News

10 Mar 2004 You can now access the new web page running on the HyperVOS server at http://interreality.org/wwwvos/home.

HyperVOS is a web server that represents web documents and data using Vobjects, forming a tree similar to the XML Document Object Model (DOM) data structure. It allows you to organize the parts of a document hierarchically at arbitrary granularity, and supports templates with parameter substitution. The structure is stored in a MySQL database for long-term persistance.

You can access the structure using S4 Mesh by connecting to: vop://interreality.org:4238. The default policy is read-only, so you won't be able to screw up the actual VOS page. We are thinking of making a "sandbox" area where people can experiment, if there is interest. Presently you have to use Mesh to edit the tree, but Reed has begun work on "Metalurgy" which will be a GUI object tree/property editor. I've also been thinking about implementing on-line editing within hypervos, allowing you to edit the object tree from within the web browser.

As you can tell, there isn't really any content -- so far I've been working on the layout, and then getting running on the interreality.org server (as opposed to my laptop where I do development). Over the next couple weeks we'll start importing content into hypervos; when that's done it will become the new VOS web page.

-- tetron

15 Dec 2003 Sebastian Malcolm (syb) has put up a gallery of VOS-related images.

10 Dec 2003 Progress update: We are currently working on an overhaul of the core VOS library to utilize and support threading, as well as make Metaobject extension more flexible and improve access control. This project and the new version is called S4. S4 will greatly improve application performace and usability, especially on certain platforms and in combination with other frameworks, such as wxWindows and CrystalSpace. In addition, the protocol, source code and documentation will be cleaned up, and dead code and usused features removed. We hope to clean up TerAngreal's code a lot, and the auxilliary (non-VOS) libraries will be available as seperate packages as well. Expect lots of progress on S4 and TerAngreal after the new year. See mailing list posts here and (previously) here for more information about S4.

Also check out this screenshot of the Mozilla web browser rendered on a polygon. Pete has been working on this neat addition to CrystalSpace for a little while: expect it to be supported in the next version of TerAngreal. (More info here, as well)

29 Sep 2003 Version 0.12.2 has been released: this fixes several building/packaging bugs in 0.12.1 source release. (The functionality is the same) Download source code here. The 0.12.1 binary package for Windows is still available and is compatible. Sorry that it took so long to get this together! We are also thinking about release 0.13 soon, with a couple of very important new features for users of Ter'Angreal.

5 Sep 2003 You may now download version 0.12.1. New features in this release:

Binaries for Ter'Angreal are available for Windows
The VOS<-->IRC bridge script now supports transmitting user joins and leaves between chat spaces and listing the users in the other chat space
Ter'Angreal supports volumetric fog in a sector
Avatar movement under physics simulation has been improved
The servicelist daemon should be a bit more stable
Work has begun on the VRMLServer, to tightly integrate VRML support into VOS
The usual bugfixes, tweaks and magic...

12 Aug 2003 At long last, version Version 0.12.0 is now available. New features in this release:

This version introduces the Compact Object Description (COD) file format, which allows for loading and saving vobjects to disk and for efficiently transferring vobjects over the network.
The time required to download a virtual world has be greatly reduced, especially on high-latency links.
It is now possible to create VOS worlds using Blender (using a python export script) or 3D Studio Max (using the "a3dlconverter" utility).
The Abstract 3D Layer (A3DL) has been revised to better handle materials and textures, and more efficiently describe 3D geometry. A3DL also has preliminary support for portals (viewports going from one world to another).
There is a now complete set of coding tutorials available to introduce programmers to the VOS API.
VOS now supports applying low-level filters to message traffic.
VOS now supports output buffering (previously it only buffered incoming data).
Blocking operations like connect() and gethostbyname() are now done in a separate thread to avoid stalling the entire application.
Header files have been rearranged to make it easier to use VOS in external projects.
VOS now compiles on Solaris, bringing the list of supported platforms to Linux, Macintosh OS X, Solaris and Microsoft Windows.

9 July 2003 A prerelease of Version 0.12.0 is now available for testing. Please try it out and report any problems!

16 June 2003 Version 0.12.0 will be released soon...

26 Febuary 2003 By the way, if you don't see any worlds in the world list, try entering vop://interreality.org:4232/world into the URL box when you start Ter'Angreal. This is the demo server which the virtual web cam is connected to.

26 Febuary 2003 Version 0.11.1 is out!

This version introduces new code to discover the hostname of the computer it is running on, necessary to connect to other VOS sites (like the world server). As it turned out, this was a major snag that prevented many people from logging on. This means the VOS_HOSTNAME workaround described below should no longer be necessary.
The other major snag, a bug which caused the servicelist daemon to crash on our server (which meant people wouldn't see the world even if it was actually running), has also been fixed ;-)
Various other bugs have been found and squashed.
In honor of having a several meters of snow dropped on us over the course of this winter, we have added atmospheric effects -- it's snowing in the demo world!
The Windows binary package has been updated. Debian packages for 0.11.1 will be available soon.

In addition, the mailing lists are back.

Some known issues with this release are:

Ter'Angreal's new GUI is not ready yet.
The Perl bindings (VOS.pm) are not working with Debian at the moment, so you can only get that from the source package.
The focus of the Windows release is Ter'Angreal; this means that all of the important stuff works on Windows but some miscellaneous stuff may not.
A possible bug in Ter'Angreal was fixed just after release. This bug (crashing when attempting to load your avatar's model) is not consistent and may or may not happen for you. It happened to me once on Linux and may have happened to at least one other person on Windown 98SE. (rh 28 February 2003)

13 Febuary 2003 I just realized that there is a problem with the 0.11.0 Windows package. VOS needs to determine the fully qualified domain name for client that it's running on, however it seems that the function that I am using to determine this domain name only returns the hostname! So instead of "host.domain.com" it reports "host". This is bad, because when the client tries to connect to the VOS world server the spoof checking code (which verifies that the reported host name of the peer is valid) will fail.

There is a workaround for this. If there is an environment variable "VOS_HOSTNAME" it will use that as the hostname instead of the default. So in the example, if you did

VOS_HOSTNAME=host.domain.com

and then ran terangreal in that environment, it will work properly (I just tested this, and I can easily connect to the world server from work using the current Windows binaries).

11 Febuary 2003 It is my pleasure to announce that Version 0.11.0 has been released! There are many, many changes in this version (this is only a partial list):

The VR client Ter'Angreal now supports rigid body physics using the Open Dynamics Engine. This provides collision detection and response.
VOS now has a service discovery system. In particular, this makes it very easy to find and join virtual worlds.
Ter'Angreal has been ported to Microsoft Windows. In this release it can be compiled "out of the box" on Microsoft Visual C++ 7.0. In addition, there is a win32 binary distribution of Ter'Angreal available for those who would like to try it out.
Binary Debian packages are also available. These packages were built on stable Debian 3.0 and should work on any Debian system using either the stable or unstable distribution.
This version supports the recent Crystal Space stable release 0.96.
We have an abstract graphical user interface system. Similarly to the way A3DL describes a 3D scene, this system expresses the layout of GUI as a collection of vobjects and is accessed using as special rendering client (Metatronic). This is the foundation for the Ter'Angreal user interface, although it is still incomplete in this release.
VOS contains a new helper library, "typehelper" which serves an abstract API for calling on helper applications in the same way that a web browser can call helper applications for unfamiliar media.
There is a new material type -- if one gives a 3D object a "text"ure of type "text/plain" the literal ASCII text will be rendered as the texture!
Ter'Angreal can now save chat logs to a file.
Playlistd, the VOS-based mp3 jukebox, can now stream to Shoutcast/Icecast servers.
A number of race conditions and other stability problems have been fixed.

11 Febuary 2003 If you want to talk to me, I'll be in the metaverse :-) However if the reason you want to talk to me is that you can't get IN to the metaverse, then I am "tetron" on irc.freenode.net in #vos and #crystalspace.

11 Febuary 2003 Version 0.11.0 has been uploaded. There is a massive list of new features which I will list here when I write the actual press release tomorrow :-)

4 January 2003 Happy New Year! We've been rather quiet for the past couple months, but that's because we've been hard at work! We intend to have a new release out in a couple weeks. In particular, we are working hard at porting VOS and Ter'Angreal to Windows and so we should have a binary distribution for Windows that anyone can try without having to compile anything :-) Other major new features include collision detection and rigid body physics simulation, a service discovery system (so that you can find other virtual worlds more easily) and a new VOS-based GUI system.

15 October 2002 Version 0.10.1 is now available. This fixes all known compilation problems, including problems with the Visual C++ project files, and updates Ter'Angreal to use Crystal Space smart pointers, so it will compile with the most recent CVS snapshots. In addition, x86 binary packages for Debian GNU/Linux are now available.

11 October 2002 It is my pleasure to announce that Version 0.10.0 is now available. Here are some highlights from this release:

Significant performance improvments -- a major bottleneck in the message processing code has been removed. VOS is quite fast now!
In Ter'Angreal (the 3D client), you will enter the world almost immediately and objects will appear as they are downloaded.
There is now support for issuing complex queries about an object structure on a site with the results streamed back. This greatly improves network utilization as it avoids many round trip time delays.
You can now write world servers in Perl.
There is a new demo world, "Conic Temple".
VOS has been ported to Microsoft Windows; project files are available for Visual C++ 7.0 (Visual Studio.NET).
Some parts of the protocol has been tweaked to be more efficient.
A premium assortment of tweaks, bugfixes, and chocolate truffles :-)

Source packages are available now, and updated binary packages should be available in a few days.

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