Hi list! I've off and on used RealXtend on a curiosity basis for a while. I'm a content creator, although I've been working with Second Life for quite a while, I use just about anything that's remotely called a virtual world and even some game engines (Unreal, BlueMars/Cryengine, etc). Been around virtual worlds since they were 2.5 d back in the 90s.
So I'm pretty excited about what's up with this project, been lurking it for quite some time. Although I can use Blender, my tools of choice are modo, ZBrush and Carrara. I'm capable with 3ds Max too. My primary interests are in creating new avatars, accessories for avatars, as well as environments. I've come back to experimenting and seeing how the user experience is like. I've got some observations - 1. I fired up Taiga successfully this morning and logged into my private standalone world to get a feeling for where it's at. Thankfully this was relatively painfree - I had major issues a few months ago, this has seriously improved. 2. Cameras. Not to put too fine a point on it, they suck. Can't cam to look at the front of the avatar in default mode, which makes it hard to see what you are doing when customising the avatar. The free mode isn't really that great either - its better for building and no support for mouse wheel zoom, which I feel is more natural (and its supported in the default, it should be consistent IMO). 3. No onscreen camera and avatar movement controls. Think ahead for touchscreens - a gui for movement and camera makes navigation easier for those who are either visually inclined or may not have a mouse at hand. 4. Cannot minimise the IM window - takes up huge amount of screen real estate - clicking it away clicks away the IM. I do love that I can just have Google talk in my virtual world. That is fantastic. (I'm not a Facebook fan, but its nice to have that one too) 5. Economy - how will content delivery be handled? It needs to be easy to import, so that content creators like myself can make assets that are "ready to go" for a world creator to just buy and put it in the world. Also thought needs to be taken towards making it super easy to deliver this content to users, and make it super easy for them to customise and accessorise their avatars - as they will not in general have high technical skill. My focus is more on the avatar because IMO that is where you have to grab people to make them want to use the software. Pretty builds are empty without users, so their experience really needs to be center stage. Anyway, I don't want to sound critical, I do really love RealXtend and I want to see it succeed. I'm going to keep on using it as you guys put out new versions of the software as I do like the general direction its going. I'll be super excited when I see Apple support too (not just Macs, but also the iDevices, this also goes for Android - I was super excited when I saw the Nokia demo on YouTube). anyway, happy Sunday! hypatiaa -- http://groups.google.com/group/realxtend http://www.realxtend.org
