Cebra releases VirtuoCity 2.6!

With this new release, various browsers and Mac users are supported.

One of the prime features of this release is Mac OS X compatibility. This has been requested by many and it is of course very important for many of our customers to be platform and browser independent. Currently we support Firefox and Safari on OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and Firefox on OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). We soon hope to add support for Safari on Snow Leopard as well.

More work was done on platform support. In particular we had a number of glitches and problems on Windows Vista and Windows 7. Most of these have been fixed, for example installers for the exporter, worldconnecter and worldserver are Vista/7 aware. Also Worldconnector/worldserver connection issues have been addressed.

We now support a broad range of browsers and platforms (Windows: XP,Vista and 7 Mac OS X: 10.5 and 10.6 Browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome). If you combine the browsers and operating systems it ammount to a huge number of possible runtime environments. In order to limit the ammount of testing and development effort we need for all this we drop some old platforms from time to time so that we can keep moving forward instead of only doing backward compatibility. With this release we drop support for IE 6, you can try it, but if it doesn't work... In the exporter we dropped support for 3D Studio 9 and older. On the positive side we plan to support 64 bit version of 3D Studio in the future.

The other major new feature is skeletal avatars. This will give a lot more character to the virtual worlds.

Smooth animation, more detail and visually so much more compelling. We created a new set of 26 skeletal avatars, this is techically not a part of the new software release, but a new avatar system is of little use without any avatars. The standard login page was changed to view and select the new avatars, in time when we migrate our virtual worlds to the 2.6 version they will replace the old avatars. Note that the virtual city of Helmond and of Zwolle have been migrated already!

Also new is the fact that Google Streetview has been connected to out virtual worlds. 

Provided that Streetview pictures are available, visitors can compare the virtual view with the Streetview view.

Much has been improves on the monitoring and reporting system for client and servers, which added also much to the stability of the VirtuoCity applictations.

Short feature list

• Mac compatiblity
• Skeletal avatars
• Vista & 7 compatiblity
• Preregistration of plugin, removing most "gold bars" in Internet explorer
• Install to AppData instead of Programs Files (can help with installations in restricted environments)
• Smart filename history in exporter
• 3D Studio 2010 support
• Animations can be played backwards and ping-pong
• Hide OSD navigation
• Additions to server-side scripting (python)