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

[Adam Frisby]

Lumberyard requires you host any backend servers on Amazon AWS, FYI.

Unity will be unencumbered here, but could be a problem for larger organisations as noted below; but that will only affect active viewer developers rather than users.

Godot is decent, although still a little immature - it's getting better though. Godot/Unity have the advantage of 1st class C#/.NET support. There's another engine starting with 'X' (something like Xenon) which was open sourced recently from a commercial studio which might be worth looking into too.

Re: Open Sim content in modern engines - the OAR converter linked below produces a lot of materials, materials = drawcalls, I wrote a script (it's in our editor pack) which removes the duplicate materials which speeds up rendering dramatically. 1 drawcall is roughly the same GPU cost as around 10-20K tris; unless you're using a batching-friendly graphics API like DX12, Metal or Vulkan.

My 2c.

- Adam

-----Original Message-----
From: opensim-dev-bounces at opensimulator.org <opensim-dev-bounces at opensimulator.org> On Behalf Of Tommy Anderberg
Sent: Tuesday, 18 December 2018 12:32 AM
To: opensim-dev at opensimulator.org
Subject: Re: [Opensim-dev] Opensim-dev Digest, Vol 53, Issue 5

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?
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