Just want to send a brief update on this.
A few of us have now taken a deeper look at Melanie's Unreal-based
viewer, and made an effort to update it to the latest version of UE.
Good news: it renders opensim content dynamically and it does it very well!
Bad news: the licensing situation is a no-go. We asked Epic Games staff,
and it's clear that they don't want this kind of thing out there without
collecting royalties from grid operators.
So, after a lot of brainstorming and researching what's available, we've
now zoomed in on two main pieces: Xenko (https://xenko.com/) and
Chromiumfx (https://bitbucket.org/chromiumfx/chromiumfx/src/default/).
The project will be in C#, so there's already a ton of code that we can
grab from OpenSim and libomv. All of these pieces are open source with
friendly licenses.
Keep in mind that this viewer project is NOT going to be a clone of the
Linden viewer -- far from it. We envision a situation where ppl continue
to use the Linden viewer for the SL-like experience, but use this new
viewer for other kinds of experiences over the exact same content, with
real-time co-existence of the two viewer families in the same virtual
spaces.
The goal is to develop a new generation of Internet browser that can
render all sorts of 3D multiuser applications off the bat, and by
design. The UI of those applications is written in HTML5/JavaScript, the
backend is done with OpenSim modules, and the 3D content is done...
well, with the Linden viewer, for the foreseeable future.
Eventually someone may want to clone the SL experience with this new
viewer, something that will be possible, but that's not in the purview
of this project. The SL experience is just one particular application
that this viewer can run.
There's a small architectural document here:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1VdWuvjTGi-JDPcuyfXiP1tEj8_3__pxVCBZa6BIa-hs/edit#slide=id.p
No promises, things can fizzle, but for the moment we're fired up to
embark on this new project! We'll send news again when there's code to
share.
Happy Holidays!
Diva
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