OVW Meeting 6

I am happy to announce the 6th Open Virtual World meeting.

Topics:

• Current developments
• Roadmap
• Items on web pages
• Item server architecture
• Item protocol
• Q&A

Date: Monday, October 3rd, 2011, 18:00 h GMT+2

Place: Haus 73, Schulterblatt, Hamburg, Germany

Come join us. The meeting is open to everyone, devs, users, supporters...

UPDATE:
Live: https://plus.google.com/hangouts/extras/talk.google.com/openvirtualworld-meeting-6

Web Avatar Ready for Developers

Just in time for GDC Europe 2011: the Open Virtual World client is now "Ready for Developers" who want to build their apps on the Web Avatar platform.

The Open Virtual World client is

• a Web Avatar platform.
• a Concurrent Casual Gaming platform
• a platform where you can build your casual game

The Open Virtual World client has

• an avatar on every web page
• a WebKit based rendering engine
• modules and APIs
• everything a client app needs: protocols, logging, configuration
• open source

"Ready for Developers" means:

• it is working
• it can be used by developers
• it is not ready for end users
• it needs customization and packaging
• it needs gaming extensions and a game server if you want your users to do gaming
• it needs an item shop and inventory if you want to sell virtual goods
• it needs integration with your user profiles if you want to make the Web Avatar as a feature for existing games
• it is not a product yet
• but: it is a working platform for you to make a product
• and: it is free and open source

The Open Virtual World project will soon publish a complete client which users can download. Until then, developers get early access to the platform.

Need help? mail to openvirtualworld@gmail.com

Three Musketeers

Chrome support arrived.

We now have extensions for all 3 major browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer. See the image where I am on this blog page with my avatar and 3 different browsers at the same time.

If my avatar moves in one browser, then it moves in all browsers. If I chat in one browser, I chat in all at the same time. The client logs in to the chat room only once. But the avatar is shown on all browsers.

This is very different from weblin where you could only be on a page with on browser. Other browsers of the same page/domain had no avatars at all.

Initially I wanted to defer Chrome support until after the release. But it is much better to have Chrome support, because I Chrome is my main browser. The client needs lots of day to day testing. Now it is being tested all the time while I am doing my normal web browsing.

By the way: a weblin just private chatted to me, but there is no private chat yet. I just saw it in the logfile, but I could not reply. Do we need private chat early?

Roadmap Update

The core software of the client is ready to be released. I am already using the client day to day. I wish there were a Google Chrome extension. But it has only Firefox and IE currently. So I am using more Firefox than usual.

The biggest remaining problem: although the software is ready, it needs configuration. If you have a web server which hosts an avatar description and if you have an XMPP account and if you are prepared to add both to the config file like I did for my tests, then the software works for you. This is probably not the case for most of you. Therefore, I have to add a bit of auto-configuration before I can release the software (is this correct?). I can release now, but would you want it with so much work on your side? Tell me what you think.

Anyway, I updated the roadmap and I will keep it up to date from now. Here is the task list:

IE Plugin, Installer, Setup, VS10, Support Software

Just a short notice what's currently happening: I am working on

• some issues with the IE support. Stability is very good, but avatars were "behind" the browser window
• installer for the IE extension
• simple setup process which starts after downloading/installing, where you can select install browser extensions, select a nickname/avatar.
• I upgraded to MS Visual Studio 2010. There are some migration issues to be solved. But I feel, that it is better to migrate now than during the beta phase.
• There is now a separate code repository for the WebKit SDK. It has 1.5 GB headers, libraries and DLLs, which are needed to build and run the WebView module. Surprisingly the result is not larger than 10 MB.

Still next on the list:

• Finishing Setup and browser extension installers
• Simple Web site
• Installer packaging and final testing

Asynchronous and Messaging

Our extensive unit test suite discovered, that

• if two WebKit instances are loaded simultaneously, which use the same JS file from the local disk, then initializing one of the JS engines sometimes fails.

The average WebKit programmer will never experience this. The average WebKit programmer uses WebKit to make a web browser. And web browsers do not create many instances simultaneously. You press CTRL-T to open a new tab. Then another. Not two at the same time. Especially not from the local file system. Maybe that's the reason why nobody discovered the "feature" before.

Anyway, this means, that creation of WebKits must be serialized. This in turn, introduces all kinds of asynchronous behavior, which must be handled properly in many places. Asynchronous programming is always more challenging than spaghetti coding. Fortunately the client is message based. The image shows events which wait for other things to complete, before they are forwarded. In other words: the display must be loaded before it can show something. As simple as that.

This kept me busy several evenings and made a huge commit. Now I can continue with the setup/install process.

Internet Explorer Plugin, Autostart and System Tray

Three of the remaining six tasks are done:

• IE Support: I implemented an IE browser helper which connects to the client and tells about opening and closing of tabs, about URL navigation and tab switches.
• System Tray Icon: a small fun project. Since the client has no window, we need something else to control it. I created a small system tray icon which can start and stop the client.
• Autostart: this was the easiest task. Just a registry setting, configured by the system tray icon menu.

Now remaining:

• Settings dialog (do we really need this, we could start with config files and add a settings dialog later)
• Simple Web site
• Installer packaging and final testing

Next is the Web site. We need some place to download the installer and a simple way to configure the avatar, e.g. change animations and nickname.

Finally, we have to bundle all files and create an installer for Firefox and IE extensions. Not a simple task, especially the IE installer. And finally, finally there is much testing required because we want the installer to do it's job smoothly.