RE: [realXtend] reX assoc board meet: focus on creation tools
A couple little hopefully clarifying points: I think what Peter meant with porting and Jonne with rewriting is the same thing.. taking ideas and implementing them on Tundra, i.e. porting to Tundra. Possibly abstract logic code could be reused within some functionality, for example in a camera animation math code or game AI logic rules or so. Benefits of Tundra being reportedly nicer arch and code structure, ECs vs. using inheritance hierarchies for the functionalities etc .. the core mechanics on which the features would be rewritten. It sure is encouraging and nice that an outside evaluator who has studied sources of both softwares makes that proposal About reX scope Tundra Core etc: certainly we are not changing the definition of Tundra core, fancy editors and asset libraries etc. are definitely not part of the core (as in the core APIs, ‘the purple box’, the non-optional parts of Tundra SDK) and at least if they are large or custom, not part of the SDK and the default distribution either. In an extreme case, if we’d decide to pursue a complex e.g. a one-click-app-creator within realXtend, it could well be e.g. a separate project with an own repo and all .. for example an optional Tundra plugin which could be bundled in some ‘creator release’, but which would not be necessary in a minimal end user client used to visit scenes. A port of Ogitor to be a Tundra plugin would certainly fit in this category I think, as a fork tracking the original Ogitor repo perhaps. I just want to keep it clear how realXtend assoc. activities and Tundra core SDK scope can be different things, it is up to us to decide where we think cooperation and some common public effort would be most useful. That said, in the meeting I found that shaders were one concrete content-centric topic which seems nice and simple, and which can help almost everyone to create more things easier. The current SuperShader and other bundled shaders for e.g. the parallel split shadows etc. are in all releases, are basically always assumed to be there, is ‘core’ in that sense (whereas technically they are more just arbitrary scene content) -- if there are clear needs for improvement in that department it could make a nice little project. Of course they don’t help anything alone, if no one knows how to create a new scene or app, but as one piece for the puzzle. One relieving point about shaders is that they are at least somewhat engine agnostic, AFAIK same GLSL can run in Ogre and WebGL and whatever other engine (well, at least when using opengl.. but that’s a different discussion). I’d like the creation focused track to continue as planned, with Ludo and Spinningwire/ENER etc. art folks gathering requirements for their professional work etc., and Admino informing about your needs. BTW Jonne it was originally Tommi from Admino who said that new content examples and something to help content creation would be the most important thing for reX now But definitely docs and tutorials etc. are so important, obviously related to ease of creation too, that must be top priority. I don’t know yet how to organize that work but I think will talk with Kari, perhaps he has ideas how to get some funded doc project going. Last year I tried to get some university folks at the dept. of information processing sciences (software engineering etc) who work with people in the informatics department (library etc folks on the humanist side) to do some reX document work but haven’t heard anything back. Perhaps useful for long term, but for a quick fix we need something simpler .. a little project for some company and/or just doing more tutos and docs in our free time. ~Toni From: Jonne Nauha Sent: January 9, 2013 11:11 PM To: realxtend@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: [realXtend] reX assoc board meet: focus on creation tools you point to code/sceenshots to get some kind of idea? I doubt there is any porting to be done, its a completely different beast without all of our dependencies/libraries/frameworks. Features/ideas can be copied (if they apply to the Tundra idelogy) but they will probably need to be rewritten from scratch. I think we can however agree rex project should focus on documentation and examples (both c++ and javascript). Content creation tools can also be on the table, but as we have talked numerous times (in the issue tracker) Peter it might not be in the Tundra SDK scope to have fancy editors and ship certain kinds of 3D assets with it. Maybe we need to adjust that purity goal, I don't know. I would like to see the assets at least in a different repo if this happens and move /bin/scenes and parts of /bin/media there too. I think many of the end user problems with Tundra come from that we are a very programmer oriented thing. You can't do much with Tundra if you don't know how to code or are willing to look at some headers. This can partly be solved
RE: [realXtend] reX assoc board meet: focus on creation tools
Hi, just for info that I edited the notes from the meeting to be clearer, structured a bit and set headings for sections etc. - also added the note about focus on game dev which was discussed here. Separated background discussion etc. from actual decisions more clearly. ~Toni The full notes with some additional points are in https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IqS7Z9WUy_7jt753oSnt3HE0ISQXhT4zstP71A_6FKY/edit -- http://groups.google.com/group/realxtend http://www.realxtend.org
Re: [realXtend] reX assoc board meet: focus on creation tools
Hi, Been following this conversation with some interest as I am one of those people waiting until documentation (and fancy editors) catch up. Recently came across this useful article on open source efforts for documentation and developer/user engagement: http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2013/01/03/starting-open-source-project/ Hope it helps sharpen direction just as it has done to me. Regards, Nexii Malthus On 10 Jan 2013, at 16:45, t...@playsign.net wrote: Hi, just for info that I edited the notes from the meeting to be clearer, structured a bit and set headings for sections etc. - also added the note about focus on game dev which was discussed here. Separated background discussion etc. from actual decisions more clearly. ~Toni The full notes with some additional points are in https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IqS7Z9WUy_7jt753oSnt3HE0ISQXhT4zstP71A_6FKY/edit -- http://groups.google.com/group/realxtend http://www.realxtend.org -- http://groups.google.com/group/realxtend http://www.realxtend.org
Re: [realXtend] reX assoc board meet: focus on creation tools
We have done some more documentation for Meshmoon. It's not exactly realXtend Tundra but most of the things in the tutorial videos etc. are the same as you would do them with a basic Tundra. Docs: http://doc.meshmoon.com/ Developer doxygen (applicable to Tundra): http://doc.meshmoon.com/doxygen/ Tutorial videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/Adminomedia Just as a hint if you are looking into this now. Unfortunately I doubt we'll get anything concrete on rex documentation side in a while :I Best regards, Jonne Nauha Adminotech developer On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 8:15 PM, Nexii nex...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, Been following this conversation with some interest as I am one of those people waiting until documentation (and fancy editors) catch up. Recently came across this useful article on open source efforts for documentation and developer/user engagement: http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2013/01/03/starting-open-source-project/ Hope it helps sharpen direction just as it has done to me. Regards, Nexii Malthus On 10 Jan 2013, at 16:45, t...@playsign.net wrote: Hi, just for info that I edited the notes from the meeting to be clearer, structured a bit and set headings for sections etc. - also added the note about focus on game dev which was discussed here. Separated background discussion etc. from actual decisions more clearly. ~Toni The full notes with some additional points are in https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IqS7Z9WUy_7jt753oSnt3HE0ISQXhT4zstP71A_6FKY/edit -- http://groups.google.com/group/realxtend http://www.realxtend.org -- http://groups.google.com/group/realxtend http://www.realxtend.org -- http://groups.google.com/group/realxtend http://www.realxtend.org
Re: [realXtend] reX assoc board meet: focus on creation tools
Hi Toni Happy new year to everyone in the group. Its great to see how the realxtend project progresses. Some things that come to my mind to wish is about enhancing the COLLADA import by using zipped COLLADA files like the Khronos suggestion of .zae files and a drag and drop feature to upload them like it is in open wonderland. The way how it works right now is allready great, but I think I wasn't the only one that tripped by the upload, before finding out that a placeable has to be assigned too. Maybe it would be a nice feature if a placeable could be assigned somehow automaticly to COLLADA objects. About inworld creation tools I think it's nice and useful to have some basic tools like 3d text, a pointer and maybe a basic sketching tool with line and circle features to draw some planes which could be used for web content or image display. It could also be useful to have sort of a library of basic geometric shapes to use to sketch out something quickly in realtime collaborative sessions, with an option to group selected elements and to export those groups to a COLLADA or .obj file. On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 8:45 AM, t...@playsign.net wrote: 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!
Re: [realXtend] reX assoc board meet: focus on creation tools
Just a few suggestions / things to note. 1. Even if the primary intent is not games, it would be wise to develop with the same performance mindset of a game engine. Long term viability as a platform requires keeping up with tech. 2. It might be wise to try porting ogitor to run inside realXtend. If nothing else make an exporter from ogitor to tundra. It may also be wise to look at how torque has their dcc set up. 3. It may be a good idea to look at porting torques functionality to tundra. I was recently doing research on torque, and they have a massive community, but their architecture is really bad. Don't count out game developers as a possible audience. If you were to outreach to game developers, and they were to get involved in improving the game engine side of things, it would benefit the academic side too. Games tend to be one of the biggest driving forces of technology. Cheers, Peter t...@playsign.net wrote: 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 --
Re: [realXtend] reX assoc board meet: focus on creation tools
On Wed, 2013-01-09 at 10:22 -0500, Peter C wrote: Just a few suggestions / things to note. Thanks - quick comments: 1. Even if the primary intent is not games, it would be wise to develop with the same performance mindset of a game engine. Long term viability as a platform requires keeping up with tech. We certainly keep that up -- both Ludocraft and Playsign are games companies, the requirements from us (e.g. Ludo's old creation tool doc, the mobile tundra plan etc) are largely from games dev perspective). Sometimes it is more difficult for us to get a good understanding of the *other* requirements, other apps besides games :) If you are referring to the remark in the google doc, it tries to say that reX is essentially about *networked multiplayer games* (or other multiuser apps) out of the box, is inherently networked, whereas e.g. Unity3D was originally for single player games (though has many mature ways to do networking nowadays with 3rd party addons and has basics builtin too). 2. It might be wise to try porting ogitor to run inside realXtend. If nothing else make an exporter from ogitor to tundra. It may also be wise to look at how torque has their dcc set up. Yes we looked at Ogitor back in the early days when considering options, I was repeatedly showing it to the guys in sprint meetings etc .. and read some of their code when considering editing things in Naali/Tundra etc. Both Tundra and Ogitor support the old simple Ogre dotscene format so they might be interoperable already, i.e. you might be able to import Ogitor authored scenes to Tundra. When I tried dotscene things in Ogitor 0.3 some 2-3(?) years ago, though, got only some crash then, dunno about the status of dotscene vs. their own format there -- certainly worth a new look, it always has seemed like a good project. 3. It may be a good idea to look at porting torques functionality to tundra. I was recently doing research on torque, and they have a massive community, but their architecture is really bad. Don't count out game developers as a possible audience. If you were to outreach to game developers, and they were to get involved in improving the game engine side of things, it would benefit the academic side too. Games tend to be one of the biggest driving forces of technology. Yes, I actually tested it for some reason last year a little and thought there were nice things, certainly also worth more study. Scripting / Logic authoring has been my pet peeve for long, and still kind of sold with the Scratch design for very simple things at least (for kids and non-programmers), and both Google Blockly and Waterbear would seem to allow it nicely for Tundra-JS. Do you have some things in specific in mind about Torque, does it cover everything a bit like Unity, dealing with assets etc? I'm recalling the game maker things with events and states and something for logic etc, hopefully have time for a study soon enough (or someone else has). ~Toni Cheers, Peter t...@playsign.net wrote: 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
Re: [realXtend] reX assoc board meet: focus on creation tools
In regards to the game dev aspect: I'm sorry if that came off the wrong way, it was just the google doc read a little more like this is an academic project, the focus is on professional use and not games, end of story. Sorry if I misinterpreted that. Also, in regards to Ogitor, I was thinking more build some sort of plug-in that would allow for using Ogitor functionality in Tundra as an in-scene editor. Also, for torque, I have to do some more research in to it, however the main two things that come to mind are possibly implementing the ability to easily transition from Torque to Tundra. The main problem I see with Torque is it is based on the old multiple inheritance methods, and is a pain to work with when you start needing custom functionality. There are resources that require you edit the engine source code at a low level to add functionality needed for a script. My thoughts were to try to use Tundra as a base to try to fix Torque's weaknesses, while allowing for easy inter-op. Ideally it would be a collaboration between the RealXtend association and GarageGames to create the best of both worlds, but I doubt that would happen. If nothing else, my main concern would be the need to implement similar DCC as torque's editor in to RealXtend, along with better tutorials on extending realXtend (not just scripts, but plug-ins as well). The documentation from Torque is really good compared to Tundra, and Tundra is a pain to start developing for from an outsider's prospective. Meshmoon alleviated some of the content creation documentation issues, however for development of additional plug-ins, or more general, non-Meshmoon specific documentation, realXtend is still lacking big time. I'm still having issues getting DCC working for realXtend, and I haven't been able to do much involving test scenes because of it. The documentation for adding a new plug-in, such as a terrain module, is almost non-existent. There are other irks such as not having easy to access documentation telling what the shortcuts are for the pop up windows easily accessible from Github or in a document somewhere in the Git as well. I think that the primary things that RealXtend could benefit from would be better documentation of how to develop for it beyond basic scripting and DCC, such as tutorials for plug-in/script development, content creation, and general tutorials which take you through the whole process of creating a basic game/scene that's actually playable and more interesting than just walking around (something like Ludocraft Circus or a basic FPS); and the ability to more easily create content. These things would be the primary way to get ready to bring more people over. Beyond that, better outreach and publicizing of the project itself would bring more people in as well. The only reason I found out about realXtend in the first place was because I found it by chance through the opensim wiki. Having press releases about releases and the like go out to places like Ogre, and having an Ogre wiki page and link to realxtend in the Ogre wiki for 3rd party projects using Ogre, would probably help bring more people in. RealXtend is a good framework, even if it needs some tune-ups, but it needs more publicity and documentation in order to grow and get bigger. On 01/09/2013 01:05 PM, Toni Alatalo wrote: On Wed, 2013-01-09 at 10:22 -0500, Peter C wrote: Just a few suggestions / things to note. Thanks - quick comments: 1. Even if the primary intent is not games, it would be wise to develop with the same performance mindset of a game engine. Long term viability as a platform requires keeping up with tech. We certainly keep that up -- both Ludocraft and Playsign are games companies, the requirements from us (e.g. Ludo's old creation tool doc, the mobile tundra plan etc) are largely from games dev perspective). Sometimes it is more difficult for us to get a good understanding of the *other* requirements, other apps besides games :) If you are referring to the remark in the google doc, it tries to say that reX is essentially about *networked multiplayer games* (or other multiuser apps) out of the box, is inherently networked, whereas e.g. Unity3D was originally for single player games (though has many mature ways to do networking nowadays with 3rd party addons and has basics builtin too). 2. It might be wise to try porting ogitor to run inside realXtend. If nothing else make an exporter from ogitor to tundra. It may also be wise to look at how torque has their dcc set up. Yes we looked at Ogitor back in the early days when considering options, I was repeatedly showing it to the guys in sprint meetings etc .. and read some of their code when considering editing things in Naali/Tundra etc. Both Tundra and Ogitor support the old simple Ogre dotscene format so they might be interoperable already, i.e. you might be able to import Ogitor authored scenes to Tundra. When I tried dotscene things in Ogitor 0.3 some 2-3(?)
Re: [realXtend] reX assoc board meet: focus on creation tools
On Wed, 2013-01-09 at 13:30 -0500, Peter C. wrote: In regards to the game dev aspect: I'm sorry if that came off the wrong way, it was just the google doc read a little more like this is an academic project, the focus is on professional use and not games, end of story. Sorry if I misinterpreted that. Also, in regards to Ogitor, I Right, well it's me who has to be sorry for writing it too unclearly there I'm afraid. Actually the strategy we hope to drive now in the research cooperation with the university here etc. is that out of the academic work we would get concrete improvements to the tech which would really help e.g. game creation. was thinking more build some sort of plug-in that would allow for using Ogitor functionality in Tundra as an in-scene editor. Also, for torque, Right, that's what I was also wondering early on -- especially because also Ogitor uses Qt like Tundra does, might be possible to somehow hook Ogitor to be a Tundra plugin or something even (but not totally straightfoward, because Ogitor uses the Ogre API directly, whereas to integrate in Tundra nicely it'd need to be ported to the Tundra API which wraps Ogre). I have to do some more research in to it, however the main two things that come to mind are possibly implementing the ability to easily transition from Torque to Tundra. The main problem I see with Torque is it is based on the old multiple inheritance methods, and is a pain to work with when you start needing custom functionality. There are Right - the entity-component model in Tundra has certainly proven to be a nice strong point, has served great for extensibility in practice, is easy to understand I think etc. easy inter-op. Ideally it would be a collaboration between the RealXtend association and GarageGames to create the best of both worlds, but I doubt that would happen. If nothing else, my main concern would be the need to implement similar DCC as torque's editor in to RealXtend, along Interesting - it might be a far call, but it is also good to brainstorm with an open mind sometimes. BTW didn't they open source something recently, was it torque3d runtime or what? I think that the primary things that RealXtend could benefit from would be better documentation of how to develop for it beyond basic scripting Agreed. As you noted, Meshmoon docs helped already, but certainly much is still urgently needed. I think we need tech dev too but certainly creating those docs must be somehow organized finally. out to places like Ogre, and having an Ogre wiki page and link to realxtend in the Ogre wiki for 3rd party projects using Ogre, would *nod* -- I think the time is certainly ripe to submit Tundra as a candidate featured project for the Ogre site. Feel free to do it, anyone basically, but I think I must if no one else beats me to it (should not be hard..) Thanks again for the good points and welcome reminders (I wasn't recalling Ogitor and Torque too clearly at all, have been quite occupied with many other things recently too). ~Toni On 01/09/2013 01:05 PM, Toni Alatalo wrote: On Wed, 2013-01-09 at 10:22 -0500, Peter C wrote: Just a few suggestions / things to note. Thanks - quick comments: 1. Even if the primary intent is not games, it would be wise to develop with the same performance mindset of a game engine. Long term viability as a platform requires keeping up with tech. We certainly keep that up -- both Ludocraft and Playsign are games companies, the requirements from us (e.g. Ludo's old creation tool doc, the mobile tundra plan etc) are largely from games dev perspective). Sometimes it is more difficult for us to get a good understanding of the *other* requirements, other apps besides games :) If you are referring to the remark in the google doc, it tries to say that reX is essentially about *networked multiplayer games* (or other multiuser apps) out of the box, is inherently networked, whereas e.g. Unity3D was originally for single player games (though has many mature ways to do networking nowadays with 3rd party addons and has basics builtin too). 2. It might be wise to try porting ogitor to run inside realXtend. If nothing else make an exporter from ogitor to tundra. It may also be wise to look at how torque has their dcc set up. Yes we looked at Ogitor back in the early days when considering options, I was repeatedly showing it to the guys in sprint meetings etc .. and read some of their code when considering editing things in Naali/Tundra etc. Both Tundra and Ogitor support the old simple Ogre dotscene format so they might be interoperable already, i.e. you might be able to import Ogitor authored scenes to Tundra. When I tried dotscene things in Ogitor 0.3 some 2-3(?) years ago, though, got only some crash then, dunno about the status of dotscene vs. their own format there -- certainly worth a new look, it always has seemed like a good project. 3. It may be a
Re: [realXtend] reX assoc board meet: focus on creation tools
They open sourced the whole of Torque3D: https://github.com/GarageGames/Torque3D It only runs on Windows for now, but they are pushing for Mac and Linux support. They are also planning on open sourcing Torque2D. I think that for inter-op it would be best to start by porting functionality Torque has that Tundra does not to Tundra, and then figuring out ways to convert content/scripts from Torque to Tundra. I was looking at Torque, and the source code it self is really heavily interconnected; it would take a complete overhaul to move it to a modern entity-component system. I personally would rather just implement the missing functionality in Tundra and make it easy to port from Torque to Tundra. On 01/09/2013 01:42 PM, Toni Alatalo wrote: On Wed, 2013-01-09 at 13:30 -0500, Peter C. wrote: In regards to the game dev aspect: I'm sorry if that came off the wrong way, it was just the google doc read a little more like this is an academic project, the focus is on professional use and not games, end of story. Sorry if I misinterpreted that. Also, in regards to Ogitor, I Right, well it's me who has to be sorry for writing it too unclearly there I'm afraid. Actually the strategy we hope to drive now in the research cooperation with the university here etc. is that out of the academic work we would get concrete improvements to the tech which would really help e.g. game creation. was thinking more build some sort of plug-in that would allow for using Ogitor functionality in Tundra as an in-scene editor. Also, for torque, Right, that's what I was also wondering early on -- especially because also Ogitor uses Qt like Tundra does, might be possible to somehow hook Ogitor to be a Tundra plugin or something even (but not totally straightfoward, because Ogitor uses the Ogre API directly, whereas to integrate in Tundra nicely it'd need to be ported to the Tundra API which wraps Ogre). I have to do some more research in to it, however the main two things that come to mind are possibly implementing the ability to easily transition from Torque to Tundra. The main problem I see with Torque is it is based on the old multiple inheritance methods, and is a pain to work with when you start needing custom functionality. There are Right - the entity-component model in Tundra has certainly proven to be a nice strong point, has served great for extensibility in practice, is easy to understand I think etc. easy inter-op. Ideally it would be a collaboration between the RealXtend association and GarageGames to create the best of both worlds, but I doubt that would happen. If nothing else, my main concern would be the need to implement similar DCC as torque's editor in to RealXtend, along Interesting - it might be a far call, but it is also good to brainstorm with an open mind sometimes. BTW didn't they open source something recently, was it torque3d runtime or what? I think that the primary things that RealXtend could benefit from would be better documentation of how to develop for it beyond basic scripting Agreed. As you noted, Meshmoon docs helped already, but certainly much is still urgently needed. I think we need tech dev too but certainly creating those docs must be somehow organized finally. out to places like Ogre, and having an Ogre wiki page and link to realxtend in the Ogre wiki for 3rd party projects using Ogre, would *nod* -- I think the time is certainly ripe to submit Tundra as a candidate featured project for the Ogre site. Feel free to do it, anyone basically, but I think I must if no one else beats me to it (should not be hard..) Thanks again for the good points and welcome reminders (I wasn't recalling Ogitor and Torque too clearly at all, have been quite occupied with many other things recently too). ~Toni On 01/09/2013 01:05 PM, Toni Alatalo wrote: On Wed, 2013-01-09 at 10:22 -0500, Peter C wrote: Just a few suggestions / things to note. Thanks - quick comments: 1. Even if the primary intent is not games, it would be wise to develop with the same performance mindset of a game engine. Long term viability as a platform requires keeping up with tech. We certainly keep that up -- both Ludocraft and Playsign are games companies, the requirements from us (e.g. Ludo's old creation tool doc, the mobile tundra plan etc) are largely from games dev perspective). Sometimes it is more difficult for us to get a good understanding of the *other* requirements, other apps besides games :) If you are referring to the remark in the google doc, it tries to say that reX is essentially about *networked multiplayer games* (or other multiuser apps) out of the box, is inherently networked, whereas e.g. Unity3D was originally for single player games (though has many mature ways to do networking nowadays with 3rd party addons and has basics builtin too). 2. It might be wise to try porting ogitor to run inside realXtend. If nothing else make an exporter from
Re: [realXtend] reX assoc board meet: focus on creation tools
This Torque seems nice, I guess. The repo is very weirdly structured for me, very hard to find the actual code. Seems they don't use a lot of dependencies, which is good i guess. Seems to implement their own window managers etc. for each platform, seems crazy to me but gets you the most control :) Yeah it looks nice and all, but why exactly should we start porting features from it to Tundra? It seems to have a very different use, as in having a flexible gui editor to create projects in click here and here to make a game kind of way. Is this networked at all or a make single player games framework? I dont even know exactly what it is, just by reading the readme from github it still leaves me puzzled. Can you be more specific what would you like to see in Tundra from this? Can you point to code/sceenshots to get some kind of idea? I doubt there is any porting to be done, its a completely different beast without all of our dependencies/libraries/frameworks. Features/ideas can be copied (if they apply to the Tundra idelogy) but they will probably need to be rewritten from scratch. I think we can however agree rex project should focus on documentation and examples (both c++ and javascript). Content creation tools can also be on the table, but as we have talked numerous times (in the issue tracker) Peter it might not be in the Tundra SDK scope to have fancy editors and ship certain kinds of 3D assets with it. Maybe we need to adjust that purity goal, I don't know. I would like to see the assets at least in a different repo if this happens and move /bin/scenes and parts of /bin/media there too. I think many of the end user problems with Tundra come from that we are a very programmer oriented thing. You can't do much with Tundra if you don't know how to code or are willing to look at some headers. This can partly be solved with documentation, but at the end of the day if you want to make things move and pop (like a game), you need to write some code either with javascript and/or c++ code. Tundra is a more of a developer SDK with some examples to get you started, not a full click a button on a editor to make a game kind of thing, I guess that is a quite nice dream to have. We could make this kind of editor, maybe utilizing ogitor or just build our own, but we would need to move our focus out from Tundra core. I suspect that this Torque was not made in a couple of months but there is some serious money and effort behind it before made open source. Btw. We have it on our todo list to make most of these things to Meshmoon. Nice(r) editors, easy primitive building, scripting templates and drag and drop content libraries. We need to make usage and building easier for our end users, I just think it might be more in Meshmoons scope that Tundra cores, hard to say. I know for a fact that if I implement these in Meshmoon I can make it just the way we like. If I'm doing it it Tundra core I need to ask for acceptance, deal with merge politics, go with cores UI style and in many cases dump down or limit the implementation so that it is generic enough and usable everywhere. *TL;DR +1 for documentation and modeling/scripting examples :)* Best regards, Jonne Nauha Adminotech developer On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 9:24 PM, Peter C. th3fly...@gmail.com wrote: They open sourced the whole of Torque3D: https://github.com/GarageGames/Torque3D It only runs on Windows for now, but they are pushing for Mac and Linux support. They are also planning on open sourcing Torque2D. I think that for inter-op it would be best to start by porting functionality Torque has that Tundra does not to Tundra, and then figuring out ways to convert content/scripts from Torque to Tundra. I was looking at Torque, and the source code it self is really heavily interconnected; it would take a complete overhaul to move it to a modern entity-component system. I personally would rather just implement the missing functionality in Tundra and make it easy to port from Torque to Tundra. On 01/09/2013 01:42 PM, Toni Alatalo wrote: On Wed, 2013-01-09 at 13:30 -0500, Peter C. wrote: In regards to the game dev aspect: I'm sorry if that came off the wrong way, it was just the google doc read a little more like this is an academic project, the focus is on professional use and not games, end of story. Sorry if I misinterpreted that. Also, in regards to Ogitor, I Right, well it's me who has to be sorry for writing it too unclearly there I'm afraid. Actually the strategy we hope to drive now in the research cooperation with the university here etc. is that out of the academic work we would get concrete improvements to the tech which would really help e.g. game creation. was thinking more build some sort of plug-in that would allow for using Ogitor functionality in Tundra as an in-scene editor. Also, for torque, Right, that's what I was also wondering early on -- especially because also Ogitor uses Qt like Tundra does, might be
Re: [realXtend] reX assoc board meet: focus on creation tools
I suggest you read through their website, as the github is fairly basic compared to their actual website. https://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-3d On 01/09/2013 04:11 PM, Jonne Nauha wrote: This Torque seems nice, I guess. The repo is very weirdly structured for me, very hard to find the actual code. Seems they don't use a lot of dependencies, which is good i guess. Seems to implement their own window managers etc. for each platform, seems crazy to me but gets you the most control :) Yeah it looks nice and all, but why exactly should we start porting features from it to Tundra? It seems to have a very different use, as in having a flexible gui editor to create projects in click here and here to make a game kind of way. Is this networked at all or a make single player games framework? I dont even know exactly what it is, just by reading the readme from github it still leaves me puzzled. Can you be more specific what would you like to see in Tundra from this? Can you point to code/sceenshots to get some kind of idea? I doubt there is any porting to be done, its a completely different beast without all of our dependencies/libraries/frameworks. Features/ideas can be copied (if they apply to the Tundra idelogy) but they will probably need to be rewritten from scratch. I think we can however agree rex project should focus on documentation and examples (both c++ and javascript). Content creation tools can also be on the table, but as we have talked numerous times (in the issue tracker) Peter it might not be in the Tundra SDK scope to have fancy editors and ship certain kinds of 3D assets with it. Maybe we need to adjust that purity goal, I don't know. I would like to see the assets at least in a different repo if this happens and move /bin/scenes and parts of /bin/media there too. I think many of the end user problems with Tundra come from that we are a very programmer oriented thing. You can't do much with Tundra if you don't know how to code or are willing to look at some headers. This can partly be solved with documentation, but at the end of the day if you want to make things move and pop (like a game), you need to write some code either with javascript and/or c++ code. Tundra is a more of a developer SDK with some examples to get you started, not a full click a button on a editor to make a game kind of thing, I guess that is a quite nice dream to have. We could make this kind of editor, maybe utilizing ogitor or just build our own, but we would need to move our focus out from Tundra core. I suspect that this Torque was not made in a couple of months but there is some serious money and effort behind it before made open source. Btw. We have it on our todo list to make most of these things to Meshmoon. Nice(r) editors, easy primitive building, scripting templates and drag and drop content libraries. We need to make usage and building easier for our end users, I just think it might be more in Meshmoons scope that Tundra cores, hard to say. I know for a fact that if I implement these in Meshmoon I can make it just the way we like. If I'm doing it it Tundra core I need to ask for acceptance, deal with merge politics, go with cores UI style and in many cases dump down or limit the implementation so that it is generic enough and usable everywhere. *TL;DR +1 for documentation and modeling/scripting examples :)* Best regards, Jonne Nauha Adminotech developer On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 9:24 PM, Peter C. th3fly...@gmail.com mailto:th3fly...@gmail.com wrote: They open sourced the whole of Torque3D: https://github.com/GarageGames/Torque3D It only runs on Windows for now, but they are pushing for Mac and Linux support. They are also planning on open sourcing Torque2D. I think that for inter-op it would be best to start by porting functionality Torque has that Tundra does not to Tundra, and then figuring out ways to convert content/scripts from Torque to Tundra. I was looking at Torque, and the source code it self is really heavily interconnected; it would take a complete overhaul to move it to a modern entity-component system. I personally would rather just implement the missing functionality in Tundra and make it easy to port from Torque to Tundra. On 01/09/2013 01:42 PM, Toni Alatalo wrote: On Wed, 2013-01-09 at 13:30 -0500, Peter C. wrote: In regards to the game dev aspect: I'm sorry if that came off the wrong way, it was just the google doc read a little more like this is an academic project, the focus is on professional use and not games, end of story. Sorry if I misinterpreted that. Also, in regards to Ogitor, I Right, well it's me who has to be sorry for writing it too unclearly there I'm afraid. Actually the strategy we hope to drive now in the research cooperation with the university
