[Opensim-dev] Answering some questions about 3Di Viewer "Rei"

[Toni Alatalo]

nlin kirjoitti:
> 3D meshes are just one example of new content types that can be 
> implemented when compatible licenses allow developers to work both on 
> server and viewer. I'm sure there are many other more exciting things 
> that are possible.

Indeed. One I think is SVG textures, and perhaps SVG objects that are 
not textures but actual in-world vector objects with curves and stuff. 
I've been thinking of testing SVG in Naali some day 'cause qt comes with 
the support for it, other people elsewhere have actually integrated Qt 
to Ogre just to get SVG support. One other is procedural textures, and 
perhaps other kinds of procedural geometry (than prims).

It might be interesting to have text objects too, like Blender as 
text/font objects. 
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Modelling/Text . And who 
knows what else. But all hopefully in sane interoperable ways that work 
both in Irrlicht, Ogre and any other way to render.

Meshes are an obvious one to start with 'cause there are already working 
currently incompatible implementations. One solution that I've been told 
from Cable Beach / Sirikata / something talks is that servers would host 
assets like meshes in two formats: the native for that env (ogre, 
irrlicht, something) and a standard from which the native for some other 
environment can be converted (perhaps Collada).

But another way would be to agree on a format everyone uses, like .x 
which Adam suggested, or (some) Collada binary which the Sirikata folks 
said would be actually also more efficient and fit for wire transfers 
than e.g. the Ogre format we use now. They plan to write a module that 
loads Collada binary directly to Ogre in-memory meshes, so that the Ogre 
file format wouldn't be used anywhere anymore -- if/as that's feasible, 
it would probably work with Irrlicht too. And AFAIK that has been the 
Linden plan too, just use Collada. I haven't personally looked into any 
of the binary formats.

> -nlin

~Toni