Friday, March 22, 2013

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.