First a little background, I was invited as both the founder of the Openlife Grid and an active participant in the Opensimulator Project, to attend this event in Oulu, Finland.
Not completely aware of what I was in for I can say before hand I was excited nonetheless but wasn't prepared for what was to come. I think I could safely say what was presented pleasantly surprised and excited all that attended.
I will try not to go too much into detail but provide pictures and videos with comment to help explain the event.
Being from Australia -'Anything' degrees is cold. Here you can see it really was cold on arrival.
Picture: The view from the plane, I was almost a little shocked to see that the ocean is frozen.
... I did say cold didn't I? But Oulu is a beautiful place nonetheless.
Picture: The View from the Hotel, Oulu, Finland. (snow, snowing & cold, but very beautiful).
OK, So nice snow pictures and all but what was going on?
Well, Friday morning we all met. Firstly wow, it was great to meet most of the others from the OpenSimulator project, I don't think it had been done before, and whilst things may have started quiet it didn't take long for us all to Gel together and get talking! And then we met the guys under the banner 'RealXtend', this was interesting why had I flown more than 14,000km across the planet? Who were they and what had they been doing? Questions were flying in everyone's minds and we started to get some information.
2 Companies Admino & Ludocraft had been working furiously in the background over the past 4 months, 'extending' the function of the OpenSimulator Project, they had done this with the afforded generosity of Juha Hulkko.
So what did they want global domination? No. Were they Anti-Linden? No (actually Chris Collins from Linden Labs was there too). Did they want to take over the OpenSimulator Project? No.
They wanted to move forward, extend as the name suggests features & methods for greater user function and versatility of the code & it's application.
OK so the morning meeting was a good start and now all of us were even more curious. What was next? Well, Finland likes coffee so it was a coffee! Alright that sounded like a little stall but we jumped in taxi's headed for Rehapolis for 'real' demonstration.
So without saying to much more what did we see?
2 Parts.
- A Modified SL Viewer (with OGRE 3D Engine) let's call this the 'REX' Viewer.
- A Modified Opensim Server setup let's call this the 'REX' OS Server.
Picture: Juha Hulkko, introducing the RealXtend work and his vision.
Picture: Can you tell that these guys have seen things they know we'll be excited about? Just look at the faces of our hosts as they prepare the demonstration!
Picture: The 'REX' Viewer Login Screen. getting exciting now...
Picture: Almost there... yes they have a content developer. Clearly a pretty good one too!
Picture: OK. We logged in and went into a little house full of people but, notice there is actualy only one Avatar here? It can be hard to tell the difference these other people are all meshes! (that's right not prims - meshes).
But so is the Avatar, the Mesh system is much more advanced than the standard 'prims' and these Avatars are created with a defineable bone structure of over 160+ bones! Plus 'mesh' attachments are possible with multiple attachments to each part of the bone structure. -Yes this excited us quite a bit too.
*For those curious it was an 8800 series nVidia Card achieving approx 42fps.
OK - So I may as well Start talking about what they did. Then throw a bunch more pictures at you:
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