realXtend viewer 0.4 tech lead interview
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!
