[Opensim-users] Hoping for a fearless comparison of opensim vs unity 3D

[David Burden]

I was going to sit this one out but seeing as Tom name-checked us....

I think what Toni, Doug and Maria have been saying is pretty spot on. It
all comes down to the fact that SL (and to an extent OpenSim) is a complete
virtual world environment, whereas Unity is a game engine. Out the box
Unity does nothing, you have to build up what functionality you need -
SL/OS gives you a huge head start by already doing avatars, chat, voice,
multi-user, editing etc. You could, if you really wanted, build most, but
certainly not all, of the SL/OpenSim functionality in Unity, but in reality
you just build what you need for a given project.

Collaborative manipulation and placement (as on your Rezmela video) is
definitely possible, and when we redo our OOPAL system for Unity that is
pretty much what it will do. What would be a lot harder is collaborative
prim based building - still probably do'able though perhaps not with the
flexibility of SL/OS. The link-set example you mention would be do'able,
 Unity has a similar concept, but in reality you might not do it in the
exact same way.

Collaborative white boards are certainly do'able (we're just doing one),
but document editing isn't really viable as Unity does not have a MOAP
equivalent - we've tried a few third party solutions but they all fall well
short of the SL functionality - and of course that also means that there is
no collaborative web browsing - a real issue for some uses cases. There are
I believe a few bespoke solutions where people have used Unity as the basis
of larger commercial virtual office offerings and built the collaborative
document bit in.

You don't see many voice demos as that is something that does have to be
brought in through a third party service, Vivox/Teamspeak etc, so tends to
just be rolled out as needed - although a lot of Unity use cases don't need
it (or just use Skype/Google+). But is certainly an extra hurdle to jump if
you need it and you're going from SL/OS to Unity.

Can't comment on Physics as we rarely use it. We are also looking at WebGL,
initially for non-avatar activities, but the DoD Virtual Worlds Framework
that Maria mentions are some of the best avatar driven demos I've seen for
WebGL and there are emerging WebGL game engines like GooEngine.

Unity is though just such a different experience from SL/OS. With Unity you
are building an app from the outside, with SL/OS you're building one from
inside. Having spent a lot of time in both just in the last couple of weeks
there are annoyances and strengths in both. Approaches like PIVOTE where we
try and take the logic out of the environment certainly help, but we still
don't have the ideal solution anywhere.

You say that "So I guess it will be a race between how fast opensim can get
a browser
based viewer solution, or less ideally,  tablet viewers that actually work
by providing a PC level experience, and how fast the Unity team can develop
their server solution." but that is not the case - Photon and SmartFox are
proper established MMO servers for people using Unity and other systems,
any Unity corporate offering will only add to that. So with a Unity system
already having multi-user, and web, and tablet, and having complete control
of the user experience (cf Kay's comment - I think - about a simpler
OpenSim browser, something we've also always called for) it has already won
that race, and is why we end up using it on most projects. SL/OS really is
just left for those cases where you either need a big populated shared
world (eg for social science or AI research), or you need that highly
collaborative build approach.

We did a comparison paper a while ago at which might be of use -
http://www.daden.co.uk/resources/download-white-papers/ -  and our single
user Unity demo space (although untypical of how we normally use Unity -
see the videos for that) has just gone up at
http://www.daden-cs1.co.uk/demos/dadencampus/DadenCampus.html (beware 88MB
- not yet really optimised for web delivery) . We hope to add multi-user
shortly, but it shows some of the things mentioned such as in-world video,
in world white board, simple object manipulation etc - and the content of
the space is certainly relevant to everyone on this group :-)

David




David Burden
Managing Director
Daden Limited

t: +44 (0)121 250 5678
m: 07811 266 199
e: david.burden at daden.co.uk
w: www.daden.co.uk
skype: daden5
twitter: www.twitter.com/davidburden

Daden specialise in creating immersive learning & visualisation systems.
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