I have been working on this idea for an online Church for many years. There have been other examples of this type of project. They have been mostly 2d or web based as 3d technology has been considered expensive. I first designed the Church using Sketchup about 10 years ago.
In the last 2 years I have been actively developing the project and the game technology that powers it using the Godot Engine. I always wanted it to be an MMO supporting maybe up to 100 players at a time. For a long time the right database technology eluded me, or seemed too complex to achieve a good result. I learned about latency, state machines, interpolation and Prediction, which was all a useful education. Finally, I found a technology called SpacetimeDB which seems ideally suited to this kind of project. However, it has taken me some time to go from the 2d tutorials to a fully working 3d environment.
So now we have something that we can build on. We have 3d players who can move, chat, sit and relax and participate in the kind of community activities you find in a Church, such as worship, drinking coffee and chatting, and attending classes, presentations or lectures.
So now we have to open the doors and let people in. It might be a bumpy start, but the best way to go forward is to develop the project with the help of community involvement and feedback.
UNFORTUNATELY WE ARE NOT READY FOR A GENERAL ACCESS PLAYTEST.
If you are interested and would be willing to take part in some limited scope playtests to test the functionality of the Church, we would love to meet you on our discord server.: https://discord.gg/wtue5ftP5