Mikko Pallari

ModreX region in OSGrid

pallarim — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:44:42 +0000

I wrote a quick post to realXtend’s “official” blog about adding ModreX region to OSGrid. Go and read it here: http://realxtend.blogspot.com/2009/12/modrex-region-in-osgrid.html

Ogre scene importer first in action pic

pallarim — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:21:19 +0000

Here is a screenshot of first test of OGRE scene importer that can import ogre scenes to ModreX. This example is not optimized for virtual world use and it contains about 1200 unique meshes and about 20 different materials.

Announcing iKaenkky

pallarim — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:32:50 +0000

Based on a popular website, Kaenkky.com, I’m proud to present first version of iKaenkky. iKaenkky is an iPhone software which locates pizza, kebab or other kaenkky places near you. The places are fetched from kaenkky.com service which is very popular in Oulu area, but also restaurants from other cities exist in the service.

The software fetches restaurant information from kaenkky.com API with REST in JSON format. On iPhone side I used objective-c JSON framework to parse the data and iphone-google-maps-component to display all data. Location information is fetched with iPhones own CoreLocation component.

iKaenkky is still in very early stage and there is tons of stuff to improve. Some people will get it for testing as early beta quite soon, but full release date is yet to be announced.

Re-thinking inventory

pallarim — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 08:07:07 +0000

Since the realXtend team started making the new viewer, we stepped out and started to re-think some of the related issues. One of those is inventory. We started to look what inventory is, what does it do and what we can do with it.

For first thing, inventory consists of folders and items in those folders. Items can be textures, meshes, prims and so on. Sometimes user may want to share folder to his friend.

Access to inventory must also secured so that other users or hostile simulators can’t steal, destroy or modify users assets. This is why the inventory must be separated from the simulator.

So as a summary: we want inventory to be a filesystem that is served to user across the internet. This might sound a bit hard, but luckily John Hurliman pointed out that there is already a standard for this: IETF RFC 2518 or more generally known as WebDAV.

On beginning of May John Hurliman kicked off a project WebDAVSharp. This is a project that extends the C# WebServer project with WebDAV. We use the project itself inside Cable Beach. It’s now been awhile since we started and we are now seeing light at end of the tunnel. We are now able to browse through our inventory with MS Explorer which has WebDAV functionality built in. Although it looks promising, it is still missing some core features like ACL, ways of downloading items etc.

New realXtend community site opens

pallarim — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 06:19:45 +0000

Last night Matteo Ligas announced about new realXtend community site and simulator, reXpioneers.com. What is notable and was not said in the announcement is that the simulator is running ModreX on top of OpenSim. In the sim there isn’t much yet, but as said in the announcement it is going to be community effort.

Anyway, congratulations and salut to people behind reXpioneers.com.

realXtend NG preview

pallarim — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:28:55 +0000

As you might know that realXtend team is working hard on the new viewer and there has been lots of effort to get a release out by end of June. Here are couple of preview videos how the viewer looks like. The viewer is in videos connected to ModreX enabled OpenSim. In that simulator are assets imported from the 0.4 Beneath the Waves. The first video shows the new Caelum sky with couple of bots in the island. The second one shows how the dynamic shadows are rendered near the underwater dome.

How OpenID works

pallarim — Thu, 28 May 2009 10:25:43 +0000

As you might know we are planning on using OpenID as our identity provider with rex-NG, Cable Beach being the relay provider. Here is a short video explaining how OpenID works and why we think OpenID is way to go. This video is brought to you by myVidoop.com

Refactored ModreX ClientView

pallarim — Wed, 20 May 2009 06:55:11 +0000

I did a bit of refactoring to the clientview class in ModreX. Now if the protocol changes in some way, we can move the corresponding method from RexClientViewBase to RexClientViewLegacy, mark the method iteself to abstract or virtual and add the alternative implementation to new client view class. In this diagram we have modified the SendRexObjectProperties implementation and added an alternative client view class: RexClientViewBob.

The diagram itself was created with: http://yuml.me/

Generic Grid Server Concept branch

pallarim — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 08:51:38 +0000

On February 25th MW wrote to OpenSim developer mailing list about making Grid mode servers to set of plugins and modules. Since that a lot has happened: features have been converted to modules, grid and user server converted to plugins etc. In this post I’m going to explain what it currenty does and what it can do.

Before going to details a couple of explanations:
Plugin = Mono.Addins style Application plugin, see: How to create a dynamic plugin
Module = IRegionModule style dynamic plugin, see: IRegionModule

Current branch (revision 8975) has already User server and Grid server converted to plugins which can be loaded to same process. Also features of both these two servers have been converted to modules and User server plugin can load them dynamically. After a talk with MW aobut the module loading we have decided that module loading should be in its own plugin since all pluings might need the feature.

After that I have written a patch to OpenSim mantis, which implements this ModuleLoaderPlugin and allows dynamic module loading of grid modules.

“So what good is this?”, someone might ask. This allows to create separate modules for user server, grid server and maybe to other grid servers later on. One could for example create a module which checks the version information of the client. Or create a new login protocol. Possibilities are endless.

New release of ModreX allows Hypergridding

pallarim — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:29:59 +0000

It has been month since last release of the ModreX. New release contains the long waited support for multiple regions. Although grid mode isn’t yet supported, the new release allows user to connect to other simulators with hyper grid.

To run your ModreX enabled sim in hypergrid mode see OpenSim documentation about the subject. See also Paul Fishwick’s blog entry about the hypergridding.