Here’s an update of some organizational and development planning work that has been going on a bit behind the scenes for realXtend. Summary: there’s a new board for the association, and we are working on a more detailed plan for the so-called Mobile Tundra track featured in the roadmap document earlier.
Berlin Gallery Weekend 2012 featured 51 new openings in galleries around the real city. Each exhibition is also publicly online using realXtend in Virtual Gallery Weekend — at least for this week still, so you have now a unique chance to see some interesting contemporary art pieces!
The same scene is available both with a Tundra client (‘full version’) and, for the first time for a real commercial realXtend service, with a browser based client using Flash and Away3d (‘light version’).
Do visit, and we are happy to answer any questions for example in the comments here! Virtual Gallery Weekend is a Spinningwire Ltd. project, in collaboration with Adminotech for the Tundra version and Playsign for the browser based one. The technology review leading to use of Away3d for this project was published earlier in Browser Based realXtend Client Technologies.
The video from the realXtend presentation at Blender Conference 2011 is up, thanks to the conference organizers!
The picture is from a camera viewing the projected display, which was nice and bright with colours at the conference venue, but for some reason appears quite dark in the youtube video. Things do show and audio is ok so I hope this works as an introduction to Tundra overall. Features the Chesapeake Bay demo scene with little games, and finally the nice new Blender integration itself. There are other videos and docs about blender2ogre with actual usage instructions etc. by Brett.
Having the ‘magic button’ in Blender, that automatically runs the Ogre exporter and runs the scene in Tundra for me, has actually made a big difference: now just testing some old existing game prototype scene, made with Blender, doesn’t feel like much effort with the exports and all .. is just a click of a button. Workflow is the thing!
UPDATE: The demo server is currently offline, as it is being updated to a new version that works with new browsers (Chrome 14 and up) and Tundra2.
First WebNaali demo is up. It features very basic avatar and chat functionality, connected to a Tundra server hosting the TOY lobby scene. You can connect to the same server with native Tundra too. A video of these basics:
It currently works only in stable Chrome, version 13. We’ll look at Firefox support next.
Client is at http://www.realxtend.org/webnaali/ws3dclient.html.
It doesn’t have progress bars, and it takes long for the scene to download with the textures, and during that you mostly just see a white page now. Be patient.
The new public demo server to which you can login with the ‘try it’ button here features new simple creation tools. Feel free to test, and here’s a couple of videos that demonstrate them a bit:
This first video shows a little authoring, and also the whole process from starting a viewer and logging in etc .. whole operation in a bit over 2 minutes:
