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You can do that with second life / opensim, but there is no VR viewer and the FPS is low because models are not optimized. That said, you realize that opensim

You can do that with second life / opensim, but there is no VR viewer and the FPS is low because models are not optimized. That said, you realize that opensim is very complex. it involves assets, streaming, simulating physics (the physics happen on the server) with multiple physics engines, managing users and groups, networking, scripting engines (it has 2 now), and is constantly trying to reverse engineer the second life protocol in order to work with he viewer which is not fully open source. It's not appealing to developers because it's a lot of work. When it started the project received backing from IBM who developed a large part of it. Nowadays there's no corporate interest probably because it's considered unmonetizeable.

Animats 5y ago
> The problem is that it is hard even just to visit. Yes. The hard part isn't installing the viewer and logging in. That works fairly well. So does the initial tutorial on how to move and view. Then it gets hard. There are two main new user questions in Second Life and Open Simulator: "What do I do now", and "How do I fix this %(^$* clothing problem"? It's quite possible to end up with body parts missing or invisible. The clothing system was created by users on top of the built-in avatar system, so it's mostly workarounds atop workarounds. People who master the system have the best looking avatars of any virtual world. > FPS is low because models are not optimized. That's a common comment, but can be overcome. The client is doing almost everything in one overloaded thread, and uses OpenGL. The code is two decades old. (I'm working on a new prototype viewer, using Rust and Vulkan. Easier than trying to work on the legacy code.) > It's not appealing to developers because it's a lot of work. Right. That applies both to Open Simulator, which is volunteer, and Second Life, which has paid developers. The SL developers have a "can't do" corporate culture. (Yes, some of you will read this, and you know this is correct.) Worse, they convinced top management years ago that nothing could be done. This resulted in top management diverting resources into other projects, all of which failed after losing tens of millions of dollars. It's also hard to get people who can work on this. The people who can do this kind of work can do other, more profitable things. The primary architect of the SL/Open simulator technology went on to do Facebook's mobile app, became VP of mobile at Facebook, and cashed out.

Animats 5y ago

> The problem is that it is hard even just to visit. Yes. The hard part isn't installing the viewer and logging in. That works fairly well. So does the initial tutorial on how to move and view. Then it gets hard. There are two main new user questions in Second Life and Open Simulator: "What do I do now", and "How do I fix this %(^$* clothing problem"? It's quite possible to end up with body parts missing or invisible. The clothing system was created by users on top of the built-in avatar system, so it's mostly workarounds atop workarounds. People who master the system have the best looking avatars of any virtual world. > FPS is low because models are not optimized. That's a common comment, but can be overcome. The client is doing almost everything in one overloaded thread, and uses OpenGL. The code is two decades old. (I'm working on a new prototype viewer, using Rust and Vulkan. Easier than trying to work on the legacy code.) > It's not appealing to developers because it's a lot of work. Right. That applies both to Open Simulator, which is volunteer, and Second Life, which has paid developers. The SL developers have a "can't do" corporate culture. (Yes, some of you will read this, and you know this is correct.) Worse, they convinced top management years ago that nothing could be done. This resulted in top management diverting resources into other projects, all of which failed after losing tens of millions of dollars. It's also hard to get people who can work on this. The people who can do this kind of work can do other, more profitable things. The primary architect of the SL/Open simulator technology went on to do Facebook's mobile app, became VP of mobile at Facebook, and cashed out.