On Wed, 2011-12-28 at 18:10 +0200, Jukka Jylänki wrote: > A small teaser of an upcoming project I got started on during this > holiday season. > http://dl.dropbox.com/u/40949268/TundraWebPlugin.png
Cool stuff! > The image shows Tundra scenes embedded to web pages in Firefox and > Chrome on Windows. The feature is very experimental (read, hacks all We are also continuing on the web client front, with the different approach of not using Ogre & Qt but stuff that's available in the browsers. I see the whole browser issue as two fold, meaning either tech that: a) Works in a browser, so the user can open the world by opening the familiar web browser and going to the right address. This is what the plugin gives, and it can make a diff as people don't need to open separate applications. The difference is not huge compared to using the full client application, though, as you still need to download+install, and also the current client opens automatically from web page logins. But it might still make a crucial difference. b) Runs without installing anything manually. This is the idea in the WebNaali (or WebTundra if you prefer) effort with websocket & webgl - it just works when those techs are available, without any downloads or installs. There's now a project that's interested in the b) approach, but that requires voice (mumble-like talking with people). Reading the mic etc is not available in browsers yet (WebRTC is in the works though), so we've now been testing Flash. Flash client techs somewhat fit the b) 'no install' requirement as some >90% of users have it preinstalled (for example youtube still doesn't work without it by default). For voice-in-browser / flash based voice we've now settled on at least testing the pretty neat looking open source tech from http://bigbluebutton.org/ . Also making a mumble voip plugin was in the list of options - i suppose it can work in the plugin you've been working on? An interesting thing with Flash now is that it now (finally!) has hardware accelerated 3d rendering support too. Even Unity3D has it as an export target in the 3.5 developer beta that came out just before christmas. Worked ok in our tests so far. Requires updating Flash to the new version (11), though, but perhaps people do that anyway and new machines seem to come with it preinstalled (at least a new macbook did). We are now making scene rendering tests with the open source away3d flash lib, which might be suitable for making a reX / Tundra compliant client (similar to WebNaali). Benefit of Flash over WebGL is that it works in all browsers (i.e. including Internet Explorer) and it may possibly be faster (if that stage3d api does more in native code, haven't checked nor tested yet). And presumably it works similarily in all browsers (with webgl firefox is currently at least sometimes much slower than chrome - opera is getting it too in 12 but we haven't tested that). With the AIR runtime it may also work in iOS (iphone&ipad) and android devices, but I understood that those don't have the 3d support yet. No one seems to be a great fan of Flash nowadays (except the makers of unity3d flash support who seem enthusiastic about that new runtime :), but it can anyhow be a practical solution now in that customer project for which we are making the tests. We can probably tell the results later (by late January) and if it results in making some kind of a reX client hopefully have that as open source normally etc. Flash itself is proprietary but it doesn't prevent doing open source projects on top of it, there are many out there. > This approach is parallel to how Unity Web Player works. Perhaps it > becomes a stable part of Tundra in the future. Yes this might well complement the native Tundra offering. BTW Unity3d also seemed to have a Google Native Client (NaCl) version of the player now - that's pretty cool as that way native code can be just downloaded and executed, in a secure sandbox, automatically without manual installs. Unfortunately is again a Chrome only tech so far, the spec is open and they hope other browser makers would implement it too but I don't know if anyone will. > jj ~Toni -- http://groups.google.com/group/realxtend http://www.realxtend.org
