3Di – the Japanese OpenSim development company just opened the code up for their brand new in-a-browser viewer for OpenSim. It’s written in C#, has plugins for IE and Firefox; and is loosely based on the OpenSim-core team’s “Idealist Viewer”, which uses the Irrlicht 3D engine.
3Di’s innovations have been adding proper avatar support (albeit not the SL ones), improving the framerate fairly dramatically; and of course embedding it into a browser. It’s named “Rei” after the Japanese number for ‘Zero’ – and code is availible under a standard 3-Clause BSD license.
There’s already been a lot of news out there for the announcement of OpenViewer itself – so I probably wont go into too much detail; other than it lets you embed a 3D OpenSim space onto an arbitrary website – something which combined with say OpenID or anonymous login, could do wonders for increasing userbase concurrencies on OpenSim deployments.
OpenViewer has a couple of nifty extensions to the protocol like Mesh support – which uses the Irrlicht Model Format (realXtend uses the OGRE Model & Material Format, SL is planning to use the OBJ format – but dont expect anything for another year or two.); I’m not entirely sure how that plays into the building editor – specifically how you upload & use them, but I’m sure that will be clarified in forthcoming documentation. It will be interesting to see how well it performs on some big complicated sims (like say one of Shenlei’s behemoths), in theory it might behave a little bit better on the server, since libsl handles packeting a lot more sanely (and in lower volume) than the official viewer does.
There’s been some discussion in addition on the opensim-dev mailing list about getting realXtend & Rei both standardising on a common mesh format; COLLADA has been suggested – but the level of filesize bloat raises concerns for realtime streaming downloads of complicated regions.
Site: http://www.3di-rei.org (code & instructions)
Press Release (English): http://www.3di.jp/en/news/2009093001.html
Hopefully in the coming weeks, we can look at ways of embedding this into the OpenSim & OSgrid websites as a quick way to ‘try out’ the sims.
A relevant note:
“Everyone” here actually means “every Windows user”,
as this is not supported on Mac or Linux.
Opensource Obscure
1 Oct 09 at 10:50 am
I shot some video of this browser in action on osgrid, few things to note there is still no inventory access, i was unable to chat, and i could not leave Lbsa Plaza, but here is a quick video I shot of what it looks like on osgrid, http://nebadon2025.com/osgvid/3DI.osgrid.org.001.mp4 , still quite a ways to go, but its a good start, sort of reminds me of the old Dos game “Out of this world” or “FlashbacK”
Nebadon Izumi
1 Oct 09 at 8:12 pm
@OpenSource Obscure:
Yeah, but the engine is Lin/Mac compatible, there are only managed components; in theory you should be able to get the Firefox plugin working using Mono somehow. It’s been done before.
@Neb:
Very cool, I’ll take a look at that now.
Adam Frisby
1 Oct 09 at 8:15 pm
I looked deeper and I am sure you know the links between the realXtend And 3Di teams I found and Irrlicht supports Ogre meshes so the knowledge is there.
Just shooting from the hip —> It would seem natural that many mesh formats should be supported ie: importable & exportable to the servers. The server must do the translations since the viewers are so tightly wrapped. The servers(native)format used for storage can be independent of the format used to transfer data to and from the editor or viewer.
I would like to eventually see, multiple editors & viewers based on whatever native 3D format they wish to use/develop, but the server must support multiple format both in and out.
Yes this is quite the challenge, faced by all CADD programs for decades, ie: translation, but my god this is 2010 & open source not proprietary formats held by tight fisted competitors with products materialized in 1989. We will never agree on one format for editing, storage & display. It is time to find funding to send man to the moon, but here at home and solve this cluster fuck NOW. 3D is not, but a 3D translator/server would be the KILLER APPliance.
JeanRicard Broek
2 Oct 09 at 9:26 pm
Is there a compiled version available for those who want to try this without having to compile it?
SuezanneC Baskerville
3 Oct 09 at 1:57 pm
Are you sure there are only managed components? I’m pretty sure Irrlicht itself is native code, which is probably fortunate given that the Microsoft managed 3D APIs have no Linux equivalent. Then there’s whatever code is required to integrate it with the browser; that’s going to be horribly platform-dependent.
makomk
3 Oct 09 at 2:15 pm
I’m trying to follow the instructions for downloading and compiling Rei, 3Di’s browser based opensim viewer.
I’m stuck at the installation program for Git.
Which of the following two choices should I make:
1. Use Get Bash only
2. Run Git from the Windows Command Prompt.
Option 2 says to make sure I don’t have Cygwin’s Git installed. I do have Cygwin installed as a result of compiling LibSL. Does that mean that I have Cygwin’s Git installed? I don’t know enough about Cygwin to know if installing Cygwin means that Cygwin’s Git has to be installed or not.
SuezanneC Baskerville
3 Oct 09 at 11:52 pm
Makomk: Correct – Irrlicht is a dependency, but it’s linked via IrrlichtNETCP which runs on Linux & Mac too (like the original IdealistViewer it is based on).
Suezanne: There’s some guides for git on the OpenSim website which are decent: http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Using_Git
Adam Frisby
4 Oct 09 at 12:53 am
Thanks for link Adam.
Unfortunately the OpenSim guide to installing Git doesn’t mention anything about the question I asked and is otherwise not tailored to helping a novice install Git for the purpose of using it in connection with Rei as opposed to OpenSim.
I didn’t get any answers to my question from the various places I asked at, such as at the Rei Google group, FriendFeed, Facebook, Twitter, etc. so I went ahead and proceeded with option two. Nothing has exploded yet, not at least in my vicinity, and I was able to go ahead and get Rei compiled.
It doesn’t seem to be very stable on my system using IE 8.
I don’t see how to change the avatar from male to female.
I would be quite pleased if anyone reading this who is a member of Second Life would post a comment about Rei in my self-named group forum in forums.secondlife.com at http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=342688 .
SuezanneC Baskerville
4 Oct 09 at 6:41 pm
I made some tests with it. It’s quite easy to build and there are no problems starting the viewer within the browser. Right now it has only the basic functionality for viewing and moving but it a start for getting things up and running within browsers.
The current version does not show Avatars with a standard OpenSimulator that has no realXtend Modules installed. Adam already said that. But it’s still fun to walk around.
Danger:
I noticed a bug that sets all your avatarappearance itemids ad assetsids in the avatars database record to uuid-zero when using the viewer with a standard opensimulator installation. The clothing won’t load anymore and you have to manually reset pants and skirts to meaningful values in the database to get things in order again.
You have been warned!
Kai Ludwig
4 Oct 09 at 11:20 pm
Hi Kai. I think i have been hit by that bug. Could you tell me how do i fix this exactly? And what can be done to solve this?
Nithin
20 Oct 09 at 7:06 pm