3Di – the Japanese OpenSim development company just opened the code up for their brand new in-a-browser viewer for OpenSim.
3Di - the Japanese OpenSim development company just opened the
code up for their brand new in-a-browser viewer for OpenSim. It's
written in C#, has plugins for IE and Firefox; and is loosely based
on the OpenSim-core team's "Idealist Viewer", which uses the
Irrlicht 3D engine.
3Di's innovations have been adding proper avatar support (albeit
not the SL ones), improving the framerate fairly dramatically; and
of course embedding it into a browser. It's named "Rei" after the
Japanese number for 'Zero' - and code is availible under a standard
3-Clause BSD license.
There's already been a lot of news out there for the
announcement of OpenViewer itself - so I probably wont go into too
much detail; other than it lets you embed a 3D OpenSim space onto
an arbitrary website - something which combined with say OpenID or
anonymous login, could do wonders for increasing userbase
concurrencies on OpenSim deployments.
OpenViewer has a couple of nifty extensions to the protocol like
Mesh support - which uses the Irrlicht Model Format (realXtend uses
the OGRE Model & Material Format, SL is planning to use the OBJ
format - but dont expect anything for another year or two.); I'm
not entirely sure how that plays into the building editor -
specifically how you upload & use them, but I'm sure that will
be clarified in forthcoming documentation. It will be interesting
to see how well it performs on some big complicated sims (like say
one of Shenlei's behemoths), in theory it might behave a little bit
better on the server, since libsl handles packeting a lot more
sanely (and in lower volume) than the official viewer does.
There's been some discussion in addition on the opensim-dev
mailing list about getting realXtend & Rei both standardising
on a common mesh format; COLLADA has been suggested - but the level
of filesize bloat raises concerns for realtime streaming downloads
of complicated regions.
Site: http://www.3di-rei.org (code
& instructions)
Press Release (English): http://www.3di.jp/en/news/2009093001.html
Hopefully in the coming weeks, we can look at ways of embedding
this into the OpenSim & OSgrid websites as a quick way to 'try
out' the sims.