Open Simulator wasn't something I expected to see on HN.<p>Open Simulator checks off almost all of the boxes for the "metaverse". Multi-user 3D world, check. User-created content, check. Open system, check. Interoperability between servers run by different parties, check. Anybody can run a server, check. Compatibility with external asset storage systems, check. Compatibility with external payment systems, check. Second Life itself isn't as open.<p>So why isn't it the metaverse?<p>Well, there's a problem. It's not "fun".<p>If you start up an instance of Open Simulator, you get a blank piece of terrain. You can log in and visit it, and so can others, if you let them. Now you can build things. You can import assets and place them in world. You can sell or give parcels to others so you can have neighbors, who also can build.<p>This appeals to the fraction of the population which needs an outlet for their creativity. People who probably have a workshop or a drawing pad or a software development environment or a CAD program. It's not a passive form of entertainment. This makes it niche.<p>That may be a generic problem with the "metaverse". People don't actually go to any of the NFT worlds much. Decentraland runs about 200-300 concurrent users. (They hit 350 today!) Sominium Space, maybe 25. Most of the rest are vaporware at this point.<p>Attempts to make metaverses fun mostly so far involve bringing in DJs, or adding gambling.
You need something fun for new non-creator users to do the first time they log in.<p>You can put games inside a metaverse. That's what Roblox is. Roblox is Youtube for junior game developers. Upload something, compete for attention and revenue. Open Simulator and Second Life are a bit too sluggish for that. Mostly because of dated implementations.
Open Simulator only has one real maintainer at this point. Linden Lab has a new VP of engineering who's trying to increase performance, but he's facing a long-standing corporate culture of "can't do".<p>(I've been working on an SL/Open Simulator client that uses Rust/Rend3/WGPU/Vulkan, and can get consistent 60FPS frame rates. But it's nowhere near feature complete. The performance problem is solveable through parallelism and some algorithms that turn O(n) into O(n log n). The fun problem, I don't have an answer for.)
Heh, I played with this when I was working in the Second Life/Virtual world bubble (around 2008). Back then it was called OpenSim and the code was a mess, not made any better by running in an itself very buggy (at least then) Mono runtime. Enthusiastic hackers working on it though!<p>Back then the client (viewer) was still closed source, which seems to have changed since.
For folks interested in exploring Opensimulator on their desktop or vps, there's a easy-to-use package made up which includes a configuration creator and some utilities:
<a href="https://outworldz.com/Outworldz_installer/" rel="nofollow">https://outworldz.com/Outworldz_installer/</a><p>There's a support forum for it on Mewe:
<a href="https://mewe.com/group/5bc12bdc322b35103f0965d3" rel="nofollow">https://mewe.com/group/5bc12bdc322b35103f0965d3</a>
BBC article on metaverse yesterday got me thinking that the time may have come for the success of lifesim/metaverse applications. I think we’ll see several providers emerge as we did with social, some consolidation and failures, with a single large provider remaining, as with search and social networks. I think the media frenzy and megatrend needed to support this is starting right now. You could do worse than re reading neuromancer.
I think before AR glasses show up, we may end up modeling the world like this. If your local supermarket created a virtual version of the store, you could just hold up your iPhone and see the the store through the AR camera. Instead of asking a human for help, you’d simply hold the phone up to something and some virtual 3D store worker would come and give you answers.<p>The metaverse will most likely have to be built this way until we get real AR. The old jobs will go away, of course.
The Second Life architecture was never a good approach to a virtual world, so it's surprising to see this project still going.<p>It looks like despite the <i>very</i> long list of technical shortcomings, there isn't really an alternative to date?<p>VRChat isn't comparable because you don't host it yourself and content + speech is all heavily controlled.
Does anyone else feel like the metaverse is like 3D TVs? i.e. something no one really wants except tech folks who need to sell us on the next big thing?<p>I played There(<a href="https://www.prod.there.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.prod.there.com/</a>). I hung out in Second Life, cultivated an area, setup live concerts... It was cool for a year at most. Am I just being old or is the whole idea played out and, even combined with better graphics and 3d goggles, just sort of tedious and boring?
This plus the announcement of FB that they'll hire 10,000 to work on the "metaverse" is making my head spin. Does anyone else feel like they're living in the prequel to "Snow Crash"?
I was hoping to find that the Ugandan Knuckles meme started on this platform but sadly that was VRChat which seems to be its own propritary system built with Unity.
To all those who are saying (correctly) that part of the problem with Open Sim is the developer, I'd like to recommend this fork, run by Mike Chase of Utopia Skye grid.<p><a href="https://github.com/OpenSim-NGC/OpenSim-Sasquatch" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/OpenSim-NGC/OpenSim-Sasquatch</a>
Assuming all the technical stuff is done, I wonder is it sad to live in "fantasy". Space is so massive take forever to get anywhere so can go "inwards" with virtual worlds. Does "being real" matter. Personal interest/values.