It’s been a number of months since I last looked at the State of Open Viewers back in december.

Since then there has been some coalescence on Idealist as the platform-of-choice for the future viewer. While Xenki has some definete nice features (browser access, reasonable UI), it has some problems too (32-bit only, security sandbox issues, etc)*. I’m hoping we’ll be able to take some of the UI handling code (camera control, etc) from Xenki and import it into Idealist to get a best-of-both result.

Right now, the Idealist renderer is pretty good – it’s rendering things close to 90% accuracy, the remaining 10% include avatars (a somewhat complex topic), some sculpted parameters, and special effects (glow, bump maps, etc.). The following two screenshots should give you a good approximation of the rendering capabilities of Idealist right now.

Fig 1.1 - Idealist Viewer

By contrast, the same scene in the Second Life viewer is fairly similar

Fig 1.2 - Second Life Viewer (1.22)

You can view this scene on OSGrid.org, it’s in the region “DTL Welcome Center” (a side project to build a new Orientation Island for osgrid.) – it makes a good test of a renderer since it uses almost every graphics feature on offer right now.

The most noticable differences between the viewers in terms of accuracy come down to a couple of minor but fixable points

• Texture alignment – Idealist doesnt process extra texture parameters; rotation, scale, offset, etc. Most of these are fairly simple to implement, so this should not pose any long term difficulties.
• Mirror X / Invert Sculpt Parameters – Idealist doesnt process these flags, so some of the sculpts are inverted (noticably the orange signs).
• Alpha smoothing – Idealist produces ‘rough edges’ on alpha surfaces, this is fixable with some tweaking of the renderer parameters.
• Texture Downloads – Not a bug in the renderer, however the texture download routine suffers issues with download speed and incomplete downloads. This is somewhat fixed in MXP due to MXP using plain HTTP for asset distribution – but under LLUDP some additional work needs to go into libomv to handle asset transmission better.

While that is not an exhaustive list – the current feature state is pretty good. Where work needs to go right now is in user interface (doing cross platform UI with 3D surfaces under .NET is interesting, let me assure you.) – one of the UI proposals I have been working on is pictured below.

Designing a Viewer UI

Fig 2.1 - Idealist UI Mockup

The main idea being to reduce clutter where possible – things such as Inventory are needed often, but arent needed permanently. Implementing these as a docking toolbox allows you to expand the inventory dock quickly and easily – while not having it consume significant screen real estate unnessecarily. As mentioned above – getting a design like this to work cross platform is difficult, infact it may even be easier to write a UI toolkit for Irrlicht than to attempt to embed Irrlicht into a UI toolkit while maintaining cross platform support.

MXP

One of the more interesting features of Idealist is the ability to connect a client on the newly implemented MXP handler. While getting it running requires a lot of technical knowledge right now – the MXP protocol has a lot more potential than the LLUDP one does for expansion and interactivity. There are also a number of improvements MXP makes to the transport layer which should improve scalability for the server.

Fig 3.1 - Idealist/OpenSim via MXP (source)

You can play with the MXP version by using the MXP branch of IdealistViewer, use the following settings when doing an SVN checkout

SVN URL: http://forge.opensimulator.org/svn/idealistviewer/branches/idealistviewer_mxp_0_0_1
SVN Username: anonymous
SVN Password: anonymous

There are some other benefits visible on LLUDP too, including a fixed water shader, better terrain handling and other renderer improvements which have not yet been migrated back to Idealist Trunk. When connecting, you will need to connect to the region in the format “mxp://ip:1253/<region uuid>/Test/” – note that on public grids exposing your region UUID can be a risk (some work being done on improving this).

Contributing

Finally, there’s a call for some contributors to Idealist – right now the major developers are also major OpenSim developers. We’re looking for some graphics specialists to come in and help with the design of Idealist – there’s a number of bugs and features which could do with patches, so if you are interested, please hop in #idealist-dev on Freenode.

I’ll repeat the call for Xenki if anyone is interested, I’m currently looking for a new maintainer to take over the role. Shoot me an email (see contact page for details) if you are interested in taking over the lead developer role on the project. (Update: Maintainer has been found.)