Introduction

As many of you know, there’s a number of projects now out there to help build a reasonable complementary viewer to the Second Life(R) one. There’s a couple of reasons for this, going from licensing difficulties, to general code quality, to modularity and adaptability. I won’t mention realXtend or Meerkat here – both are reasonably interesting projects, but both are still derived from the SL viewer with all the problems that brings.

All of the following are under a BSD license – although the programming language and 3D engines do vary a degree between the projects.

Xenki

OK, so it’s probably been a little while since I’ve mentioned Xenki still exists. Well, it does – and it’s had a fulltime developer on it for now several months. You can check out Albert’s work log on the forge site for it, but as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

(Pic taken in Abbotts) Now obviously, there’s still work to be done – specularity and lighting obviously need some adjustment, but there’s some things there that havent been shown working before – like textures for instance. There’s also some primitive communications features now in place which are worth taking note of – eg Area chat, etc.

OpenViewer (PyOv)

On the other front – we’ve got a small announcement to make – one of our other developers (Leon) has been working quietly with the guys from Genkii to make the OpenViewer project work under an ActiveX control – mean it now runs in the browser as well as on the desktop, using the same Python code.

The goal here is to make something that can be embedded in a website, but share code across multiple different platforms – eg the same code that runs the website control also runs the desktop standalone application. It also means porting and adding support for other platforms and browsers is quite possible to do – the only code in need of maintainence is the ‘glue’ layer between the host operating system and the Python core.

Finally, we’ve got another new entrant…

IdealistViewer

Teravus – one of the OpenSim developers started this project a few weeks ago, and it’s been making some pretty rapid progress. It’s written in C# with the Irrlicht 3D engine and already looks fairly impressive. The following was taken about thirty minutes before our pub quiz last sunday.

Summary

Now at the moment, all these projects are in their early stages – but we hope in the long run it will be possible to get some of these new viewers off the ground, and in a way which represent significant user-friendly as well as developer-friendly improvements.

If you have the time availible – all of them are accepting outside patches and contributions, all are reasonably worthy projects that target their own niches, and ultimately any work done for one can be ported to the others without any licensing hassle.

Links

Xenki - http://forge.opensimulator.org/gf/project/xenki/ (use SVN for latest versions)

OpenViewer – http://www.openviewer.org/

IdealistViewer – http://forge.opensimulator.org/gf/project/idealistviewer/ (use SVN)