Hi, we meet monthly with parties doing realXtend development. To talk about work done and coming to next release, and to design how upcoming new things should be made. This is for organizations doing actual code contributions -- make enough pull requests and you'll get invited :) The community meetings that Fred organizes inworld are open for anyone -- at least I will be participating there in the future from the dev side, if there are code questions etc, and we are available almost all the time on freenode irc #realxtend-dev for questions and open talks.
We'll be posting notes from the core dev meets -- here are the main points that we discussed with Jukka (Ludocraft & realXtend association), Jonne (Adminotech) and Jarkko (CIE / Chiru project) yesterday: New things for next Tundra release: * Adminotech made substantial improvements to Tundra in the Berlin Gallery Weekend project. All those are in the realXtend Tundra repo now (merged via pull requests) already. Highlights: - Voice: fixes to the new Mumble plugin which was recently rewritten from scratch, reusing much of the code from the normal standalone Mumble client. Is reliable and gives good quality voice now (basically same as Mumble normally). Is also compatible with other Mumble clients, which now exist for at least iOS (iPhone & iPad) too -- so participating in same voice conferences with Tundra and iPhone works now! - Mac improvements -- Windows and OSX versions are equally well supported now (in the current Admino builds and hopefully in next realXtend release too). For example dealing with the now very common low end graphics cards in e.g. Macbook airs needed care. * Ludocraft has made a lot of bugfixes and improvements. Also a new Entity-Component: GraphicsViewCanvas, to put 2d GUI to 3d objects as textures, so that the drawing is efficient and mouse input events work. Earlier EC WidgetCanvas component has allowed the same, but with a heavier drawing mechanism and without input support. * cie.fi's Chiru project has reorganized their Tundra codes so that instead of a modified Tundra repo that has both core changes + Chiru's modules, there is now a separate chiru add-ons repository for the optional plugins which work on unmodified realXtend Tundra core too. Jarkko can tell at some point about the highlights there. We at Playsign had our hands full with the alternative Flash client + XMPP backend virtual world system for the Berlin event, discussed in other posts. We've been now doing long term roadmap planning with all the companies where consider the alternative techs etc., that's still going on -- plans start to come online early next week, will post about that separately. On-going development work: * Chiru is continuing with the Asset Import module (using the assimp library), which they already had working for COLLADA and .blend scene loading with Tundra1 last year. One guy is porting it now first to Tundra2 as is, and will then refactor it so that it fits the core and the asset api etc. nicely. Many file types supported by assimp are bundles which include many assets -- for example a Collada file can optionally contain a library of meshes, materials, even texture bitmap data, and possibly a full scene hierarchy with parenting etc. We can add support to importing such scene files similarily to how Ogre .scene files are imported now. Also the plan is to support referring to assets in such bundles, for example a mesh reference like: mycollada.dae#chair * Chiru is also testing interest management / network messaging priorization, to support large scenes with a lot of moving objects (idea is to use a similar technique that Sirikata does, prioritize messages based on distance or view angle) In the companies we typically go where projects take us -- I understood that for Adminotech and Ludocraft it is not known yet what core improvements or new functionality would be coming next. Admino is at least working on their hosting backend anyway. With Playsign we have some teaching sessions soon where have planned on using the Chesapeake Bay scene & scripts, and I also promised to visit the Boston Immersive Education summit to present it, so we'll continue with the Tundra2 port of that (some of the animal walk paths code work now but not all, hopefully we can get the games working too soon enough). The long term roadmapping work was requested by the realXtend foundation board -- there we basically identify possible bigger development targets, for which the foundation guys said that even substantial funding could be possible via some development programs etc. A major topic there is running on current mobile platforms, iOS and Android etc. Do ask if have any questions about status of things and what is going on. Cheers, ~Toni -- http://groups.google.com/group/realxtend http://www.realxtend.org
