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

Tue Jul 22 19:37:22 UTC 2014

what i would like to see in a viewer is

1 the ability to disable loading of chunks (if i do not use the voice
parts let me not load them at all)

2 a way to load the stuff in your sight range FIRST (why are you
loading the ground texture when im at 20K altitude)

3 better support for small screens (hint im running on a netbook with
1024X600 screen)

4 this is a wild dream but an embedded "sandbox" sim with a single
hardcoded account would be grand.

i suppose the human kit is nice but 20 gigs?? i couldn't do that with
SoAS MakeHuman Gimp and Blender without having like 12 gigs of
content.
btw are we muggles going to get to play sometime??

On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 1:47 PM, Justin Clark-Casey
<jjustincc at googlemail.com> wrote:
> I wouldn't agree that people don't want to use virtual worlds as a
> communication medium.  I suspect it depends heavily on the context.  For
> instance, I'm currently involved with a student programme where many
> meetings are held in-world and there don't seem to be too many problems
> apart from occasional Vivox issues.  In another context, we hold in-world
> meetings all the time for OSCC planning and that seems to work pretty well -
> for instance I could post up performance report graphs in world without
> having to direct people to an external website.
>
> But I do agree that ease-of-use is a major issue.  I think it would be very
> interesting to see a viewer that provided a configurable way to strip out
> the features that aren't needed in particular situations (e.g. education).
> I think Firestorm provides skinning that can do some of this, but these
> viewers are still pretty oriented towards Second Life and so that stuff
> doesn't have much focus.  Making such a viewer is something I would do
> myself if I had double the amount of time I do now :)
>
>
> On 22/07/14 09:14, Tom Willans wrote:
>>
>> I agree with Justin about a big difference being to persistent metaverse
>> and longer term social dynamics, formation of identity etc. I suspect that
>> many educational uses think in one off terms eg a collaborative class in
>> business collaboration even if there is concern about reuse of assets o
>> reusable learning objects etc. Not the development of university, school or
>> wider social network. Most Unity examples are one off uses eg teach
>> sensitive sex education, help the emergency services learn to communicate
>> etc. rather than an ongoing world of Warcraft scenario.
>>
>> So one question is what is OpenSim used for?
>>
>> It is also a fact that OpenSim is tightly coupled with Second a Life, and
>> this is not unsurprising given its heritage and the vast, in comparison,
>> user base there and technical advice. There is of course the very tight link
>> in terms of viewer technology. It was this link that, in part, made me
>> choose OpenSim over Wonderland for instance. Whilst I predominately use
>> OpenSim now it is not on social grounds but as a platform.
>>
>> People do not want to use metaverses on the scale of other social media (
>> viewing opensim as a social platform) or remote communication platform e.g.
>> Skype meetings rather than OpenSim meetings.  I once suggested a meeting in
>> SL - might as well of mentioned someone has BO; move on quickly. OpenSim
>> also shares a lot with virtual reality platforms - I do hate that term e.g.
>> CAVE which like Unity tends to have a one off. The Rift is narrowing the
>> gap, and OpenSim/SL has been displayed in CAVE environments.
>>
>> Technologies such as the Oculus Rift and other potential haptic
>> technologies may have a impact. I had to halt my experiments for a while as
>> Cybersickness on the DevKit1 caused problems. Still the Rift did score
>> highly on presence questionnaires despite this, although the questionnaires
>> are only a part of the presence story.
>>
>>   The move to using multiple platforms, augmented reality is a challenge.
>> In a social environment I want to communicate wherever I go. I am tapping
>> away on my iPad, checked my emails on the phone and soon will start using my
>> laptop.
>>
>> Is it time to pull together these strands about what will make a better
>> OpenSim?
>>
>> I am not just talking about the technological issues, although these and
>> the formats are vital but also aspects relating to human factors, presence,
>> emotion, collaboration theory and of course standards formats as well as
>> it's uses above? OpenSim does have a divide between the platform and viewer
>> yet setting aside client/server and technical issues they are intimately
>> coupled as one.
>>
>> Oh if anyone knows has a financial viability/funding wand please let me
>> know ;)
>>
>> Tom Willans  BSc(Hons)  MBCS  CITP
>> PhD Student
>> Serious Games Institute, Coventry University
>> United Kingdom
>>
>> Managing Director Bessacarr Publications Ltd
>> +44 (0)121 288 0281
>> email: tom.willans at bessacarr.com
>> skype: tom.willans
>> Second Life and OSGrid: Tom Tiros
>>
>>
>>
>> Sent from my iPad
>>
>>> On 22 Jul 2014, at 00:48, Justin Clark-Casey <jjustincc at googlemail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I think that OpenSimulator and Unity have some overlap but not by a huge
>>> amount.
>>>
>>> My perspective is that the focus of Unity is very much on game
>>> development.  It gives you a good and flexible set of tools but you need to
>>> do a fair amount of work to plug them together or extend them to create a
>>> high fidelity (ha) product.  The focus is on creating a one-off experience,
>>> though the lines are blurring now that some games (e.g. Minecraft, DOTA2)
>>> are very long lived and keep receiving updates.  The experiences are high
>>> quality because they are quite tightly controlled.  High multi-user (let
>>> alone massive multi-user) has not been a focus area because this stuff is
>>> *hard* and nowadays not obviously a winning formula for gamers.
>>>
>>> For OpenSimulator, the focus and much of the raison d'etre is the unified
>>> and persistent virtual world.  Thus, it gives you a high level set of tools
>>> which are much less flexible (inventory, attachments, linksets, etc.) but
>>> because everyone has them it allows collaboration and content reuse at a
>>> high level (e.g. scripted objects, OARs).  Some games blur into this
>>> (Minecraft, etc.).  It's a free-form environment so there's a high degree of
>>> freedom but a lot that can go wrong (analogous to open-world jank) [1].  I
>>> see it as more web-like because the same high-level software is evolved over
>>> time with the hosted content changing.
>>>
>>> Moreover, there's a very high social focus through time.  Because the
>>> same high-level concepts are shared, there's more scope for network effects
>>> (esp. with the Hypergrid) but the technological base is much more primitive
>>> and relatively unexplored.
>>>
>>> So whilst I think Unity makes sense in many use cases, OpenSimulator is
>>> ultimately much more interesting to me (unsurprisingly) because it gives a
>>> glimpse into something radically new, a distributed, anarchic and evolving
>>> Metaverse rather than a single vendor game.
>>>
>>> I think there is vast scope for the OpenSimulator ecosystem to continue
>>> to evolve with features such as template objects, multi-level linksets, more
>>> intuitive viewers and to adapt to technological evolution as embodied by new
>>> hardware such as the Oculus Rift.  Because it's open-source, innovation can
>>> happen anywhere and without a single company's permission.  I believe the
>>> critical thing is that we arrive at protocols and formats that allow
>>> evolution by disconnected parties whilst still inter-operating with the
>>> existing system.  Again, it's a comparison with a web ecosystem that has
>>> extensible formats such as HTTP and HTML (insert a tag that a browser
>>> doesn't understand and it doesn't (usually) stop your whole page from
>>> rendering).
>>>
>>> However, arriving at these formats and solving other hard fundamental
>>> problems takes an enormous amount of time and effort, not only through
>>> writing code but also in discussion and co-operation between parties with
>>> different interests.  My hope has always been that the platform will become
>>> interesting enough to attract the critical mass of academics, enthusiasts
>>> and entrepreneurs who can generate the time and funding required.  To some
>>> extent this happened but not enough (as of yet) to win any significant
>>> attention outside of this niche.
>>>
>>> [1] http://www.giantbomb.com/open-world/3015-207/
>>>
>>>> On 21/07/14 16:43, Wade wrote:
>>>> This discussion has been the most enlightening  I've seen in a long
>>>> time!
>>>> Thank you everyone!
>>>>
>>>> My experience agrees that faculty don't generally want to learn 3D
>>>> content creation.
>>>>
>>>> Students are an interesting mix, and in high-stress programs also have
>>>> very little tolerance or capacity for steep
>>>> learning curves.
>>>> ===
>>>> *On simplicity *
>>>>
>>>> In terms of students building things that didn't exist,   maybe there is
>>>> a game-principle based sweet-spot,  because
>>>> it's clear from the numbers that tens of millions of people spend tens
>>>> or hundreds of hours with Minecraft.
>>>>
>>>> That suggest to me that students would love to co-create cool stuff, but
>>>> the interface for doing so needs to have an
>>>> extremely extremely simple /*starter subset*/.   I say "starter",
>>>> because gaming-principles also show that people who
>>>> stick around and pay for worlds like World of Warcraft*_like
>>>> challenges_*, or "unnecessary difficulties" as Jane
>>>> McGonigal's "/*Reality is Broken*/ - why Games make us Better and How
>>>> they can Change the World" book explains so well.
>>>> (Imagine the interest in golf if the average length from tee to hole was
>>>> ten feet, in a straight line, on a flat course,
>>>> and the hole was ten feet across.)    This is a great book, by the way,
>>>> and very eye opening and challenging a lot of
>>>> misunderstood concepts about "games", the nature and type of feedback
>>>> that works,  and why so many people voluntarily
>>>> spend so much time on them, that is directly applicable to building any
>>>> learning environment.
>>>>
>>>> For experienced builders (or those past their anxiety - resistance
>>>> stage), yeah,  prefabs in Unity are great!
>>>>
>>>> What is even better is that in Unity you CAN build/*hierarchical
>>>> objects,*/  then mix and match the parts.  In OpenSim
>>>> and Second LIfe,  once you put the wheels on the car and make a
>>>> link-set,  all traces of "wheel" are gone, and it
>>>> becomes absurdly difficult to go back and put different wheels on the
>>>> car if each wheel has 47 parts like spokes or
>>>> lugnuts.     You can approximate some of that capacity with "Builder's
>>>> Buddy" or other tools that let you rez an entire
>>>> multiobject scene with one click, but those are a true pain to load and
>>>> maintain.
>>>>
>>>> So,  whether it's Unity or OpenSim,  I think one thing that is needed
>>>> that is very hard to still see for Virtual reality
>>>> natives is exactly HOW SIMPLE the INITIAL interface has to be, so that
>>>> it is satisfying and rewarding to try to use for
>>>> a terrified newbie, peeking though the fingers of the hands over the
>>>> eyes.   So simple in fact that even a faculty
>>>> member might say "Oh heck, even I can do THAT!".
>>>>
>>>> ===
>>>> *On "weakest links" in collaborative environments*
>>>>
>>>> And both faculty and students are greatly upset by technological failure
>>>> where they are used to trivial behavior, such
>>>> as having voice working.   The collaborative environment is much harsher
>>>> than individual user environment since for
>>>> voice (or many other things) to actually be useful,  it has to work for
>>>> EVERYONE, not just most people.
>>>>
>>>> This is a feature of collaborative environments that I didn't realize
>>>> till Gary Olsen pointed it out.  A collaborative
>>>> environment can become a "weakest link" exposer, where everyone's
>>>> experience is limited by the least capable user.
>>>> This is one of the issues with, say, Electronic Health Records systems
>>>> that is underappreciated and distinguishes it
>>>> from, say,  a cloud-based spreadsheet.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>> http://opensimulator.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Justin Clark-Casey (justincc)
>>> OSVW Consulting
>>> http://justincc.org
>>> http://twitter.com/justincc
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>>> http://opensimulator.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users
>>
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>
>
> --
> Justin Clark-Casey (justincc)
> OSVW Consulting
> http://justincc.org
> http://twitter.com/justincc
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-- 
Robert L Martin