Ein Artikel auf heise Netze beschreibt die Konferenz der Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), bei der es um die Erschaffung von offenen Protokollen für Virtuelle Welten und Identitäten ging. Vertreter von Opensim, Weblin, Linden Lab und Forterra bemühen sich um einen offenen Standard, der den Austausch zwischen virtuellen Welten zum Ziel hat. Die Konferenz wurde als Audiostream übertragen, und die “Community at Large” konnte per Jabber/Chat teilnehmen.

Here’s a short demo of a text solution for Opensim, I built tonight: Text gets rendered in a proportional font, and displayed in Opensim.

Made with Python Imaging Library, Bitstream™ Vera Sans and Opensim. (And Ava100, the first image I uploadad onto our new grid.^^)

Adam Frisby, co-creator of OpenSim announced earlier this day on the Opensim-dev mailing list that he added a new transport protocol to the OpenSim server, MXP or Metaverse Exchange Protocol is being worked on.

“MXP concentrates on messages required for the defined 3d simulation model. MXP specification does not contain application specific concepts but acts as a transport layer for specialized interaction and state data described in Metaverse eXchange Markup Language (MXML).”

He also announced to have several Virtual Worlds Environments checked for “Openness” of the protocol and possible interoperability:

• ActiveWorlds: No protocol documentation, and the company running it is likely to get snippy and involve lawyers (of course if they say otherwise, I’d be happy to look into adding compatibility).
• There.com: Ditto, no protocol documentation.
• Forterra: No protocol docs, described us as “Communists” at a UK Serious Games Conf panel. Probably not a great choice.
• Croquet: No adapter being worked on (I was working on VastPark – which we started today and will finish tomorrow/weds.). Would be interesting to try however – would definitely need help from the Croquet team.
• Wonderland: A option if we can get past licensing issues (it’s all GPL). If their protocol docs are nicely licensed we could build a library from that for .NET. If they make a concession on their protocol libraries to LGPL, then we could IKVM them.

Here’s Adam’s blog post about both the collaboration with VastPark and the new protocol implementation; an article on Virtual Worlds News is here.

P.S.: Congratulations to @Prokofy on her new job at Forterra!

I’ve been teleporting around the smashing new Hypergrid experience this last night, and all I can say: Watch out, Second Life! All reasoning saying that Opensim would split the small scene into so many divided grids and cultures is nonexistent for me from today on. And OpenSimulator actually is the Apache of 3D environments.

Ah, and a Happy Birthday to OpenSimulator!

I’ve described the new URL scheme for Second Life and Opensim Grids and places in a previous article. Now with the latest update from subversion, the normal

python setup.py build ; su -c “python setup.py install”

is working under linux. Also I found how to run the URL handler directly from Firefox 3.0.5:

On my system, it is not sufficient, to simply define the protocol handlers in the about:config of Firefox.

network.protocol-handler.app.rezzme     (string) /usr/bin/rezzme.py
network.protocol-handler.app.rezzmes   (string) /usr/bin/rezzme.py

In addition to that, I had to define 2 boolean values, like:

network.protocol-handler.external.rezzme   (boolean) true
network.protocol-handler.external.rezzmes  (boolean) true

After that, the test URLs open fine by clicking. Please note, that the Urls need quite some time to open, while it works very fast from the commandline. Dunno why yet…

Update: The bad delay appears only when trying the example.net-link. Just ignore that^^

I found a nice new project yeasterday: The rezzme:// URI scheme is a method to bookmark virtual places that goes far deeper than the secondlife:// or SLurl system, which both are limited to Second Life.

Usage (examples):

• rezzme://example.net:9000/ (Log into a certain Simulator)

• rezzme://Torrid%20Luna@primforge.org:9009/ (" with a certain Avatar name)
• rezzme://opensim.zurich.ibm.com:9000/zurela/128/34/23 (Go to a special place within this Grid)

Of course, just defining a new URL scheme does nothing yet,  you need a program that understands the URL scheme.  Under http://forge.opensimulator.org/gf/project/rezzme/scmsvn/?action=AccessInfo there’s a protocol handler, written in Python/Qt4, that is able to parse the rezzme-Scheme and bookmark the URLs. It even enables you to define several different clients to open certain adresses with, so if you want to use the Meerkat or Hippo viewer for a certain address, this is no problem.

The handler is available for Win and Linux so far, a Mac version should follow soon. It simply saves the bookmarks and defined clients in 2 files in your home directory, .rezzme.clients and .rezzme.bookmarks. By adding the rezzmy.py program to your Firefox config you will be able to start these clients by simply clicking a Web URL.

Way cool.

tx Oh was at the Orange Island interoperability meeting. And he made an audio recording of the conference, I am hearing right now. Way interesting, the idea of merging 2D / Web2.0 with 3D / Web3.0: Instead of bringing the web to SL, take your avatar (and your friend’s ones) from SL to the two-dimensional Web and back.

Weblin (on the more flat side of the VW scene) seems to be an important part of it, because it exists with a good user base, has an open and transparent architecture, and it is really useful by itself.

[audio:http://primforge.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/interop-panel.mp3]