Daikon Forge

Over at UgoTrade and Massively there’s a buzz going about realXtend joining the OpenSim project, and I have got to say that this announcement (and the accompanying screenshots and video) marks perhaps the first time that I’ve gotten truly excited about a virtual world other than Second Life®.

Let me start with the goodies before I say my piece :

Who is realXtend?

I’ve never heard of them before, but here’s what their website has to say:

Creating an open source platform for interconnected virtual worlds is the goal of realXtend project. We collaborate with OpenSim, OpenViewer and realXtend viewer projects.

Next generation virtual reality development is the core of realXtend project. We focus on interoperability technologies, usability and real-life application support.

The announcement goes into a little more detail about the relationship between OpenSimulator and realXtend:

realXtend is contributing all the server side code for their developments to OpenSim and continues to do so from now on. This collaboration of two projects with a similar vision enables realXtend and OpenSim to focus on common issues, and solve them more quickly – leveraging experience and knowledge from each party. realXtend project manager Jani Pirkola comments on the joining as "I see this as a great possibility to quickly make OpenSim the global de facto standard and to significantly speed up the global technology development in this area. Our common goal is to create the best open source virtual world server platform, and to continue the rapid evolution of OpenSim".

What’s so cool about this partnership?

For the little time I’ve had to learn about this (even more info on the OpenSimulator blog), here are just a few of the things mentioned that get me stoked:

1. OGRE rendering support – Anyone in the graphics and games industry has heard of OGRE.  It’s one of the oldest and most capable open source rendering engines available, and is absolutely packed with features and optimizations that blow Second Life’s rendering pipeline completely out of the water.
2. Real 3D mesh support – Yes, that’s right, this project uses actual 3d meshes instead of just geometric solid primitives!  According to Adam Frisby of the OpenSimulator project: "Meshes behave just like another prim type – you can drag, scale, and rotate meshes around using the same method that you use on primitives and object groups. You can link meshes with other primitives, save them to inventory and use them in pretty much the same way you use primitives."
3. Unlimited Attachments - ’nuff said.
4. Ability to script avatar skeletons – Apparently inverse kinematics is on the feature list, but in addition to that developers will have the ability to script fine-grained control of the skeleton’s bones.  While it may not allow for everything that Endorphin would, it would seem to me that this could provide a great deal more spontaneity and interactivity between avatars than Second Life®.ever could.   Note, this is not just .bvh animations uploaded like Second Life®.we’re talking scripted access to the skeleton!

There’s a great deal more information at the sites linked above (document sharing, collaboration, roadmap, etc.), and I’m far from finished reading and learning about what exactly this could all mean, but it all looks very promising indeed!

If we could get C:SI working on such a system, it would be insanely cool, and I’m already imagining what we could accomplish with that kind of detail and interactivity