Virtual Object System

wxTer'Angreal now loads a default space instead of leaving you at a black screen. The demo world at interreality.org has been improved. There is a new human-readable XML Object Description (XOD) file format. There is a new loading and saving framework that handles importing/exporting from both native and foreign file formats. The VOSApp framework has been rewritten. This release significantly reorganizes the source code and reduces external dependencies, which should make VOS easier to build.

A new XML object description (XOD) file format was
added. The ASE 3D loader was improved to correctly
skip over unrecognized sections. The VOS-Browser
is more stable now. The dependency on flex and
bison to compile was eliminated. Several libraries
were merged in to reduce outside dependencies. A
compiling problem on OS X was fixed. VOS now uses
gcc 4.x symbol visibility if available. Support
for MSVC 8 was added. The documentation was
reorganized and the build instructions were
updated. This is a prerelease for testing but
should much easier to build than previous
versions.

Important fixes were made to the networking code.
The browser now supports a progress bar. Speech
bubbles, collision detection and gravity, and
AMD64 support were added. Win32 support was
improved. The latest CVS version of crystal space
is required.

A new VOS Infrastructure Protocol (VIP), and a new transport protocol built on UDP to support low-latency messaging and multiple parallel data streams in a single connection. The VOS 3D Browser Ter'Angreal now has a wxWidgets-based GUI. The GUI supports chatting, loading new avatars, bookmarking worlds, loading worlds from COD files, and more. Many improvements to the VOS plugin to the Crystal Space 3D engine. Better Windows support (compiles under MinGW). Now provides a Windows exe installer. Debian packages are available for x86 via apt-get. Should now compile and run on OS X.

A multi-threaded architecture based on thread
pools, a new extension system, and a new
application framework providing support for
command line parsing were added. An abstract 3D
layer has been implemented as a plugin to the
Crystal Space engine. Configuration files and
dynamically loaded plugins are now supported. A
plugin-based OmniVOS server makes it easy to
configure a custom server. A persistance layer can
keep site state up-to-date in a MySQL database or
a filesystem. A search language was added for
selecting and downloading many objects at once. A
Blender Python script was added to export Blender
3D scenes to A3DL.