redbaron {l Wrote}:Hi all! Saw info about the game on happypenguin. I have few questions as we looking for platform for building something similair to virtual worlds (a-la second life) but not in so big scale. Here they are:
1. Does your scripting engine have abilities of interacting with outer world? I mean on some event do HTTP Post reuqest or any other way to tell third-party system about event?
Yes. There is a server plugin, for example, that uses HTTP to scrape the active servers, and it generates portals for them in the lobby. Such plugins are written in Python, so this stuff is very convenient to do. Some of these plugins are experimental, but I would be happy to polish them up for normal use, if you or anyone else is actively using them.
2. Does it support loading media files from web and showing them on surfaces? Like video or jpeg images. Streaming without full buffering would be ideal
There is an experimental VLC plugin, shown in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pue-wRGa6yU. Also an experimental plugin for showing web pages. It wouldn't be hard to show jpeg images. All of this uses an existing function that lets you update surface textures dynamically.
3. How big the worlds could be? I am intrested mostly not in scale of level, but in ammount of entities on level, number of scripts, their sizes etc.
Well, it really depends on the kind of entity, what scripts, etc. As one example, the Razanak game has over 1,000 entities (mainly simple ones like lights, but not only) and runs a lot of constant scripts. CPU usage on the server is 2%-10%, and less than 100MB. Overall I would claim that this technology is much more scalable than Second Life (and even more so, for OpenSim), but the comparison is not entirely apples-to-apples.
In general, a major goal in this project is to have a
lightweight open source virtual worlds platform, so we are focused on that.
4. Can't find any example of possibilty to import models from 3DMax/Maya/Blender
Anything that can export MD5 will work (and basically everything can). See our wiki page -
http://wiki.syntensity.com/creating/models - and the cube documentation it links to. Also the cube wiki has some pages on exporting details.