"
"Mall Price: priceCC"
"anything else"
]
}What it costs, what you keep
Upload cost
Uploading costs 20% of the total value of the upload. The rate is the same whatever the quantity.
- Rate
- 20% of the total value of the upload
- How it is worked out
- quantity × item price = total value. 20% of the total value is the Mall upload charge.
- For example
- 100 items at 100 CC each is a total value of 10,000 CC, so the upload charge is 2,000 CC.
Previous rule — no longer applies
| Quantity | Percentage |
|---|---|
| under 50 | 25% |
| under 100 | 20% |
| under 200 | 15% |
| 200 or more | 10% |
What you keep
80% of the selling price for each instance sold.
Restocking
Restocking charges the same 20% of the total value as a new upload.
Removal, restock and redrops
The Mall periodically removes older objects to make room for new ones. A removed object is not gone: once its restock date comes round, its creator can put it back.
Never removed
- CBP Items
- Black Items
- CTR Currency
- CTR 10cc coin
Also exempt
- White Wall/Step set
- Black Wall/step set
- Starter Home Wall
- All Pocket Doors
When a removed object may go back
| Removed | Drop | Restock from |
|---|---|---|
| December 1, 2026 | [07##] | March 1, 2027 |
| November 1, 2026 | [06##] | February 1, 2027 |
| October 1, 2026 | [05##] | January 1, 2027 |
| September 1, 2026 | [04##] | December 1, 2026 |
| August 1, 2026 | [03##] | November 1, 2026 |
| July 1, 2026 | [02##] | October 1, 2026 |
| June 1, 2026 | [01##] | September 1, 2026 |
| May 1, 2026 | [12##] | August 1, 2026 |
| April 1, 2026 | [11##] | July 1, 2026 |
| March 1, 2026 | [10##] | June 1, 2026 |
| February 1, 2026 | [09##] | May 1, 2026 |
All items dropped before or during August 2025 may be redropped.
What to build it with
Mall tools
The Mall's own checkers come first. Everything after them is somebody else's software: a starting list for anyone who wants to build an object and does not know what to open. None of it is Mall policy and none of it is endorsed by the Mall.
The Mall tools are now in the Cybertown Mall Checker. The Cybertown Mall Checker brings the World, Item, and Material tools together in one place.
Check it before you upload
The Mall runs its own checks on upload. These let you fail fast, on your own machine, before you spend a submission.
-
Mall Item Checker
Loads one .wrl and at most one texture and measures it against the Mall's upload rules — file size, texture count, bounds, forbidden nodes, WorldInfo. Renders the object in a room with the real Cybertown avatar for scale, so you can see whether your chair is knee-high before anyone else does.
-
World Checker
The same engine with a world rule pack: a whole folder or ZIP, any number of textures, sounds included. Ground at Y = 0 rather than an item's Y = -1.75.
-
Material
777 named colours and materials on real geometry under real lighting, so you can pick a Material block by looking at it instead of by guessing at six numbers.
Build the object
There is no single right tool. Morning.star hand-codes; others model and export. Both end in a VRML97 .wrl file, and the Mall does not care which route it took.
-
WRL Forge
A VRML97 editor built for Cybertown items specifically: it knows the Mall's rules, measures real transform-aware bounds, and previews in the same renderer this site uses. Built by BassMekanik.
-
A text editor
Hand-coding needs nothing else. Morning.star's tutorials below assume exactly this and nothing more. Notepad++, VS Code, gedit, vim — any editor that saves plain text with a .wrl extension.
Watch out Turn off anything that rewrites your file: smart quotes and auto-formatting will break VRML.
-
Blender
A full 3D modeller, and the one most people reading this will end up in. Blender dropped its own VRML export at version 2.80, so exporting a .wrl needs one of the two community add-ons below — the bundled Web3D X3D exporter writes .x3d, which the Mall does not take.
Watch out No exporter's output is Mall-ready as it comes: expect to reduce geometry, flatten the node tree and rewrite Material blocks by hand. Check the result before you upload it.
-
VRML2 Exporter for Blender, by Breetos
Campbell Barton's original VRML2 exporter, brought forward to Blender's current Extension format by Breetos, who is a CTR member. Exports meshes with UVs, one image texture per object and vertex or material colours. Hosted here with his permission.
Watch out Install it through Edit > Preferences > Extensions > Install from Disk, and do not unzip it first. The archive as Breetos originally handed it over will not install — its manifest sits one folder down and macOS resource forks came along with it — so the file linked here is the same six files re-rooted for Blender, nothing else changed. The original is kept beside it if you want to check that.
-
VRML2 export add-on, by Graham O'Neill
A separate revival of the same Campbell Barton exporter, written when 2.80 removed VRML export and still maintained on its author's own page. Works out colours from the material nodes automatically and writes the object's bounds and dimensions into the .wrl as comments, which is genuinely useful when you are checking against Mall limits.
Watch out Legacy add-on format rather than Blender's newer Extension format. Two independent forks of one 2007 exporter is not a mistake — try whichever suits your Blender.
-
Autodesk 3ds Max
Has shipped a VRML97 exporter for a very long time, which is why so much period Cybertown work came out of it.
Watch out Its exporter emits far more than the Mall allows. Treat the output as a starting point, not a submission.
-
Vivaty Studio
A VRML/X3D authoring tool, discontinued around 2010. Still used in this community because it was built for exactly this kind of work and nothing has replaced it. CTR members have written Vivaty guides; see the reading list on this page.
Watch out There is no official download any more and this is not one — it is a third-party software directory, and the copy the community has settled on. Treat it the way you would treat any unofficial installer for a dead Windows tool: scan it, and ask in CTR first if you are unsure.
-
Spazz3D
What most Cybertown creators used originally — Morning.star names it in their introduction as the tool they could not get working, which is how they ended up hand-coding.
Watch out Discontinued and long unsupported, and no download is linked here. CTR members have circulated an installation guide and lesson notes for it; those are in the reading list on this page.
-
Flux Studio
Media Machines' X3D/VRML authoring tool, discontinued with the company. The installer survives inside the Web3D Consortium's own X3D source repository, in the 2008 content creation showcase — which is about as reputable a home as a dead tool gets.
Watch out A 2008 Windows installer. The link goes to the folder rather than straight at the .exe on purpose, so you can see what you are downloading and where it lives.
-
MeshLab
Not a modeller — a mesh processor. Where it earns its place is decimation: if a model is over the Mall's limits, MeshLab will reduce the triangle count far more gracefully than deleting geometry by hand, and it will clean up duplicate vertices and bad normals on the way through.
Watch out It does not write VRML97 that the Mall will take. Reduce here, then export from your modeller.
-
X3D File Converter
Converts between VRML97, X3D XML, X3D JSON and the rest, in the browser. Written by create3000, who write X_ITE — the renderer this site, the Item Checker and the Mall archive all use — so what it produces is what our viewers actually read.
Watch out Converting to VRML97 gets you a valid file, not a Mall-legal one. Run the result through the Item Checker.
-
VirtualMarx online VRML editor
A 2004 in-browser hand-coding tool: type VRML on one side, see it render on the other. Preserved here because of what it shows about how people worked at the time.
Watch out This is a Wayback Machine capture of a site that no longer exists. The page loads; the renderer behind it needed a VRML plug-in that no current browser has, so read it, do not expect to work in it.
Make the textures
Morning.star's rule of thumb: VRML work is about half form and half texture. A good texture rescues a simple shape; a bad one cannot be rescued by any amount of geometry. Two things are needed — something to paint in, and somewhere to start from.
-
GIMP
Enough for everything the Mall's texture rules allow — JPEG, GIF and PNG at power-of-two sizes.
-
Krita
Painting-first, if you are making artwork rather than editing photographs.
-
LazPaint
A lighter image editor than GIMP with layers, filters and the format support the Mall's texture rules need. Worth trying if GIMP is more program than the job wants.
-
Pexels textures
Photographic textures under a licence that allows use and modification without attribution. A starting point rather than a finished texture — crop to a power of two and make it tile before it goes anywhere near an upload.
Watch out Check the licence on the page you download from rather than assuming, and remember the Mall's own rule: what you upload has to be yours to upload.
About this list
A tool is listed with a link only where a home for it is known, and the link says which kind of home it is: official, a community mirror, or a Wayback Machine capture of a site that is gone. Several of these are the last surviving copy of something, and the last surviving copy tends to move — so the links here are held as data and are expected to be corrected over time.
The caveats below are written from each tool's own documentation and from what the Mall's rules require, rather than from a fresh install of every tool.
Learn to build one
Hand-coding VRML, by Morning.star
All 11 tutorialsEleven tutorials taking you from an empty text file to an object ready to upload — written by a creator with well over a thousand hand-coded objects behind them.CREATOR NOTEpublished with permission
- Intro INTRO to CODING VRML by HAND When I first discovered CT, I was completely blown away by the 3D thing.
- 01 GETTING STARTED Our purpose here is not to learn all of the possible ways of doing something.
- 02 CREATING SHAPES To begin we'll have a look at what a piece of coding looks like.
- 03 CODING MATERIAL ATTRIBUTES There are a number of attributes that can be assigned within material ( each X here represents a number with a value that falls between 0 & 1 ) :…
- 04 MAKING OBJECTS - Some General Issues One of the most difficult parts in creating is judging the proportions of an object.
- 05 CREATING a CANVAS The easy way to get your painting on a canvas is to make a simple Box & put your texture file on it.
Start with the introduction See all 11
Back to topRead and watch
Reading list
Gathered out of the Cybertown Revival Discord by the people who use these tools.
VRML itself
The language the Mall runs on has barely changed since 1997, which is the one advantage of building for it: a book from that year is still current.
-
The VRML 2.0 Sourcebook
The standard reference for the version of VRML the Mall accepts, node by node. If you hand-code, this is the book the syntax in Morning.star's tutorials comes out of.
Watch out Borrowable rather than free to read — the Internet Archive lends it one copy at a time and you need a free account.
-
Hand-coding VRML
Eleven tutorials on this site, from an empty text file to an object ready to upload. Published with their permission.
Blender, for people making Mall objects
Blender is enormous and almost none of it is relevant here. These are the corners that are: low-poly modelling, UV unwrapping, and getting a .wrl back out at the end.
-
Blender 4.3 | UV Unwrapping For Beginners
Unwrapping is the step that decides whether your texture lands where you meant it to. Worth watching before you paint anything.
-
Imphenzia
Low-poly modelling, taught as a discipline rather than as a limitation. That is exactly the discipline a Mall object needs.
-
100+ Tips to Boost Modeling in Blender
General speed and technique. Dip in rather than watching end to end.
-
Animation for Beginners
Animation basics in Blender.
Watch out Blender's animation does not survive VRML97 export. Useful for understanding motion; the movement in a Mall object is authored with interpolators and ROUTEs, which is a different job.
-
How to create Low Poly Animations in Blender
A breakdown of a finished low-poly animated piece.
Watch out Same caveat as above — the modelling carries over to the Mall, the animation pipeline does not.
-
VRML 2 export not visible
The answer to the first problem everybody hits: the VRML2 exporter is an add-on and has to be enabled in Preferences before File > Export shows it at all.
-
io_scene_vrml2, the original exporter source
The exporter every current Blender-to-VRML add-on descends from, including the two on this page. Two files. Worth reading if you want to know exactly what your .wrl is going to contain.
More Mall tutorials are being prepared. Some older community material cannot be republished until the original files and the authors' permission are available.
What is known to exist
- VRML lesson 1, and Spazz3D lessons 2 and 3 — GenNomro, PDF
- Vivaty 101 — GenNomro, PDF
- Item viewing guide, and a second part on colour bleed — GenNomro, PDF
- Flux Studio tutorials 1 to 13 — GenNomro, screen-recorded video
- Art-frame objects at 3x4, 4x3 and 3x2 large — GenNomro, WRL
- Guide to installing Spazz3D — unattributed, PDF
- Camaro model, as a worked example of reducing a Vivaty file — Scott99, WRL
- An early animated object — Phantom, WRL