[Opensim-dev] Opensim-dev Digest, Vol 53, Issue 5

[Tommy Anderberg]

On Sat, 15 Dec 2018 05:07:36 -0800, Cinder Roxley 
<cinder at alchemyviewer.org> wrote:

> As far as Unreal goes, I wouldn?t be caught in the royalty payments mess > that all entails.
Good point, spelled out here:
https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2018/12/new-opensource-vr-viewer-for-opensim-may-be-coming-soon/#comment-4234386321

Cryengine uses essentially the same revenue model:
https://www.cryengine.com/ce-terms

Amazon's Cryengine-derived Lumberyard on the other hand is free to use, 
with source available: https://github.com/aws/lumberyard
It has various nice features, including support for VR, Mac, PlayStation 
and mobile, but apparently not Linux.

Unity also seems unencumbered by revenue share requirements, and unless 
somebody is going to fund OpenSim viewer developer to the tune of more 
than $100k, Unity Personal should be an option:
https://store.unity.com/products/unity-personal

BTW, in the fall of 2017 I experimented with porting OpenSim content to 
Unity using OAR Converter ( 
https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/atate/2017/09/17/oar-conv/ ), pretty much the 
functional equivalent to the Unreal demo which sparked this discussion. 
It worked well enough on desktop, but quickly bogged down to unusable 
frame rates in VR (Core i5-7600K and GTX 1070 driving an HTC Vive). 
Automated and *efficient* conversion of OpenSim content is not easy.

Besides the big commercial names, there are a few FOSS ones which might 
be relevant: https://github.com/collections/game-engines

Godot ( https://github.com/godotengine/godot ) easily wins the star 
count, but Urho3d ( https://github.com/urho3d/Urho3D ) also seems 
capable and actively developed. Two other engines which might be worth a 
look are Banshee ( https://github.com/BearishSun/BansheeEngine ) and
GamePlay ( https://github.com/gameplay3d/GamePlay ). Has anyone here 
taken any of these for a spin?