FreeGameDev

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?
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
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.
4. Can't find any example of possibilty to import models from 3DMax/Maya/Blender

The best thing I like about this project is it's flexibility, especially that according to wiki its possible to customize UI of clients. That's wonderfull.

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.

(darnit kripken, stop being so helpful, I'm trying to score some karma here! :P )

1. Not sure about this. I doubt it's possible atm, but it might happen later on. Hopefully kripken can shed some details on his views
2. There's a web-browser plugin, and a vlc plugin. The vlc plugin would handle streaming, but you'd need to setup the stream-server yourself.
3. Worlds are infinite, as you can link to other maps, and maps can be pretty large. 1km by 1km I think is the reasonable max, but you could do things like make the scale of your model smaller to make the world seem bigger.
4. You can import models from blender/max/maya you just have to export them to obj or md2/3/5 formats. Guides are on the wiki: http://wiki.syntensity.com/creating/models http://sauerbraten.org/docs/models.html http://cube.wikispaces.com/Blender+to+M ... auerbraten http://cube.wikispaces.com/Blender+Animated+Md3+Export example blend file used in Sauerbraten (same engine): http://cube.wikispaces.com/Mr+Fixit (this model is not free for reuse, attribution for GearTrooper)

TheAncientGoat {l Wrote}:(darnit kripken, stop being so helpful, I'm trying to score some karma here! :P )

That's --karma for you, since you just asked somebody to not be helpful.

charlie {l Wrote}:That's --karma for you, since you just asked somebody to not be helpful.

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