> On 20 Mar 2019, at 12:39, Dr Ramesh Ramloll <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> At the last OSCC, there was a lot of positivity around a new modern viewer
> using Unreal Engine. Now with Google Stadia, it appears that it will be
> possible for opensim builders to access the same audience as other
> platforms on any device. I know 'streaming' is pretty old now, but for
> Google to go in this way suggests that they might have made it affordable.
> Do we know what's happening with the Unreal Engine viewer effort?
>
> Best regards,
> Ramesh
I keep looking at streaming offerings but every time I do I'm not convinced;
while there are some games where it's "fine" the quality just never lives up to
claims and for twitchy games it's a non-starter.
While opensim is arguably not a twitchy game where response times are key,
you're still talking about adding another layer of lag between the user and the
simulator which feels like a recipe of extra-strength headaches to me.
There's also something to be said for privacy; a true virtual world is so much
more personal than games like Call of Duty, Fortnite etc., you're not just
dressing up the same basic player(s) that everyone else has, you're creating an
avatar that *is* you, or an extension of you, in a virtual world. Introducing
another party into that pipeline (other than grid, sim and you) feels weird to
me.
So yeah, I dunno; if streaming can be used to help people with less powerful
hardware to get better visuals then sure, streaming could be of benefit to
them, but for anyone with a half-decent machine streaming is to be avoided IMO.
I'm also not sure how useful mobile support via streaming would be for a
platform like OpenSim, in terms of controls there's a lot to try and boil down
into a mobile device; if you want to support in-viewer build tools then that
complexity is even greater.
I don't think streaming platforms are a "game changer" for virtual worlds,
they're an option for increasing accessibility given how demanding viewers tend
to be on hardware, but the streaming aspect doesn't fundamentally change the
difficulties of presenting a complex, malleable virtual world to users,
streaming is really just a change in delivery method. I also don't think
there's anything specific to Google's offering that makes it fundamentally
different to all the past services that have tried; technology to implement it
has improved, but you're still adding input and output latency plus video
compression no matter what you do.
It's worth remembering as well that aside from the initial rush of assets
downloading in a new sim, the actual back and forth messaging is relatively
light; video streaming on the other hand still requires a fair bit of bandwidth
just to look good, as well as modern processors for full h.265 support in
hardware (or a dedicated GPU in which case you could probably handle a local
viewer), so streaming isn't necessarily cost-free in terms of performance and
hardware requirements either.
Does anyone know if there's much demand for virtual worlds on the go? I don't
know that it's something I'd fully want to do on my smartphone, though the
ability to chat with people in-world would be useful; does OpenSim currently
support a way to do this without having a zombie avatar sign into a region?
Sorry for the text-wall and if I come across as too negative; it's an
interesting technical space, I'm just a bit skeptical how much it really
affects something like OpenSim.
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