On 22 Jul 2014, at 00:48, Justin Clark-Casey <[email protected]> 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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Justin Clark-Casey (justincc)
OSVW Consulting
http://justincc.org
http://twitter.com/justincc
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