Naali on the Nokia N900

If your not a big reader skip to the bottom and at least check out the video!

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I bought a Nokia N900 phone recently. It's a great device and has a lot of potential with the linux based Maemo5 OS and the processing power. First I made some simple small application in Qt to test how it's done and learned a lot. The thing was that these application didn't do or show anything that could be useful for anyone.

Hmm... why not build Naali for that thing? Is it too heavy to run, what about the 3D rendering? What about building Ogre and all the other dependencies? Only way to find out is to give it a try. I had a 4 day easter holiday (extended weekend) coming up so I started the home project then. I made slow but steady progress during these days. Building ARM versions of Ogre and all the deps were the biggest challenge for sure.

Naali itself didn't need that much work, just disabling some modules and I got myself the first build. As an end result I had Naali that started from the terminal and opened a QMainWindow that had ogre rendering to it. The UI was not showing, the window was just black. Oh... I also had one pissed girlfriend for not spending the holiday with her. She watched/listened me swear and curse on the computer for days, thanks Susanna for putting up with me ;)

On the next workday I showed this "thing" to my co-workers. Didn't get that good of a welcome as... well it didn't do anyting. So next few days I worked on actually showing something and doing a login. I made a simple timer into rexlogic to blast a hardcoded login away when Naali was done loading. And what do you know, it went in and showed me a bringht yellow Audi world. As I later discovered it was the EnvironmentModule doing this, it also crashed the viewer every time terrain was fully loaded. So I disabled the module, after that everything started to load and most importantly look good with the GLES rendering. Of course the sky was black and terrain had no texture due to disabling the module, but our target world is indoors so that didn't matter at the moment.

Next I showed this thing at work and then I got some peoples interest peaking. Then it became my job to make this thing "working" and in demo shape in 1-2 weeks. I took the challenge, did my best and here is the result.

The video demos everything I've managed to do so far specifically for the Maemo platform. This includes removing the normal Naali UI and remaking a simple UI for the interactions that we were interested in, without obstructing the world view too much. Some small adjustments in the window creation. I also tweaked the input system to work with a touch screen and made some special camera controls. Probably I missed something, small changes were required here and there.

Check out the video at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP7zty5Kg7g

Best Regards,

Jonne Nauha

realXtend developer

Using Facebook chat with Naali

Since Facebook opened its chat to Jabber/XMPP clients, it has been available to be used with Naali. Now you already can have your Facebook friends list in Naali and chat with people with it. Voice chat, however, doesn't work, because the Facebook chat doesn't support it. You can view your jabber id and server settings from the Facebook guide.

New UI in development

The new Naali platform is still some way behind the original realXtend viewer when it comes to feature completeness. It seems that our original predictions were correct, however, and the new technology enables us to create new features and fix issues at a high rate. One of the aspects we will be looking into a lot more in the near future is the user interface.

Until now UI design has been driven by the need to have some kind of a way to access the functionalities mostly for testing purposes. After the release of the 0.1 version (Don't forget to pick yours here) we will be concentrating a bit more on the UI side. Here's a brief explanation on the new approach by Jonne Nauha (typos are all mine):

Ether concept

We have had some actual UI design meetings now and decided on some high level consepts. One of them is "ether space" versus "inworld space". Th e aim is to have "ether" as the view where you land in when you launch Naali. It will be the place to make logins, create new avatars, create new worlds and possibly access tools/settings for the viewer. We would like to get rid of the "write your information to these text fields" approach. Of course this is somewhat necessary when creating avatars /worlds, but in basic use the workflow should be "I'll pick this avatar, I'll pick this world, ok lets go" -type of thing.

We tried to think of a simple and at the same time nice looking and inviting thing, so we started prototyping a "flip book" type of thing that resembles iTunes cover flow, but for virtual worlds. Me and Mikko Alaluusua have worked on this for a few days now and have got something together already. We did this out of Naali codebase with QtCreator and used pure Qt, namely the Qt animation framework is used heavily. The cards get loaded into a scene that is shown in a full screen graphics view, so it will be easy to port into Naali.

The fps in my capture software was too low to show the animations fluently and somehow it altered the colors too, but you should be able to get the idea. The navigation is WASD or arrow keys, and we'll add mouse selection functionality to the "cards" too. The background image and other graphics are only for prototyping, not what will eventually be included in Naali. For now the avatars have the basic image of the naali (arctic fox) and worlds all share the globe image. The idea with the images is that your avatar's screenshot will be inserted there and it is updated when you change your appearance or logout (not really decided yet) and for the world images a screenshot is taken from the position you last left the world in question.

Inworld widget interaction

The inworld widgets will probably stay with the slim frame or maybe some styling will be done there with proper graphics. The main thing inworld would be to get rid of the age old toolbar at the top of the screen. We are now close to 10 widgets and they will only increase in numbers when we go forward. We were thinking of giving each corner inworld a certain type like widgets on the top left, notifications / status things on the top right, messaging on the lower left etc. Of course the positions or the final look are not firmly decided yet. But at least I would like to remake the "widget toolbar" into something icon based and add some snappy animations like some kind of a layered menu that has sub groups for widgets like interacting, world building etc.

Also some kind of workspaces would be nice to make. So you could make different UI views and swap between them fast to get to your tools. A little bit like operating systems have multiple desktop views that have their own set of applications and you can move apps between them.

UI for interacting with objects and people

We also need something similar to pie menu we all know and love/hate :) There hasn't been any decisions about this yet, but some kind of a hovering "info card" for things you want to interact is the goal. This infocard could follow the avatar / object that you have interest in or it could be pinned to a position. The idea for these cards would be that there would be a viewport (camera) to the item, for example the avatars face that you clicked or movable view of a object you are interacting with. Also this card would have quick selections for sending messages to a user etc. This will also be the most challenging thing if we do it purely on Qt that needs an ogre viewport rendered to it. Right now all info that is showed of people is a static 2D overlay that has the avatars name. And if this is the best we can do with ogre then we probably go with Qt on these infocards.

Schedule

The aim is to get most of this done by the march release. It may be that "ether space" will have 70% of the defined features, inworld "info cards" 50% etc. as its hard to know what obstacles there will be ahead. Especially when our Ogre+Qt is a special thing without paint events that there always can be something unsuspected outcomes of this, good example is that we had fully working video calls in Naali IM before we moved them inside the scene and now gstreamer doesent render the video to the window handle.

Naali 0.1(first public rc) released!

This is it. There are still a number of bugs to fix (some of the code heroes sitting right next to me are currently hard at work fixing and tweaking) and an incredible number of new features to do, but as the version number 0.1 suggests more than a final product this really is a glimpse of things to come. Nevertheless and although I might be considered partial, I still think it's already quite interesting and suggest you try it out for yourselves. Let's take a quick look.



Swimming with the fishes is as pretty as ever. There's of course a lot of room for optimization, but the graphical capabilities have traditionally been one of the focus points in our development and that won't change with the new Naali viewer. You can connect to existing realXtend and OpenSim worlds (sorry, walking between regions is still in the works) or host your own with the realXtend server (new version to be released soon).

Here's a shot of the user interface. We're currently working on enhancements to the visuals and a new layout for the UI, this is an example of some of the functionality. Note that I'm logged in with my Jabber account, which makes it possible for me to communicate with the outside world as well. Currently it's also possible to make video calls (and only video calls, yes, we're working on it) and we have quite a few ideas about future development for the communications module.

Ok pay attention, everyone, because now comes the really important part! We started the work on the new viewer and server software because we had a lot of ideas on how to improve realXtend, but the software architecture we had at the time didn't offer the kind of room for expansion we were looking for. Naali does. And not only room for us to work with, but for everyone interested in it as well. realXtend is an open source project where everyone can participate. The code is available under the liberal Apache 2 license, grab yours today right after you test the binary we prepared for you.

We would love to have your input on what you think about the new viewer as well as the bug reports that will inevitably be generated now that more and more people start testing the software. From now on we intend to make new binary releases more often, which means you will get to see the new features relatively quickly even if you don't want to build the code yourself. The Naali viewer is designed to be cross-platform and we have run tests on Linux, Mac support is on the way as well. I hope there are some enthusiastic Mac and Linux users who would like to join the community and together make sure Naali works equally well on all the platforms.

Get the software here:
http://code.google.com/p/realxtend-naali/

Here you can find discussion on realXtend software:
http://groups.google.com/group/realxtend
http://groups.google.com/group/realxtend-dev

If you run into bugs, please let us know here (please check for known issues first):
http://code.google.com/p/realxtend-naali/issues/list

We will be explaining the new features in more detail on this blog soon, you might also want to browse the existing documentation here:
http://wiki.realxtend.org/index.php/Main_Page

Tutorial to import scene from Blender to realXtend

Requirements:
Blender
Ogre mesh exporter plugin (http://www.ogre3d.org/wiki/index.php/Blender_Exporter)
Ogre scene exporter plugin (http://www.ogre3d.org/wiki/index.php/Blender_dotScene_Exporter)
ModreX trunk or branch 0.1.2-rc



First you need to export all meshes from the scene. Select all meshes in scene by pressing 'a'. Then select OGRE mesh export tool from File->Export->OGRE Meshes. Ensure that you have selected all meshes from the "Selected" box. Select your favorite options and ensure that you have selected at least options "Fix Up Axis to Y" and OgreXMLConverter. OgreXMLConverter option may require that you specify the path to your OgreXMLConverter in the properties section.



In some cases not all textures are copied to the destination directory. To export textures from .blender file select File->External Data->Unpack into files. This will extract all textures from scene to location of your .blender file.



After exporting meshes you need to also export the scene file. This includes information on where the objects are placed in the scene. Select scene export tool from File->Export->OGRE Scene. In this dialog, ensure that all meshes are selected and that "Fix Up Axis to Y" is NOT selected.



Now after exporting scene and mesh files, we are ready to import them. Copy scene-, material-, mesh and texture files to OpenSim bin folder. Ensure that the name of the scene and material files are same expect for the file extension of course. Boot up your simulator if it isn't already running. Apply offset if necessary with command "ogrescene offset x,y,z", where x, y and z are the offset values of x, y and z axis. X and Y values of the objects in Scene file need to be between 0-256m and Z needs to be higher than 0. Otherwise the objects won't show up. By applying the offset command you can affect these values. Note that usually waterlevel in OpenSim is at 20 meters. Import scene with command "ogrescene import X", where X is the name of the scene without the .scene file extension.



After inputting the import command it may take a while to import all the objects. Sometimes there might be errors when importing the scene or when exporting to OGRE format and objects might not view exactly the same as in Blender.


Notes by Antti: The above example .blend file was retrieved from this site: http://gryllus.net/Blender/StudentGallery.html

Also note that the export tools for blender are quite specific about the format of the textures. You need to create UV maps for the textures and have the TexFace selection on in the Blender material menu.

ModreX region in OSGrid

This is a feature that many people have asked for: the ability to use grid mode with ModreX. We have now made this simple test server for testing interoperability of ModreX regions in an OpenSim grid.



Getting the region in ModreX mode is a pretty straightforward procedure. First configure your region according to OSGrid instructions, then modify ModreX configurations. First thing to do is to enable the default Event Queue and disable RexEventQueue. Without this, once entered to ModreX region, one can't teleport or walk out of it. Second thing to set is the client stack plugin. Set clientstack_plugin configuration to "ModularRex.dll" instead of the default LL. This makes UDP listener spawn RexClientViews instead of LLClientViews. This is important when using realXtend features like meshes, particle scripts and so on.

Final thing to notice from ModreX options is the ClientView option. By default this option is in mode compatible. The compatible mode is ment for interoperability purposes, it supports both LL and realXtend clients. However there is a drawback, compatible mode doesn't support smaller avatar update messages. This means that clients spend twice as much bytes on avatar update messages in compatible mode than in Naali or 0.4 mode. Both Naali and 0.4 mode do support these smaller avatar update messages, but SL client crashes on these messages, so these modes shouldn't be used in grids where SL clients are also used. Differences with Naali and 0.4 modes aren't that great, but as you can expect 0.4 supports the older realXtend clients and their features and is also compatible with Naali clients. Naali mode contains a bit more experimental packets that aren't handled properly in realXtend 0.4 series clients.

Now that the region is configured it can be added to the grid. Although you can see from the picture that the region is working in the grid it is still lacking some features. User needs to press Shift+R (on the 0.42 realXtend viewer) to switch to OGRE rendering and to view the scene properly. Currently grid mode doesn't support realXtend authentication or realXtend avatars. Also at time of the testing there were some problems uploading textures and the physics engine crashed few times. Mediaurls are disabled from the client since it didn't receive rex_mode flag in login response.

0.0.2 preview release of next-generation realXtend software

Sorry for all the blogspamming, I know it's only been a bit over a year since I last wrote to this blog. After becoming the project manager for the realXtend team I didn't have as much time for blogging as I used to, which resulted in the long period of silence. There have been some changes in the organization as well and no more meeting logs to report, because the development teams in different companies are now seeing each other more in the real world. From now on this blog should be getting more lively (not referring to the Google product) and interesting, when our developers start to write about their work and achievements.

So what has happened since September 2008? The most important change was the decision to start building a next-generation realXtend platform in early 2009. The world server is still based on OpenSimulator, but now we have the ModreX project, which makes it a lot easier for us to integrate with OpenSim. The authentication and content delivery services are all new and we also have a built-from-scratch viewer known as Naali (Arctic Fox in Finnish). You can find a lot more information about Naali and Taiga (the next-generation realXtend servers) on their respective wiki sites, in this post I will cover some of the highlights of the latest release.

• Naali Wiki
• Taiga Wiki

It is important to note that Naali and Taiga are still in very early stages of development as the version number 0.0.2 suggests. The first end-user release of the next-generation platform is scheduled for early 2010. All the code is of course always available through our website, this release is meant for those of you who don't want to build the code daily, but are interested in our work. START SUBLIMINAL MESSAGE We would also like to give you all a chance to relatively easily see for yourselves what we have done and get interested enough to join the realXtend platform development. END SUBLIMINAL MESSAGE When you notice functionality missing or something lacking in the new release, keep in mind that the shiny new realXtend platform is built to be modifiable and modular so that YOU can participate. A good place to get started is our general or the more developer-oriented mailing list.

So, what can you expect from the 0.0.2 version released today? Let's take a look.

This rather innocent shot of Mikko showing off with his dual-monitor system becomes frightening when you realize that the round little island looks a lot like my head rising out of the ocean. You can see some of the inventory and editing windows in this screen.


Here you can see some of the interesting properties of the new technology. A couple of the users are logged in using the traditional realXtend avatar service, others have OpenSimulator authentication and one of them uses the new OpenID-based method. One of the most important features for us is the ability to easily move between worlds without dependencies to central authorities and OpenID seems to fit the bill quite nicely.


This picture shows the guys packaging Naali 0.0.2 downloads. We expect to get a lot of traffic, but there should be enough Naalis for everyone.


Here's Stompy the Robot, an important part of any packaging / delivery operation found in many post offices worldwide.


This is Jonne showing off the functionalities of the current user interface. Note the Jabber-based communication window that allows you to send messages to other Jabber users and the world chat functionality in the lower left corner. In the background, Stompy and his friend Crunchy are making sure that your packages arrive safely and usually take less space than when they were sent. Naali uses the OGRE rendering engine to deliver the goods.


I hope the little teaser got you interested enough to check out our wiki. There's a lot of good information there and when you come up with more questions, you can join us on the mailing lists. START LIE Don't worry, we won't try to get you to contribute to our little project and together make the virtual world a bit better place. END LIE

I would like to thank all the developers for the amazing job so far. The goals we had at the beginning of 2009 were pretty ambitious, but you have delivered time after time and I look forward to the final push towards the first end-user release set for beginning of 2010.