While Iain's working on that.....

......i've been investigating the new Google O3D.

Without going into all the boring details, a few things stand out straight away:

• The build process is quite involved and has a few none-standard elements
• On Linux input events don't work (which makes things difficult for obvious reasons)
• It's otherwise a very nice little 3D engine

One thing that I have pondered is implementing a wrapper around O3D and Flash - using Iain's engine for people with only flash installed or using O3D where available.

To do this though requires some UI changes, specifically the movement controls will be hyperlinks outside of the O3D widget - imagine a 3D viewport with a few arrow buttons underneath it which you click on to move around.

Of course, this will also enable a public version 1 to be rolled out much much quicker. Whether or not that version 1 will be of use to people is a different matter - it is not yet possible to guarantee reliability as per my previous post on the subject and things are under very heavy flux right now, with the user accounts database being wiped about 30 times a day (in-memory store for development purposes).

Another benefit of course is that O3D will get some nice GPLed changes piled on top of it to enable tighter integration and some firefox XPIs can be provided to make setup very simple.

I'm going to leave the question of whether or not to do this up to the comments I receive on this post - comment away!