CyberTech News

Lot of things are happening around Modrex because it is being actively developed by the realXtend team and it glues Opensim and realXtend together.  Modrex is a DLL that makes stock Opensim to be a realXtend server.

Albert from Hispagrid uploaded Modrex binaries. The download package includes all the servers you need to run realXtend server side. Thank you Albert and everyone at Hispagrid! Albert intends to upload more realXtend content in the near future.

For instructions how to compile Modrex yourself can be found from Opensim wiki. Check it also if you don’t know what Modrex actually is.

Paul Fishwick opened a new blog modrex.wordpress.com to record experiences and issues, the contents, when suitable for republishing, will be aggregated also to CyberTech News.

Hypergrid works with Modrex – this is great news! One problem seems to be that OGRE rendering in the realXtend viewer is inefficient with prims – it is performing really well only with realXtend native 3D meshes.

OpenSim, realXtend binary, download, hispagrid, hypergrid, modrex

Lasse Öörni was the tech lead for the realXtend viewers 0.1 – 0.4. During that time he has learnt to know SL Viewer quite well. He is technically skilled and did many almost heroic development efforts when SL Viewer was forged to realXtend Viewer.

Lasse is an interesting person, and he is definitely not just your ordinary code developer. I just finished the book he wrote in a month, just before the launch of realXtend 0.4. Download the book: Agents of Metal.

Agents of Metal is an action-packed, violent story wrapped with conspiracy theories and aggressive metal music. The story has feelings and emotions, even a spark of love, so it is not just a single minded shooting gallery.

Have you ever wondered where the heavy metal music came from to some of the realXtend videos? Lasse is also a one man band; he plays guitar, bass, drums and sings vocals. Rex Ping plays one of Lasse’s songs, Vision Never Dies in the earliear article Rex Ping introduces MP3 player for realXtend. You can download the whole pack of Lasse’s songs here (free for non-commercial use).

Lasse, what was the biggest single thing you did to rexviewer (I bet it was OGRE integration)? How do you feel about it?
Yes, integrating & getting OGRE to coexist with the SL’s renderer. I’m not totally satisfied of what I did, considering how OpenGL driver bugs seem to cause crashes on some graphics cards, but at least it was a good learning experience.

What do you have to say about SL Viewer? Does it have a future?
For its original intended purpose, I don’t have bad things to say about it, and it certainly has some nice parts of code, like the UI. Yes, I believe it has a future.

What do you think about rex NG? What is your guestimate when there could be first public alpha version ready?
We’re only starting implementation, it’s certainly exciting to see where it will go. Anything I say is just a very rough guess, but internally we’ve planned some kind of essential tasks like basic rendering to be done in the summer.

How did you fit together writing AoM and making final crunch for rexviewer 0.4 at the same time?
I always write at evening or night anyway, and actually the crunch was somewhat relaxed as material support etc. critical tasks had already been done, so it was not too hard. Distractions, like Far Cry 2, were more of a problem.

What would you do differently if you could (with rexviewers 0.1 to 0.4)?
I would avoid the dual OpenGL contexts with whatever means necessary.

Anything you would like to say to ctn readers?
Well, stay tuned for the rex NG viewer, and Agents of Metal part 2!

realXtend download, Ogre3D, opengl, realxtend 0.4, rex-ng, sl viewer

Users of the Openlife and popular backup software for Avatar inventory called Second Inventory would be aware of the disabled access to the Openlife with second inventory software whilst improvements to security and stability are made. 

Second Inventory developers are working together with the 3DX team to make improvements to the methods and capabilities of second inventory and it’s access to the Openlifegrid.

The improvements being developed will make will improve it’s security and safety to provide Openlife users a 3rd party backup method for the inventory and a method for Second Life Creators to safely import their content to the Openlife knowing the software cannot be used to steal the content or not respect the creator’s Avatar Name. 

The Second Inventory team expects the first changes to be available in the coming soon version 1.2.0.9 version of Second Inventory.

Collaboration and design ideas have already started in co-operation to improving the security relationship between, content creator, user and the Openlifegrid. Improvements to script upload capabilities have also been shared between the Second Inventory and the Openlife Grid and can be expected in the next release.

(via Sakai Openlife’s blog)

OpenLife, security assets, download, second inventory, Second Life, textures

The purpose of this article is to publish a provisional patent application I filed back in March 2008. The provisional covers Content Injection and Control Protocol, which I created to allow Green Phosphor’s data visualization application to interface with virtual world platforms (see previous article on CICP here).

I recently asked the Slashdot readership whether I should fork out the additional $10k it would take to properly complete the app, since I am releasing CICP to the public domain anyway. Despite a large number of trolls saying I was stupid to ask such a question on Slashdot, I received a lot of very good advice; and it sums up to this: publish the work, and as prior art it protects the protocol. I think this is important. Not only is CICP useful for business applications to produce 3D user interfaces within virtual worlds; it is a predecessor to MXP (see previous article on MXP here). MXP has the potential to tie together many worlds and programs into one metaverse. The MXP project is seeking developers… go to http://www.bubblecloud.org.

Without further ado, here’s the publishing of the provisional patent application for CICP. CICP is for all.

Darkstar, OpenSim, realXtend cicp, download, green phosphor, mxp, network, olive, protocol, RL control, Second Life, wonderland

If you want more land in SL, it is going to cost you more. A lot more. With realXtend, you can add more land mass with a few clicks. For free (actually you need to have necessary machinery and bandwidth available, so it is not so free).

Test User found a huge carbon footprint when he was checking his world: “No wonder that we are getting climate change – I am going to do only virtual meetings to cut my travel – and I don’t want to meet the guy who did that.”

rexServer 0.4 comes with the default fish world, which is only one region. Download blank server from CTN files before trying the instructions here (Thanks to Peter Quirk for the original instructions).

Copy the default.xml to myregion_east.xml. Edit myregion_east.xml in the following ways:

1. change the sim_name to something else, preferably without spaces. Let’s call it myregion_east for this example.
2. get a new GUID from http://www.guidgenerator.com/online-guid-generator.aspx and plug it into the sim_UUID field.
3. set the sim_location_x value to 1001 so the new region appears directly to the right of the default region on the map.
4. set the internal_ip_port value to 9001 (the port needs to be different for every xml file)
5. start the rexserver processes

When the opensim.exe process reports that the server is up and serving two regions, type the following in the opensim DOS window (Opensim console):

   change-region myregion_east
   terrain fill 21
   terrain bake

It is especially exciting to have your rexviewer connected as you get to see terrain changes in real time. It may give you a god-like feeling (or goddess-like depending on your preferences). Use command “terrain help” at the console to get some useful commands to make further experiments. Download the terrain file used in the screenshot – you need to adjust the height with terrain commands to get some water to the footprint.

OpenSim, realXtend download, region, rexserver 0.4, Tags: carbon footprint, terrain

Collaborative web browsing plays an important role in meetings. Meeting rooms have usually data projectors so that people can plug in their laptops and show slides, documents and web pages to support their message in a meeting.

In realXtend 0.4 it is possible to show web pages with live flash content, like a Youtube video (see CTN article about that). The web page to show is defined in the texture properties as a media URL. 

However, it is a bit clumsy to use texture properties to change the web page when there are lot of people attending a meeting and possibly wanting to share something.
CTN built a server side solution to the problem using PHP and javascript.

Follow these steps to test the solution:

1. download php and html files (unzip webscreen.zip) and upload them to your web server (if you don’t have a web server, get a free hosting from http://www.000webhost.com/. For professional use CTN recommends http://www.hosting24.com.)
2. set texture’s media URL to http://www.cybertechnews.org/webscreen/webscreen.html (use your own server name here!) and apply the texture to a cube
3. open a browser window to http://www.cybertechnews.org/webscreen/seturl.php (use your own server name here)
4. write a URL (e.g. http://www.realxtend.org) to the text input field and press enter, after a few seconds, the web page shows in realXtend viewer, and the same web page is shown to all participants in the virtual world at the same time.

Extra benefit of this approach is that people who do not have realXtend can also follow the presentation from the same URL using a standard browser (you can test it by using the CTN URLs in the steps above).
If you wish to have several webscreens showing different content, it is easy to copy the same web files to another folder at the web server to separate URLs. To develop the solution further, learn the tricks from this book.

The next topic will be about how to share your Powerpoint slides in realXtend – stay tuned!

realXtend browsing, download, howto, javascript, php, rexviewer, textures, youtube

realXtend offers beautiful “Beneath the vawes” world as a default with their server download. It requires some work to clean it up so that you can start to build your own world. Now it is done and CyberTech News offers you a blank rexserver 0.4 download in two flavors:

- Without assets (55M): http://www.cybertechnews.org/downloads/rexserverblank0.4.zip

- With assets (69M):  http://www.cybertechnews.org/downloads/rexserverblankwithassets0.4.zip

CTN web page shown at almost empty rexserver 0.4

For the with-asset-version, you can find a CyberTech News page on a TV set at the middle of the empty island… Testuser is also a bit modified and looks like Samuel J. Enjoy!

realXtend 3D models, assets, download, rexserver 0.4, textures