The basic rewrite of the viewer has been done, I’ve seperated out the renderer and the network code into seperate classes (which in turn will be abstracted into interfaces once I have a good idea on what functions are going to be required). There is a screenshot attached below.

Basic Scene Rendering using BoxRenderer.

Switching to a more advanced mesher

One of the things I have been tinkering with has been using more advanced meshing algorithms. libomv now has a IRendering interface which actually acts as the host for a variety of meshers (GPL, BSD, and others with varying levels of accuracy) - I’ve decided to use this interface internally when hooking in the mesher for the default renderer, so we can use any supported mesh generation algorithm, including both the GPL’d one derived from the viewer, the BSD box renderer, and potentially OpenSim’s BSD Meshmeriser. (The latter being my personal preference - since I’d like to be able to actually take a look under the hood rather than linking to magical black boxes. Insert obligatory licensing complaint here.)

In english - we can make things look prettier. The above screenshot was with the simple box renderer, the one below was linked against the more advanced one. The difference between these two functions is a single line of code and a difference reference when compiling the XBAP.

Now unfortunately, since I’d rather keep Xenki under a BSD/MIT-style license (usual reasons) - the distributed sources I’ll be releasing wont be linked against the more advanced renderer which I’m using for the screenshot below, but I do plan on spending some time tommorow attempting to get Meshmeriser working in it’s place if I can.

The timeline from here

My goals with this will be to try get textures (at least in a preliminary fashion) done tommorow, after that I will look at adding UV and Normals support to Meshmeriser and convert it to a IRendering interface so we can use it.

I also plan on cleaning up the UI a little more, below is a screenshot of the basic login form that now exists (so usernames and passwords are no longer hard coded, and this is almost venturing towards being sort of usable)

With a little luck, this will be sort of usable for basic navigation and viewing by the end of the week. I will post an updated source package sometime between now and then.