Could HighFidelity become the new opensimulator?

#1

Hello. Just some food for thought:

  • VR has not only not lived up to the hype, it probably does not have a viable future for massive adoption

  • HighFidelity seems to have nailed the right architecture for online worlds, and can become an amazing platform for those who like the open metaverse and the creativity it inspires

  • OpenSimulator is kind of stuck for years with very critical (and insurmountable) performance problems

  • HighFidelity could add awesome in-world building abilities which would allow anyone to get creative easily, which is essential to keep people around.

  • HighFidelity could focus away from VR a bit and try to build a better desktop experience, since people will probably be more comfortable and faster in their computers.

I would really like to start using highfidelity but the lack of in-world building and standard avatar is fatal - it’s just not fun. Personally i don’t care much for VR as long as there are great graphics , it works fast and it scales well. Personally i find that the fun of VR wanes fast, while the fun of building never ends.

So, is anyone thinking of steering HF away from trying to become an AltSpaceVR and more towards a new, better and open source SL ?

#2

I agree that Hi Fi has to be ‘more’ than the rest. To all compete in the same ground is mass suicide.

#3

Focus away, not sure… I’m here mainly because this is VR. Otherwise, I would return in SL.
People are there, creator too. It cost me 0$ and I even make money, (Which would be less sure on opensim.)

For a simplified creation, maybe we could just take the open sim code and plug an export to fbx on it. :wink:

#4

Hi Satyros,

Fully agree with you.

In order to be sucessful, most probably HiFi needs to be also as good as SL and Opensim from the avatar rendering quality and the in-world editing functionality, which it does not seem to be today, yet.

Aspects like full VR and the Javascript API are big plusses, still requiring core stuff like rendering and editing to meet the ones of previous generations ie Opensim and SL.

-michel

#5

Just discover that Firestorm has a “Save As… Collada” functionality… So if you can build in SL / Opensim and import it to HF (after a simple conversion to fbx in Blender).

#6

I don’t think it should be moving away from VR - I think your judgment on VR’s fate is way too premature. VR is just getting started. It’s still incredibly expensive, but just like mobile phones eventually did, headsets will get cheaper in time. The fact that you need such an expensive PC to go along with it is another huge problem, but with that Android port they’re apparently working on, people will be able to use the phone they already own, with a much cheaper mobile VR headset (anywhere between $15-90).

However I do completely agree with you that the desktop experience needs to be given more attention. Non-VR users will always outnumber VR users. Just from a numbers standpoint you have to be blind to not at least accommodate desktop users. Those desktop users can one day turn into VR users, because once they’ve been around on the platform long enough they’ll want to experience it with even more immersion. But they won’t even get to that point if they get too frustrated by the lackluster desktop experience on their first day trying it,.

I would love for a viable alternative to OpenSim to finally happen. Unlike OpenSim, HF won’t be forever held back by being a SL clone and all the baggage (both technical and cultural) that comes with that.

#7

That’s a good one. HF doesn’t even support text chat because it’s so focused on VR. You think they are going to do a 180? People have been asking for that for years now.

#8

This is a very short sighted view. That’s like saying a 5 year old child has not lived up to his potential as a human being.
The gear is expensive, the content is sparse, the format is new, the road is unmarked.
As we speak dozens of the worlds largest companies are creating VR departments and spending millions and billions on R+D.

Facebook continue to spend billions http://fortune.com/2017/01/18/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-virtual-reality-billions/
Microsoft, Sony, Google, Apple and many other world leaders are all reported to be ramping UP their spending on R&D for VR and AR this year.

Hardware is being designed to be cheaper, meaning more accessible by the masses. Content is being produced all over the globe. The upward force of VR right now is so powerful that the result will be a saturation of affordable hardware and a plethora of AAA and free content. This will pretty much force the public to adopt.

If you look around today you see not many people with HMDs, if you have a HMD you will see not much content, if you then make a prediction based on just these observations you can be forgiven for holding the opinion that you have.
If you only read all the tabloid news then one day you will read that VR is huge, the next day you will read that VR is dead. You will also get all the most important details about Kim Kardashion and nothing about world politics except Trump’s opinion of gays in the service, if you get my drift. No real news.
These “news” services are nothing more than story generators and cannot be relied on for solid data and genuine trends and uptake analysis. We need to dig deeper, read more sources from genuine news outlets from business and serious publishers before we make predictions about the state of the industry.

We all want something different from Hifi, once I thought the users all wanted the same things as me. But after a few years I realize I was wrong. Everyone wants something different. Even reading just this thread I see some want different things. some want chat, some want inworld build tools, some want land tools, some want currency, some want good avatars, some want customizable avatars, some want massive control over the av creation process, some want easy to use presets. Some want easy block inworld build tools, some want primitive inworld building tools, some want total vertex controllable inworld building, and some realize this is not Maya, nor Blender nor 3ds Max. Its not a building platform, its a rendering platform, it will never be as good at building as a dedicated building program.
So do you want inworld building at the expense of first rate graphics?
Nobody ever complained that Hifi doesnt provide an inworld texture creation and 2d graphics tools or audio mix-down facilities because SL never had it. We only want inworld build tools because SL has them and thats what we are used to.

I do agree however that the desktop interface must not be ignored.
Building in Hifi with a HMD is like shaping cotton candy with an axe.
So completely difficult, inaccurate and clumsy trying to build inside a HMD that any real builder will simply use desktop to create, and HMD to experience.
So now I ask you to think this thru again, do you really want to try to build complex polygon models inside Hifi with a HMD?

#9

Wonders if Michelangelo could have done David with a keyboard and mouse ,hand controllers seem closer to a hammer and chisel . I’m a die hard keyboard mouse user but I fully expect that to change at some point probably when I can get a clean efficient model of Michelangelo,s David from my phone .
If people want to build second life in their domain they can,people enjoy living in the past .I want to see what’s in the future
It’s all about sharks with laser beams

#10

I recall using a mouse for art being described by a prominent technologist once as “Trying to draw with a crayon stuck in a potato.”

VR interfaces are still a lot younger than GUIs were by the time this comment was made.

(And the answer is really to use a mouse for pointing at stuff and a graphics tablet for precision drawing. In VR, the hand controllers are in the position of the mouse, for the moment at least. The 3D equivalent of the tablet is a different device entirely! possibly…).

#11

Interestingly, an in-built SL-like avatar system standard (as an option in addition to the full-custom option) used to be something I was very big on wanting. Eventually I gained enough skills with Blender that I no longer really need that feature for my own use!

As for in-world audio/texture/3D editing of resources, I am strongly in favor of HiFi providing the necessary hooks into the JS system so third parties can write applications that can be plugged in to do such things (ideally, a number of different applications for different capability-needs levels - I use GIMP exclusively, even with PhotoShop on my work machine right beside it. Some people - as we learned last week - find MS-Paint all they need and very much worth having immediately to-hand!).

I ultimately want to use HiFi as my primary GUI, but I don’t need my applications built into the GUI anymore than I want Linus Torvolds putting GIMP or Audacity in the Kernel (or Xorg putting them in the x-server core, which is probably a better equivalence, though lacking name-recognition appeal :grin: )!

#12

The big mistake with high fidelity is the desktop UI. and the placement tool.

#13

Re:text chat. This is false.

High fidelity does have support for text chat and it has a very rudimentary one at that already in place. It’s not ideal, but it exists.

Their stance however has been to not make one official because they want others to make them integrated into the platform to avoid centralization to their servers to just HiFi servers. You’ll find that a very common theme for features in HiFi.

Same thing with inventories. It’s more akin to a early days of web than SL.

All of those are absolute possible to be done by others already. It’s just a matter of having others do them.

#14

De-centralized chat and inventory…

Now that sounds a good mix for a new brexit (sorry UK)
That is going to be a nightmare to link to each other. and use a defined protocol.

#15

I imagine integrating an existing distributed chat system - say, XMPP - might do the trick for chat.

#16

Well, look at the internet it self. We dont have a single chat system but have a plothera of different mediums, nor do we have a single store or store database…

I mean earlier on we even had a chat system connecting to an IRC of all places. Why reinvent the wheel over and over again when there are many other protocolls. I dont think it would be a stretch to make a Discord or Slack connection from Hifi.

#17

Is there a way to be notified by a script while we are online? It would need that to plug any com system.

#18

Technically speaking since all scripts are client side, running a script (in client or entity) could send a client specific online event and poll to an external service.

Otherwise there is the avatar friend list API also in excistance.

#19

Giving the direction that Melanie wants opensim to go there’s going to be a big push to other alternatives like halcyon and even whitecore (I know of one grid that’s actively moving to it). I can see HiFi being an alternative, I mean Kitely is already moving towards a gated community version of HiFi and they are one of the larger commercial hosting providers for opensim.

#20

To throw some sand in the gears.

I do not see how high fidelity can replace opensim.
If you not need the realtime build functionality.
Sansar is already ahead of high fidelity. it looks better , the graphics sre better. The have a normal desktop interface and if you not need more then 5scenes. it’s cheaper then secondlife, opensim and high fidelity. I cannot run for 10$ my own server.

I tried to avoid this point, but high fidelity ignored the desktop way to much for long time and made it worse this year. And the graphics not really got better to.

Not to forget the terrible placement tool in hifi the torture us with for 15+ months. Afraid hifi is going the same way as opensim. a slow developing platform with a small userbase.