How to create multiuser networked events in Jibe and Unity3d using iTween

In Jibe 2.0 we've included an easy system that gives you the power to use iTween to create multiuser networked events.  This allows you create shared experiences between avatars using interactive and complex object animations.

Watch my tutorial to learn more!


Video: How to create multiuser networked events in Jibe and Unity3d using iTween


Take care,
-John "Pathfinder" Lester
Chief Learning Officer
ReactionGrid, Inc.

How to create Avatar Sit locations on any object in a Jibe world in Unity3d

Here's a short tutorial video that will show you how to create avatar sit locations on any object in your Jibe world.  It's a very powerful and flexible system where you simply drag and drop sit locations onto anything in your multiuser Jibe world, allowing you to easily create collaborative meeting environments that encourage avatars to gather together in groups.

In this video, I also review how to avoid the accidental misuse of a script that could potentially cause your Avatar to fall through the floor.  Safety First!

Creating Sit Locations in Jibe and Unity3d from John Lester on Vimeo.

You can also find this tutorial video in our Knowledge Base.

Take care,
-John "Pathfinder" Lester
Chief Learning Officer, ReactionGrid

Breakdown of Oculus Rift Virtual Reality Headset and Integrating with Unity3d and Jibe

I'm eagerly awaiting my own developer version of the Oculus Rift, which should arrive in about a month.

My plans are to immediately start working on how to best integrate it with Jibe and Unity3d.  

In particular, our newly released Jibe 2.0 has a built-in 1st-person perspective mode that is ideal for things like virtual reality headsets.

Exploring a multiuser Jibe 2.0 world in 1st-person perspective.  

Keep an eye on this blog for future details.

Needless to say, I was very excited to see the folks at iFixit posting a great teardown of the developer version of the Oculus Rift headset.

If you have an Oculus Rift and would like to brainstorm with me on how it can be integrated with multiuser virtual world applications, please drop me an email (pathfinder@reactiongrid.com) or post in the comments.

Perhaps we can also schedule a Team Fortress 2 game while using our headsets!

-John "Pathfinder" Lester
Chief Learning Officer, ReactionGrid Inc.

P.S.  ReactionGrid's Lead Developer Matthew Bertrand is also getting an Oculus Rift dev kit.  He's pretty psyched about it, and we all expect amazing things from him!

How to embed and play a movie on an object in Unity3d and Jibe

Watching "Hedgehog in the Fog"
in my Jibe world.

Note: You'll need the Unity Pro editor if you want to work with Movie Textures in Unity3d.

Unity3d allows you to embed and play videos on any surface in a 3d environment.

This means you can easily create a web-based Jibe world where avatars explore a multiuser 3d virtual space while watching videos or movies playing on screens/signs/any surface you wish.

The most common way to add video to a Unity3d project is by adding a video file to your project's Asset Folder, which automatically creates a Movie Texture (details here).

However, adding a video file directly to your project means the size of the video file will be added to the final size of your completed Unity webplayer file.  In other words, if your video clip is 50 Megabytes large, then your Unity webplayer file will have an extra 50 Megabytes added on to it.

For folks creating Jibe worlds with Unity3d (or anyone creating Unity webplayer files for streaming on the Web) this is not good.  You always want your webplayer file to be as small as possible so your webplayer file will finish downloading and start running as quickly as possible.

Fortunately, there's a way you can download/stream a movie from the Web so it doesn't add to the size of your Unity webplayer file.  Unity will immediately start playing the movie as soon as it has buffered enough of it, similar to how YouTube works.

Here's a simple example:

Step 1: Get your video ready as an OGG file on the Web

Unity needs videos to be in OGG format (file extension .ogg).  If you need to convert an existing video file into OGG format, I suggest using VLC (it's free and cross platform).  Take your OGG video, put it on a webserver somewhere and remember the URL.

Important Note: If you're managing your own webserver, be sure it has the MIME type for Ogg Vorbis enabled.  For Extension use .ogg, and for MIME type use application/ogg.

Here's a sample 60 Megabyte OGG video I made and uploaded to Wordpress.  Feel free to use this URL in your own tests.  You can also click on it to see how it plays in your browser.
http://becunningandfulloftricks.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/hedgehog_in_the_fog.ogg

Step 2: Create a Cube

In this example, we're going to make a basic cube and have the video play on its surface.  Of course you could flatten the cube so it looks likes a screen and then place it on a model of a TV or something.  I'm just being lazy.

Step 3: Create a new Javascript

I like the name of a script to remind me what the script actually does, so I'm going to call this new script ClicktoPlayWebMovie.

Here's the code.  Copy and paste this into your new script and save it.

var url = "http://becunningandfulloftricks.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/hedgehog_in_the_fog.ogg";
function OnMouseDown () {
 // Start download
 var www = new WWW(url);
// Make sure the movie is ready to start before we start playing
 var movieTexture = www.movie;
 while (!movieTexture.isReadyToPlay)
 yield;
// Initialize texture to be 1:1 resolution
 renderer.material.mainTexture = movieTexture;
// Assign clip to audio source
 // Sync playback with audio
 audio.clip = movieTexture.audioClip;
// Play both movie & sound
 movieTexture.Play();
 audio.Play();
}
// Make sure we have audio source
@script RequireComponent (AudioSource)
function Update () {
}

You can see at the top of the script that I've included my demo URL as the default movie URL.  You can always change it later.

Step 4: Add ClicktoPlayWebMovie script to your cube

Drag the ClicktoPlayWebMovie script from your Project folder onto the Cube in your Scene view.  This will add the script to the cube.

Now select your Cube in the Scene view and look at the Inspector settings.  You can change the movie URL by simply editing the URL field in the Inspector.

Also notice that there is an Audio Source added to the Cube.  This was added automatically when you added the script to the Cube, since the script needs an Audio Source component to work.  Don't delete or modify the Audio Source component.  Just leave it be.

Step 5: You're done.  Test it out!

You can run your Jibe world locally in the Unity editor and test it out that way.  Walk up to the cube and click on it.  The movie will start playing on all surfaces of  the cube.

You can also view an online version of this demo in my own Jibe world.

Enjoy!

-John "Pathfinder" Lester
Chief Learning Officer, ReactionGrid Inc.

How to Fix the Unity Asset Server error "Cannot Start Service" on Windows

The Unity Asset Server is a fantastic tool for version control and collaborating with a group of people on a project in Unity3D.  Our customers primarily use Windows servers, and some of them are running their own Unity Asset Servers to facilitate working together on Jibe projects.

We just learned of a bug that might affect folks running their own Unity Asset Server on Windows.  Fortunately it's not serious at all (just annoying as heck), and the fix is incredibly easy and permanent.  

Are you running the Unity Asset Server on a Windows machine?

Has it suddenly stopped working, refusing to start no matter what you do?

Do you immediately see the following popup error when using the Unity Asset Server Control Panel?

If so, don't panic.

Just watch this short video that walks you through exactly how to fix the issue.

(You can also find this information in our new Confluence KnowledgeBase)

Take care,

-John "Pathfinder" Lester

Chief Learning Officer, ReactionGrid Inc.

Jibe 2.0 Now Available

Jibe 2.0 Now Available!

We are pleased to announce Jibe 2.0!

This is not an April Fools joke.  Jibe 2.0 is now available.  Please see our Press Release for all the details.

We also encourage everyone to register a free account on our site and then download the Jibe 2.0 Manual from our downloads site.  

And if you are already a Jibe Mars customer, we have a sweet treat for you.  You can grab Jibe 2.0 for free with your subscription to Jibe Mars!

We also have some special deals for those clients on Jibe Moon, Atmosphere and Oceanic as well as our Behind the Firewall clients and Self Hosted Jibe kit users.

Please contact us for more information via our Support Portal.  Just submit a Support Ticket with any questions or to find out if you qualify for any of our special discounted upgrades.

ReactionGrid Inc. is proud to announce Jibe 2.0 Release Date (and a Reminder about Copyright and Open Source)

On April 1, 2013 ReactionGrid Inc. will make Jibe 2.0 available for purchase. Originally we were set for a point release of Jibe as 1.5, but the longer we worked to improve our product the more we realized that we had actually created a full version release with major improvements and new feature sets.

• Room variable support
• Unity 4 support
• Photon 3 & Photon Cloud support
• Improved avatar pipeline to enable wider range of custom avatars
• Reduced requirement for naming conventions for avatar outfits when customizing appearance options
• Animations can have any name, and are mapped to known animation states via a simple script set up in the Inspector (makes it much easier to grab animations from places like the Mixamo store to add simple gestures to your avatars)
• Appearance maps can support model, hair and outfit choices out of the box, the goal is to move towards a more extensible system
• Storage and retrieval of avatar dressing choices for Jibe Mars customers for future implementation of immediate login of pre-dressed avatars.
• Simplified networking scripts for position updates of objects
• Recategorized Jibe scripts in Unity hierarchy for clearer organization
• Increased flexibility on login process
• Change from three scripts (ChooseAvatar, DressingRoom, SingleSceneConfiguration) for choosing avatars and logging in, to one single simplified script (JibeLogin)
• Combine Loader and Dressing room concepts into a Login scene where you can choose all outfit choices on login.
• Or you can change which scene is the first in the build order and log in directly to the main scene where the activity will take place
• Dedicated dressing room can be reached from any other scene in the build and should return you to the last known location
• Extra sample scripts for more common functionality (such as taking screenshots from inworld)
• Spatial audio support for Vivox voice on web player builds
• Chat history plus ability to chat from the webpage (removing the need to have the chat textbox on screen all the time while inworld)
• Single player mode for offline testing - extremely useful for debugging while not connected, or for doing a demo from behind a tight firewall
• Improved event tracking scripts for capturing additional information about user interactions
• Improved tracking of Account UUID (Unique Identifier for a logged in user) for use within websites where tracking by known ID is important. This feature enables both understanding of the current ID of the player from the multiplayer server perspective and from a user-maintained system.
• 100% C# codebase with final scripts converted from Javascript.
• Updated Jibe manual with full information on each of the new features in the platform!
  
  

We've also updated our Jibe Web Suite for our hosted and behind firewall server customers to include a rich administration site and support for groups and role based permissions to give you more control over access to your Jibe worlds.

One reason why Jibe is such a powerful 3d simulation and virtual world platform is because the majority of the source code of Jibe is viewable and modifiable by our customers. This gives Jibe users the ability to fully customize their projects. However, we’d like to remind everyone of ReactionGrid’s copyright ownership and licensing agreement.

ReactionGrid Inc. owns the copyright to the Jibe project kit software as well as the server-side application code (i.e., the “JibeWebSuite”). No part of Jibe is Open Source, nor is there any legal fork of the Jibe code. It is not ReactionGrid Inc.’s intention to release Jibe as Open Source, and any 3rd-party release and/or reselling of Jibe is a violation of copyright law.

For more details on ReactionGrid Inc.’s Jibe Software License, please see our knowledgebase article.