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.
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.
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.
“realXtend 0.4 which was released a week ago has a significant optimization regarding avatar movement packets. The number of packets has been reduced, the size of them made smaller and more movement updates are combined into one packet from multiple avatars. With this optimization and the new rexbots, we have been able to have over 300 bots on our LAN servers. Here’s a video to prove it.”
via http://community.rexdeveloper.org/
This is unexpected, totally. My experience with OpenSim is that when the user count goes over 30, or even 20, things start to degrade. The article said that there were optimizations done for the protocol, so that has been the real bottleneck.
Having 300 bots is not the same as having 300 avatars - there is a significant difference in the resulting amount of network traffic. However this is a big step to right direction!
How many simultaneous avatars realXtend supports? After the optimizations, my guess is: around 60.
It also looks that the rexviewer is quite well optimized, because it could render those 300 avatars in the video, all at the same time.
Be the First to Comment 
Test User watches Guns and Roses “Welcome to the jungle”.
When you see the texture at the prim, go to inventory and edit properties of the texture (see example left). Set media URL to 
