Not sure, but maby good to have this topic on osgrid forum to ?
The biggest problem with makeing own viewer. There are not enough devs
with the right skills.
Thats the biggest problem. the amount of people that want and can spend
time for a special opensim viewer.
On 2012-12-11 00:08, Mircea Kitsune wrote:
Hey everyone. I've been away from OpenSim for a while but got back.
Since last time I've been around, I read about Linden's decision to
cut OpenSim support from their viewer due to some crazy licenses with
their physics engine. The rights and wrongs have been discussed and
are not the point of this email. But this decision means that in some
senses, OpenSim will become completely separate from Linden's SL, and
some fundamental things might change. I wanted both to ask what
exactly is going to happen, but also post my own suggestion. Obviously
I'm not someone who can say what's good and bad, but personally this
is what I strongly believe OpenSim should do and go for.
The way I see things, OpenSim has primarily been a server-side for
Second Life during its existence. Even if its purpose is a general
virtual worlds platform, SL was the only usable viewer in practice.
Now that LL cut its support, it's in the situation of having no exact
client to be used with. There are many third-party viewers that will
continue supporting OpenSim, but IMHO they can't be considered a
reliable source in the long term. I assume most of them have their own
developers which take decisions independently from the OpenSim team.
If one of those viewers dies for instance, it's up to the user to go
looking for another one that's still under development. Apart from the
fact that people have to hunt for a viewer, this situation also kept
OpenSim from being able to make changes that would require viewer
modifications as well.
My opinion is that OpenSim won't get far if it relies on random viewer
forks to be used with at this point. We are not a clear standard
technology, unlike web browsers for instance where you can use Apache
to host and FireFox to browse, both unrelated and a variety of choices
available for each. This is not to say OpenSim should be unusable with
viewers unrelated to SL, since that would go against its purpose. But
the SL viewer is a very large and complex thing, and there will surely
never be anyone making a client from scratch which will implement all
of its features, look as good, be as fast, as bug free, etc. The
building and prim editing tools, the terrain editor, the avatar and
mesh system, the rendering features, the GUI... it's unlikely anyone
will properly re-write all that from zero when the SL viewer exists
and works fine.
This is why I believe we need our own official viewer, developed by
and with the OpenSim server, and based on one of the Second Life
viewers. Apart from the fact that people will know they don't depend
on someone else to make them a viewer, it would allow client + server
changes to be done for the first time, rather than having to stay
within the SL viewer's limits. If that doesn't happen, I don't believe
we'll ever become a better virtual worlds platform outside of SL's
shadow. I remember the days of RealXtend (I heard it's dead now) which
took the SL viewer in one hand, OpenSim in another, and created its
very own project which was completely amazing for those days (SL now
has mesh support and better graphics so it makes RealXtend less
special at this day). My personal opinion is that it's time OpenSim
does something similar.
If it was me, I'd say grab the latest SL viewer without the
restrictive Havoc library and make OpenSim viewer from that. If Linden
adds a nice feature to theirs which we can copy over, sure thing, but
otherwise it can go its own separate way. On the other hand, it would
be a good aim to allow previous SL viewers to still connect to
OpenSim, though they wouldn't recognize some of its specific features
then. I know OS and SL and under two different licenses, but that
doesn't make it wrong to distribute both on the same website and as
part of the same project.
What does the core team of OpenSim think about this? Are there any
plans or will to go in this direction? Or does anyone believe that
instead we should continue providing support for SL's features and
have OpenSim users find their own clients like until now? I believe
this is an important question, and would like to know what to expect
in the future. Personally I really hope something in this direction
will be decided, but I'm not one to know best.
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