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The main reasons are: - The viewer is fricking hard to use by today's standards. I regularly introduce people to Opensim/SL and they can't figure out what the

The main reasons are: - The viewer is fricking hard to use by today's standards. I regularly introduce people to Opensim/SL and they can't figure out what the hell is going on. IT doesnt help that SL has a bonkers ancient avatar system, where people wear 2 avatars, use an alpha to hide the first and then wear a second as attachments. Good luck explaining this to people whose computer skills end at scrolling. - People use underpowered laptops that crash all the time. Sadly it s the reality of having $1000 phones and $200 laptops/desktops - It's buggy as hell. Hypergrid is a hack, nothing more. It's not supposed to be there, but thanks to the patience of some viewer developers they make it barely work. Unfortunately opensimulator does not have enough developers (basically only one person, Ubit) , and almost nobody is working on making a viewer exclusively for it. - Opensimulator is a complex system, hampered by the need to emulate the SL protocol in a distributed world. The developers try hard but it's so hard to improve without a complete rewrite and a team of devleopers that can actually cooperate (there are like 100 forks, lack of leadership, and developers generally dont get along) - There are more than enough regions -- but most are empty because of the chicken-and-egg issue (not enough users means people get bored and leave) and because its so buggy that people crash while trying to teleport. - There is a lot of content pirated from SL that keeps people busy in opensim. Unfortunate but also true. - There is a popular farming system , sailing system, almost every kind of animated roleplay that you can do in second life, there is the ability to script elaborate scenarios with NPCs (that dont exist in SL) . All those keep a lot of people busy (shameless plug you can find them at https://opensimworld.com https://opensimworld.com). AFAIK there is nothing that it is missing from Second Life at the moment except the users. If you think something is missing, i d be happy to build it The metaverse doesn't NEED to be for everyone, but it can certainly have wide appeal if it is easy to access and people can express themselves . In a social environment the games etc are mostly a distraction, what matters is finding users to interact with. Non-creators spend most of their time modifying their avatar. And BTW people don't need to run a region to log in to the hypergrid. You can instantly create an account in one of the open grids like https://osgrid.org https://osgrid.org and go online, and then you can jump to any world.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
> The metaverse doesn't NEED to be for everyone, but it can certainly have wide appeal if it is easy to access and people can express themselves. If there are still technical problems both about and inside the "metaverse", why not focus on making it appealing to people with technical chops first? It surely isn't, otherwise this wouldn't be the first time I hear of OpenSimulator. GP says it's not fun, and that attempts to making it fun involve bringing some lowest-common-denominator forms of entertainment. But what is it about it that makes it not fun for techies? Or for creatives with enough patience to pick up the necessary tech skills along the way? These people should be able to provide content, activity and root out technical problems. It's how many technological products in the past (including the Web, arguably) became popular: first becoming popular with tech-savvy people, and building up widespread appeal on that base.
- danbmil99 5y ago
  Aah, all these issues were apparent in the first couple years of the project (2008-2009). Let's be frank: The early oughts want their '90s-level-graphics klunky 3D-metaverses back. If the Snow Crash, Gibson, Matrix - level metaverse is ever going to be a real thing, it needs to be: * technically up-to-date - at the graphics level of a recent unreal or unity game * Mobile / pad-friendly * AR//VR enabled and most importantly: * It has to be truly, organically interesting to experience from the get-go (as a viewer, not a content creator) The present state of the field seems to have limited appeal beyond content builders and hard-case SL fans.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  It IS appealling to those people. This is a 15 year old project with only 1 active developer yet it still has thousands of users despite needing to set up a bunch of ini files and NAT loopback to run it. The problem is that it is hard even just to visit. Most people who run grids and regions are quite technical people who were in second life around the time it was hot , which is a long time ago, thats why you dont hear a lot about it. During the VR hype mania years many people left to try the new platforms until they failed. And in general people don't seem to reach outside their social media bubbles much. Afaik there are no casinos in opensim btw. It s usually parties with wannabe DJs, real DJs and often live music

TeMPOraL 5y ago

> The metaverse doesn't NEED to be for everyone, but it can certainly have wide appeal if it is easy to access and people can express themselves. If there are still technical problems both about and inside the "metaverse", why not focus on making it appealing to people with technical chops first? It surely isn't, otherwise this wouldn't be the first time I hear of OpenSimulator. GP says it's not fun, and that attempts to making it fun involve bringing some lowest-common-denominator forms of entertainment. But what is it about it that makes it not fun for techies? Or for creatives with enough patience to pick up the necessary tech skills along the way? These people should be able to provide content, activity and root out technical problems. It's how many technological products in the past (including the Web, arguably) became popular: first becoming popular with tech-savvy people, and building up widespread appeal on that base.

danbmil99 5y ago
Aah, all these issues were apparent in the first couple years of the project (2008-2009). Let's be frank: The early oughts want their '90s-level-graphics klunky 3D-metaverses back. If the Snow Crash, Gibson, Matrix - level metaverse is ever going to be a real thing, it needs to be: * technically up-to-date - at the graphics level of a recent unreal or unity game * Mobile / pad-friendly * AR//VR enabled and most importantly: * It has to be truly, organically interesting to experience from the get-go (as a viewer, not a content creator) The present state of the field seems to have limited appeal beyond content builders and hard-case SL fans.
cblconfederate 5y ago
It IS appealling to those people. This is a 15 year old project with only 1 active developer yet it still has thousands of users despite needing to set up a bunch of ini files and NAT loopback to run it. The problem is that it is hard even just to visit. Most people who run grids and regions are quite technical people who were in second life around the time it was hot , which is a long time ago, thats why you dont hear a lot about it. During the VR hype mania years many people left to try the new platforms until they failed. And in general people don't seem to reach outside their social media bubbles much. Afaik there are no casinos in opensim btw. It s usually parties with wannabe DJs, real DJs and often live music