Before Rei was released at the end of September, it was called 3Di OpenViewer. That version didn’t need to download textures through the region server, rather, it would download assets (textures, meshes, avatars) directly from dedicated asset servers. For this reason, when someone logged in to an upstream OpenSim grid with 3Di OpenViewer, textures and avatars would not appear.
But that changed when we released Rei as an open-source viewer at the end of September. At that time, textures were already being fetched from OpenSim. You can go ahead and grab the installer from github and it will display textures. What it won’t do with textures is correctly apply UV coordinates in some (fortunately very rare) twisted-hollow-prim cases (but it was more about PrimMesher than Rei). Since September, we have done many improvements to PrimMesher - and Rei too, so now even those rare cases appear correctly (big thanks to the bug reporters). Texture downloads are slow unfortunately, but more on that later.
Now this is a very delicate issue. The heart of the issue is that currently there is no non-LL viewer that supports SecondLife™ avatars. Let me say that again: there are no viewers that support SL™ avatars. Naali has a built-in mesh (the same as their old viewer), IdealistViewer has a built-in mesh, LookingGlass doesn’t yet have avatars (correct me if it does), Xenki doesn’t have an avatar yet as far as I know either.
The closest a viewer gets to SL avatar support is the PandaViewer by dahlia (http://vimeo.com/6812213) , which supports avatar shapes and actually looks really nice. Unfortunately it’s not open source (yet?), nor is it available in any form.
The thing with avatar support is that it’s pretty difficult to do right. No, not only technically, but there’s the issue of using or not using Linden Labs™’s original mesh. You can find downloadable meshes, but there is a nice warning hidden neatly inside an obj file:
This model is released for use by residents of Second Life. It may be imported into external 3D modeling, texturing, and animation applications to aid in the creation of character animations and textures for Second Life, as well as for any non-commercial purpose. Use or modification of this model for any other commercial purpose is prohibited without the express written consent of Linden Lab.
With all this said, we are looking at SL™ avatar support. It definitely won’t happen before the end of this year, the target is early next year.
Of course Rei still has issues with upstream OpenSim support. This is partially due to the very very bad way textures are downloaded (through a single server, in UDP). The truth is, even the SL™ viewer chokes on those: in heavy regions it would download the low resolution image, but the full image is never actually downloaded. My personal opinion is that the sooner we can break free from that way of transferring assets to clients, the better (guess how 3Di OpenViewer delivers content, through dedicated asset servers). Hopefully OpenSim will not remain an SL™ clone and there will be lots of innovations in the virtual world space coming from OpenSim. Rei is supposed to show what is possible when we can control both the viewer and the server side without the fear of not being able to work on one or the other for six months.
So, what do you think of the viewer so far? What sort of improvements do you think would be nice? What do you think is missing, other than the avatar support?
In general, what are the things you absolutely expect from a virtual world viewer?
Let me know in the comments.