Hi,
we had a semiofficial(*) realXtend association board meeting yesterday, mostly to discuss and organize further planning on development roadmap for the new year. My full notes are on-line, main point summarized here: We decided to plan work on two fronts, creation tools and pipelines coming as a new primary focus. The other area is the tech platform & engines topic which was already worked on a lot last already (the realXtend roadmap doc from last spring discusses the three areas there, i.e. current Tundra, browser based clients and the Mobile Tundra unified light client idea). For the creation tools and pipeline we agreed to gather wishes, requirements and development proposals and meet again on Thursday next week (17th) to put together a plan. Ludocraft made one report on this already ages ago, they’ll check if parts of it are still valid. Francois will talk with Matteo and Francois from Spinningwire and ENER labs. Adminotech has some concrete needs, I think largely coming from VW use in education. I think Evocons at least can tell what they need in their work with the building industry. You, anyone, can also use this chance to inform the planning: what would you need to be able to create applications, worlds or whatever with realXtend better, or is that even a bottleneck for you now? Even vague ideas are welcome but the more concrete a plan the better of course. Some things discussed in the meeting: more example assets for e.g. use of different materials / options of the SuperShader, creating a new shader library. Better scene/ec editor with grouping etc. A question: is tighter Blender integration, for example with live material preview with a Tundra window as demonstrated by blender2ogre, a good way to author or is something else better? The full notes with some additional points are in https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IqS7Z9WUy_7jt753oSnt3HE0ISQXhT4zstP71A_6FKY/edit (not too structured, sorry). I think we can use this mailing list / google group to gather ideas and discuss, but am also interested in more structured ways. For example getsatisfaction.com has seemed nice for working on feature requests, I think I saw Kitely using that long ago and tested creating a realXtend account there too, but I don't have any real experience on using that or any other similar service. Github issues serve well for actual todo items and feature wishes too but I don’t think it suits this kind of requirements elicitation. Am open for suggestions, either here or privately. Finally, I’d like to explain a bit the rationale for the focus on creation tools as how the common interest focused there surprised me. I have earlier thought that there is a big divide between a)professional creators and b) supporting easy end user content creation. Basic realXtend offering, e.g. the Tundra SDK and the little WebGL and Flash clients, target professional creators -- people who are comfortable with normal 3d modeling and programming etc. More Second Life or Facebook style end user creation are implemented in custom applications, for example the TOY content tools which are a now a part of the Meshmoon offering, Cyberslide where you can just create a scene from your Powerpoint slides, or Ludocraft’s sandbox. But yesterday the common understanding was that there are many things that we could do to help both professional creators and services with user created content. Ease of creation is of utmost importance in professional use as well as it of course affects both the quality and especially the cost duration of projects. Also we figured that work on creation tools is relevant in any case, no matter whether we end up using Ogre, some other native engine, or WebGL more in the future. so here’s a starting point for the year! ~Toni (*) not everyone in the board could participate yesterday, so we postponed some administrative bureaucracy for a later meeting and focused on the dev planning work -- http://groups.google.com/group/realxtend http://www.realxtend.org
