[Opensim-dev] thinking about a viewer

[Mister Blue]

Good stuff.

@Gunther: I have toyed with building an OpenSim module that adds an OpenSim
region to the HiFi hierarchical object tree. Then I spent a week trying to
build the HiFi viewer to conclude that they are creating a new integrated
viewer in the same sort of form as the SL viewer. While I like a lot of
their grid and object system, I'm not happy with the viewer.

@Tochner: RealXtend contains a lot of good work and it is now wrapped into
the Fi-Ware European project which will provide it funding and momentum.
Like OpenSim, there are companies using RealXtend and, for smaller worlds,
it works pretty well.

You are right that starting from scratch would be a long road. But, since
we are in the open-source world and many necessary parts are available to
build on.

I've been thinking along the lines of building a browser based renderer
using asm.js for performance and borrowing rendering logic from HiFi (they
seem to have people who know about rendering arch) and three.js (which has
an efficient, generalized renderer) and Radegast. RealXtend has developed a
flexible WebSockets transport system (protocol versioning and
multi-channels, ...). Add to that a 'space management' system like
Sirikata's or the hierarchical tree of HiFi but with a generalization for
girds and different authentication systems. I like Macaroons for bearer
certificates or passing around permissions. Avatar renderers would come
from HiFi and Radegast although I wonder if avatar rendering could be cut
out of the LL viewer as a separate LGPL'ed library. The interface to the
backend would be cloud-ish -- all REST interfaces that can use all the
scaling tech of modern web applications (notifications, CDNs, managed APIs,
versioning, ...).

An eventual research project would be the storage and manipulation of
objects in spaces. I wonder if only 'digested' objects can be sent to
viewers? 'Digested' in the sense that they have been combined, formatted,
enhanced for viewing (added light maps or occlusion maps) or merged to
build views of that city in the distance. If intermediate processors
(between the client and the object stores) can make 'views' for the client,
what would they do? What is the 'map/reduce' operation for 3d world
objects? Now could procedural rendering fit into this?

Anyway, that's a long way of saying that starting from scratch would be
hard. Not only in the amount of work but also in building both new
developer and user communities. As @Justin pointed out, I am being very
optimistic on the amount of work involved.

A first step would be a simple viewer that shows promise and connects to
existing grids. A baby step.

-- mb

On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 6:49 AM, Frank Nichols <j.frank.nichols at gmail.com>
wrote:

> "make it in a way it can better support functionality for handicapt
> people."
>
> Absolutely - this will go a long way towards gaining acceptance!
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 7:16 AM, R.Gunther <rigun at rigutech.nl> wrote:
>
>> Afree with this, i think its just a bit to early for a viewer.
>> Its better if possible to adjust opensim to make it High Fidelity
>> compatible.
>> And als use there viewer, or write one thats based on high fidelity code.
>> If you now write a viewer for opensim you possible have to many bandages
>> needed later to adjust it for High Fidelity.
>> High Fidelity can give a few parts that openmsim is now missing.
>>
>>
>> On 2014-08-07 09:05, Ilan Tochner wrote:
>>
>>> I highly recommend that we avoid trying to start a viewer project from
>>> scratch. Doing so without a dedicated group working full time for an
>>> extended period of time will result in the viewer project's failure and the
>>> growing irrelevance of the OpenSim project that will pend the availability
>>> of this modern viewer.
>>>
>>> I suggest we either adopt and extend the realXtend project for our needs
>>> (with or without its server architecture) or invest our collective R&D
>>> resources towards pushing High Fidelity in the direction we want it to
>>> evolve to. These liberally-licensed open source projects have already had
>>> many developer-years worth of effort invested in them and are actively
>>> developed by more people than are currently contributing to the OpenSim
>>> codebase. It would be very unwise IMO to spend years reimplementing the
>>> type of viewer they already have working.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> Ilan Tochner
>>> Co-Founder and CEO
>>> Kitely Ltd.
>>>
>>>
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>
>
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