I have built the Teapot viewer and dabble with it on occasion. While it
is not an "official" viewer, it is very solid and a good place to
implement things that might find their way into other viewers over time.
I think Armin has been busy with viewer development for the MOSES
project, but when this split happened, he was slated to develop the
OpenSim FS viewer and said that if things were developed in Teapot, he
could possibly work them through the FS QA process.
~BlueWall
On 12/10/2012 06:08 PM, Mircea Kitsune wrote:
Hey everyone. I've been away from OpenSim for a while but got back.
Since last time I've been around, I read about Linden's decision to cut
OpenSim support from their viewer due to some crazy licenses with their
physics engine. The rights and wrongs have been discussed and are not
the point of this email. But this decision means that in some senses,
OpenSim will become completely separate from Linden's SL, and some
fundamental things might change. I wanted both to ask what exactly is
going to happen, but also post my own suggestion. Obviously I'm not
someone who can say what's good and bad, but personally this is what I
strongly believe OpenSim should do and go for.
The way I see things, OpenSim has primarily been a server-side for
Second Life during its existence. Even if its purpose is a general
virtual worlds platform, SL was the only usable viewer in practice. Now
that LL cut its support, it's in the situation of having no exact client
to be used with. There are many third-party viewers that will continue
supporting OpenSim, but IMHO they can't be considered a reliable source
in the long term. I assume most of them have their own developers which
take decisions independently from the OpenSim team. If one of those
viewers dies for instance, it's up to the user to go looking for another
one that's still under development. Apart from the fact that people have
to hunt for a viewer, this situation also kept OpenSim from being able
to make changes that would require viewer modifications as well.
My opinion is that OpenSim won't get far if it relies on random viewer
forks to be used with at this point. We are not a clear standard
technology, unlike web browsers for instance where you can use Apache to
host and FireFox to browse, both unrelated and a variety of choices
available for each. This is not to say OpenSim should be unusable with
viewers unrelated to SL, since that would go against its purpose. But
the SL viewer is a very large and complex thing, and there will surely
never be anyone making a client from scratch which will implement all of
its features, look as good, be as fast, as bug free, etc. The building
and prim editing tools, the terrain editor, the avatar and mesh system,
the rendering features, the GUI... it's unlikely anyone will properly
re-write all that from zero when the SL viewer exists and works fine.
This is why I believe we need our own official viewer, developed by and
with the OpenSim server, and based on one of the Second Life viewers.
Apart from the fact that people will know they don't depend on someone
else to make them a viewer, it would allow client + server changes to be
done for the first time, rather than having to stay within the SL
viewer's limits. If that doesn't happen, I don't believe we'll ever
become a better virtual worlds platform outside of SL's shadow. I
remember the days of RealXtend (I heard it's dead now) which took the SL
viewer in one hand, OpenSim in another, and created its very own project
which was completely amazing for those days (SL now has mesh support and
better graphics so it makes RealXtend less special at this day). My
personal opinion is that it's time OpenSim does something similar.
If it was me, I'd say grab the latest SL viewer without the restrictive
Havoc library and make OpenSim viewer from that. If Linden adds a nice
feature to theirs which we can copy over, sure thing, but otherwise it
can go its own separate way. On the other hand, it would be a good aim
to allow previous SL viewers to still connect to OpenSim, though they
wouldn't recognize some of its specific features then. I know OS and SL
and under two different licenses, but that doesn't make it wrong to
distribute both on the same website and as part of the same project.
What does the core team of OpenSim think about this? Are there any plans
or will to go in this direction? Or does anyone believe that instead we
should continue providing support for SL's features and have OpenSim
users find their own clients like until now? I believe this is an
important question, and would like to know what to expect in the future.
Personally I really hope something in this direction will be decided,
but I'm not one to know best.
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