[Opensim-users] realxtend integration

[Toni Alatalo]

On Thu, 11 Dec 2008, Ryan McDougall wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 11:27 AM, Jeroen van Veen <j.veenvan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2. Are there any plans to build on the bsd-licensed verse udp protocol?
>> (http://www.uni-verse.org/)
> I am afraid that I am unfamiliar with it. What I can say that when
> making a new viewer with our resources, there is no opportunity to
> explore with protocols. We will focus on reX as a module on OpenSim

I have some experience from using Verse (we tested it for movie production 
as a part of project orange.blender.org when made the elephantsdream.org),
and also discussed it with some people who were involved with openviewer 
last spring (<daedius> if i recall correctly), so try to summary my 
understanding here as it was brought up.

The Verse protocol is primarily not for making virtual worlds, nor 
games, but for connecting different apps like 3d modellers and 
paint programs etc. to be able to collaborate and/or see results 
live. I think the power there is being able to sync things like change of 
a position of a vertex in a mesh, or the colour of a pixel in a texture 
bitmap, so that you can e.g. have a modeller, paint app, and a game engine
running as Verse apps with the shared data on the server. This would save 
from the typical export-import-restart loop, and allows tweaking models, 
uv coordinates and textures so that you see the actual result in the game 
engine / movie renderer immediately.

It may still be interesting to think of it in the opensim/rex context. 
Daedius had an interesting idea to integrate verse to the viewer, so that 
changes made in e.g. a modelling app would show immediately in the meshes, 
and then after editing the client would upload the version of mesh to the 
server.

Another route we were once thinking was to add Verse support to the 
Opensim/Rex server, so that Verse enabled apps could connect to it for 
authoring (e.g. manipulating the scene, moving obs/prims etc with a more 
powerful interface - i'd sure like to have outliner, multiple viewports 
etc when editing scenes). I don't know which would be easier and better: 
add SL protocol support for a modelling app so it could work as an 
authoring client, or add Verse support to the OpenSim server.

The situation with Verse in general remains tricky as far as I know - 
during the Uni-Verse project they added preliminary support to Blender (by 
integrating it in the insides) and to Max (as a plugin), and tried with 
Maya, and made a plugin for Gimp. One lesson they learned was that adding 
good verse support, especially to a closed source app, is hard as classic 
apps are typically not structured so that network access could touch their 
dearest data. When making a new app with Verse in mind it's all different 
and Eskil has been succesful there with his own toolset. But basically 
Verse seems pretty much dead to me, no one using, no one adding support. 
It's still the only thing I know for such a purpose and seems to work well 
(it synchs vertex movements quickly), and the callback design is perhaps 
good too, so dunno if it'll somehow pick up some day anyway.

Also I don't know where the differences in the actual protocol lie in the 
end - Verse focuses on syncing 2d and 3d data needed for making movies and 
games, meshes, uv coords, textures, shader params, .., and does not touch 
things like avatar animations and even less IM, commerce or anything like 
that which you have in SL. But still e.g. the object movents are similar 
functionality, and the Verse protocol is extensible for custom data, so 
don't know if it could fit despite the different initial focus. I do 
recall that Eskil himself didn't use it for his MMO, so am still guessing 
that it fits just the authoring better.

There are other projects with protocols for virtual worlds with focus more 
similar to OpenSim/Rex, like http://interreality.org and of course Croquet 
etc. so for SL replacements / alternatives those would probably be more 
relevant to consider. Verse might be an interesting complementing tool in 
the set. But like Ryan said, Rex targets now at getting a viewer that'll 
work with the current server using the existing protocol. Anyone else, 
feel free to experiment with Verse and stuff!

~Toni, not speaking for the Rex project but to inform them too :)