Here is a short update whats going on at Meshmoon for every lurker here on
the realXtend mailing lists!
*Meshmoon Web Rocket - Browser based client for Meshmoon hosting*
*
*
As you might have noticed here on the mailing lists there is a lot of buzz
around Tundra web clients. We started to implement our own from scratch
implementation for both C++ server side and javascript for the browser
side. This work has reached a point that we feel confident to call it alpha
and make it publicly available. Everyone can login to www.meshmoon.com and
navigate to the top bar link "Web Rocket" to try it out.
To make it perfectly clear. This is not a standalone web client or just
loading a static scene. We are actually connecting to a live hosted
Meshmoon server that serves the same scene/protocol messages as it would
for desktop clients. Web and Desktop clients can see each others avatars,
see their live movement and chat with each other etc.
Here is the feature rundown:
- No plugins needed, standard WebGL (rendering) + WebSocket (networking).
- Connects to the same servers that desktop clients do: Meshmoon hosting
accepts WebSocket based connections.
- Works great with latest Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, these will
be supported officially at the beginning. We might add Mac OS X Safari
support later.
- Full scene synchronization from server and other clients (native or web
).
- JavaScript implementations for a bunch of Tundra entity components:
EC_Placeable, EC_Name, EC_Mesh, EC_Light, EC_Avatar, EC_DynamicComponent,
EC_AnimationController and EC_Script
- Runtime dynamic loading of web client JavaScript application logic.
Just like our native client does with EC_Script we can also load
scene specific JavaScript applications to the browser context.
- I provide default Avatar and Chat Meshmoon applications, just like
we do for desktop clients. These are detected during runtime
from the scene
content and the apps are started.
- API documentation will be released once we get there :) Then anyone
can write apps for the browser as well as the desktop client!
- Asset system
- One key feature in our Meshmoon web client support is that the
scene authors/artists do not have to do *anything* for the web client
to work correctly.
- OgreMeshAsset: Implements parsing .mesh.xml based Ogre meshes to
the web client rendering engine. Support submeshes with unique
materials in
each.
- OgreMaterialAsset: Supports a wide range of Ogre material
properties. Multitexture support: diffuse texture, lightmap texture and
specular texture. Detection of Ogre blending modes and some shaders and
ports them to the web rendering engine materials.
- OgreSkeletonAsset: Implements parsing of .skeleton.xml based Ogre
skeletons. Bone and animation mapping to skinned meshes and loading them
correctly to the web rendering engine. Playback via
EC_AnimationController.
- ScriptAsset: Implements loading JavaScript and running it. Used
with EC_Script.
- AvatarDescAsset: Implements parsing legacy realXtend avatar
descriptions and forming mesh, skeleton and materials out of them for
EC_Avatar.
We will be changing avatars to the Meshmoon Avatar system once its
done. This is a collada based avatar description that will be supported
both on the web and desktop client.
*
*
*Desktop Rocket client*
We just released Meshmoon Rocket 2.5 that has all the latest code from
realXtend Tundra that all sorts of people have contributed + our Meshmoon
bugfixes pull request code. And of course all the new features in Meshmoon
functionality as well.
- *Meshmoon Build Mode:* We got a new long time realXtend developer to
the Adminotech dev roster, many of you might know him as Stinkfist here on
the mailing lists and working on the core repo. This is great news for our
users as we can crank out features even faster.
- Easy scene manipulation and building with objects has been a long
time just laying there and now we wanted to do something about
it. As most
of you know just using the core Tundra EC editors, having to know what
component does what and how they should be configured etc. is
not very user
friendly. This is why we started creating a Rocket core feature
that gives
you nice, rich UI to build in your scene. This tool is only available on
the taskbar and menus if you are a admin in the scene you logged in.
- To start with we have a couple of modes: *Environment* Easy setup
of your scenes sky, water and fog. *Lights* to manipulate the ambient
light, light directions and add custom lights to your scene. *Physics
*currently this only toggles between visualizing all the objects that
have physics in them. We will be adding selecting objects and editing the
physics properties later.
- Coming up *Simple Building:* Tundra is great when you have 3D
content in a modelling software and just want to import that. The problem
is that most people don't have the know how to use these 3rd
party software
or they want something simpler. As its familiar to most in
second life and
opensim they have "prims". Set of primitive shapes that anyone can build
anything out of inside the client. We will be adding something
similar that
gets adjusted into our Ogre 3D engine. Back in the day when Tundra
connected to OpenSim we already had primitive components so we know
somewhat how to start working on this. This feature will come
later to the
curret build editor, once its ready enough for mainstream testing.
- *Meshmoon Scene Storage*
- Added a filter widget so you can easily find existing files in your
storage.
- Added support for .txml drag and drop content import to storage
subfolders. This makes it a lot easier to manage chunks of your scene if
you have splitted it up to multiple export from blender etc. Also
conflicting file names wont anymore be a problem. To use this
navigate to a
existing subfolder or create a new one, then drag your txml into the
storage file list area and follow the import dialogs like usual.
- *Meshmoon Cave and 3D support: *The realXtend Tundra core plugin
for cave and 3D rendering has been unmaintained for a long long time. It
has severe crash bugs and the usability of the user interface was horrible
:) We decided to rewrite the logic as a Rocket feature.
- Our completely rewritten CAVE functionality is meant for real
"professional" setups that have enabled Nvidia Surround Desktop or AMD
Eyefinity. This makes the operating system see a single big resolution
display. Having multiple monitors in normal mode won't work with our CAVE
technique.
- 3D stereo has been tested with Nvidia 3D vision. You can use the
default nvidia shortcuts to enabled/disable 3D stereo rendering.
This is a
bit trickier to enable, you'll have to add startup parameters
"--fullscreen" and "--ogrecapturetopwindow" for it to work. We will fix
this in the next release by making a new Rocket shortcut that
will start it
with the proper parameters.
- We are planning to add body gesture controls to the CAVE
funtionality in the near future.
- *EC_MeshmoonTeleport*
- Teleport component that support click and proximity teleporting
with optional UI confirmation from the user. Supports teleports
in your own
scene or a teleport to other Meshmoon hosted scenes. Permission
validations
when teleport destination is a private scene.
- We will be adding functionality to the *Build Mode* tools to add
teleports later. But for now you can add the component by hand with EC
editor. If attribute "Destination Scene" is empty it will use the current
scene, if it is a URL to another meshmoon world it will teleport
there. You
can get the full scene url from the top of meshmoon.com admin panels
-> space settings.
- *Tundra core editors undo/redo capabilities*
- This was a feature made with the realXtend assosiation sponsored
development money. All editors now support a undo/redo history stack. The
widgets can be found from the top of the editor widgets.
P.S. Out latest
newsletter<http://us6.campaign-archive2.com/?u=513d1a2ca9ad624a767fd335d&id=0571df357b>
has
more information about 2.5 and Web Rocket.
Best regards,
Jonne Nauha
Meshmoon developer at Adminotech Ltd.
www.meshmoon.com
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