Hello Your teachers project sounds some what ambitious for the opensim environment ... Opensim is in alpha stage of development and Realxtend is as well .. Your questions about the .42 viewer..... That viewer can be considered a proof of concept viewer ... In the point in time that viewer was released .. The designers were showing that what they were attempting could be done .... The original Realxtend Viewer could be considered a depricated project at this point .. This is because the original project has come soo far at this point beyond the protocols at the base of the viewer .... that we are moving into a new Era and concept of the VR ... The old viewers is partially based on SL proticols and contains SL specific Artifacts within it .. such as the clothing situation you spoke about.. which i explain later ..
Viewers and Realxtend :: Currently Realxtend .42 and Naali are the only supported viewers that can access Realxtend Taiga grids ... The hippo viewer or any other SL protocol viewers cannot access realxtend worlds ... This is largely because realxtend uses a true 3d Rendering engine that is compatible with other 3d modelling and design environments ... it originally added a Mesh to the opensim server ... now we are beyond this with python and other exciting features being added ... All of the new features that have been added to opensim via the realxtend project .. or are being added ... Lead to the development of Naali.. which is moving ahead at an exciting pace.... in a developers sense.. which means that by the end of the year .. it will be much more stable , full featured and practically usable .... than it is now ... Current development levels are only .0.2 for the client side viewer and .01 for the server side code .... This is a very early stage ( point 1 and point 2.. not one point 0 ) ... At this point projects are exciting because of the potential of this environment ... but many features are yet to be implemented ... opensim is .69 code .. so it is farther along than realxtend.. and it is convoluted some what at its base.. though powerful.... Realxtend is obviously based on opensim.... but because of the Vast Pleathora of features that is possible with Realxtend .. we are still in a very early alpha stage .. The earlier .42 viewer contains some artifacts within it.. such as the clothing you created .. not being able to be worn... etc .. The clothing issue.. is because your avatar is not even an SL avatar ... the Realxtend project brings a very interesting issue into the problem for the grid designer in terms of fashion and clothing... This is because many different avatar body shapes can be worn at the core of the system.. In SL ... there are only a few base avatar body meshes.... all women are based off of one basic mesh.. while all men are developed off of another... This has lead to a uniformity in the design of clothing and attachments in SL .. this uniformity also means that a person that is very wise to this... knows that every woman is essentially the same.. they have only small changes in there look.. and a changed face.. In realxtend.. the base of the human body can change... the model itself can be different for every individual avatar ... This leads to a great deal of diversity in body types in this environment.. but it leads to a problem as designers have to model clothing for each individual body type that is possible in world.. Plus people need to know there body type as well.. they cant just go buy clothing that is one size fits all in realxtend... This leads to a much more challenging environment when it comes to clothing and looks.. but the possibilites are also greater here ... things must be planned out a much different way however Your base mission of your teacher wanting specific things done for a final project ... Your teacher is an academic... Academics have a way of thinking up things that are challenging but potentially possible ... The first thing I would ask in such a situation is... This is possible to be done.. but can it be done with the Opensim codebase .... There are some instabilities in the platform .. and its appears to be an easy codebase on the surface of things .. but it is not.. things are known to break in an opensim environment.. because it is alpha code in general ... Fixes can be found for these things.. if you are a good coder ... but fixes take time... In general... please expect more time than you would think at first.. and a more difficult challenge than it appears on the surface ... There are Phd level computer scientists writing code for opensim .... some that are backed by megacorporations ... These megacorporations are the ones working on the ideas that you set forth ... In my view .. your professor should be the one leading the code writing effort ... as is being done by other Academics at major universities ... Putting the web on a prim :: A person came to the realxtend community shortly ago.. I believe from the SUN microsystems project Wonderland ... This person offered to bring Firefox on a prim to Realxtend Taiga / Naali ... So in the next few months I think we will be seeing this ... Some of the things you speak about are possible at the moment in SL .. some of the things are only possible in realxtend ... and some are in the future ... I caution you to consider this a developing project ... The things you are proposing are challenging but possible ... and are going to take time ... I am not trying to sound like an engineer here and tell you things are not possible for you to do.. I simply saying that because it is alpha code .. it is unstable code and this means you get errors that you do not expect ... and are some times very interesting...always time consuming and sometimes frustrating .... = these errors and issues can bust days ... trying to figure them out and fix them .. long 12 hour days .. In short .. I would suggest that your teacher and yourself potentially contact the person that was going to bring web on a prim to Realxtend... talk with them and maybe you can get a chunk of code from them and colloborate and bring this to realxtend ! -- http://groups.google.com/group/realxtend http://www.realxtend.org To unsubscribe, reply using "remove me" as the subject.
