Open Simulator - advantages and disadvantages

[Marcin Pang]



As the topic - I wonder, what are your opinions.

I'm doing a work, that uses OS and writing a essay about that. I wanted to put some information about it from what you may encounter and write a small review. Anyway, it should be research, so I do not want anything more to suggest.

I will be grateful for any help.

[Kelley Foxclaw]

We are very exprienced in OS, and are a bit dissappointed at this point.  From what we have seen, and we won't mention names, they are laggy and unreliable.  There is still the Ruth thing when you enter, and a lack of creativity as far as animations, and scripting compatibility. 

We have several that we are trying to put online at this point, but because all of this stuff is still thinking in a windows mode, and not in Linux, Open BSD, ETC... it's not going anywhere, fast.  I personally think that Linden Labs is restricting it's developement, but that's just me.

One day Open Sim may become the thing that will give Linden competition, until then we all just stumble around.

Kelley

[Ceera Murakami]

I'm working a large OS project for a University client, with 30+ sims and growing. It's rather like trying to set up a university campus on a deserted tropical island, with only a sledgehammer, a machete, and a single paintbrush for tools.

It's okay for basic architectural building, but the physics system is so primitive that it is impossible to create a physical elevator. I had to replace a perfectly functional physical elevator that I designed for one of their buildings, and instead create a sit-teleporter that opened and closed the elevator cars on each floor, and kind of, sort of gave the effect of the elevator. When you pushed the elevator floor selection button, it teleported you.

Being able to make prims up to 128 Meters in any dimension is quite nice. It's one of the few solid positives I can list.

Terraforming is screwy. It's almost impossible to properly smooth the edges between sims. Often you end up with a 1 meter step edge instead of something level, when you attempt to use the smoothing tool across a sim boundary.

Resources for doing just about any sort of content creation consist of what you bring to the project yourself, and a small assortment of open-source scripts and animations. If you do all your own building, texturing, scripting, clothes making, avatar making, animations, etc., you may be able to make nice things. Assuming all the script functions and physics functions and other infrastructure that you need manages to work. They often don't.

Forget about having access to large groups of customers, large groups of merchants, or a real economy that allows you to pay money in and cash money out. The few OS grids that have anything close to that are like a one-horse town compared to New York, as far as lack of resources goes.

Forget about large selections of non-Human avatars, or for that matter ANY selection of non-Human avatars. The only furries I have seen are ripped off freebies and copybotted stuff from the SL grid. Haven't yet seen any reputable SL avatar maker setting up shop to sell furry avatars on an OS Grid.

Running an OS grid certainly is cheaper than what LL charges. But you get what you pay for. The OS implementation is incomplete and buggy.