Some newbie questions about realXtend...
Groove
educational use.
I have a couple of questions about realXtend...
1) Can assets/worlds designed for opensim be used in Taiga?
2) How mature is voice support using Taiga + Naali?
3) Is there any way to auto-login a user (with real name) who is
logged in to a Joomla or Moodle site?
4) Can Taiga run on cloud servers (eg Rackspace or Amazon)?
Toni Alatalo
> I'm new to virtual worlds, but looking at setting up a sim server for
> educational use.
> I have a couple of questions about realXtend...
Welcome :)
We have made quite an interesting toolset for educational use recently -- there is not much of it out yet (like videos or a demo server), but hopefully soon enough.
> 1) Can assets/worlds designed for opensim be used in Taiga?
As far as the server goes, yes, because Taiga is Opensim (just with some modules added).
It is more of a viewer question. Naali has basic prim support, so things should work. It is not currently optimized for rendering a large number of small individual prims, though. In our project with schools we've used meshes (but don't expect the teachers and the pupils to know polygon modelling - have just added tools how they can create 3d text objects and bring in images and web pages etc. easily to new meshes, and use ready-made mesh objects from the web).
> 2) How mature is voice support using Taiga + Naali?
We have had mumble support since last May or so, and as far as I know people have been happy with it. It has been enhanced along the way, mostly by adding configuration features like allowing separate voice channels for groups etc. (that was also made in that project with schools).
> 3) Is there any way to auto-login a user (with real name) who is
> logged in to a Joomla or Moodle site?
Yes. We have used web login to authenticate both with OpenID (google, yahoo, all kinds of providers) and Microsoft LiveID (which is similar I think). If Joomla or Moodle can act as an OpenID provider, it should just work. If not, is quite simple to add something to your website to allow authentication.
Those openid authentication things in current Taiga are from the Cable Beach 2 project by Intel, which I think later changed to be Simiangrid .. it might be quite straightforward to upgrade to simiangrid usege too if needed.
In Naali the web authentication can be integrated in the viewer GUI as it embeds a web viewer. But I think there is also already builtin support for launching the viewer from an authenticated external web browser.
> 4) Can Taiga run on cloud servers (eg Rackspace or Amazon)?
I think yes, has the same requirements as Opensim in general. Am not 100% sure though, don't do hosting myself.
~Toni
Groove
On Jan 22, 5:44 pm, Toni Alatalo <t...@playsign.net> wrote:
> We have made quite an interesting toolset for educational use recently -- there is not much of it out yet (like videos or a demo server), but hopefully soon enough.
http://www.maxping.org/technobabble/platforms/open-source/free-virtual-worlds-based-education-platform-done-in-realxtend-beats-second-life-5-0-and-more.aspx
or something else?
Toni Alatalo
> Are you alluding to TOY, eg:
> http://www.maxping.org/technobabble/platforms/open-source/free-virtual-worlds-based-education-platform-done-in-realxtend-beats-second-life-5-0-and-more.aspx
yes.
realxtend has been used for education things also in other projects,
both before and after TOY, but that was the thing i was referring to. as
has been the only one i've been involved in and know anything about :)
and 'we' referring to playsign in this case (is a bit vague, sometimes
it means all of realxtend and sometimes just some company)
~Toni
Groove
TOY sounds like a very interesting project :)
Any idea when there might be more information available and/or a
public release?
Is the intention still to make it a free open source release?
Toni Alatalo
> TOY sounds like a very interesting project :)
> Any idea when there might be more information available and/or a
> public release?
Soon I think -- one idea is that there'd be a public server out for
people to test. I suspect that also for you pointing to a pile of code
would not be helpful, 'cause it would be considerable work to setup and
configure and it requires some extra server backends etc. And there are
probably no docs for those configs.
> Is the intention still to make it a free open source release?
I had to ask around a bit and have some talks to get to know the current
status about this. Conclusion is that the plan is indeed to have the
tools as open source, but to provide it also as a service commercially
for those who don't want to install & maintain etc. themselves.
Also one idea in TOY development has been to be close to normal Naali
development. All the basics like using web pages, drag&drop of new
meshes to worlds from the web, the Mumble voice etc. have been in Naali
releases for long and used in TOY pretty much as is (were developed
partly as TOY work but put to mainline Naali immediately). TOY just has
some additional simple content creation GUIs on top of these.
One fun feature is that you can carry objects around, as a simple way to
build a scene without having to know how to 3d manipulation with the
normal editing tools. That is also something that we all agree that
could and should be just a normal feature in default Naali, but it's not
integrated over yet.
Guys have now been at least experimentally porting some of the tools to
work on Tundra, which is AFAIK not a big change 'cause much of them were
already client side Naali things and the API on the client is side is
mostly same no matter which server is used. And custom feats use ECs for
storage&syncs and those work similarily in Taiga&Tundra. In that work
they are ported from py to js so that they can be downloaded and
executed as a part of services on the net, don't have to be bundled in
Naali releases or installed with an add-on system that asks permissions
from users etc. So they can be updated after deployment. (i did propose
they would have used js already in the previous step, but they didn't
wanna learn a new lang then, and we still don't have js bindings for all
the things like webkit so probably doing in py was quicker then ..
porting between py & js is usually simple so i expect we see results
soon).
~Toni
Groove
@Toni
Many thanks for looking into this for me! I appreciate it :)
Is there some way for me to stay informed about the availability of
the public server (or other info), eg is there a website, mailing
list, or whatever I could keep an eye on?