[Animats]

Which is why I'm working on a multi-threaded Second Life / Open Simulator client in Rust. The frame rate problem can be overcome. Another example of mine:

https://vimeo.com/640175119

Runs 55-60FPS in a crowded area.

Over-complicated avatar clothing is a separate problem. This is a huge deal in Second Life, because it's the greatest dress-up virtual world ever built. Users expect a lot. The tattoo layer has to show through mesh stockings, for example. I have some ideas on speeding that up but haven't implemented anything. What's needed is an optimization step that takes place when an avatar changes clothes. All the layers of meshes need to be crunched down to a simplified game-type combined mesh. In a game, that would be done during asset building. In a world where you can change clothes, mixing and matching items, it has to be done somewhere near run time. But not on every frame, just at clothing changes. This is already done for textures; all the texture clothing layers of an avatar are baked down to one. Roblox does something like this in their experimental mesh avatar system.

There's a mindset that this is impossible, shared by the low end of metaverse developers. It's not shared by Roblox or Epic or IMVU, who are busy solving the problem. This is a moderately hard problem, but it's not impossible.

Linden Lab staff had convinced themselves that it was impossible to speed up the viewer. After some people in Linden Lab management saw what I'd done, somehow there suddenly was much more effort going into improving the viewer FPS in their C++ client.

[bullen]

I think that the open part of the metaverse needs to be code and legal before aestetic. Mostly because skin mesh animation is the hardest part of game dev. because of pipeline costs and code complexity.

The Roblox solution looks terrible; bloated, bug prone and poor performing. I manage 2000 non-instanced characters (each with a interchangeable weapon) on a 1050Ti.

I'm going with royalty free assets that I happen to have a custom agreement to because of an early adopter advantage which allows me to redistribute them not only in a game but also with my open-source engine.

The content being editable creates headaches and decreases improvement of technology since more time is wasted on supporting more and more data for zero gameplay benefit.

Physics is the gameplay changer for MMO games, and it needs to be implemented in the game and not in some external library to be efficient/specialized enough to scale in a MMO setting.