While realXtend project concentrates on Naali, the next generation virtual worlds viewer, they still maintain the old viewer, which now hits 0.42 and brings some previously unseen and exciting features.
realXtend viewer 0.41 was released already a good while ago and
some already thought that the project abandoned the old viewer for
good in favor to Naali development. But no,
they did not forget the existing users.
Naali viewer is progressing steadily and Maxping expects to see
the first really usable version around the end of 2009. That will
be a remarkable milestone to the whole Second Life and Opensim
based 3d web movement as
the whole community gets the first viewer that is not based on
Linden Lab's Second Life viewer code.
The current realXtend viewer is based on Second Life viewer, but
is already quite different from it. Lets review the new
features.
realXtend v 0.42 features
-> Experimental support for spherical
worlds
The virtual earth has been flat. Now that is about to change. Is
it going to be a ball? Yes, but not as you would think! realXtend
surprises us by defining a new model where the avatars can walk
inside of the ball - not outside like in the real world. This
(also) gives you the feeling of having a never ending world, but
you will see the other avatars ""hanging around". Definitely a way
to make your customer surprised, hopefully positively. Do not
worry, it is still possible to have traditional flat
worlds...
-> Allow to disable terrain & water
rendering
Now it is possible to really make use of some skyboxes, that
have beautifully designed lower parts - they were under water in
the previous model. Also if the terrain is not rendered, it is
possible to make illusion of freely floating buildings, in space
maybe? (Get some free skyboxes from rexxed.com!)
-> Bug fixes:
- Fixed loading of mesh textures when mesh has
out-of-the-ordinary
bounding box
- Fixed custom skybox/water textures not resetting when smooth
teleporting
- Fixed texture flipping on mesh UV coordinate channels other than
the
first
Download the new version here to test it yourself.
Maxping will test and report later how all this comes around in
the new exciting virtual world designs. We also suspect that they
did not introduce those features just for having them for
nothing... I expect to see the realXtend project use those for some
exciting new worlds... stay tuned!
snowcrashme