Quick status update. Although I've been very quiet (unfortunately) development is moving forward. As of Sunday night, my code runs on Windows, OS X and Linux, including embedding the Lightfeather 3D engine, loading and displaying a COD file, and browsing the vobject structure. I want to spend a couple more days adding features, then I'm going to lay down the infrastructure to make a binary package (.msi on Windows, .app bundle on OS X, .deb for Debian) and announce it to a few places and get some feedback.
The goals for the UI prototype is to explore how to present a highly configurable user interface based around vobjects, to consider the kinds of tasks and workflow a user might perform in the GUI, and to confront cross-platform issues (in compiling, in the operation of the GUI and in distributing binary packages) up front, so that development "stays honest" and as OS-neutral as possible. My intention is to initially target the agent-based simulation and visualization community. This includes agent-based AI research in virtual environments, realtime immersive simulation, visualization of results from constructive (noninteractive) simulation, and visualizing live data in a virtual environment. This is a pretty broad set of categories, but I think there are enough similarities to bring them together under a common architechture. There are several reasons for using this as a focus rather than games or commercial applications. The greatest and most productive interest in VOS in the past has come from people doing agent-based AI research. Both academically and professionally, Reed and I have a great deal of background in agent-based simulation. It gives us a focus that is a bit more specific than simply "build a game engine", and looking at it from a the standpoint of formal simulation design lets us apply a little more rigor than goes into the average game or entertainment-oriented virtual environment. Finally, just like the web grew from scientific applications to become general purpose, a scientific simulation-oriented framework is still applicable to more informal areas like games, commerce or education. We intend to pursue our designs with all these areas in mind. By developing the UI first, I'm also taking a more top-down design strategy. In the past, developing the backend first has led to the UI and the sample 3D worlds being an afterthought, which of course didn't impress most users. To avoid making that mistake again, I'm going to focus on UI and content creation up front, to make good presentation and usability (and usefulness) a priority, and only then develop the backend to support those requirements. (It also helps that I'm getting more comfortable with modeling in Blender, and can produce programmer art that is at least marginally better than colored boxes). I'm hoping to have something for you all to see (UI prototype, with no network capability) in two to three weeks. -- [ Peter Amstutz ][ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ][ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ] [Lead Programmer][Interreality Project][Virtual Reality for the Internet] [ VOS: Next Generation Internet Communication][ http://interreality.org ] [ http://interreality.org/~tetron ][ pgpkey: pgpkeys.mit.edu 18C21DF7 ]
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