Version 0.20.0 of the Virtual Object System (VOS), with related application libraries and tools, has been released. This version represents a major rewrite of the core system from the previous versions and has been a long time coming, and we hope you will find it interesting!
See http://interreality.org for more information, or read on for key changes and more about VOS and the project…
The Virtual Object System (VOS) provides a flexible object-oriented system to describe, relate and and manipulate information over the network, simplifying application development. The Interreality project is a collection of Open Source, Free Software projects based on the VOS platform. The goal of the Interreality project is to develop a free and open platform for multiuser 3D virtual reality and interactive, collaborative 3D virtual spaces. As part of this effort we have developed the Virtual Object System, a powerful networking protocol and C++ implementation that has also been applied to many applications outside of virtual reality including hypertext content management with revision control and graphical user interfaces. The VOS community is small but growing and we invite you to join us.
The Interreality website is at http://interreality.org
Major features of this release include:
- Multithreaded architecture based on thread pools; VOS code is threadsafe
- Extension system allowing users to modify any aspect of Vobject behavior at runtime
- Flexible security model supporting identities and groups
- The Abstract 3D Layer has been implemented as a plugin to the Crystal Space 3D engine, this makes it easy to use VOS to develop multiuser 3D applications with Crystal Space
- Application framework providing support for command line parsing, configuration files and dynamically loaded plugins
- Plugin-based OmniVOS server makes it easy to configure a custom VOS server for a variety of tasks
- Persistance layer can keep site state up-to-date in MySQL database or filesystem
- New search language for selecting and downloading many objects at once
- Blender Python script to export Blender 3D scenes to A3DL
- Debian packages available
- Portable to Linux, Solaris, MacOSX and Windows
Please note that the VOS 3D client “Ter’Angreal” has been rewritten from scratch and unfortunately does not support most of the features present in the previous release. As it is lacks much in the way of friendly end-user applications, this release is intended mainly for developers and people interested in testing and working with VOS as the applications develop further.
reed