Posted by on February 28, 2009 under avatar, howto | 
You can connect to Second Life using realXtend viewer. It is not at its best that way, but still there are some nice features worth writing about. One of them is the possibility for inter-grid teleporting, as I wrote in teleporting with realXtend. Another smaller yet interesting feature is that it is possible to import and export the avatar appearance.
Many people have spent a lot of time in tweaking their avatar appearance in Second Life. SL Avatar has 144 settings:
- Shape, 77 settings
- Skin, 26 settings
- Hair, 39 settings
- Eyes, 2 settings
Bringing your avatar to OSGrid is clearly a non-zero effort. Using realXtend appearance import/export, the work is made significantly easier.
The export gives you a XML file that can be saved to a local computer (it is actually just a text file, not xml inside). You need to have “worn” bodyparts and clothing on when using the import and export facilities. Textures keys are exported but currently not able to be imported, because different grids will have different keys, and there is no way to match them up.
To Export:
- Start editing your appearance
- Click the Export Button,
- Select a file name for the saved data
To import:
- Start Editing your appearance
- Click the Import Button
- Select a file with the saved data
- Make changes to textures
- Click SaveAll Button
This is tested from Second Life to OSGrid, and to a standalone Opensim. Textures need to be upload separately and set manually. Many thanks to Ewe Loon for the code patch!
Note: The avatar appearance import/export works in Opensim and SL, not with the realXtend’s own free form mesh avatar. realXtend’s own avatar is stored on a separate server which makes it easy to be used at different realXtend servers (ie your avatar travels with you when you teleport around), which makes this kind of import/export unnecessary.
The avatar appearance import/export can also be used to back up your sl avatar easily or you can even send your sl avatar settings in email.
Posted by on February 22, 2009 under howto |
realXtend viewer is able to teleport between Second Life, Opensim and realXtend. Simplest way to teleport is to use view->address bar menu item to show your address bar. Type and go, just like in a web browser!
World owners can also make link objects. In the picture above, there is a realXtend teleport object on the left. However, teleports can be scripted to any object. Here’s how:
- Right click object, select edit
- go to content tab and edit object’s script (create a new script, if needed)
- copy the code:
Save the script, close the edit window and the link object is ready. Click the object, and a popup will appear asking for the username & password. Lucy is going to teleport to Second Life, and change user account to Yani Pinion on the way in the picture below:
Here are two llMapDestination examples you can use. rex-url is used when you want to teleport anywhere else than to Second Life, and sl-ulr is used when you want to teleport to Sec0nd Life. The same works from Second Life, just use rex-url in llMapDestination to exit Second Life and teleport to realXtend or Opensim. This works only with rexViewer, naturally.
llMapDestination("rex://world.adminotech.com", <100, 100, 0>, ZERO_VECTOR);
llMapDestination("sl://cisco", <76, 173, 142>, ZERO_VECTOR);
Posted by on February 5, 2009 under howto |
In the previous slideshow howto article, the process of bringing a powerpoint slideshow to a realXtend virtual world was explained. The process was, although technically sound in many ways, also a bit cumbersome.
There is an easier way, especially if your slides are not top secret.
In the picture above you can see the result. I am taking advantage of the webscreen I presented in an earlier article - Browse the web together in realXtend.
The process is simple. Upload the slides to http://www.slideshare.net on your account. You get a URL for every slideshow. To protect your slides from public viewing, it is possible to define slideshows private, and you can get a URL for them too.
Now use that URL with the webscreen or as a texture MediaURL to show the first slide of the presentation inside a realXtend world. Now there is one problem to overcome - there is a lot of stuff that does not belong to the slide, just like with Youtube videos (check also previous article Watch YouTube videos from realXtend). Now it is time to use slide offset and repeat -properties to show only the slide portion of the web page. Take a look at this picture to see the exact settings you need to do. As a sidenote, this works with Youtube as well.
To change the slide, you need to append slash + slide number at the end of the URL. Look at the first screenshot to see an example. This can be done using the webscreen, or simply manually changing the MediaURL.
Posted by on January 31, 2009 under howto |
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:
- change the sim_name to something else, preferably without spaces. Let’s call it myregion_east for this example.
- get a new GUID from http://www.guidgenerator.com/online-guid-generator.aspx and plug it into the sim_UUID field.
- set the sim_location_x value to 1001 so the new region appears directly to the right of the default region on the map.
- set the internal_ip_port value to 9001 (the port needs to be different for every xml file)
- 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.
Posted by on January 28, 2009 under Ideas, howto |
First reaction of many people to virtual worlds is that they begin to think about possible applications. One of the most common idea is the meeting application.
It is so strongly in peoples minds, that if a virtual world platform does not support some basic technology enablers for the meeting use case, the platform is considered useless.
The key technology enablers for successful virtual meetings are:
- Application sharing
- Document sharing
- Web co-browsing
- Spatialized voice support (3D audio)
- (Powerpoint) Presentations
- Streaming real time media
- Customizable avatars and rich interaction
I believe that moving our current 2D User Interface paradigms to virtual worlds is only an intermediate step towards true 3D applications. In true 3D applications brainstorming, training, planning and many other (collaborative) activities are not done in front of flat virtual screens. The real 3D approach takes current strengths and weaknesses of virtual world technologies into account (as I wrote in an earlier post - Virtual world advantage over real life).
But for now, it is still important to get basic things working as people have tons of legacy Powerpoint presentations and other 2D material. Follow the following steps to use your ppt files inside realXtend:
- Open your .ppt file in OpenOffice Impress, check the slides that everything looks good
- Make a new empty folder for the resulting files
- Select file->export, type “rexslides.html” for the file name and “export as html” to the new empty folder
- Select “New design” -> next -> “Webcast“
- Now you can select ASP or Perl solution, depending on your web server platform - Perl should work for most - the rest of the steps assume perl. You need a web server for this to work; CTN recommends http://www.hosting24.com
- Set URL for listeners to “index.html” and presentation URL to “http://www.cybertechnews.org/webcast/” and URL to perl scripts to “http://www.cybertechnews.org/webcast/perl/“
- In the next screen, use jpegs and set the resolution to highest: 1024×768, in the next dialog you can save the design if you wish
- copy txt files to the /webcast/perl/ folder at your web server, and set them writable (permissions to 666)
- copy pl files to the /webcast/perl/ folder at your web server, and set them executable (permissions to 755)
- copy all the other files to /webcast/ folder at your web server
Now you are ready to use the presentation in realXtend. Just use a texture’s media URL property, set it to http://www.cybertechnews.org/webcast/ and apply the texture to your favorite object.
To control the presentation, open a web browser and point it to http://www.cybertechnews.org/webcast/rexslides.html
Posted by on January 25, 2009 under Ideas, howto |
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:
- 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.)
- 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
- open a browser window to http://www.cybertechnews.org/webscreen/seturl.php (use your own server name here)
- 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!
Posted by on January 17, 2009 under howto |
Now it is possible to watch your favorite Youtube videos from the comfort of a realXtend world. Rendering web pages to a prim or 3D object has been working already from the first realXtend release. Now the realXtend 0.4 release brings the possibility to make the rendered web pages flash content to show in real time.
Test User watches Guns and Roses “Welcome to the jungle”.
To make this work, you need to make a prim box for the screen and upload a placeholder texture. The texture is used to mark the place of the web page so it can be anything as long as it is jpeg and a small one.
When you see the texture at the prim, go to inventory and edit properties of the texture (see example left). Set media URL to 
http://www.cybertechnews.com/test/gnr.html which is a web page with a black background and the embedded Youtube video - feel free to copy the code if you want to make your own pages. I used “autoplay=1″ parameter to start the video automatically, otherwise the video just stands still.
To make the video show, set the Refresh rate to “60″, which is how many times per second the screen is updated.
Note that the video is not synchronized between viewers, but if you want to share a video with your friend, just restart the video and you will get a simultaneous experience. Simplest way to restart is to go again to texture properties and hit enter at the MediaURL field.
Posted by on January 15, 2009 under Ideas, howto |
realXtend project used the Scrum methodology from the beginning. The reason for this was the nature of the project. It was really hard to estimate what we could achieve within 6 calendar months we got the funding for. The goal was simple enough; to make a demo prototype of a future virtual world platform that is good enough to get more funding to continue the effort. So we really needed to do as good demo as possible.
A screenshot from a testing session.
The Scrum methodology we learned from an excellent book: Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg. The book is absolutely the best and easiest to read about how to use Scrum in practice.
realXtend project started with two participating Finnish companies, Ludocraft and Admino technologies. The companies are both located at the Oulu area, but they are still located quite far from each other. In the Scrum methodology the whole Scrum team must be co-located for two main reasons; to maximize the communication bandwidth between team members and secondly, to have the daily scrum meetings together.
Initially we had everyone working at the same scrum team and we used skype between the two offices for the daily scrum meetings. It was working, but not as good as it should. Irc, physical visits, email and skype were all used every day to keep things synchronized.
After two months of work, the realXtend platform was at the stage where we decided to move our daily scrum meetings to the virtual space. It was awful. Everyone looked the same - our first woman avatar, which was later called as “crack-slut madonna” by someone, she had just white underwear and no hair… voice was working through team speak software. Opensim had some serious problems at that time, objects were lost and big craters appeared to the landscape. We partly moved back to skype, but continued to use realXtend for the meetings weekly.
Eating our own dogfood did good to the development. Scrum helped us to always work on most important issues and we did not need to worry about changing a project plan like we would have done with the waterfall project management model.
Scrum did not work so well with some of the content oriented tasks. Artists need time to think and be creative and they did not like Scrum. If I had to do the first six months again for the realXtend, I would left artists out of the daily Scrum meetings and keep their tasks out of sprint backlogs. I would still have them present at the sprint planning meetings as it is essential to synchronize their work with the software developers.
At the end of the six month period we had moved realXtend sprint and product backlogs to Google docs, and we used a big virtual wall with sections to move tasks around. Tasks were small notes containing the name of the task. The synchronization between Google docs and the virtual wall was done by hand, and they were quite often not in sync.
The effective virtual world Scrum work clearly needs a virtual world application to support it. Copying the real world task wall did not work well enough - see a previous article, where I discuss about how to effectively use virtual worlds and avoid their weaknesses. The synchronization between virtual world application and a spreadsheet should work instantly and automatically.
After the fist six month the realXtend project moved to more traditional project management for a period of four months (March 2008 - June 2008). The reason for this was that the new funding source wanted to have exact task lists for the Avatar 2 sub-project. Even as the results were good in terms of software and content, this did not work very well when compared to Scrum. Many tasks slipped over their deadlines and the project management felt like a real work for a while.
From July 2008 the project used Scrum again.
The key findings summarized:
- Scrum works well for high risk projects with limited visibility
- Scrum does not fit well to content oriented work
- Virtual worlds allow Scrum teams to work in a multi-site setting
- A specific Scrum application built on top of realXtend would dramatically increase the efficiency
- Virtual world applications need to be integrated to old fashioned applications (like the spreadsheet).
Posted by on January 11, 2009 under howto |
realXtend viewer allows you to upload OGRE particle effects. Common uses for particle effects are e.g. fire and smoke. Some ready made particle effects come with the viewer. You can find them from the “example_assets” folder from the viewer installation.
It was about time to get some snow!
Tuco from the realXtend team tipped me about two downloadable particle effect editors: Particle Accelerator and FXpression. I downloaded them both and got Particle Accelerator to work for my setup.
There were plenty of examples where from you can copy code and save them as a .particle file. Particle scripts are text files which makes it easy to tweak them. I found it really necessary to do that as the effect did not look exactly the same as in the editor. Especially the scale was a bit different than in the editor, at first I got 4-meter snowballs attacking me as you can see from the screenshot below!
4-meter snowflakes look good too
To get snow (as in the first picture) download the snow.particle script - right click and save-as. Then follow the steps:
- create a box, make it big so it is easier to find later
- upload snow.particle using the viewer file menu
- open the rex tab while editing the newly created box
- from the particle effect drop down menu, select the just uploaded particle script
- Go to object tab, change the position of the box to 128,128,200 and the snow will fall about evenly
- If the snow is going sideways or upside down, you might need to turn the box
I found out that it is easy to spend hours playing with different scripts…
Posted by on January 6, 2009 under News, howto |
Linux users can run realXtend viewer by using Wine.
Introduction of Wine from the website: “Wine is a translation layer (a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on Linux and other POSIX compatible operating systems. Windows programs running in Wine act as native programs would, running without the performance or memory usage penalties of an emulator, with a similar look and feel to other applications on your desktop.”
Screenshot from OpenSim wiki that shows off rex on linux
Instructions how to use Wine and make the realXtend viewer 0.4 run on Linux can be found from OpenSim wiki. The instructions were for Linux, but Wine works also on Mac OS X. If you try that and make it work (or not) on OS X, please leave a comment on this article!
When I first read about realXtend on Wine, I was suspicious about the performance. Wine works surprisingly well, the OpenSim wiki page says that the frame rate was “about 40/50 fps on a 8600 GT“.
realXtend viewer has been Windows-only right from the start. The first goal of the realXtend team was to make a prototype, so it did not matter that it was working only on Windows. The prototype was working well enough at the time of the first release (February 2008) that the prototype development continued - and continued as Windows-only.
The realXtend team is now planning a new from-scratch, BSD licensed and cross-platform viewer (read the CTN article about the new viewer). However, as making a new viewer is a huge task, we can not expect to use the new viewer before summer 2009 - so Linux/Mac users can use Wine as an intermediate solution until that.
